How to Win Friends and Influence People, the 1936 book that started the modern self-help movement, will be of particular benefit to you if you fall into any of the following categories: 1) You live in the 1930s; 2) You are a hard-working 1930s businessman looking to land that promotion, or show your appreciation of your wife, whose vocation is cooking your meals and helping you out of your 1930s coat each evening; 3) You are a hard-working 1930s businessman who doesn’t yet have a wife but wants to ingratiate himself with a certain pretty ‘salesgirl’ at the department store where you buy your 1930s coats.
In other words, it’s a bit dated. Yet, extraordinarily, Dale Carnegie’s book continues to sell many thousands of copies every year, has never been out of print and, at the time of writing, is the eighteenth most popular self-help book on Amazon.com. The total number of copies sold is widely reported to have surpassed 15 million. Evidently, something about it still appeals strongly, so I thought I’d investigate.
‘That’s £7.99, please,’ said the man in the bookshop. I muttered a thank you. Had I read the book, I’d have looked him in the eye, smiled and said, ‘Thank you, Neil! I really appreciate your helping me today, Neil. Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself, Neil?’
Carnegie’s rules for smooth social interaction and success in life involve never criticising other people openly, praising them at every opportunity, and ‘becoming genuinely interested’ in their jobs and hobbies, which is a laudable goal, except that in Carnegie’s own examples it never amounts to anything more than pretending to be fascinated.‘Always make the other person feel important,’ Carnegie writes. Oh, and: ‘Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.’
All this is either brilliantly empathetic, or coldly manipulative: I can’t figure out which. Cigar-chomping captains of industry are saluted for keeping their workers productive through nothing but charm; the mining baron John D. Rockefeller is praised for subduing striking workers by making them feel wanted – as opposed to, say, increasing their wages. The truculent British part of my brain kept objecting to this as horribly fake, even as the other part pointed out that ‘fake it till you make it’ is a perfectly acceptable way of going about things.
The problem is not so much the initial fakery as the self-consciousness it induces. Watching yourself all day as you fine-tune your methods of interacting with people is a near-perfect way of driving yourself insane; eventually, you give up and slip back into living your life instead of watching yourself live it, at which point you revert to your natural temperament. Some have suggested my natural temperament involves an element of grumpiness. Usually, I’d reject this crossly, but having read Carnegie – who says you should never tell another person they’re wrong – I’d like to say in response: ‘You’re right! That’s fascinating. Now, tell me about yourself.’
It’s a common observation, among residents and visitors alike, that to walk through London at rush hour is to encounter a staggeringly large number of rude people, angry people and aggressive people, many of whom are also stupid. The observation is so commonplace, in fact, that it presents a problem: if you’ve ever had cause to criticise London’s obnoxious hordes, you’ve almost certainly been dismissed by someone else, at some point, as being one of the obnoxious types yourself. You’re not, of course. You’re a reasonable, warm-spirited person. You sometimes get irritable, after a stressful day, when it’s raining and you forgot your umbrella, but who wouldn’t? That doesn’t make you an unpleasant person. It’s other people who are irredeemably, intrinsically awful. (See also Sartre’s famous remark that ‘hell is other people, especially the ones who linger pointlessly at the cash machine for 45 seconds after withdrawing their money’.)
We think this way because we’re hypocrites, certainly – but also thanks to one of the most important phenomena in social psychology, the fundamental attribution error, or FAE. In accounting for others’ behaviour, we chronically overvalue personality-based explanations, while undervaluing situational ones. ‘When we see someone else kick a vending machine for no visible reason, we assume they are “an angry person”,’ writes Eliezer Yudkowsky at the blog overcomingbias.com. ‘But when you yourself kick the machine, it’s because the bus was late, the train was early, your report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten your lunch money for the second day in a row. Surely, you think to yourself, anyone would kick the vending machine, in that situation.’
The bias runs deep. Few of us, surely, think of ourselves as having a fixed, monochrome personality: we’re happy or sad, stressed or relaxed, depending on circumstances. Yet we stubbornly resist the notion that others might be similarly circumstance-dependent. In a well-known 1960s study, people were shown two essays, one arguing in favour of Castro’s Cuba and one against. Even when it was explained that the authors had been ordered to adopt each position based on a coin-toss – that their situation, in other words, had forced their hand – readers still concluded that the ‘pro-Castro’ author must be, deep down, pro-Castro, and the other anti.44 (Intriguingly, this personality-trumps-situation bias seems less prevalent in more collectivist cultures, such as Japan, than individualist ones, such as America.45)
Self-help gurus love to dispense personality-based counsel when it comes to others: there’s advice for dealing with ‘toxic people’, ‘energy vampires’, the neurotic, the negative, the self-absorbed. Personality disorders do exist, to be sure, but the FAE suggests we should err on the side of cutting people some slack – that almost everyone believes that what they do, at any given moment, is a natural response to their circumstances.
