Chapter 9
Correcting Bad Impressions and Overcoming Misunderstandings
Your boss doesn’t think you’re particularly competent. Or your coworker thinks you’re a pretentious ass. You’ve made a bad Phase 1 impression—probably because you were not yet familiar with the biases and lenses of perception—and now you want to repair the damage you’ve done. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures. You need to somehow get your perceiver to enter Phase 2, the correction phase, so that his or her impression of you will be revised to reflect you more accurately.
Once in Phase 2, the perceiver will be more likely to take into account the circumstances surrounding your actions (e.g., Maybe she isn’t incompetent . . . perhaps she’s just new to this kind of task). He or she may consider other likely motives for your behavior (e.g., Maybe he’s not really pretentious . . . he could be simply trying to appear knowledgeable, and he doesn’t realize how it’s coming across). In Phase 2, perceivers are willing to entertain the possibility that they might have been wrong about you (e.g., I should give him a second chance—not everyone makes a good first impression).
People can and do revise their opinions of others all the time, and although first impressions are important, it’s usually never too late to fix a negative one. The key is to understand what’s going on “beneath the hood”—what it takes for the mind of the perceiver to change the picture the first impression has already painted of you.
I’m going to say this right up front: getting your perceiver to enter Phase 2 is going to be hard, and it will require patience, effort, and careful planning. There are, broadly speaking, two ways to approach the challenge.
Bombard Them with Overwhelming Evidence
One way to push your perceivers into Phase 2 is to bombard your perceivers with overwhelming evidence that their impression of you is wrong. In other words, keep piling it on until the cognitive misers can no longer selectively tune it out. The evidence has to be attention getting, because only information that is really inconsistent with their existing impression of you will likely get noticed. In other words, if you have given someone the impression that you’re aloof and unfriendly, being a little friendlier next time isn’t going to do a damn thing for you—it’s just not going to even register.
So be prepared to go to extremes. For instance, imagine that your employee Carl has a well-deserved reputation for being late to work. You have spoken to him about it several times, and he has not improved. His behavior has led you to have serious questions about his competence and his commitment. Realizing this, Carl decides to turn over a new leaf and become punctual, hoping this will change your impression of him. Every day for a week, he arrives at work on time. Do you think this would lead you to see Carl in a new way? Do you think it would even register?
What if, instead of simply arriving on time, Carl starting arriving an hour early for work every day for a week. That would certainly register, because it represents a big change—a departure from your impression of him that’s too big to ignore. You would naturally wonder, “What’s up with Carl?” and pay closer attention to his behavior in the coming weeks to see if the change lasts. Carl’s behavior would have successfully nudged you into Phase 2.
In a sense, this is what many actors are doing when they deliberately take on roles that require them to dramatically alter their appearance for the worse. When a beauty like Charlize Theron becomes almost unrecognizably ugly for her role as a serial killer in Monster, or when a handsome charmer like Matthew McConaughey loses forty-five pounds to play an AIDS-stricken man in Dallas Buyers Club, audiences and critics feel compelled to consider these actors with fresh eyes. Suddenly, the performer that you—and the Academy Awards voters—had pegged as “just another pretty face” or “that romantic-comedy guy” seems far more worthy of being taken seriously. When the evidence you provide the perceiver with is too attention getting or too unexpected to be ignored, the perceiver has no other way to make sense of it but to enter Phase 2 and reconsider his or her assumptions about you.
If you want to change an impression, the evidence should also be plentiful. If your boss thinks you are incompetent, then performing well once or twice—even if it’s a genius-level performance—may not be enough to do the trick. It’s too easy to write off a single piece of evidence as a fluke—an “even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then” kind of thing.
On the other hand, repeated, impressive displays of your extreme competence, non-pretentiousness, or friendliness (and, ideally, few distractions to compete for the perceiver’s attention during these displays) will create too much cognitive dissonance in your perceiver’s mind for him or her to dismiss or ignore, forcing the person to engage in Phase 2 to try to reduce the unpleasantness and get things right.
Because it requires so much evidence, in practice, the bombardment approach is often effort-intensive and time-consuming. Case in point: I have a good friend, “Patrick,” who makes deeply terrible first impressions. Just god-awful, the worst I have ever seen. When he gets nervous, as he often does when meeting new people, he has a very strange and totally maladaptive defense mechanism: an uncanny ability to find something you feel particularly touchy about, and then make an insulting remark about it. It’s like a moth to a flame.
