Reason Number One: You Are a Riddle, Wrapped in an Enigma

For starters, you are much harder to read than you might imagine. No one is actually an open book. For you to be truly, completely, and 100 percent accurately knowable, other people would need to be able to look into your mind directly. Recent advances in neuroscience notwithstanding, that’s not possible. So you will, of necessity, remain something of a mystery to everyone around you.

And you aren’t doing as much as you might imagine to make yourself knowable, either. Your emotions are less obvious than you realize, and your face is less expressive, too. Studies show that while very strong, basic emotions—surprise, fear, disgust, and anger—are fairly easy to read, the more subtle emotions we experience on a daily basis are not. Chances are, how you look when you are slightly frustrated isn’t all that different from how you look when you are a little concerned, confused, disappointed, or nervous. Your “I’m kind of hurt by what you just said” face probably looks an awful lot like your “I’m not at all hurt by what you just said” face. And the majority of times that you’ve said to yourself, “I made my intentions clear,” or “He knows what I meant,” you didn’t and he doesn’t.

Psychologists call this the transparency illusion, and we are all its victims. Take, for instance, research by Jacquie Vorauer and Stephanie-Danielle Claude of the University of Manitoba. They were interested in how readily negotiators would pick up on the goals and intentions of their negotiation partners—obviously, a critical piece of information in any negotiation. The researchers observed pairs of negotiators who were asked to jointly solve an interpersonal problem that had no obvious or easy solution, such as: “Your sister is engaged to marry a man who, in your opinion, is bad news. You do not trust him, and you suspect that he has been cheating on your sister. Your sister, however, is very much in love. What should you do?”³

Before beginning to work out joint solutions to each of the problems, negotiators were asked to privately indicate which of the following five goals was their primary goal in the negotiation:

1. Hold firm to my own personal opinions.
2. Make sure that the other person feels satisfied with the chosen solutions, even if it means that I have to compromise some of my own values and beliefs.
3. Make sure that each of us makes a similar number of compromises.
4. Focus on identifying the best solutions to the problems without worrying about the implications of my choices for my relationships with the other person.
5. Gain the liking of the other person.

At the end of the negotiations, the participants were asked what they thought their partner’s primary goal was, based on the way he or she behaved throughout the task. How transparent was the partner’s true intention? Evidently, about as transparent as a brick wall, as it was guessed correctly only 26 percent of the time—just barely better than chance. Now, how transparent did each partner believe his or her intentions to be? The partners estimated that their goal would be crystal clear 60 percent of the time.

And yet no one is entirely unknowable either. In fact, some of us are actually easier to understand than others. These people seem to express themselves in ways that allow others to perceive them more accurately. Psychologists refer to this ability as being more or less judgeable, or as personality expert David Funder calls it, being a “good target.” What actually makes someone more judgeable? Funder has argued that in order for people to be accurate in their assessments of someone else, four things need to happen. The target must (1) make information available and (2) make sure that information is relevant. Then, the perceiver must (3) detect, or pay attention to, that information and (4) use it correctly.⁴

Let’s focus for now on the parts that are in your (i.e., the target’s) control. (The other parts, about how perceivers detect and use information, will be the focus of the next chapter.) To be judgeable, you are going to need to make information about yourself available to others, and it should provide evidence of the particular qualities you are trying to convey. (In other words, just knowing that you graduated at the top of your class at Harvard tells me nothing at all about how personable, trustworthy, creative, or resilient you are.) So if you are a very shy and reserved person who reveals next to nothing about your thoughts and feelings to the people around you, then they will know very little about you—aside from the fact that you are shy and reserved, obviously. The danger there is that people will generally fill in the blanks themselves, imagining a whole personality profile for you that may or may not—probably not—be accurate.