There are broader ramifications, too. The FAE undermines arguments based on the idea of ‘a few bad apples’, whether that’s torturers at Abu Ghraib or everyday criminals who are ‘just born that way’. This isn’t to excuse bad acts; it’s simply being clear-eyed. ‘While a few bad apples might spoil the barrel … a vinegar barrel will always transform sweet cucumbers into sour pickles,’ notes Philip Zimbardo, in a paper entitled ‘A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil’.46 (Zimbardo’s notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students asked to play prison guards behaved with striking cruelty towards students playing prisoners, shows how powerful situational influences can be.) So, he wonders, ‘does it make more sense to spend resources to identify, isolate and destroy bad apples, or to understand how vinegar works?’
This is going to be awkward, but someone has to tell you, so it might as well be me: you’re kind of a loser. You know that feeling you sometimes have that your friends have more friends than you? You’re right. They do. And you know how almost everyone at the gym seems in better shape than you, and how everyone at your book club seems better read? Well, they are. If you’re single, it’s probably a while since you dated – what with you being such a loser – but when you did, do you recall thinking the other person was more romantically experienced than you? I’m afraid it was probably true.
The only consolation in all this is that it’s nothing personal: it’s a bizarre statistical fact that almost all of us have fewer friends than our friends, more flab than our fellow gym-goers, and so on. In other words, you’re a loser, but it’s not your fault: it’s just mathematics. (I mean, it’s probably just mathematics. You might be a catastrophic failure as a human being, for all I know. But let’s focus on the mathematics.)
To anyone not steeped in the science of numbers, this seems crazy. Friendship is a two-way street, so you’d assume things would average out: any given person would be as likely to be more popular than their friends as less. But as the sociologist Scott Feld showed, in a 1991 paper bluntly entitled ‘Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do’, this isn’t true. If you list all your friends, and then ask them all how many friends they have, their average is very likely to be higher than your friend count.47
The reason is bewilderingly simple: ‘You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends,’ as the psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa explains.48You’re more likely to know more popular people, and less likely to know less popular ones. Some people may be completely friendless, but you’re not friends with any of them.
The implications of this seeming paradox cascade through daily life. People at your gym tend to be fitter than you because you tend not to encounter the ones who rarely go; any given romantic partner is likely to have had more partners than you because you’re more likely to be part of a larger group than a small one. (‘If your lover only had one lover,’ Kanazawa points out, ‘you are probably not him.’) This is also why people think of certain beaches or museums or airports as usually busier than they actually are: by definition, most people aren’t there when they’re less crowded.
This takes some mental gymnastics to appreciate, but it’s deeply reassuring. We’re often told that comparing yourself with others is a fast track to misery – ‘the grass is always greener’ – but the usual explanation is that we choose to compare ourselves with the wrong people: we pick the happiest, wealthiest, most talented people, and ignore how much better off we are than most. Feld’s work, though, suggests that this is only half of the problem. When it comes to our social circles, the field from which we’re choosing our comparisons is also skewed against us to begin with. So next time you catch yourself feeling self-pityingly inferior to almost everyone you know, take heart: you’re right, but then again, it’s probably the same for them, too.
The advice of etiquette experts on dealing with unwanted invitations, or overly demanding requests for favours, has always been the same: just say no. That may have been a useless mantra in the war on drugs, but in the war on relatives who want to stay for a fortnight, or colleagues trying to get you to do their work for them, the manners guru Emily Post’s formulation – ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible’ – remains the gold standard. Excuses merely invite negotiation. The comic retort has its place (Peter Cook: ‘Oh dear, I find I’m watching television that night’), and I’m fond of the tautological non-explanation (‘I can’t, because I’m unable to’). But these are variations on a theme. The best way to say no is to say no. Then shut up.
This is a lesson we’re unable to learn, however, judging by the scores of books promising to help us. The Power of a Positive No, How to Say No Without Feeling Guilty, The Book of No … Publishers, certainly, seem unable to refuse. Such books are meant to help combat the ‘disease to please’ – a phrase that doesn’t make grammatical sense, but rhymes, giving it instant pop-psychology cachet. There are certainly profound issues here, relating to self-esteem, guilt and more. But it’s also worth considering whether part of the problem doesn’t originate in a simple misunderstanding between two types of people: Askers and Guessers.
This terminology comes from a brilliant web posting by Andrea Donderi that has achieved minor cult status online.49 We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise – fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid ‘putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes … A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.’
Neither approach is ‘wrong’, but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who is assuming you might decline. If you’re a Guesser, you’ll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it’s a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they tend to be diehard Askers.