People don’t just form a negative impression of Patrick when they meet him—they actively hate him. But the thing is, the real Patrick is one of the most kind, loving, and loyal people you will ever meet. Once he stops being nervous and you really get to know him, you realize that he is the very opposite of what his first impression would lead you to believe. I’ve noticed that this process takes about six months, give or take—which is why his only friends tend to be the people who were forced to spend that much time with him, like his classmates and coworkers. It takes many, many instances of witnessing Patrick’s good qualities to erase the memory of your first moments with him—moments that in no way represent the person he truly is.
Make Them Want to Revise Their Opinion of You
If you don’t have six months to spare, you are going to have to go with this second option. When you can make your perceiver want to revise his or her opinion of you, you can achieve your aims faster and with less effort. But this approach requires you to make use of some clever strategizing.
Each of the strategies I’m about to describe has been shown to significantly increase the odds that a perceiver will enter Phase 2 processing and will form a more accurate (and often, more positive) impression of you. You can use them alone or in combination to increase the odds even further.
Activate the Perceiver’s Goal of Egalitarianism, or Fairness
In general, people like to think of themselves as fair and unbiased. And if you ask them if they have the goal of judging people fairly and treating them accordingly, they will almost certainly tell you that yes, they do. Psychologists call this having an egalitarian goal.
Research suggests that when the egalitarian goal is strong and active—meaning that the perceiver is genuinely committed to fairness and that the goal has been activated in his or her mind in the current situation—the perceiver will spontaneously and automatically inhibit biases and stereotypes to a large degree.1 In other words, the biases won’t even come to mind, so they can’t inappropriately influence perception. It’s almost like skipping Phase 1 and heading directly to Phase 2, where the impression you create will be more accurate and more in keeping with your intentions.
The problem, of course, is that even when perceivers do have a strong egalitarian goal, they often aren’t deliberately focused on that goal when they are judging you. After all, you probably want to be egalitarian, but when is the last time you thought to yourself, “I really want to judge this person fairly and accurately, without use of bias or stereotypes” when you met him or her for the first time? It’s just not something any of us naturally do. So despite our desire to be unbiased, our egalitarian goal doesn’t become active. The Phase 1 biases have free rein to muck things up, and we end up failing rather epically in the fairness department.
But as my good friend, Lehigh University psychologist Gordon Moskowitz, discovered, there are ways to make people aware of their egalitarian ideals—to activate the goal for them in a given interaction, in case they don’t do it for themselves.2 First, you can use the power of labeling. In general, people will try to conform to the labels they are given, provided that the labels are positive and not totally inconsistent with their existing views. For example, when individuals who contributed to a charity were told that they were “a generous donor,” they gave significantly more money two weeks later when asked for another donation. It’s as if they thought to themselves, Well, after all, I am a generous donor, and giving more is what generous donors do.3
You can harness this power by complimenting your perceiver on his or her “fairness,” “unbiased assessment,” “keen perception,” or “uncanny accuracy” when it comes to perceiving others. If you don’t know the perceiver well and would have no basis to make such a judgment, you can try a different approach—suggest that in the perceiver’s line of work or in his or her position in the company, the ability to accurately and fairly assess others “must be a key skill to possess.” You wouldn’t be lying, since this is always a key skill to possess, no matter what someone does for a living. But by reminding the person of its importance, you will be activating the egalitarian goal that will lead him or her into Phase 2.
Interestingly, Moskowitz has found that there is an even more effective way to produce egalitarian perception—to remind the perceivers of times in the past that they have failed to be fair and unbiased. In his studies, he asks participants to reflect on a time in the past when their judgment of another person was influenced by the stereotype of their group—for instance, a time when they wondered if a female leader would be up to the job, simply because she was a woman, or a time when they felt threatened in the presence of a black man who hadn’t actually done anything remotely threatening.4 If we’re honest, it’s not hard for most of us to think of a time when we judged someone else in a way that we aren’t proud of.