Manipulative people can use this dynamic to their advantage. For instance, I had an office mate in graduate school who was famous for his reserve in romantic relationships. Actually, he was fairly reserved in general, but when it came to dating, he managed to somehow say or do almost nothing that would reveal his true thoughts and feelings. He was a completely closed book. I once asked him if this caused problems for him with the women in his life, and he told me, with remarkable candor, that he did it intentionally—he had found that women would usually interpret his silences in positive ways. (He’s so mysterious. He’s a deep thinker. Maybe he’s been hurt before—I’ll bet he’s really sensitive . . .) The personality they would invent for him, he said, was in fact much better than his actual personality. So to him, silence was golden. As a psychologist, I found this fascinating. As a single woman, on the other hand, I found it more than a little terrifying.

Ignoring my former office mate for the moment, it is definitely better to be judgeable—to have other people read you easily and accurately. Research consistently shows that people who are more judgeable are psychologically better adjusted—they are happier; are more satisfied with their personal and professional lives; have more lasting, positive relationships; and have a greater sense of purpose.⁵ They feel able to live more authentically and are more confident in their self-knowledge. This makes a lot of sense. If people are seeing you the way you see yourself, then you aren’t getting all the unsettling, self-doubt-inducing feedback that the chronically misunderstood have to endure. Life is simply easier and more rewarding when people “get you” and provide you with the opportunities and support that are a good fit for you.

Reason Number Two: Your Actions Are a Matter of Interpretation

The second reason those core assumptions—that you are seen objectively and are seen the way you see yourself—are flawed is that the information other people get from you and about you, the words you speak and the behaviors you engage in, is always given meaning through interpretation.

That can be hard to wrap your head around, because it’s not at all how perception feels. It feels like we see what is there—like there’s no interpretation involved.

Imagine that your neighbor Steve runs into you at the grocery store and says, “Hi! So glad to see you!” That seems unambiguous, doesn’t it? It obviously means he is feeling happy to see you because he genuinely likes you—unless, of course, he means it sarcastically. (Was there a funny tone in his voice? Was he looking away when he said it?) Or maybe he’s just pretending to be happy because he wants something from you. (Is it the end of the month? Steve is usually broke at the end of the month . . .) Then again, maybe he’s just being polite. (Hmmm . . .)

OK, now imagine that you and Steve have started chatting in the produce aisle. But he keeps staring off into the distance. That is clearly rude, isn’t it? Steve is obviously a jerk. Unless maybe something is on his mind. (Didn’t someone say his mother has been ill?) Or maybe he’s distracted. (After all, he is in the middle of running errands.)

Strings of words, like Hi-I’m-so-glad-to-see-you, and actions, like staring off into the distance, are the clues we have to try to understand what another person is like. But as you can see, these word strings and actions have very little meaning by themselves. We need to figure out what they mean—from the context and from everything else we know (or think we know) about the person. So if you believe that Steve likes you, then Steve’s greeting will seem friendly and genuine. If, on the other hand, you feel like Steve’s been giving you the cold shoulder for a while now, you are likely to doubt his sincerity or wonder if he’s about to ask you to feed his cat while he’s away.

So if words and deeds must be interpreted to give them meaning, you can never be seen as you “objectively” are (and neither can Steve). And since you have unique access to your own thoughts and intentions, while other people are left having to guess what you are up to, it’s easy to see why those interpretations can end up being very different—why other people don’t see you the way you see yourself.

In fact, other people don’t even agree with each other about what you are like. I’ll bet President Obama thinks of himself as a highly competent person—after all, the man has two Ivy League degrees, served as editor of the Harvard Law Review, and was skillful enough to be elected senator and then president. But do others see him that way? A 2012 Pew poll asked one thousand Americans to describe the president in one word. There was enormous variety in the words people chose—with the popularity of words like “great” and “intelligent” being roughly equal to words like “failure” and “incompetent.” Equal numbers of people described him as “honest” and “a liar.” (And then there’s poor Vice President Joe Biden—the most popular word used to describe him was “good,” followed very closely by “idiot.”)

It’s really not that there is no agreement on the character traits of public figures. It’s just that there’s a lot less than you think. For example, a group of research psychologists asked over two hundred Germans to judge the personalities of fifteen well-known public figures in Germany. These included Pope Benedict XVI, actress Angelina Jolie, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, designer Karl Lagerfeld, and singer Madonna.⁶ The participants in the study were given a list of thirty adjectives (e.g., reckless, helpful, lively, selfish, responsible, shy, irritable) to use to describe each celebrity.