Self-help seeks to make us all Askers, training us to both ask and refuse with relish; the mediation expert William Ury recommends memorising ‘anchor phrases’ such as ‘that doesn’t work for me’. But Guessers can take solace in logic: in many social situations (though perhaps not in the workplace) the very fact that you’re receiving an anxiety-inducing request is proof that the person asking is an Asker. He or she is half-expecting you’ll say no, and has no inkling of the torture you’re experiencing. So say no, and see what happens. Nothing will.
Everyone would like to be thought of as interesting, but the quest is fraught with dangers. ‘Before you read this discussion of how we can become more interesting,’ wrote Barbara Wedgwood, in a 1965 book called How to Be a More Interesting Woman, ‘think of this: not every man wants an interesting woman, any more than every husband wants or could even tolerate a beauty. It is a very difficult thing to be a woman.’
That particular consideration may be somewhat less pressing today, but learning to be interesting remains a very difficult thing, for men and women. Self-help books promise to show you how, yet usually end up parroting Wedgwood’s comically counterproductive advice. For example: ‘Find some subject that really interests you and become an expert in it.’ We all know people like this, who won’t shut up about their specialism. But we don’t tend to describe them as ‘interesting’.
The problem may be that nobody can define interestingness to start with. Consequently, many tips for cultivating it just restate the problem: ‘Develop an instinct for the things people want to hear about.’ Or they veer close to circular reasoning. ‘Start a blog,’ the designer and blogger Russell Davies recommends, but as experience shows, only interesting people – Davies included – start interesting blogs. Boring people’s blogs are distillations of their boringness.
Interestingly – no, I promise – boringness in a conversation partner is much easier to define than interestingness. It is the refusal to grant equal status to your interlocutor as a person. ‘There is no more infuriating feeling than having your individuality ignored, your own psychology unacknowledged,’ argues Robert Greene in The 48 Laws of Power. Perhaps that’s why bores provoke a level of rage that seems disproportionate to their offence. ‘People do all kinds of aggressive and antisocial things to each other – surely I do a few myself – and talking on and on can’t be the worst of them,’ writes the literary scholar Mark Edmundson in The American Scholar. ‘Still, being on the receiving end of such verbiage sends me close to the edge.’
Specialist-subject bores, Edmundson observes, aren’t even the worst: the worst are those who think they’re experts in your specialism. Of one colleague, prone to offering wisdom on Coleridge, he writes: ‘He must think he’s doing me a favour by lecturing me on a matter close to my heart, and I think I’m doing him a favour by listening. When two people take themselves to be doing each other favours when they’re not, the account books get unbalanced and disaster is up the road, for each one thinks he has the other in his debt.’
All this may help explain why self-help’s other famous tip for becoming interesting – that it’s all about being interested in the other person – seems so insufficient. Certainly, it gets at something true: we’re all egotists, and pandering to that can work. But being ostentatiously interested is still a form of egotism, and asking all the questions is a way of controlling the conversation. The technique of ‘active listening’ is a worthy one, but try one iota too hard and you’ve swung the focus back to yourself again. Especially if you’re doing it only to seem interesting. An alarming possibility rears its head: are all attempts to become interesting inherently self-centred – and thus prone to make you more boring?
It’s a time-worn observation that for every famous proverb, there’s an equal and opposite proverb – do many hands make light work, or do too many cooks spoil the broth? So when it comes to our notions of romance, it’s baffling how long the phrase ‘opposites attract’ has persisted as if it were fact. The counter-proverb here, of course, is that birds of a feather flock together. And if you must base your psychological outlook on proverbs, aren’t humans more likely to behave like birds than like magnets? In recent years, several researchers have shown that opposites don’t attract.50 Search for a date using the ‘scientific approach’ of the leading site eharmony.com, and you’ll be matched with potential lovers based on various commonalities that are ‘predictors of long-term relationship success’. Compatibility, then, is about similarity. Good. So that’s the eternal mystery of love finally solved. Right?
Well, no, and the complicating factor comes courtesy of Ted Huston, a University of Texas psychology professor who runs the PAIR Project, a long-term study of married couples that began in 1981. The project has reached numerous intriguing conclusions, such as that couples who are ‘particularly lovey-dovey’ as newlyweds are more likely to divorce – a finding that, I admit, triggers my schadenfreude response, having tolerated far too many ostentatious public displays of affection by such couples. But the project’s most fascinating finding is detailed in Tara Parker-Pope’s book For Better (For Worse): The Science of a Happy Marriage. Happy and unhappy relationships, Huston found, simply aren’t much correlated with how many likes, dislikes and related characteristics a couple does or doesn’t share. It’s not that opposites attract, or that similar people attract; rather, he argues, the whole question of compatibility, in either of these senses, just isn’t very important in the success or failure of any given romance. Which is head-spinningly confusing, when you think about it: how can the outcome of a relationship between two people not depend on what those people are like?
