Chapter 6
The Ego Lens
Actress and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow had a very interesting 2013. She starred in the blockbuster film Iron Man 3, released a best-selling cookbook called It’s All Good, and was voted People magazine’s “Most Beautiful Person.” She was having quite a run of good fortune until, a few weeks after People’s results were announced, a new story came to dominate the publicity surrounding her—that she had been voted by readers of Star Magazine the “Most Hated Celebrity in Hollywood.”
Now, I’m not saying that Paltrow doesn’t invite some of the negativity that comes her way by advertising her high-end, healthy-eating, absurdly fit, and all-around superior personal life so publicly through her lifestyle website and newsletter, Goop. But are the accusations that she is “preachy,” “arrogant,” “pretentious, or “elitist” really fair? Comb through a smattering of the anti-Gwyneth rhetoric you find online, and there is very little evidence offered that she is any of those things, save the occasional quote that was probably taken out of context (and almost certainly interpreted as unkindly as possible).
Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow is a real jerk—or maybe she isn’t. But an awful lot of people who have never met her seem to be sure that she is. Why?
Most of us assume that the beautiful people have it made—that being attractive gives you all sorts of advantages across the board. Much of the time, we are right. Thanks to the halo effect we covered in chapter 2, when people are attractive, we often unconsciously assume that they have lots of other good qualities, too. We perceive them to be warmer, kinder, smarter, funnier, and more honest, simply because they are easier on the eyes.
There are times, however, when the advantages of being beautiful don’t always translate into greater successes. In fact, being good-looking can cost you opportunities—jobs, assignments, scholarships, promotions, and the like. Not because the halo effect isn’t working, but because it’s being trumped by something even more powerful: your perceiver’s ego lens.
You see, the ego lens, like the trust and power lenses, has a single mission. In this case, it’s to see things in such a way that the perceiver comes out on top. The ego lens has several strategies that it can deploy to accomplish this mission, each of which I’ll describe in detail in this chapter. Put simply, they are as follows:
- Focus on how the perceiver is better than you or on how the perceiver’s group (us) is better than your group (them).
- Focus on how you and the perceiver are in the same group (i.e., both of you are us) and therefore the perceiver can enjoy your successes and bask in the reflected glory of your awesomeness.
- Decide that your good qualities are not a threat, because you are not competing with the perceiver for the same resources or because the perceiver doesn’t actually value those particular qualities.
- If strategies 1, 2, and 3 don’t work or aren’t applicable, your good qualities and accomplishments are a threat to the perceiver’s self-esteem. Therefore, you must be avoided or sabotaged to neutralize the threat.
Let’s think about how these strategies might play out for an attractive female candidate applying for a job. If she is being interviewed by another attractive female, then strategy 1 applies—since the interviewer is very attractive herself, it would be relatively easy for her to convince herself that she is a bit more attractive than the applicant. These things are subjective, after all. So the threat is eliminated, and the halo effect can work its positive magic.
If the attractive female applicant is instead being interviewed by a male interviewer, then strategy 3 applies. She and her interviewer are not competing for the same resources (e.g., potential lovers), so no threat there, either.
But what if her interviewer is a less attractive female? Let’s face it—strategy 2 is not going to work. These two people are strangers, and they are potentially competing for the same resources. That they both belong to the group “women” is probably not going to be enough to make the greater attractiveness of one more palatable to the other. For the interviewer, the applicant’s attractiveness is a threat. So that leaves strategy 4: avoid or sabotage. And this is exactly what researchers find.
For instance, in one study, attractive applicants for a graduate scholarship received more favorable ratings from opposite-sex raters (halo effect), but not from same-sex raters. Men were unimpressed by a male applicant’s handsomeness (no halo effect), and women actually penalized female applicants for beauty.1
In another study, ratings of attractive job applicants’ qualifications depended on the beauty of their beholder. Good-looking raters didn’t seem to care one way or another how handsome or beautiful an applicant was, but average-looking raters did—they penalized better-looking same-sex applicants.2
Again, raters usually have no idea that they are being influenced by physical attractiveness when making these judgments. The ego lens warps their perception at Phase 1, such that threatening applicants seem genuinely less qualified, less accomplished. No one actually says to himself or herself, much less to others, I am threatened by this person, so there is no way I’m hiring this applicant. But that’s exactly what happens.
