How We Know What Isn't So (25 page)

Self-handicapping is just one example of a class of social strategies people employ to boost their status or achieve some goal, but that in fact often backfire. Name-dropping, boasting, and “coming on strong” are other examples of social strategies that are generally ineffective but are frequently employed. “Showing off” and “holding forth” by dominating conversation sometimes fall in this class as well. Why do people continue to employ such strategies if they are so ineffective? Why don’t people learn that these techniques more often hurt their cause rather than help it? When individuals name-drop by alluding to their connections to the rich and famous (e.g., “Francis did not have the artistic freedom he needs in that picture,” or “Although publicly she indicated otherwise, Brooke gave me the impression that she was never really comfortable here at Princeton”), we often turn away and roll our eyes in disbelief and disgust. When people directly boast about their accomplishments and associations (e.g., “I went backstage at the Stones concert and Mick and I shared a beer,” or “My dad was the guy who gave Wozniak and Jobs the main idea for the Apple II”), we secretly get angry and wonder just how gullible they think we are.

The central concern of this chapter is how it is that phenomena like boasting, self-handicapping, and name-dropping survive despite the fact that they so frequently fail. At first glance, it might seem that flattery or ingratiation belongs in this group. Indeed, there are times when an attempt at ingratiation is so blatant that it is perceived as manipulative and actually backfires (“I just wanted to tell you how much I have been enjoying your course. About my midterm …”).
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However, I suspect that such failures are not the norm because the warm glow of being flattered often overcomes the cold realization that it might be strategic. Also, we can be won over by transparent ingratiation because we are impressed that the flatterer at least has the good taste to consider us worthy of flattery! (“Surely she does not flatter everybody.”) Flattery, then, is like the other strategies discussed above in that it
should
be ineffective; unlike the others, however, it usually works. As Milan Kundera points out, “How defenseless we are in the face of flattery!”
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An argument could even be made that flattery is a strategy that is actually underutilized.

Flattery aside then, what can we say about why these other, generally ineffective, social strategies are nevertheless employed? First, it is important to be clear at the outset that sometimes these strategies are used with no illusions about their effectiveness. It is not possible to tell, from the mere fact that a person
employs
a given strategy, whether he or she necessarily
believes
it to be effective. We have all had the experience of returning from a social gathering and thinking “There I go again!” or “Am I ever going to stop doing that?” Such counter-productive actions that we carry out in spite of ourselves are not at issue here. Nor is this chapter concerned with those instances in which a person consciously acts in ways that he or she knows will entail some cost (such as alienating others) in order to achieve some compensatory gain. People are sometimes willing to sacrifice successful self-presentation for other benefits. For example, a person might provide a bogus excuse for failure that he or she expects nobody to believe just to avoid having to talk about the outcome—and its real implications—any further.

What this chapter
is
concerned with is the persistence of counterproductive strategies that the people who employ them truly believe to be effective. A great many name-droppers, bores, boasters, and self-handicappers walk away from social encounters convinced that they have skillfully managed the interaction and made a favorable impression—while their interaction partners walk away shaking their heads and muttering under their breath. It is this mismatch between presumed and actual effectiveness that is at issue here. How can it be explained?

Dysfunctional Persistence as Inaccurate Covariation Detection.
A little thought reveals that this issue is really a special case of the problem of assessing relationships that was discussed in chapter 3. In this case, it involves people’s ability to assess the relationship between their own strategies and various social outcomes. As we saw in chapter 3, people sometimes have difficulty estimating relationships because of common limitations in the evidence available to them, and because of various imperfections in the way they evaluate that evidence. Both play an important role in making ineffective social strategies seem effective.

The commonly available evidence is limited in two ways: a) information regarding the chosen strategy’s effectiveness is often biased, and b) information about the effectiveness of alternative strategies is often difficult or impossible to obtain. Information about how well a given strategy has fared is often biased because of people’s reluctance (discussed in Chapter 7) to convey to others their negative reactions. As alluded to above, when someone boasts, drops names, or self-handicaps, we usually turn away and roll our eyes or mutter under our breath. We may subsequently express our disgust to someone else (usually a sympathetic fellow-victim), but we rarely confront the offender directly. Thus, the inveterate name-dropper or self-handicapper rarely receives the feedback necessary to lay bare the futility of his or her efforts. The person can therefore only learn that the strategy is ineffective by taking note of what did
not
happen, such as the absence of a deepening bond or the failure to achieve greater warmth in the relationship. Drawing appropriate inferences from such non-occurrences is notoriously difficult.
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As a result, the person observes that nothing really bad happens, and so assumes that the other person has “bought” the excuse, the bogus affiliation with someone of prestige, or the fabricated account of previous exploits.