There’s a way through this seeming paradox, but it requires that we rethink compatibility entirely. Huston argues that it does play one specific and unexpected role in love: when couples start worrying about whether they’re compatible, it’s usually the sign of a relationship in trouble. ‘We’re just not compatible’ really means ‘we’re not getting along’. Seen like this, compatibility is just a label we put on the black box of love: when things are working out, we call it compatibility; when they’re not, we blame incompatibility. The mystery of what makes relationships work hasn’t been explained, only renamed.
Behind all this is a deeper assumption: that whatever it is that makes a pairing flourish is something each party brings into the relationship from outside. The psychologist Robert Epstein is on a lifelong mission to establish the opposite: that compatibility, if it means anything, is something built from inside a relationship, and that love can be consciously created. All that two partners need share, at the outset, is the willingness to try. Which all sounds like so much feelgood vagueness until you learn that, in 2002, Epstein met a woman on a plane and, in an effort to prove his point, persuaded her to try to fall in love with him.
Epstein’s ‘Love Project’, which fixated the US media for several weeks, involved him and the woman, Gabriella Castillo, pursuing various techniques – affectionate touch, talking about their vulnerabilities, etcetera – that earlier studies had suggested would give rise to feelings of affection. And love did blossom, but let’s be honest: it spoils the story that things didn’t work out long-term. (The given reason, which sounds fair enough, is that Castillo lived in Venezuela, while Epstein lived in the US; the logistics were too much of a challenge.) Still, Epstein insists his basic point stands, and marshals studies to support it. Eye-gazing alone, according to his research, can cause leaps in feelings of affection of up to 70 per cent among people who barely know each other.51 These days, Epstein studies arranged marriages (not to be confused with forced marriages) and cites evidence to suggest that, by and large, the love that grows within them is far more robust than in what we call love marriages.52
This needn’t be an argument, if you’re single, for asking your grandmother or favourite aunt to select your future spouse. But it strongly implies that love can be built with almost anyone willing to have a go – and that to spend years hunting for someone with compatible qualities is to get things backwards. Too much choice can paralyse us, encouraging the illusion that a ‘soulmate’ might be lurking out there when in fact, Epstein argues, soulmates are created. The blogger Tim Ferriss quotes one female friend, eager to find a partner: ‘If I could only choose between three decent guys, it’d be a done deal. I’d be married already.’ And probably happily married, too.
I’m sure I can’t be the only person who, as Christmas approaches, likes to draw the curtains, stoke the fire, fix myself a mince pie and a brandy, and curl up with the summer 1974 edition of the sociology journal Organizational Dynamics. Wait – I am the only person? That’s a shame, because it contains an article that holds the key to the whole stress-inducing, sanity-threatening psychodrama that is Christmas. Bear with me on this.
The article is called ‘The Abilene Paradox’, and it’s by the management theorist Jerry Harvey; it begins with a personal anecdote set not at Christmas but during a stiflingly hot Texas summer. Harvey and his wife were staying with her parents, and relaxing one afternoon when his father-in-law suggested a trip to Abilene, 50 miles away, for dinner. Harvey was appalled at the thought of driving ‘across a godforsaken desert, in a furnace-like temperature … to eat unpalatable food’. But his wife seemed keen, so he kept his objections to himself.
The experience was as terrible as he’d predicted. Later, trying to be upbeat, he said, ‘That was a great trip, wasn’t it?’ But one by one, each family member confessed they’d hated it: they had agreed to go only because they believed it was what the others wanted. ‘Listen, I never wanted to go to Abilene,’ Harvey’s father-in-law said. ‘I just thought you might be bored.’
Harvey’s focus is on business: his point is that employees are so scared of standing out that companies end up taking decisions that don’t reflect the views of any of their members, ‘thereby defeat[ing] the very purpose they set out to achieve’. His article and subsequent book became a management sensation. But the paradox seems just as applicable to the original organisation, the family – especially during holidays such as Christmas, with the added burden of expectations. How many long-standing traditions do you re-run during such times, when everyone involved would secretly rather not? For some families, presumably, the whole notion of getting together at Christmas is an example of the paradox: a ritual of strained nerves that everybody performs for everybody else’s sake. I ought to emphasise that I’m not talking about my family. But then, according to the paradox, I wouldn’t dare to admit it if I were.
This shouldn’t be interpreted as a Scrooge-like condemnation of family togetherness, nor of traditions people genuinely enjoy. If anything, learning how to defeat the Abilene paradox – which you can really only do, Harvey concludes, by having the guts to speak up – is a strategy for improved relationships. (Maybe couples who take holidays separately are on to something, having had the courage to admit that’s what they prefer?) We fret a lot about how to handle disagreement, but Harvey shows that agreement may sometimes be the real threat to our wellbeing.