The primary function of the ego lens is to protect and enhance your self-esteem. It wants you to feel good about you. The ego lens works so well, in fact, that almost all of us, other than the clinically depressed, end up with an overall positive view of ourselves and relatively high self-esteem.
Your self-esteem is the sum of all your positive and negative evaluations of yourself—your assessments of your strengths and weaknesses, your memories of your successes and failures. Some of these evaluations are weighted much more heavily than others, because they have to do with things that are more central to your sense of who you are. My evaluations of my abilities as a mother and a psychologist, for example, have a much greater impact on my self-esteem than my (lack of) abilities as an athlete or an artist. Frankly, I don’t really care that I have never advanced past stick figures, because being a skilled artist is just not a big part of who I am. But when I drop the ball and forget to pack my daughter’s lunch, or when a paper that I’ve submitted is rejected from a journal, that certainly takes me down a peg.
This is really important to remember: your perceiver’s self-esteem is idiosyncratic. It’s based on what’s important to him or her, not what’s important to you. If you want to anticipate how a perceiver’s ego lens might bias his or her view of you, you’re going to need to know a little about what the perceiver cares about. Some assumptions are fairly safe—most people care about their work, their intelligence, their social standing, and their attractiveness. Not all, surely, but a healthy majority. If you pose a threat to your perceiver’s self-esteem along any of these dimensions, expect the person’s ego lens to kick into gear.
So, how does the perceiver end up with either positive or negative evaluations of his or her own abilities—where is the person’s self-esteem coming from? Generally, it comes from a nearly continuous stream of conscious and unconscious comparisons—how am I doing compared with other people? And thanks to the ego lens, for most of us, the answer almost always seems to be better than average.
Lots of people know this as the Lake Wobegon effect, so named after Garrison Keillor’s semi-autobiographical stories, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Study after study shows that like the residents of Lake Wobegon, the majority of us see ourselves as better than average along just about every meaningful dimension (and a few nonmeaningful ones). Drivers consistently rate themselves as above average in driving skill and safety consciousness. Managers rate themselves as above-average performers and leaders. Business professionals rate themselves as having above-average ethics. College students believe they are healthier, smarter, and more popular than their average peer.
Do me a quick favor, and answer these questions as honestly as you can:
What do you think the odds are that you will one day find yourself unemployed? Are you more or less likely than other people your own age?
What do you think the odds are that you will one day make a lot more money than you do now? Are you more or less likely than other people in similar jobs?
Did you say that—compared with others in similar circumstances—you are more likely to get rich and less likely to get canned? Of course you did (unless you are clinically depressed or are trying to outsmart the question). Most of us, thanks to our ego lenses, believe that good things are more likely to happen to us, and bad things less likely to happen to us, than to other people. We believe we are significantly more likely than other people to end up with a career we enjoy, own our own homes, not get divorced, and live past eighty. We think we are less likely to buy a car that turns out to be a lemon, get fired, have a heart attack, develop a drinking problem, or get infected by a venereal disease.3 Those things happen to other people, not to me. Especially that last one.
Psychologists call this illusory optimism. And I’ll be honest: for the most part, it’s a good thing. Believing that things will probably work out will keep us happier and more motivated to keep on keepin’ on, even when we are met with challenges and disappointments. Optimism has been linked to greater physical and psychological health, faster recovery from illness, and longer persistence on important life goals. So robust is our need to maintain this overly positive view that the ego lens will work particularly hard to deal with our screwups by subtly changing how we see what happened and who was to blame.
Did you ever notice how quick people are to take credit for their accomplishments and how creatively people seem to deflect blame for their failures? As a college professor, I’ve heard countless students who performed poorly on one of my tests complain about how the test was unfair or impossible, but never once have I heard from an A student that his or her excellent performance was the result of a test that was too easy. Thanks to the ego lens, it’s quite natural to see how our own effort and abilities were the drivers of our successes, while clearly seeing how insurmountable obstacles—particularly those generated by other people—were directly responsible for our failures.
My all-time favorite example of the lengths the ego lens will go comes from an article on auto insurance claims in the Toronto News from 1977. Reviewing how people described their own car accidents, the journalist found ample evidence of the ego lens in statements such as these:
“An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car, and vanished.”
“A pedestrian hit me, and went under my car.”
“As I reached an intersection, a hedge sprang up, obscuring my vision.”4
Man, I really hate it when that happens. Crazy hedges.
