Why We Can’t Accurately Judge the Impression We Make on Others
People consistently make mistakes when trying to assess the impression they make on those around them. One important reason is that each person knows much more about themselves than others do, and they unintentionally factor in this “hidden” information when trying to see themselves through someone else’s eyes. This appears to be a fundamental flaw in our “social intelligence,” one that we can’t overcome even when we’re fully aware that others lack our “personal context.”
One of the most fascinating areas of modern experimental psychology is the study of the various imperfections in our thinking—systematic errors we make in situations that seem simple and obvious. Such research clearly shows that the human mind is far from perfect, and evolution still has work to do.
Our thinking is especially prone to errors during social interactions. We tend to overestimate ourselves and underestimate others. We systematically misjudge abilities, chances of success, career prospects, and personal qualities—both our own and those of others. In some cases, these errors might have an adaptive purpose (for example, the well-known phenomenon of excessive optimism about our own abilities and prospects). Other failures of “social intelligence” bring nothing but trouble, conflict, and stress.
Everyone is objectively interested in accurately assessing the impression they make on others. This may have been one of the main mental challenges faced by our ancestors since ancient times. Without this ability, it would be nearly impossible to improve one’s status (and reproductive success) in a complex primate group. If natural selection hasn’t managed to “tune” our brains to solve this problem effectively over millions of years, it may be because the task is extremely difficult—or perhaps optimizing the brain in this way would conflict with other important mental functions.
Why We Misjudge How Others See Us
We usually judge others “by ourselves”—this principle underlies our social intelligence. In many cases, this strategy works well, but not when it comes to evaluating the impression we make. Psychologists believe the main reason is that we have very different sets of data about ourselves and others: we perceive ourselves from the inside, with all our thoughts, desires, motives, memories, and fantasies, while we see others only from the outside and can judge them only by their actions, words, manners, and so on. Even though we know that some information about us is hidden from others, we still struggle to factor this in when assessing the impression we make. We unintentionally—and sometimes illogically—“project” our own knowledge into the minds of others, even though they clearly don’t have access to it.
Experiments Demonstrating This Flaw
American psychologists clearly demonstrated this frustrating “glitch” in our thinking through a series of four simple experiments involving large groups of college students.
Experiment 1: Darts Performance
In the first experiment, each participant played darts twice: once practicing alone, and once in front of an audience of strangers. Afterward, they rated, on a scale of 1 to 10, the impression they thought they made on the audience and their own satisfaction with their performance. The audience also rated the participant’s skill on the same scale.
Statistical analysis showed that participants’ expectations of the impression they made correlated strongly with two things: whether they performed better or worse in front of the audience compared to their practice round, and their own subjective satisfaction with their performance. Those who did better in public than in practice expected higher ratings from the audience, regardless of their actual performance. The audience’s ratings, however, depended only on the actual performance and did not correlate with the participant’s self-assessment or their practice results (which the audience didn’t see). In other words, participants expected others to judge them based on information only they themselves had.
On average, participants in this experiment significantly underestimated the impression they made on the audience.
Experiment 2: Singing Performance
The second experiment showed that expected ratings could be either underestimated or overestimated, depending on how confident participants felt during their public performance. Students were asked to sing a fragment of the popular song “End Of The World As We Know It” twice. The first time was a practice run; the second was recorded. They were told that others would listen to the recording and rate their performance. Half the singers were given the lyrics during practice but had to sing from memory during the recording; the other half practiced from memory but had the lyrics during the recording, which should have boosted their confidence.
Students in the second group rated their own performances higher and expected higher ratings from listeners, even though this wasn’t reflected in reality. Listeners gave roughly the same average ratings to both groups. Listener ratings were significantly lower than what the confident singers expected, and higher than what the less confident singers anticipated.
Experiment 3: Word Game (Boggle)
The third experiment was especially interesting because participants were explicitly told what the evaluators would and wouldn’t know. Students played a word game (Boggle), finding as many words as possible in a grid of 16 letters. On average, they found 25 words. Each student worked alone but was told that three other students had found 80, 83, and 88 words (this was a lie, meant to make the participant feel they had performed poorly). The numbers were chosen to be impressive but believable.
Participants were then asked to predict how a stranger would rate their intelligence, quick thinking, and Boggle skills based on their test results. Half were told that the same person would rate all four group members (and thus would know the participant did “worst”), while the other half were told that different people would rate each participant (so the rater wouldn’t know how others did). A third, control group wasn’t told anything about the other participants’ results and didn’t think they had performed poorly.
As expected, the control group predicted much higher ratings for themselves than the two “deceived” groups. But most interestingly, both groups who “knew” they had done worst expected equally low ratings, regardless of whether the rater would know this or not. In other words, people didn’t adjust their expectations based on what the evaluator actually knew—they only cared about what they themselves knew about their own performance.
Experiment 4: The Power of Imagination
The fourth experiment tested whether simply imagining a scenario could influence how people thought they were perceived. One group of students was asked to imagine a situation where they made a good impression; another group imagined making a bad impression; a control group did no imagining. Then, each participant had a six-minute one-on-one conversation with a stranger. Afterward, they rated the impression they thought they made (and the impression the other person made on them) on a scale of 1 to 10, and predicted how the other person would rate their sense of humor, friendliness, charm, rudeness, dullness, intelligence, honesty, secrecy, warmth, and caring.
The type of scenario participants imagined before the conversation had a strong effect on the impression they thought they made—but no effect at all on the actual impression they made. Those who imagined making a bad impression thought they had done poorly; those who imagined making a good impression were sure they had been liked. In reality, both groups were far from accurate.
Why It’s Easier with Friends
The authors optimistically note that people tend to make such big mistakes only when interacting with strangers, as in these experiments. It’s easier to communicate with close friends and family. Why? Is it because we know and understand them better, and can more accurately model their thoughts and reactions? The authors believe it’s more likely because friends know much more about our “personal context”—the very information we unconsciously “project” into others’ minds when assessing how they see us, even when we know they don’t actually have access to it.