What Moskowitz consistently finds is that reminders of past failures to be fair create a powerful desire to be fair in the present. He refers to this process as compensatory cognition, because it is quite literally a (largely unconscious) attempt by the perceiver’s brain to compensate for errors it has made in the past—to bring things back to the way they are supposed to be. Compensatory cognition results in strong activation of the egalitarian goal and a near complete inhibition of stereotypes and biases.
Now, I imagine you are wondering, how the heck do I remind someone of times when his or her judgment lacked fairness without, you know, having the person get really angry and hate me for it? Good question. You don’t want to put your perceiver on the defensive, because the ego lens will kick in, and then you’ll be toast. You must tread lightly.
Instead of hitting someone with an accusation, try opening up about some of your own challenges with fairness. Tell your own story about a time when you misjudged someone, by letting a stereotype or some other kind of bias get in the way. I have a whole catalog (I’m embarrassed to say) of such stories that I employ on these occasions:
The grad student from rural Pennsylvania: I assumed she would be hopelessly boring and naive, only to find that she had a sharp wit and enough cynicism to rival any born-and-bred New Yorker.
The disheveled man in dirty sweatpants and T-shirt: I found him wandering the halls at Columbia, and I nearly called Security on him—only to see him again a month later, delivering a talk to the entire department on the new complex statistic he had just invented. (This man, a noted psychologist and statistician, would later become one of my mentors. And yes, he would always look like that—though sometimes he would change T-shirts.)
The female postdoc with a shaved head and tattoos: I avoided the woman from sheer terror, only to find her (once we were forced together) to be one of the sweetest, silliest people I have ever known. (Her hobbies—I kid you not—are knitting and Argentine tango. So you just never know.)
Once you have made it OK to admit to this kind of failure by sharing your own example, you can invite the perceivers to respond in kind by gently asking if anything like that has ever happened to them. Even if they don’t share a story, it will get them thinking . . . and it will get their own fairness goal activated. In so doing, you create a window for them to see you in a new, more accurate way.
Notice When They Feel Out of Control
Human beings have a deep and fundamental desire for prediction and control. In order to survive, we human beings have evolved a universal, hardwired need to feel that we understand how the world works, that we can more or less anticipate what’s going to happen, and that we can make things happen in our favor. This primal longing to be, in essence, captain of our own ship has come to have new implications in the modern world.
Decades of research show that people who perceive themselves to have more autonomy in their lives—more choices and less uncertainty at work and at home—are happier, less stressed, and better able to cope with life’s hiccups than those who see themselves as a pawn of forces largely outside their control. People who feel in control also reach more of the goals they set for themselves and are better able to make and sustain major lifestyle changes when they set their minds to them.
Experiencing a lack of control, on the other hand, reliably leads to feelings of helplessness, apathy, and depression. In fact, low perceived control is one of the hallmarks of clinical depression—and the arrow of causality seems to point both ways: loss of control creates depression, and feelings of depression reduce our sense of control.
Of course, lots of other things diminish our sense of control, too. Natural disasters, unexpected loss, stressors, uncertainty, lack of choices, coercion, being micromanaged—any of these can make us feel relatively powerless and at the mercy of forces outside ourselves. And for most of us, that is a profoundly negative feeling.
It won’t surprise you to learn that one of the very first things that happens when people experience a loss of control is that they try to get it back. And if they can’t get it back by attacking the problem directly (e.g., telling the micromanaging boss, “I quit”), they will restore their sense of control in more subtle, largely unconscious ways. For example, people who chronically experience a loss of control are more likely to knock on wood or engage in other magical or superstitious thinking, to try to exert some influence over the otherwise uncontrollable.5
A big part of control is being able to successfully predict what’s going to happen—so increasing your ability to predict what others might do or say is yet another way to restore a sense of control. Consequently, people who feel out of control often become more vigilant, put in more effort, and are more detail-oriented when observing others.6
For instance, in one study, researchers gave female undergraduates a series of puzzles to solve.7 To solve them correctly, the students needed to recognize patterns across the series of puzzles—something they could only do if given accurate feedback after each puzzle. Some of these unfortunate volunteers did not receive accurate feedback—instead they received a mix of true and false feedback after each puzzle. Then, when asked to identify the total pattern after the last puzzle, they made a guess and were given no feedback at all about whether they were right or wrong. Unpredictable patterns and a lack of feedback is a great way to undermine a person’s sense of control, and that’s exactly what these young women reported feeling.
