System 1 processes information quickly, intuitively, and automatically. These “systems,” which Kahneman describes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, serve as metaphors for two different kinds of reasoning. First, according to a large body of psychological research, individuals are what psychologists call “cognitive misers.” That is, people are lazy thinkers.Īccording to the work of the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, there are two ways that the mind processes information, including information about others: through cognitive processes that Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2. The perceiver, meanwhile, is dealing with two powerful psychological forces that are warping his ability to read others accurately. Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually Deirdre Clemente 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.” 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. “Chances are,” Halvorson writes, “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. First, most people suffer from what psychologists call “ the transparency illusion”-the belief that what they feel, desire, and intend is crystal clear to others, even though they have done very little to communicate clearly what is going on inside their minds.īecause the perceived assume they are transparent, they might not spend the time or effort to be as clear and forthcoming about their intentions or emotional states as they could be, giving the perceiver very little information with which to make an accurate judgment. This gap arises, as Halvorson explains in her book, from some quirks of human psychology. There’s a big gap between how other people see us and how we see ourselves.” “If I ask you,” Halvorson told me, “about how you see yourself-what traits you would say describe you-and I ask someone who knows you well to list your traits, the correlation between what you say and what your friend says will be somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5. Most of the time, Halvorson says, people don’t realize they are not coming across the way they think they are. She goes to bed early rather than watching their favorite television show together like they usually do, and he assumes she’s not interested in spending time with him, when really she’s just exhausted after a tough day at work. How many fights between couples have started with one person misinterpreting what another says and does? He stares at his plate at dinner while she’s telling a story and she assumes he doesn’t care about what she’s saying, when really he is admiring the beautiful meal she made. These kinds of misunderstandings lead to conflict and resentment not just at work, but at home too. His colleague gently explained that his "active-listening face" looked a lot like his angry face. But that’s not why he’s keeping strange hours he just works best when the office is less crowded. He has, after all, been showing up early to work and going home late every day. Just as he misunderstands her, she misunderstands him: She offered him help because she thought he was overworked and stressed. But her colleague may interpret her offer as a lack of faith in his abilities. One person may think, for example, that by offering help to a colleague, she is coming across as generous. To Halvorson, a social psychologist at Columbia Business School who has extensively researched how people perceive one another, Tim’s story captures one of the primary problems of being a human being: Try though you might to come across in a certain way to others, people often perceive you in an altogether different way. “After a few weeks of meetings,” Halvorson explains, “one team member finally summoned up the courage to ask him the question that had been on everyone’s mind.” That question was: “Tim, are you angry with us right now?” When Tim explained that he wasn’t at all angry-that he was just putting on his “active-listening face”-his colleague gently explained that his active-listening face looked a lot like his angry face. So at team meetings, as each member spoke up about whatever project they were working on, Tim made sure he put on his “active-listening face” to signal that he cared about what each person was saying.īut after meeting with him a few times, Tim’s team got a very different message from the one he intended to send. When Tim started a new job as a manager, one of his top priorities was communicating to his team that he valued each member’s input. In her new book No One Understands You and What To Do About It, Heidi Grant Halvorson tells readers a story about her friend, Tim.
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