So here’s a real-life psychology experiment to try next time you’re at a holiday gathering: if there’s a family ritual you don’t enjoy, try gently dissenting, and see what ensues. At best, you’ll be rewarded with a chorus of happy relief. At worst, people will get tetchy. And they were going to do that at some point anyway, weren’t they?
During the 2008 US presidential election, American friends would occasionally tell me that Barack Obama’s victory seemed assured because they hadn’t met one person – not one! – who planned on voting Republican. They were right about the outcome, of course. But about 58 million people voted against Obama; it was just that you didn’t run into them in the coffee shops of Brooklyn. By the same logic, I conclude that nobody in Britain supports the death penalty, that everyone was obsessed with The Wire, and that almost no one read The Da Vinci Code. Opinion polls will back me up on this, provided they’re conducted entirely among the clientele of north London gastropubs.
The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us is known in social science as ‘homophily’, and it shapes our views, and our lives, in ways we’re barely aware of. It explains why, if you know the political positions of a person’s friends, you can have a very good guess at their own. It’s also why, say, creationists imagine that the debate over evolution is an active and unresolved one: in their social circles, it is. We long to have our opinions confirmed, not challenged, and thus, as the Harvard media researcher Ethan Zuckerman puts it, ‘Homophily causes ignorance.’ (It also makes us more extreme, studies of ‘group polarisation’ indicate.53 A group of conservatives, given the chance to discuss politics among themselves, will grow more conservative.) Even priding yourself on being open-minded is no defence if your natural, homophilic inclination is to hang out with other people like you, celebrating your love of diversity.
Technology risks making things worse: on the Internet, most obviously, it’s possible to exist almost entirely within a feedback loop shaped by your own preferences. For all its faults, the era when everyone watched the same news bulletin at least exposed people to information they hadn’t been looking for. When you Google for something, by contrast, you’re imposing the severest of filters, right from the start, on what you’ll permit into your field of attention. On sites such as Amazon and iTunes, homophily is a selling point: it’s the basis for ‘collaborative filtering’, whereby you’re recommended books and music on the basis of what others who made the same purchase – people like you – also enjoyed.
The unspoken assumption here is that you know what you like – that satisfying your existing preferences, and maybe expanding them a little around the edges, is the path to fulfilment. But if happiness research has taught us anything, it’s that we’re terrible at predicting what will bring us pleasure. Might we end up happier by exposing ourselves more often to serendipity, or even, specifically, to the people and things we don’t think we’d like?
You don’t need technology to do that, but then again, technology needn’t be the enemy. Facebook could easily offer a list of the People You’re Least Likely to Know; imagine what that could do for cross-cultural understanding. And I love the Unsuggester, a feature of the books site librarything.com: enter a book you’ve recently read, and it’ll provide a list of titles least likely to appear alongside it on other people’s bookshelves. Tell it you’re a fan of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and it’ll suggest you read Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. And maybe you should.
The great thing about developing some familiarity with the world of psychology, as I have done by now, is that whenever you’re faced with one of life’s challenges, you can easily call to mind some helpful piece of wisdom. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you’re crossing the road one autumn morning when some malicious halfwit of a taxi driver skids round the corner, douses you with puddle-water, damn near hits you, then speeds off. You don’t need to become consumed with rage, swear loudly, and demand to know if he was trying to kill you. ‘How interesting!’ you can superciliously observe instead. ‘If I were to get angry, that would be a classic example of “egocentricity bias” – the near-universal human error whereby we think of ourselves as the cause and target of others’ actions far more than is actually the case! That driver wasn’t trying to soak me, or kill me. Maybe it wasn’t his fault he didn’t see me. And even if he is a generally careless driver, which would be bad, it would be absurd to respond as if he had it in for me personally.’
Like I said, this is hypothetical. Personally, I go for the rage and swearing every time. But I shouldn’t: many studies show that we’re terrible at guessing what’s really going on in other people’s heads, and we habitually assume we figure far more prominently than we do.54 If you’re worried that your boss is displeased with your work, that your child does things just to spite you, or that your so-called friends are sneering at you behind your back, be reassured. It’s not that these people are thinking wonderful thoughts about you – they’re just not thinking about you at all. (Partly, no doubt, because they’re too busy worrying about what others are thinking about them.)
The psychologist Thomas Gilovich once made students walk into college classrooms wearing a Barry Manilow t-shirt, after he’d already conducted a survey that showed they would find this particularly embarrassing. On average, the t-shirt-wearers estimated that 46 per cent of the other students noticed their horrific clothing choice; in reality, only 23 per cent did.55Anyone who’s ever been a wallflower at a party knows this ‘social spotlight effect’ well: you stick out like a sore thumb, except that, actually, you don’t. Gilovich speculates that evolution might have given us this acute self-consciousness because being aware of what others thought of us was once a life-and-death matter. It isn’t any more, but our emotions haven’t caught up.