Comparing Apples to Other, Lesser Apples
As I mentioned, the essence of self-esteem is comparison. How does the perceiver see himself or herself, in terms of abilities and accomplishments, compared with other people? Psychologist Abraham Tesser argues that a person’s self-esteem can be enhanced or threatened by the achievements and shortcomings of another as a function of two factors.5
The first is relevance. Does the domain of achievement (or failure) really matter to the perceiver? Does it factor into the perceiver’s own sense of who he or she is? A professional tennis player is likely to be affected when a rival wins a major tournament, but not when a famous chef opens another successful restaurant. It’s not success per se that threatens the player—it’s the particular successes that he or she covets.
The second is closeness. Is this other successful person a major player in the perceiver’s life or an unknown or distant person who can easily be ignored? Perceivers are really only affected—for better or worse—by those whom they see regularly or feel strongly about. This is why sibling rivalry is a thing, and second-cousin-once-removed rivalry isn’t. Figure 6-1 shows how it works.
FIGURE 6-1
How ego threats work
Relevance and closeness affect self-esteem.
So, if we want to feel good about ourselves—removing the threat to our ego—what should we do? Obviously, who we choose to compare ourselves with will have a tremendous impact on our self-esteem. Which is why, whenever possible, the people we compare ourselves with are chosen very strategically (although unconsciously). To maintain or increase self-esteem, we can focus intentionally on close others who are clearly worse off on a relevant dimension—for example, a beloved brother who is so much more scatterbrained than superorganized you. Psychologists call this downward social comparison.
As you may have noticed, people do this sort of thing all the time, though they are usually unaware that they are motivated to do it. It’s just so easy to find someone who in some way is doing worse than you are. And the net result is feeling really good about yourself. Thank you, ego lens.
Comparing Apples to Really Awesome Apples
What happens when the perceiver can’t pick and choose the comparisons—what if the comparison is right there in front of the person, too obvious to ignore? And what if it’s not a flattering comparison? In that case, the perceiver will likely feel threatened and, as I mentioned earlier, deal with this threat through one of four ways. If you are the source of the threat, then you may not like the consequences.
Strategy 1: My Apple Is Still Better Than Your Apple
This strategy is the most obvious and straightforward. To reduce the threat created by your abilities or accomplishments, the perceiver can engage in downward comparison along some other dimension—one in which the perceiver is superior to you (or at least thinks he or she is). The perceiver may even exaggerate his or her superiority in this other domain to get the job done. For example, when we’re out for a drive and I give my husband grief about speeding, he likes to remind me that I have a long history of driving our car into—and over—curbs. Which is not at all relevant and not even true. Well, OK, it’s a little true. But he’s exaggerating my proclivity for curb jumping to make himself feel better, because he knows deep down that I am the superior driver. Obviously.
When people use this strategy, you hear a lot of “Yes, but.” As in these examples:
Yes, Angela got promoted, but she’s a total workaholic; who wants that life?
Yes, Steven is funny, but he’s kind of an attention hog.
Yes, Bob’s new girlfriend is gorgeous, but she’s about as intelligent as an eggplant.
Downward comparison of your group—rather than you individually—is a less obvious but no less effective strategy. The groups to which we belong—our group identities—are just as important in determining our sense of who we are as our individual characteristics. (Group identities tend to be based on mutual goals or other commonalities, like race, gender, ethnicity, occupation, family, country, and religion.) Just think of how being a Catholic or a Protestant in Northern Ireland during the last century, a serf or a lord in medieval Europe, or a Hatfield or a McCoy in Kentucky in the 1860s would have shaped every aspect of who you were and how you lived your life. Just think of how being black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim, rich or poor shapes lives in this country, in the here and now: the opportunities and advantages you have, the constraints and pressures you face.
In fact, you could argue—as social psychologists routinely do—that these group identities play a bigger role in determining our self-concept and self-esteem than our individual abilities and accomplishments do. Therefore, it is essential for your self-esteem that you maintain positive views of your own groups and fellow group members, because group members don’t merely reflect on you—they are a part of who you are and how you see yourself. They are us. So if they aren’t smart and brave and good, how can you be? On the other hand, when you are not in the perceiver’s group—when you are not us—you are them. And as decades of research consistently shows, them is not such a good thing to be.6
What do perceivers think they know about them? Well, generally speaking, perceivers know that they are all alike, they are very different from us, and they are not as good (smart, hardworking, moral, etc.) as we are. They are also less trustworthy and less deserving of the resources at our disposal. Sorority girls are such airheads. IT guys are so nerdy. Millennials are so entitled. And worse, far worse. Perceivers may never say it out loud—they may never even think it consciously—but their brains are wired to operate under these beliefs implicitly, and that’s enough to warp their perception in a big way.
