Popular

by Mitch Prinstein

  But remember: these biases are all skewed toward initial formative memories from our adolescence. Our adult brains began to form to help us survive in the hallways of high school. The problem is, we left high school long ago—and our brains never got the memo. This is probably why, every once in a while, something atypical happens, whether a miscommunication, a mental hiccup, or an embarrassing moment. It’s in moments like these when our background biases get thrust to the fore and exposed, and the legacy of our experiences with adolescent popularity makes itself known.

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  Many years ago, I was attempting to hang Sheetrock to create an extra room in my small condo in New Haven. After a few hours, I realized that I have no aptitude for construction work and found myself covered in drywall dust, feeling stressed and exhausted. As it happened, I had just come back from a consulting job, during which I had discovered the joys of all-expenses-paid travel at a luxury hotel and spa, and it struck me that a massage—something I would never previously have considered—sounded like the perfect way to unwind.

  I found a place calling itself a “health studio” that offered massages only a few miles away, in a tony Connecticut suburb. I scheduled an appointment and, at four o’clock, pulled into the parking lot of what looked like a high-end strip mall. You can probably see where this is headed, and by now you may be thinking that you would never make the mistake I was about to make. Surely no biases could possibly be so powerful that they would render you oblivious to such clear signals. But on that Friday afternoon, I was mostly concerned about appearing able to navigate fancy massage places and enjoy high-end indulgences. I wanted to fit in by not seeming too blue collar.

  After spending some time searching for the place, I was told to walk to the back of the row of shops, where I finally found the entrance. It stood next to a Dumpster under a neon sign—a critical cue, had I been in the proper frame of mind to notice.

  I stepped inside, took a look around, and with some confusion asked the receptionist, “Do you take credit cards?”

  “No,” she replied, “you need to give us cash. For thirty minutes, it will be forty dollars. And remember to bring your gratuity into the room with you.”

  That seemed odd, but again, I was new to the experience. I passed another man in the locker room who was wearing an expensive suit. He seemed extremely happy and had just begun loosening his tie. He looked up and offered me a quick nod. I felt calm again—after all, he seemed well adjusted and wealthy, so of course he would know what he was doing.

  Gina, the massage therapist, was young, attractive, and glad to see me. She immediately asked for her tip.

  “What? Oh, I’m sorry,” I asked as I raised a ten-dollar bill clenched in my fist. “Did you want this now?”

  Gina looked at the money, then looked at me, and then looked back at the bill. Speaking far more bluntly now, she asked, “Uhhh . . . what exactly is it that you want?”

  Oh! I finally realized. Is this one of those kind of places? Immediately panicking, I wondered, How do I get out of here quickly and politely? and began looking for an escape route. I lied about having an injured shoulder that needed medical attention and bolted.

  No one has ever gotten dressed faster. I was out of the locker room, down the stairs, past the Dumpster, and into my car before I was able to laugh at myself.

  I began to take account of what had just happened. How did I miss the neon sign directly in front of me? Why did I think the presence of a well-dressed man automatically signaled a legitimate therapeutic massage, and why did I lie about my shoulder? Each of these automatic reactions revealed my own biases.

  My visit to the “health studio” was humiliating, to say the least, and it’s still embarrassing to recall. But this anecdote offers two important lessons. First, and perhaps most important, when booking a massage, be sure to carefully review the list of available spa services before confirming your appointment. Second, we all have substantial biases that have deep roots in popularity. And these biases are responsible for far more of our automatic actions, and our mistakes, than we ever may have considered before.

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  We would all like to think that we are highly skilled observers of the world around us, so it can be unsettling to consider that we may miss signals as obvious as a neon sign directly in front of us. But in fact, we misperceive cues all the time. This is due to the first step of social information processing, referred to as “cue encoding.”

  Cue-encoding biases can be remarkably powerful. Consider for a moment the huge amount of complex social information your brain must encode every day. Like a giant filter, it must sift through all the stimuli around you, make sense of them, and then decide what deserves your attention. Consider the few moments it takes to enter your workplace. As you pass dozens of people—in a big city it might be hundreds or thousands—your brain automatically reads each of their facial expressions, postures, fragments of speech, and spatial relationships to you, all to determine what social cues are present and require action. If someone nods at the very edge of your peripheral vision, you respond immediately by nodding back and smiling without even thinking. If someone with a worried expression is gazing past you, you turn and look over your shoulder almost instinctively. But if something no less noteworthy takes place—say, a plane flying overhead—only young children will notice and react. The rest of us know that such an event is rarely relevant to us, so we screen it out. We don’t only ignore it; research reveals that if asked later, we would be quite certain that there had never been a plane at all.