An interesting implication of all this is that egocentricity isn’t the sole preserve of the kind of people we generally call egocentric – people who think they’re fantastic. Even if you’re convinced that everyone hates you, you’re still giving yourself far too prominent a role in the mental lives of others. From one perspective, this universal self-absorption seems a rather bleak state of affairs, but from another it’s freeing: you don’t need to worry about how you’re perceived as much as you thought you did. Either way, it seems to be universally true, so you might as well embrace it.
I just feel a bit sorry for Barry Manilow. Only a bit, though; I’ve got my own problems to be worrying about.
It goes without saying that many self-help books, perhaps almost all of them, fail to deliver what they promise. But there’s a special subgroup that promises things you wouldn’t want in the first place. Take How to Date Paris Hilton, by a former stripper named Clive ‘Rock Solid’ Webb, which is doomed from page one due to the author’s failure to address the question of why, in the name of all that is holy, anyone would ever want to do that. (It turns out that ‘Paris Hilton’ is intended as a synonym for ‘beautiful women’, though the book is useless anyway, since Mr Webb – or should that be Mr Solid? – is accustomed to taking his clothes off in public, and thus presumably doesn’t suffer from shyness.)
There are countless such titles on how to make yourself more likeable, in the context of dating, friendship, networking and so on. Most feel slightly manipulative and soulless, but they’re one of the most venerable strands of self-improvement, reaching back to the eighteenth century – and to a man who, had he used Clive Webb’s publishers, would probably have been known as Benjamin ‘Kite in a Thunderstorm’ Franklin.
Franklin is a curious bird: a witty writer, skilled diplomat and a genius who invented lightning conductors – and yet, one can’t help imagining, slightly irritating. ‘He seems like the type of guy,’ writes Rita Koganzon in the American political magazine Doublethink Quarterly, ‘who might have a lot of Facebook friends who, upon further questioning, would admit they accepted his friend request only because they didn’t want to offend him.’ But he also put his finger on a strange truth about human attraction: people like you more if they’ve done a favour for you than if you’ve done a favour for them. Franklin recalls trying to win over a hostile member of the Pennsylvania legislature, not by kowtowing but by asking to borrow a specific rare book from his library. The man obliged, and friendship flourished. ‘He that has once done you a kindness,’ Franklin concludes, ‘will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.’
The Ben Franklin Effect, as psychologists call it, works because we hate cognitive dissonance: we can’t stand a mismatch between our actions and thoughts. So if we find ourselves helping someone out, we’ll unconsciously adjust our feelings for them. After all, we don’t want to feel we’re valuing someone who doesn’t deserve it. In one key study, students won money in a contest; afterwards, some were asked to return it because, they were told, it was the hard-up researcher’s own cash. In a subsequent survey, that group liked the researcher significantly more than those who weren’t asked to give any money back.56
The implications are striking. Don’t suck up to your boss – make demands. Don’t shower your friends with gifts – ask to borrow their stuff. And whatever Clive ‘Rock Solid’ Webb or other dating advisers might say, don’t sidle up to members of the opposite sex in bars and offer to buy them drinks; get them to buy you drinks instead.
I like my close friends a lot – that’s the point of close friends, surely – and yet, on an almost daily basis, they appal me. I have a friend who thinks voting is a waste of time, and one who believes, sincerely, that musical theatre is a legitimate art form; I have another friend who treats any arrangement to meet at a given time and place as an amusing hypothesis, an approximation of something he might, or might not, actually end up doing. What’s especially odd is that every time I encounter these traits, I’m shocked all over again.
It’s generally held that friends are people with whom we choose to forge relationships because we find their specific personalities agreeable, or similar to our own, and yet experience regularly contradicts this. What is a friend, really? ‘All that one can safely say … is that a friend is someone one likes and wishes to see again,’ writes Joseph Epstein, fumbling for a definition in his book Friendship: An Exposé. ‘Though,’ he adds archly, ‘I can think of exceptions and qualifications even to this innocuous formulation.’
The truth is that we don’t know our friends nearly as well as we imagine. Research demonstrates that we tend to assume our friends agree with us – on politics, ethics, etcetera – more than they really do.57 The striking part is that the problem doesn’t appear to lessen as a friendship deepens: when the researchers Michael Gill and William Swann questioned students sharing rooms, they found that, as time passed, people became ever more confident in the accuracy of their judgments about the other, and yet, in reality, the judgments grew no more accurate.58 Two people might become dear friends (or romantic partners), yet remain ignorant about vast areas of each other’s inner lives.