The researchers found that among people who actually liked the celebrity in question, the average judgment correlation was 0.67. In other words, there was substantial agreement about what someone was like among those who viewed that person positively. (Quick correlation refresher: A correlation of 1.0 is perfect, meaning that one thing exactly predicts the other—they are in total sync. The closer you are to 1.0, the stronger the relationship. A correlation of 0, on the other hand, means there is no relationship at all between the two things you are comparing.)

Among those who were more neutral about the celebrity, the correlation fell to 0.44, and among those who actively disliked the celebrity, it was only 0.33, indicating significant differences of opinion. To borrow a bit from Tolstoy, it would appear that while all your fans see you similarly, the haters each hate you in their own, unique way.

You could argue that differences of perception should be expected with public figures, because we don’t actually know them personally. We know them through their TV and film appearances, their magazine interviews, their Twitter and Facebook feeds. We know them through the opinions of talking heads, cultural critics, and gossip mongers.

But surely someone who knows you firsthand will see the real you—the self that you see, right? To answer that question, researchers asked nearly four hundred college roommates to describe their own personality along with their roommate’s, to see if actually knowing each other, along with time spent living together, would have an impact on perception.⁷ Specifically, they wanted to see if over time, your roommate was more likely to begin to see you the way you see yourself. The answer was yes: as long as you have lived together for a minimum of nine months. It takes that long for perceptions to even begin to get in sync.

And even then, the correlations between how college students saw themselves and how their roommates saw them were surprisingly low, in the 0.2 to 0.5 range. Perceptions among female roommates were more similar than among male roommates, though it wasn’t exactly clear why. It may be that women are more accurate perceivers, or it may be that women have a better sense of how they are perceived—in other words, that their sense of who they are is more influenced by how others see them. In general, research shows women to be (on average) more socially sensitive and more concerned with interpersonal relationships than men, so it makes sense that women would be more invested in seeing others accurately and in how they themselves are seen. Nevertheless, even among women, the correlations between how they see themselves and how others see them were modest at best.

What about people who really know each other—like married couples? They share a life together, experience the same ups and downs, the same joys and worries, and (usually) sleep in the same bed. Surely, with all that intimate knowledge of you, your husband or wife must see you the way you see yourself, right?

Alas. There are, in fact, significant differences in perception among spouses, too. Interestingly, these differences are also highly predictable. These biases were nicely illustrated in a study of forty-four married couples, roughly half of whom were currently in marriage counseling. Those in counseling (or, as the researchers referred to them, the “distressed” group) were more likely to have a negative bias—they saw their partner in a far less flattering light than the partner did and tended to hold the partner more personally responsible for any bad behaviors they had engaged in.⁸ So while Larry may see himself as a fairly conscientious guy who occasionally forgets to take the garbage out (who doesn’t?), his wife, Susan, sees him as irresponsible and inconsiderate, leaving her (once again) to pick up the slack.

The couples who were not in counseling—the “nondistressed” group—tended to have a positive bias and were more forgiving. So when Bob forgets to take out the garbage, Mary sees him as merely a bit absent-minded, but really that’s understandable given how hard Bob has been working, and really, brilliant people are often a little absent-minded, aren’t they?

Now, maybe Susan is right and Mary is being a fool. I’m not saying that one of these biases is right and the other is wrong—in fact, any bias is by definition sometimes wrong. (On the other hand, a negative bias in a marriage is apparently quite likely to land you in marriage counseling . . . so that’s food for thought.) But taken together, it’s easy to see why misunderstandings between friends and lovers are so common and why our relationships—the keys to our ultimate success and happiness—can be so stressful.

Now you may be asking yourself, if even married couples can’t understand each other—and if even the president of the United States, with his team of communications professionals, doesn’t come across the way he intends to—what hope do I have of ever getting my boss to see my potential, or my colleague to see how hard I work? The next step is to understand how little we actually pay attention to each other and how much we rely on assumptions. That’s the subject of the next chapter.