  What else are we missing? Or just the opposite: what information may we be overly attuned to? To examine this, a team of British psychologists conducted a study to see just how much cue-encoding biases can change what we observe, and the degree to which popularity is related to those biases. They asked adults to watch eight short movies and pay careful attention to every detail they could. Each movie depicted a typical adolescent school scene, such as teens standing near their lockers, in the cafeteria, or outdoors. Each scene also included a range of social cues. Some suggested that adolescents liked each other, depicted by smiling, nodding, laughing between peers. Other cues included scenes of peers interrupting or ignoring one another, arguing, or using closed body posture—all indicators of rejection. The researchers were interested in learning what the study participants would be most likely to notice, and so had each of the subjects wear a special device over their eyes that measured exactly where their pupils were directed and for how long they remained focused on specific images on the screen.

  The results suggested that even when we are asked to watch something quite simple, we don’t take everything in. Our eyes remain focused on small subsets of action that align with our own past social experiences. People in the study with prior histories of social success, for example, remained focused predominantly on the positive interactions in the videos. For 60 percent to 70 percent of the time, their gaze remained fixed on the people who were smiling, nodding, or including one another. They looked at the people engaged in negative social interactions less frequently, and when they did, they maintained their gaze briefly.

  In contrast, those with histories of social isolation and loneliness scarcely looked at the positive scenes at all. For about 80 percent of the time, however, their pupils remained fixed on the actions that depicted social exclusion and negativity. It was as if they had watched a completely different movie altogether—focusing far more intently on cues that were barely noticed by others at all.

  These findings have been replicated in many studies. When children are asked to watch cartoons that include hostile content, those who have been rejected by their peers take much longer than others to look away. When reading stories about social interactions, those who have had difficulties with popularity are more likely to recall the hostile moments in the narratives, while those who were popular remember the friendly and supportive exchanges between the
characters.

  We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.

  —Anaïs Nin

  Does this mean that unpopular people are at risk for reliving their awkward high school days forever after, screening out all the positive social cues they witness? And are popular men and women always observing the world through “popularity-colored” glasses? To some extent, the answer is yes.

  Consider your own biases. When speaking to a group, do you look at the audience members making eye contact and nodding, or the ones staring at their phones and paying no attention to you? When you leave a party, do you recall all of the guests who spoke with you, or the one who didn’t even say hello? Has your current desire for popularity led you to encode only the information that reinforces your happiness, or is it the data that remind you of a thwarted adolescent desire to belong?

  Encoding negative social information is not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, imagine taking part in a meeting in which your firm is pitching its services to a potential client. Your teammates are friendly, charismatic, and project a sense of high status, and are all likely to encode social cues indicating that the client likes them. They notice that the client smiles often, nods in agreement, and shakes hands enthusiastically. After such a pitch meeting, research findings suggest that these employees will rate their own performance as outstanding and predict a high likelihood of landing the client.

  However, in this situation, previously unpopular individuals might ultimately be more useful. They will be more likely to notice, for instance, if the potential client breaks eye contact or alters body posture whenever the presenter talks about the future. They might be especially attuned to signals indicating which of the firm’s ideas are well received and which are falling flat. When asked later to reflect upon the pitch meeting, those who were less than popular as teenagers will offer a mixed review of how the gathering went. This phenomenon, referred to as “depressive realism,” suggests that vigilance toward negative cues actually can lead to a more objective and clearer view of social information, undistorted by a positive bias. For this reason, some research has shown that previously unpopular people are perceived by others as more empathetic and more sensitive in social situations.

  One study asked those high in power, prestige, and influence to draw an uppercase E on their foreheads as fast as they could, so that others would be able to read it. High-status people were far less likely than those low in status to draw the letter in its correct orientation and sketched a mirror image instead, leading the researchers to conclude that those high in status had a poorer ability to consider others’ perspective. Participants high in social status also score more poorly than those low in status on tests of emotional intelligence, empathy, the ability to detect sarcasm, and correctly noticing a variety of emotional expressions.

  In another study, researchers used an experimental manipulation to make their participants feel temporarily higher or lower in status and then tested whether there were differences between the groups in social information processing. They presented all participants with photos that only featured people’s eyes while they made a variety of facial expressions. Results suggested that as compared to those who were made to feel high in status, those who were made to feel lower in status were suddenly better at identifying others’ feelings. Even this artificial simulation of low status was sufficient to improve cue encoding. The benefits of unpopularity may even go deeper. Research using fMRI scans has demonstrated that while reading stories about others, those low in social status actually have more activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex—regions associated with our ability to understand what others think, feel, and want.

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  Our adolescent experiences with popularity affect not just what we see, but also how we interpret these observations. Psychologists call this the “cue interpretation” step to social information processing.

  For some, this is a concept hard to fathom. Wouldn’t everyone, when presented with the same information, reach the same logical conclusion about it? Don’t we all interpret data in similar ways?