This seems strange, until you consider, as Drake Bennett puts it in the Boston Globe, that ‘many of the benefits that friendship provides don’t necessarily depend on perfect familiarity; they stem instead from something closer to reliability’. Friendship may be less about being drawn to someone’s personality than about finding someone willing to endorse your sense of your own personality. In agreeing to keep you company, or lend an ear, a friend provides the ‘social-identity support’ we crave. You needn’t be a close match with someone, nor deeply familiar with their psyche, to strike this mutual deal. And once a friendship has begun, cognitive dissonance helps keep it going: having decided that someone’s your friend, you want to like them, if only to confirm that you made the right decision. We don’t want to know everything about our friends, Gill and Swann suggest: what we seek is ‘pragmatic accuracy’. We don’t base friendships on what we learn about people; we decide what to learn about people, and what to ignore, based on having decided to be friends.
Perhaps this sounds chillingly narcissistic – friendship exposed as a self-serving ruse in which it doesn’t matter who your friends are, so long as they agree to the role, presumably for their own equally egotistical reasons. Or perhaps there’s something moving about the notion of friendship as an agreement to keep each other company, overlook each other’s faults and not probe too deeply in ways that might undermine the friendship. It’s somewhat lacking in the eloquent proverb department, but maybe a true friend is someone who doesn’t ask many awkward questions.
Back when I was being pumped full of ‘careers advice’, one line of argument held that the best approach to job interviews was to be memorable at all costs. I recall the tale of the fresh-faced graduate arriving at an advertising agency with a goldfish in a plastic bag, which he used to illustrate some tortuous point about branding. One heard tell of would-be management consultants firing toy guns from which messages unfurled on a piece of fabric. The approach can’t have caught on, however, or else our financial and commercial institutions would have been taken over by flashy types with flair and not enough real, humdrum skills, and the economy would have collapsed.
Oh, wait.
We live in less flashy times now. But the call to be remarkable, albeit in less preposterous ways, remains loud. Books with titles such as Pop!: Stand Out in Any Crowd and 101 Ways to Stand Out at Work argue that being different is the key to thriving, while seemingly infinite numbers of personal development blogs urge readers to ‘live a remarkable life’. In this sober, mercifully goldfish-free rendering, the point has some merit: being distinctive enhances your market value. And who can’t appreciate the psychological benefits of making, and being recognised for, a unique contribution in life, rather than following the herd?
What’s odd about our preoccupation with remarkableness, though, is how it coexists with its opposite. Most self-help books that aren’t about standing out are about fitting in: making friends, finding a like-minded partner, or realising that negative experiences – sadness, worry, stress – are really rather normal. And social psychology is awash with evidence of how far we’ll go for the payoff of being the same. (In Solomon Asch’s celebrated groupthink experiments, for example, 75 per cent of participants were willing to disbelieve their own eyes when others in the room – actors posing as subjects – insisted that lines of wildly different lengths were actually the same.59)
The truth – that we need to stand out and to fit in – has been codified, in recent years, as ‘optimal distinctiveness theory’. We seem to crave the sweet spot between being too exceptional or too normal, and we’re constantly adjusting our behaviour to find this ideal. When we feel suffocated by sameness, we’ll strive to make our mark, but if we feel too lonely in our differentness, we’ll rush to conform.
In other words, it’s a balance. And yet our attitudes to specialness and ordinariness are anything but even-handed: we celebrate one and disdain the other. (‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’, Thoreau famously wrote, and however right he was, it’s hard not to detect a trace of a sneer directed at the conformists.) So it’s worth asking whether we should always be striving to be remarkable. Might some of us be better advised to get over our issues with being ordinary?
I’m not in the habit of taking advice on happiness from Philip Larkin, an incorrigible misery-guts, but his poem ‘Born Yesterday’, dedicated to a newborn baby, might serve as a useful corrective: ‘May you be ordinary;/Have, like other women,/An average of talents:/Not ugly, not good-looking,/Nothing uncustomary/To pull you off your balance …/In fact, may you be dull –/If that is what a skilled,/Vigilant, flexible,/Unemphasised, enthralled/Catching of happiness is called.’
The people to whom I’m closest are, I’m guessing, similar to those closest to you: they have good days and bad days; they’re often upbeat but sometimes depressed; occasionally, they experience major crises; and when you get them talking, usually over alcohol, they’ll almost all prove more insecure than they’d ever admit in public. But my casual acquaintances are a different story. Judging by their Facebook updates, their tweets, their sporadic group emails and our infrequent conversations at parties, their lives are one long sequence of breathtaking road-trips, beach holidays, perfect weddings, exciting new jobs and adorable new babies. They are, in short, monumentally aggravating, and I’d unfriend them in a trice, except that it would be even more aggravating to suspect them of having so much fun behind my back.