Then, all of the women were told that they would be performing a second task with a partner, and they were given the opportunity to request information about that partner in advance. The researchers found that those women who had a diminished sense of control consistently asked for more personal, diagnostic information about their future partner. To restore their sense of control, they sought to understand more thoroughly and accurately the person they would be working with.
While your perceiver is likely to go the extra mile to really “get you” when he or she is feeling out of control, it’s not exactly easy (or, strictly speaking, ethical) to deliberately put another person into that state. Your best bet is to instead simply take advantage of times when you notice your perceiver is already feeling a bit out of control—times when he or she is stressed, anxious, or a bit down, whatever the reason.
When that happens, you can offer up “getting to know you accurately” as a way to take back the reins. I’m not suggesting you actually say that—in fact, you don’t need to. Your stressed-out perceiver will naturally attempt to get a better handle on everything around him or her, including you. It’s an automatic coping mechanism—we are all just wired that way.
For example, if your office is going through a particular period of uncertainty—such as a change initiative or new leadership—it could be a good time to approach a colleague you’d like to have a better impression of you. Mention that you’d like to get better acquainted—perhaps over lunch—because it’s so much easier to work together when colleagues really know one another. “Really knowing someone” is a great way to increase one’s sense of control, so this should be particularly appealing. (If you are already acquainted with the colleague—say you’ve been working together for a year—then you can propose lunch as a way to find ways to work together more effectively. This is another way to increase control.)
Consider another example. Let’s say your boss seems overwhelmed with the number of projects on her plate. You could offer to lend a hand and could use the opportunity to showcase the skill set you want her to recognize—for instance, your organizational skills, or your initiative taking, or your resilience under pressure. Stepping up to help when a supervisor or colleague is in crisis is a great way to highlight your strengths when the person is most likely to notice.
Make Their Outcomes Dependent on You
In many ways the easiest and most direct way to get other people to want to perceive you correctly—to make the effort of Phase 2 processing worthwhile—is to create a state of interdependence between you and other people. Psychologists call this outcome dependency, and it has two basic forms.
You Are Going to Need Me
This is the stronger form, where I literally can’t get what I want without cooperation from you. This is why the powerless pay such close attention to the powerful. And this is why individuals who must rely on a colleague or teammate to deliver will take the trouble to understand that person’s character, intentions, and habits more accurately. The strong form of outcome dependency makes cooperation a necessity. I need to be able to predict your behavior, anticipate your wants and needs, and respond accordingly.
The need for accurate perception that real interdependence creates probably plays a big role in romantic relationships as well. In a couple’s early days, they can afford to see one another through rose-colored glasses, only focusing on one another’s best qualities and ignoring the other, less attractive bits because their lives are still relatively independent. But once that changes—once commitments increase, bills are shared, and there are children to raise—we literally cannot afford to paint mental pictures of our partners that are anything less than true. Romance may not fade as a consequence of knowing each other too well, but rather, we must know each other only too well if we are going to make interdependence work.
So when someone has formed a faulty impression of you, whatever the reason, it’s in your interest to find ways to increase your mutual interdependence. Offer to help the person on a current project, or ask your supervisor if the two of you can be assigned to work on something together. (Supervisors love anything that smacks of team building, so they will like this idea.) Give your perceivers the best possible reason to want to see you accurately—because they need you if they are going to succeed.
You Are Going to Have to Deal with Me
Human beings have evolved lots of ways of dealing with hardship and stress—skills and strategies that enable us to remain relatively happy and optimistic even when things are going very, very wrong. Psychologists Timothy Wilson and Dan Gilbert refer to these mechanisms collectively as the psychological immune system, and it exists to protect us from extended bouts of strong negative emotion. People are often, for instance, able to extract meaningful life lessons from failures that enable them to feel stronger and smarter for having experienced them. They count their blessings and focus on the part of the glass that is half full, rather than half empty. They decide that, really, they are better off without the relationship (or job) they have lost, because it wasn’t making them happy anyway. And when they know that they are going to have to endure something fairly difficult or painful for quite a while—like rehabilitation from an injury or four years of medical school—the most successful people find ways of thinking about their goals that make the mountain easier to climb.
