People Will Misjudge You Unless You Manipulate Them | Big Think.

People Will Misjudge You Unless You Manipulate Them

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"Perception is tricky," explains Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson, an associate director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia Business School. There's this notion that the way we see ourselves is the way others see us as well — not true. In her book No One Understands You and What to Do About It, she talks about the two phases of perception: automatic and thoughtful. People rarely try to move past that first phase where people have a "gist" of who you are as a person — most of the time, that's all they want. Halvorson explains some of the barriers that hinder people from going into that second phase and looking at you as a more nuanced person.

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HEIDI GRANT HALVORSON:

Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson is a social psychologist who researches, writes, and speaks about the science of motivation. She is the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia Business School, Senior Consultant for the Neuroleadership Institute, and author of the best-selling books:

Succeed: How We Can All Reach Our Goals, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing The World for Success and Influence (co-written with E. Tory Higgins), and The 8 Motivational Challenges.

Halvorson is also a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, 99u, Fast Company, WSJ.com, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today.

In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Judgment and Decision Making. She has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation for her research on goals and achievement.

HGH is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and was recently elected to the highly selective Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She gives frequent invited addresses and speaks regularly at national conferences, and is available for speaking and consulting engagements, primarily in education, marketing, and management. She received her PhD in social psychology from Columbia University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Heidi Grant Halvorson: One of the challenges I think that we need to face head on when we think about how we come across to other people is really understanding that perception is tricky and that for your perceiver, the person who’s trying to understand you, it’s really kind of an uphill battle. They’re operating on very little information trying to get the right, accurate image of you. But the good news is that the kinds of mistakes that perceivers make are very predictable. It’s not random. We know a lot about the kinds of signals a person sends and how they tend to be perceived by other people. President Obama, when he was running for reelection, had his first debate with Mitt Romney and he went into it, according to everything that was said afterwards, he had gone into it really trying to seem presidential and not wanting to rise to debate, kind of trying to take advantage of the fact that he was coming in as an incumbent president. And it turned out that at the end of it people who were in the audience, even people who were fans of President Obama, thought that he had come across as lethargic, as disengaged, wondering if he had had enough sleep that night. And afterwards he was really quite surprised when he spoke to his aides to find out how poorly he had done because he really thought he was very successfully coming across as above the fray and presidential when, in fact, he was actually seeming sort of out of it. And so you can think if someone like President Obama who’s really a gifted orator and has a lot of experience trying to come across to other people in a particular way, if he can be so wrong about how he’s coming across, then it’s obviously pretty easy for the rest of us to make the same mistake.

We tend to think that other people are really paying attention, really trying to understand us. I mean most of the time they’re happy to just get the gist of you and the gist can be totally wrong. The first phase of perception, what Kahneman calls system one thinking,......

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