Because perceivers are highly motivated to see their own groups (us) as fundamentally better, and because belittling them is one way to achieve this goal, researchers consistently find that perceivers engage in more negative stereotyping when they have taken a self-esteem hit. For instance, in one study, researchers asked female participants of Italian descent (who had just been given bogus feedback on an “intelligence test”) to evaluate a job candidate according to a résumé and videotaped interview. The experimenters manipulated whether the candidate was perceived as Jewish (Julie Goldberg) or Italian (Maria D’Agastino).
The researchers found that the participants who had previously failed the intelligence test derogated the personality and qualifications of the Jewish candidate (but not the Italian candidate). In prior testing, these participants had demonstrated no particular bias against Jews. In fact, among the participants who received high scores on the intelligence test—and thus had egos that felt more secure—both candidates were rated as equally positive.7 The us-versus-them effect only emerged when an ego boost was needed—though in real life, let’s face it, that’s probably happening a lot.
So, when something about your accomplishments or abilities is threatening to the perceiver, his or her ego lens can try to diminish the threat and restore self-esteem by focusing on how you are one of them, and the many dimensions along which they are inferior to us. As a consequence, you are more likely to find yourself at the receiving end of stereotyping, distrust, and discrimination—all without the perceiver’s ever realizing why.
Bottom line: if the perceiver uses the me-versus-you (us-versus-them) strategy to cope with threat, it’s not going to be good for you.
Strategy 2: Aren’t Our Apples Great? Let’s Bask in Reflected Glory!
Another way for perceivers to reduce the threat you pose—a way that will work much more in your favor—is for the perceivers to focus on how you are a part of their group, so the perceivers can share in your triumph as if it were their own. Now, instead of suffering from them discrimination, you’ll be the beneficiary of in-group favoritism and get to take advantage of an array of perception biases that exist to bolster us awesomeness.
For starters, perceivers are biased to see other group members as similar to themselves in meaningful and positive ways, and not surprisingly, they like the members more because of it. Perceivers exhibit more fairness, empathy, and compassion toward their own group members. They treat their work more generously and interact more with in-group members than they do with out-group members.
Importantly, being a member of us allows the perceiver to not just neutralize the threat your abilities and accomplishments pose, but to enjoy them—to bask in reflected glory, or as psychologists call it, to BIRG (rhymes with “surge”). Parents BIRG when their children excel in school or on the playing field, nations BIRG when their athletes take home a gold medal at the Olympics, and African Americans across the United States BIRGed when Barack Obama became the first black president.
We BIRG whenever our fellow group members succeed. Perhaps the most visible example comes from the mania surrounding our favorite sports teams. Did you ever notice how ecstatic fans become when their team wins? They spend hundreds of dollars on “authentic” jerseys and other memorabilia, paint their faces (and sometimes their bodies) with team colors and mascots. The Super Bowl and World Series victories “they” won are routinely remembered as among the greatest moments of these fans’ lives, despite the fact that the fans never once set foot on the field.
All this BIRGing can play out in more subtle ways as well. For instance, Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, found that among students at the seven universities he observed, the frequency of wearing school sweaters, caps, scarves, and the like was significantly higher on days after the football team won than on days after it lost.8
Strategy 3: That’s Not My Thing (or, Comparing Apples to Oranges)
Remember that it takes closeness and relevance to create a threat. The achievement and achiever have to matter to the perceiver. Thus, one strategy the ego lens can use to neutralize threats to self-esteem is to reduce relevance by devaluing or disengaging from the domain of your success. To do this, the perceiver basically has to decide that being great at X isn’t important to him or her, personally. It’s just not on the person’s agenda.
So your colleague’s promotion won’t be a threat if you never wanted the job yourself, and your best friend’s getting married won’t get you down if you love being single. In the example from the beginning of this chapter, being a beautiful female applicant isn’t going to threaten the male interviewer, because the male interviewer doesn’t actually want to be a beautiful woman. Presumably.
In fact, when a perceiver has a close friend or family member who achieves something in a domain of low personal relevance, it’s actually a perfect opportunity to BIRG. By associating with someone whose success is not directly comparable to his own, the perceiver can actually increase his or her self-esteem.