While it’s conceivable that my friends and family are a particularly catastrophic bunch, the real explanation is surely obvious: it’s only those with whom I’m most intimate who let me see the unvarnished reality. That’s a timeless truth, of course, but there’s a strong case to be made that these days it’s worse than ever: thanks to Facebook and other social networking sites – and the frictionless ease of electronic communication in general – it’s far easier to maintain weak quasi-friendships, and thus to hear the burnished versions of far more lives. ‘In my trips back [home], I have been struck each time by the discord between people’s Facebook lives and what they say in private,’ writes the blogger Stan James, in a penetrating post at wanderingstan.com. ‘On Facebook they have been on an amazing vacation … in person they confess that the vacation was a desperate attempt to save a marriage. On Facebook they have been to glitterati tech conferences. In person they confess they haven’t been able to sleep for months.’
That happiness is relative – that we’re made happier or sadder in large part by how we compare our lives to those around us – is one of the oldest findings in ‘positive psychology’. As James notes, people have long made the error of contrasting themselves unfavourably to television stars, imagining they know them when all they really know is a carefully edited presentation. But with quasi-friends, it’s worse, because they’re people we’ve actually met; it’s thus even harder to remember we’re not seeing the full picture. It’s like an unceasing stream of those Christmas round-robin letters, crowing about little Jessica’s triumph in grade three tuba. And you can’t even blame the quasi-friends: in the semi-public world of Facebook and its ilk, they’re hardly going to reveal their disappointments and private sadnesses, are they?
Analogous problems of vantage-point crop up regularly. The much-studied ‘impostor syndrome’, for example, relies on the fact that you can never really know the self-doubt behind other people’s achievements, only your own. The same goes for organisations: corporations and governments seem ultra-professional – until you get an inside view, whereupon they’re revealed to be seat-of-the-pants operations where almost nobody knows what they’re doing.
Not that quasi-friends are entirely bad. Sociologists have shown that ‘weak ties’ are as crucial to the flourishing of social networks as strong ones; more quasi-friends probably also means more job opportunities, and more chance of making real friends, or meeting the love of your life.60 Perhaps all we need is some kind of technological fix, to display a message under every chipper status update, and as a permanent subtitle on numerous television shows: ‘Don’t forget: this person is barely holding things together.’
44 E.E. Jones and V.A. Harris, ‘The attribution of attitudes’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3 (1967): 1–24.
45 J.G. Miller, ‘Culture and the development of everyday social explanation’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (1984): 961–978.
46 Philip Zimbardo, ‘A situationist perspective on the psychology of evil: understanding how good people are transformed into perpetrators’, in Arthur Miller, ed, The Social Psychology of Good and Evil: Understanding Our Capacity for Kindness and Cruelty (New York: Guilford, 2005).
47 Scott Feld, ‘Why your friends have more friends than you do’, American Journal of Sociology 96 (1991): 1464–77.
48 Satoshi Kanazawa, ‘Why your friends have more friends than you do’, Psychology Today, November 1, 2009, online at www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamen talist/200911/why-your-friends-have-more-friends-you-do.
49 Andrea Donderi’s posting, under the username ‘tangerine’, is online at ask.metafilter.com/55153/whats-the-middle-ground-between-fu-and-welcome#830421.
50 See, for example, research by Stephen Emlen and Peter Buston, summarised in Catherine Zandonella, ‘Opposites do not attract in mating game’, New Scientist 30 (June 2003), at www.newscientist.com/article/dn3887-opposites-do-not-attract-in-mating-game.html.
51 Robert Epstein, ‘How science can help you fall in love’, Scientific American Mind Jan–Feb 2010: 26–33.
52 Ibid.
53 One real-life example is Thomas Walker and Eleanor Main, ‘Choice shifts in political decisionmaking: federal judges and civil liberties cases’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 3 (2006): 39–48.
54 For example, Miron Zuckerman et al, ‘The egocentric bias: seeing oneself as cause and target of others’ behaviour’, Journal of Personality 51 (2006): 621–630.
55 Thomas Gilovich et al, ‘The spotlight effect in social judgment: an egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (2000): 211–222.
56 Jon Jecker and David Landy, ‘Liking a person as a function of doing him a favour’, Human Relations 22 (1969): 371–378.
57 One such recent study is S. Goel et al, ‘Real and perceived attitude homophily in social networks’, a report for Yahoo! Research (2010), available online at www.cam.cornell.edu/~sharad/papers/friendsense.pdf.
58 William Swann and Michael Gill, ‘Confidence and accuracy in person perception: do we know what we think we know about our relationship partners?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73 (1997): 747–757.
59 Solomon Asch, ‘Opinions and social pressure’, Scientific American 193 (1955): 31–35.
60 See for example Mark Granovetter, ‘The strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited’, Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–233.