So, when you know that you are going to be seeing and interacting on a regular basis with someone you strongly dislike—when it is absolutely unavoidable—the psychological immune system kicks in to convince you that it won’t be so bad. He isn’t really that awful, right? you say to yourself. Now that I think about it, there was that one time he was sort of OK.
A good friend of mine, “Jake,” once used this strategy to great effect. He was engaged to marry the daughter of a very successful New York advertising executive, and the executive in question was not happy about it. Jake, a native Texan, was a twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate with no significant career prospects and not a dollar to his name. The executive’s daughter was herself only twenty, and the two had been dating for only a few months. But they were deeply in love and absolutely certain (as young people so often are) that they had each found The One.
So Jake decided that without warning, he would pack a bag and book a flight to New York. He arrived at his future father-in-law’s doorstep and made it clear that he had no intention of leaving for at least a week—however long it took for them to get to know one another and for Jake to change the older man’s mind. Jake felt certain that by sticking to the man like glue, Jake might eventually wear down the older man. And that’s exactly what happened—anger turned to resignation and eventually even to liking. By the end of his ten-day visit, Jake had secured the executive’s blessing. Once it was clear that resistance was futile, it seems the only sensible course of action was to give in and like the guy.
Strictly speaking, this strategy doesn’t necessarily result in a more accurate view so much as a more positive view.8 Once someone realizes that he or she is going to have to put up with you for a while, the person is more likely to want to see the best in you. So if you suspect that you have created a bad impression or that your perceiver just isn’t noticing your good qualities, try to increase the amount of contact between the two of you. Stick to your perceiver like glue, and eventually the person will learn to like you, even if it kills him or her.
Here’s a hypothetical: You have clearly rubbed your colleague Jason, the director of another division in your company, the wrong way. You can’t put your finger on what exactly you did to earn his ire, but every time the two of you are in a meeting together, you can feel the coldness and distrust emanating from him, and it’s directed at you. You have heard through the grapevine that Jason may take over for his boss when she retires next year, and that means he will be in a position to affect you and your work. You need to repair this relationship, before an increase in his relative power over you only makes it worse. The problem is that the two of you don’t see much of one another and don’t work together on any projects, so there is little opportunity for you to right this wrong.
The solution is to create more face time. You begin with a little investigating and find out that Jason works out in the company gym most mornings and eats in the company cafeteria at 1 p.m. on most days. So you move your schedule around accordingly. You make sure that he sees you each time you are in the gym or cafeteria, though you do not always approach him—after all, you do not want to come off like a stalker. Many times you simply smile and nod or do a quick wave. The idea is for him to register your presence, again and again. (You may have heard the expression “Familiarity breeds contempt,” but what the research tells us is that in most cases, what familiarity breeds is liking. This happens partly because we are more comfortable with things that we’ve seen before and partly because we feel that if something or someone is going to be around a lot, we might as well like the person or thing. It’s just easier that way.)
As you notice Jason beginning to thaw, it’s OK to walk right up to him and engage him more often—asking if you can join him for lunch, for instance. The idea is not to be overly ingratiating or weirdly accommodating or to advertise your good qualities, but to just be your normal (hopefully friendly) self. He can find out on his own what there is to like about you, and now that you seem to be ever-present, he will be properly motivated to do so.
Remember, Phase 2 doesn’t happen automatically. Your perceivers have to have the mental energy and the motivation to do the work. Bombarding them with attention-getting evidence of your true nature will do the trick, but that can take a lot of time—time you may not have to spare. In that case, reminding them of their desire to judge people fairly, encouraging them to restore their sense of control by knowing you accurately, and increasing your mutual interdependence will all serve to maximize their Phase 2 motivation. The only other thing you’ll need, then, to correct their impression of you is a little patience. People rarely change their minds about something or someone overnight—but they do change, and now you have the tools to help that change along.
A Special Case: The Apology
You promised your boss you would complete an important assignment on time, and you realize you were wrong and it’s going to be late. You leave a colleague out of the loop on a joint project, causing him to feel frustrated and a bit betrayed. It’s time for a mea culpa.