Siblings and spouses often seem to use this knowledge strategically—though not necessarily consciously. They will deliberately focus on developing different domains of expertise—playing different sports, pursuing different majors, working in different industries—to make their achievements less directly comparable and thus avoiding potential self-esteem threats. I’m sure it’s not an accident that my brother was the jock and I was the bookish one, or that my husband and his four brothers each chose to pursue a very different kind of career: health care, law, finance, history, and Silicon Valley tech. If there had been a sixth brother, he would have had to have been a chef or possibly a magician.
The most well-known modern example of brothers carving out very different kinds of success would probably be the brothers Emanuel—the Chicago triumvirate whose members have each reached the very top of their respective fields: the mayor of Chicago and former White House chief of staff (Rahm), the prominent medical ethicist and health-care policy adviser (Ezekiel), and Hollywood power player and co-CEO of William Morris Endeavor (Ari). All three brothers are breathtakingly ambitious, famously competitive, and incredibly close—after all these years, still talking to one another almost daily.
But imagine how close they would be today if they had all wanted careers in politics or medicine. If they had all wanted to be the most powerful agent in Hollywood. As Ari once said, “The pressure is that you were judged by the family. Our family never cared about the kid down the block.”9 But if they had all been judged by the same standards—if their achievements had not been apples and oranges, but apples and apples—could the brothers have remained loving allies all these years? The number of families—some you undoubtedly know—torn utterly apart by sibling rivalry would seem to suggest not.
Strategy 4: Avoidance (Apples? What Apples?)
Which brings us to the ego lens’s final strategy to reduce threat. If the perceiver can’t or won’t reduce the relevance of your achievement to his or her own self-esteem, the person can reduce the closeness between the two of you, through avoidance. Take the brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher of the multiplatinum band Oasis. The Gallaghers have fought so much over who is more talented and more responsible for their success that they won’t even speak to each other anymore. Rivalry among tween darlings the Jonas Brothers put an end to their very lucrative music careers, too. Did you know that even the Everly Brothers could hardly stand one another? Even Serena Williams has said that when she faces off against Venus, she creates a certain amount of mental distance, telling herself, Right now we’re competitors; we can be sisters again later. I have no idea how often the Manning family—brimming with famous quarterbacks—gets together, but it’s got to be tricky for them sometimes, don’t you think? Just tossing around a football in the backyard at Dad’s house takes on a whole new meaning.
Of course, siblings aren’t the only ones who mitigate threat by reducing their closeness. It happens to longtime friends, lovers, and colleagues, too. Looking back at your own life, isn’t it all too easy to find examples of relationships that were undermined by your own success or by the other person’s? Weren’t there times when you felt you needed to hide or downplay the good things happening in your life for the good of your friendship, or when hearing of your friend’s streak of good fortune made you want to avoid your friend for a little while?
Reducing closeness in an existing relationship is one way to alleviate ego threat, but it’s not without its own kind of pain. Which is why, whenever possible, we try to avoid those relationships that might threaten us from the get-go. For instance, the interviewer I described at the beginning of the chapter might choose not to hire the attractive applicant because of the threat she poses. This decision would successfully reduce closeness—or more accurately, maintain distance—since the two people are unlikely to even see one another again. From a (great) distance, the latter’s beauty is no longer threatening.
Dealing with Someone Else’s Ego Lens
To deal with the ego lens, first assess the threat you may pose—particularly with someone who doesn’t know you well. Ask yourself, Am I, or could I potentially be, close to the perceiver? Remember, closeness isn’t just about how intimate your relationship is. Closeness is about how much you matter—how much your behavior can affect the perceiver’s work and life. So if you are someone the perceiver has to see often or work with directly, or who might be that in the future, you count as close.
Then ask yourself, Might my abilities or achievements be relevant to the perceiver? Are you going to have to do or say something that might cast the perceiver’s own abilities or achievements in a negative light, like giving him or her a performance review or pointing out an error?
If the answer to these two questions is yes, then you can expect the ego lens and its biases to be hard at work during your interaction. Let us now look at three strategies you can use to mitigate their effects, depending on your circumstances.
Be Modest
Modesty means deliberately doing what you can to be less threatening. I’m not suggesting that you play dumb or in any way try to be someone or something you are not. I am suggesting instead that tooting your own horn with a perceiver who feels threatened is not going to get you the results you are looking for. Being humble about your accomplishments and being willing to own up to your past or current difficulties—to be vulnerable and human—can actually be a remarkably effective communication strategy. In so doing, you allow the person you are interacting with to maintain (or even enhance) his or her own self-esteem. At the very least, you put the person at ease, instead of on the defensive.