  I decided to test this myself in one of my classes by conducting a quick experiment. Participants were asked to watch a short video and describe what they saw. The video was simple and easy to absorb: at the center of a plain white screen was a box, while three colored circles—one blue, one green, one red—each moved around it. At one point two circles enter the box, and then leave, while the third circle trails behind. At another point, one of the circles bounces against the sides of the box, which then appears to break. As soon as the video ended, the students were asked for a written description of what they had observed.

  The simplicity of the video was deliberate, designed to ensure that everyone watching was likely to have encoded the same information. In fact, the participants were shown it twice, so it would have been hard for any of them to have missed any of the objects in it. The task given to the students to write down what they had seen was likewise intentional, as it did not ask them to interpret the video’s cues but rather to merely recount what they had observed. A reasonable response, therefore, would be to describe the action of the piece as three circles moving around a box, with two entering, and so on. But no one depicts it that way. Because cue interpretation is an automatic process, we ascribe meaning and intent even to fictional objects. And our descriptions of the same event can vary substantially.

  Here are a few of the more colorful descriptions my students offered. Notice how they all interpret the video differently, ranging from neutral to far more aggressive takes:

  Student 1: “Red and Green were originally in the lead and Blue followed. Blue was very far behind and was left out of entering the square because the door closed before he got there.”

  Student 2: “The Blue circle was mad at the other two circles for locking him out, so he broke into the box and was like, ‘Hey, Green, why did you do that to me?!’ Then the Red and Green circles were like ‘whatever’ and they deserted the Blue circle and left him altogether.”

  Student 3: “OK . . . the Red and Green circles are chilling in the room (I think Red is a female). Blue is angry and feels left out—clearly blames Green circle for excluding it. Blue banged on the door and forced it open. Blue was very mad and was bouncing all over the place. Looks like there is violence. Green faced up to Blue and then left the room with Red and closed the door on Blue.”

  Student 4: “Blue is a crazed lover, blinded by jealousy, who is furious and anxious. In a violent narcissistic rage, Blue blows down the door of Green (the man in the relationship) and Red, and provoked Green into a fight. Green was not in the mood for fighting because he was happy with Red. Red chilled in the corner, scared of Blue. Green and Blue duked it out and the Green circle, who appears the victor, took Red out of the box.”

  What led to such dramatically different interpretations of such simple cues? The answer, again, has everything to do with popularity. These same students had already reported their high school popularity to me using confidential ID numbers earlier in the semester. When I matched their accounts of the video to these data, I discovered that it was the students who were unpopular as teens, like Students 3 and 4, who interpreted the circles as fighting. The formerly popular students, like Student 1, were far more likely to see them as playful.

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  We all have biases in how we interpret social cues. Since we all have unique pasts, these biases are unique to each of us. For instance, some may see a well-dressed man loosening his tie, smiling giddily, and wonder what mischief he is up to and perhaps suspect their surroundings. Others would interpret the same information differently. Admittedly, our cue-interpretation biases don’t typically land us in a den of iniquity, as they did to me, but if they are extreme, and left unchecked, they can affect our lives substantially nevertheless.

  Research h
as revealed a few common themes in cue-interpretation biases that may be especially troublesome, especially when they begin to color the way we interpret the world around us on a regular basis. In long-term studies, these have been shown to be strong predictors of significant relationship problems and even psychological symptoms like depression, anxiety, or addiction years later. Most of us know someone whose behavior reveals these tendencies.

  Imagine that you have plans to meet a friend, or maybe a first date, at a coffee shop at 6 p.m. By 6:30, you start to feel awkward sitting alone. You check your phone, but there is no email, text, or voice mail. What’s the problem? You encode all of the available information: the person you planned to meet has not arrived, and you haven’t heard a word. Now it’s time to interpret the data. What’s your gut response? Do you worry that something bad happened? Do you assume the friend is running late, or has forgotten your plans for reasons that have little to do directly with you?

  Perhaps. But if you have ever felt slighted and left out, or longed to be more popular at some point in your life, you may begin to wonder—perhaps even assume—you’ve been stood up. Now you feel a little angry. Even if your friend does show up with a reasonable explanation, those feelings may persist. This is a sign of what psychologist Geraldine Downey calls a “rejection sensitivity” bias, a tendency to expect and emotionally react to rejection that creates a cycle of lifelong unpopularity: we wish to be popular, assume we are not, and then in turn yearn for it all the more. Not surprisingly, this type of bias also predicts a host of related negative outcomes throughout our lives, including body dissatisfaction, burnout at work, depression, and loneliness. Adults with high levels of rejection sensitivity are even more likely to contract infectious illnesses and to develop heart disease.

  But can’t rejection-sensitive people just choose to make another interpretation? Can’t they just recognize that they are overly pessimistic and start making mental corrections for their self-critical biases? In other words, can’t they just snap out of it?