Sometimes, the best way to get someone’s attention—and really get the person to revise an opinion of you—is to own up to your behavior with an apology. But apologies are tricky things. Done right, they can resolve conflict, repair hurt feelings, foster forgiveness, and improve relationships. An apology can even keep you out of the courtroom. (Despite the fact that lawyers tend to caution their clients to avoid apologies like the plague, fearing that apologies are tantamount to an admission of guilt, studies show that when potential plaintiffs receive an apology, they are more likely to settle out of court for less money.)
But as anyone can tell you, apologies don’t go so well. Ask Chip Wilson, the ousted Lululemon CEO discussed earlier in this book. Or John Edwards. Or Kanye West. (I could go on and on.) An apology is no guarantee that you’ll find yourself out of hot water. Perhaps the person or persons you are seeking forgiveness from aren’t really interested in forgiving, or perhaps the transgression itself is deemed simply unforgivable. But more often than not, your apology falls flat because you apologize the wrong way. Use these strategies to get the apology right:
- Don’t justify. Most people make the mistake of making their apologies about themselves—about their own intentions, thoughts, and feelings.
“I didn’t mean to . . .”
“I was trying to . . .”
“I didn’t realize . . .”
“I had a good reason . . .”
When you screw up, the victims of your screwup do not want to hear about you. So stop talking about yourself, and put the focus of your apology where it belongs: on them.
- Imagine their perspective. Specifically, focus on how they have been affected by your mistake, on how they are feeling, and on what they need from you in order to move forward. You need to take all ambiguity out of the situation, lest their lenses wreak havoc.
- Acknowledge their feelings and values. Your perceivers are experiencing a threat, so they need affirmation. By recognizing what they are feeling and encouraging them to talk about what is important to them, you will be taking important steps in healing the damage you’ve done.
- Restore a sense of “us.” When you fail to deliver on your promises, or when you wrong another person in some way, it not only diminishes trust—it damages the sense of us that exists between you and your perceiver. You run the risk of becoming a them. Remind the injured party of your shared history, your commonalities, your shared goals. Reassure him or her that you are on the same team and have no intention of letting the team down again.
- Know your audience. It makes intuitive sense that the apology you give to your spouse for forgetting your anniversary should be different from the apology you give the stranger on the subway you spilled coffee on. But how should the apologies differ? Thanks to recent research on effective apologies, you can and should fine-tune your approach to apologizing, according to your relationship with the apology receiver.9
Compensation Versus Empathy in Apologies
The guy in the coffee-stained suit wants an offer of compensation. For strangers or mere acquaintances, offers of compensation are attempts to restore balance through some redeeming action. Sometimes the compensation is tangible, like paying to repair or replace your neighbor’s fence when you inadvertently back your car into it, or running out to get your girlfriend a new phone when you accidentally drop hers into the toilet. Offers of compensation can also be more emotional or socially supportive—as in, “I’m sorry I acted like a jerk, and I’ll make it up to you by being extra thoughtful from now on.”
But if you are a partner, colleague, or friend, you need to offer an expression of empathy. The colleague you left out of the loop or the spouse whose feelings you hurt doesn’t want compensation. Expressions of empathy involve taking the other person’s perspective and recognizing and expressing concern over the suffering you caused. (For example, “I’m so sorry that I didn’t appreciate all the effort you went to. You must have felt awful, and that’s the last thing I want.”) Through expressions of empathy, the victim feels understood and valued as a partner in the relationship, and trust is restored.
What if you’ve let the whole team down? Since in the workplace, we often operate as teams, if you’ve messed up, then chances are the entire group is affected. In team settings, people don’t want compensation or empathy—they want an acknowledgement of violated rules and norms. You basically need to admit that you broke the code of behavior of your social group, your organization, or your society. (For example, “I have a responsibility to my team/organization/family/community—and I should have known better.” “I didn’t just let myself down, I let others who count on me down.”)
When you think about it, it’s surprising that we’re often so bad at apologizing. After all, we are frequently on the receiving end of apologies ourselves—so we should know what works and what doesn’t, right? In reality, we often forget what it’s like to be on the other side—whether we’re trying to apologize, persuade, help, or motivate.
So when crafting your apology, remember to ask yourself, Who am I talking to, and what are they looking for in my apology? The guy on the subway doesn’t want to hear that you “feel his pain”—but when you forget your spouse’s birthday, your loved one definitely would like you to feel his or hers.