Be Affirming
Many of the negative effects of ego threat that I’ve described in this chapter seem to have a simple remedy: affirmation. Remember the college students who failed an intelligence test and then (unknowingly) used stereotypes about Jews to evaluate “Julie Goldberg”? In a second version of the study, after receiving the failure feedback, some of the students were given an opportunity to write a paragraph or two about their most important values. (Expressing your own values and why they matter to you is known from prior research to provide a big boost to self-esteem.) Guess what happened? No stereotyping. The self-affirming students treated “Julie Goldberg” the same way they treated “Maria D’Agastino”—as an individual, without bias. The ego lens had been neutralized.
Fortunately, there are countless ways to affirm another person so that he or she feels effective and valuable. (Note: If you think you already are good at sending affirmation signals, you might want to ask someone, because there’s a good chance you’re not. No offense, but remember the observation from chapter 1: we all communicate much less than we think we do. You say, “Of course my wife knows I think she’s beautiful!” But can your wife remember the last time you told her she looked great?)
Obviously, you can affirm someone by explicitly recognizing or praising the person’s words and deeds. You can also affirm through questions—an option that might be a bit more palatable if you aren’t very comfortable doling out praise or if you don’t know the perceiver particularly well. Ask the person to tell you about his or her current goals, values, proudest moments, dreams for the future. Ask for guidance and perspective on a vexing problem. Anything that allows perceivers to focus, for even a moment, on what is best and most meaningful about themselves and their lives will provide the kind of self-esteem boost necessary to neutralize the ego lens.
Importantly, you need to keep in mind that people don’t just want to be seen positively by others—they want to be seen the way they see themselves. Psychologists call this the desire for self-verification, and it is a profound and universal need. People become really uncomfortable when they get compliments (or criticism) they feel they genuinely don’t deserve. What this means for you is that praising someone for a quality they don’t believe they possess can backfire on you big-time. The best way to steer clear of this problem is to stick with truthful affirmations. In other words, affirm the abilities and accomplishments that you have direct evidence of—the ones that you know to be authentic and genuinely admire.
Be Us, Not Them
The ego lens isn’t all bad. There are great benefits to be had, for instance, when your perceiver chooses to BIRG over your accomplishments. But how can you encourage him or her to see you as a part of Team Us, rather than Team Them?
The surprising answer is, it doesn’t take much. Research suggests that what counts as a group you both belong to—and therefore what it takes to bring about the powerful in-group/out-group effects that I have described—can be trivial. For instance, in the laboratory, strong in-group favoritism is produced when people are placed into blue-eyed versus brown-eyed groups or categorized according to the color of the shirt they happen to be wearing. In one study, participants were asked to rate their liking for abstract paintings and were randomly told that they preferred the paintings by either “Kandinsky” or “Klee.” In another, they were asked to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar and were told (again, randomly) that they were either “overestimators” or “underestimators.” Subsequently, the researchers found that “Kandinsky fans” much preferred one another to “Klee fans” and that “overestimators” believed that their personalities were more similar to one another than to “underestimators.”10
As Henri Tajfel, one of the early giants of research on social identity, discovered, us-versus-them thinking happens even when you assign groups on the basis of a coin toss—and even when people know it was based on a coin toss. In his coin-toss studies, Tajfel witnessed in-group favoritism, dislike of the out-group, and the perception that the out-group was meaningfully different, even when objectively it could not possibly be.11
So given that it doesn’t take much to make a group, all you are looking for to emphasize your us-ness is any sort of commonality. Obviously, the more meaningful and salient your commonalities, the more effective they will be—but even something as simple as pointing out that you both are big fans of Bruce Springsteen can be enough to move you from a them to an us.
Before your next encounter with a perceiver who you suspect sees you as a them, take a moment to search your memory for some experiences or attributes you might share. These need to be true, by the way—making something up will probably create more problems for you than it will solve. Work some references to these commonalities into your conversation as naturally as you can, in whatever ways you are comfortable with, and then watch how powerfully and positively the dynamic between you and the perceiver shifts, as your perceiver’s ego lens recognizes that you are not a liability, but an asset in the ego lens’s never-ending quest to end up on top.