A friend of mine has an absolutely delightful father who has one unfortunate fault—whenever more than one other person is around, he will not let anyone talk but himself. My friend has complained about her father’s habit for years, but she has never had the heart to tell him and urge him to change. Because no one else has told him either, he can be forgiven for talking away, blissfully unaware of his audience’s discomfort. Recently, however, an opportunity presented itself. Her father returned from a dinner party in even better spirits than usual and told his daughter how he had regaled everyone with an array of insights, witticisms, and anecdotes. She then tentatively interrupted, “You know, Dad, sometimes people would enjoy the evening more if they were encouraged to participate more in the conversation themselves.” He protested: “I asked several times whether I was going on too long and everyone said ‘No, no, please continue’.” This shows just how hard it can be to get accurate information about one’s effect on others: When even explicit requests for feedback elicit disingenuous support and praise, is it any wonder that people sometimes stick with alienating interpersonal strategies?

Although the biased feedback we receive from others no doubt contributes a great deal to people’s dysfunctional adherence to ineffective social strategies, it does point to one important question that remains unanswered: If people are so disgusted by the namedropping and boasting of others, why do they attempt it themselves? Why do people fail to generalize from their own silent reactions to such strategies, and thus learn that the silence of others does not indicate approval but disapproval?

The problem of receiving biased feedback about a given strategy’s effectiveness is compounded by an inability to adequately evaluate alternative strategies. Because a given strategy is initially thought to be effective,
only
that strategy is ever employed. The person never learns what would have happened if a different tack had been taken, and thus cannot assess the true effectiveness of his or her efforts. Consider the common belief among some segments of the population that “the only way to get anywhere with the opposite sex is to come on strong.” Someone who holds such a belief will consistently come on strong and, at some point, will succeed in meeting his or her objective. The occasional success, however rare, will then be attributed to the choice of tactics, and its effectiveness will seem to be an unassailable fact of the person’s own experience. Because no single failure serves to disconfirm the strategy’s effectiveness (after all, nothing works all the time), the only way it can be shown to be ineffective is by discovering that the rate of success is lower with this strategy than with others. Given that alternative techniques are rarely if ever employed, the person is in no danger of having his or her favorite theories disabused.

In cases such as these, a belief in the effectiveness of a given strategy can also be aided and abetted by a self-fulfilling prophecy. Psychologist Robyn Dawes provides the example of people who believe that “the only way to get anywhere in this world is to push, push, push.”
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Like someone who thinks it’s necessary to come on strong with women, such a person will consistently push for what he wants. The occasional success will “prove” the wisdom of the chosen course of action, and the individual will never learn how effective he might have been had a different strategy been employed. In addition, the person’s aggressiveness may very well foster resistance in other people, and thus unintentionally create a hostile world in which it really is true that the only way to get anywhere is to push, push, push.

Thus far, the persistence of dysfunctional social strategies has been largely attributed to the imperfect nature of the evidence available to us. Some of the blame, however, must be assigned to the way we evaluate the evidence we receive. As discussed in chapters 3 & 4, we tend to attach too much significance to those occasions when the strategy proves to be effective, and too little to those times when it fails. This is partly a testimonial to the seductive power of partial reinforcement. However ineffective in general, the dysfunctional strategies discussed here do occasionally work. The relevant question, bear in mind, is not why people continue to employ strategies that are
never
effective (few people ever do), but why they engage in actions that so rarely accomplish their intended goal. Even the most far-out excuses are sometimes taken at face value and even the most outrageous boasts do not always arouse suspicion. Reinforced by occasional success, the name dropper or self-handicapper becomes deluded about the prospects for future attempts and employs the strategy too often.

This tendency to focus too heavily on the occasional success is helped along by an asymmetry in the way we evaluate success and failure. A single success generally does more to confirm a strategy’s effectiveness than a single failure does to disconfirm it. Indeed, successes tend to be taken as prima facie evidence that the strategy is effective. If coming on strong with someone leads to success, the value of assertiveness seems apparent. If it leads to failure, in contrast, it could easily be due to other factors (“s/he’s just a cold fish,” “Nobody could have gotten anywhere”). Successes, in other words, are generally seen as confirmations of one’s underlying strategy, whereas failures tend to be thought of only as failures of outcome, not as failures of strategy.

Such biases result from a seemingly compelling logic: To achieve a desired outcome, every step in a causal chain must turn out correctly; any break in the chain will lead to failure. A given failure thus does not mean that one’s strategy was ineffective, because the failure could be due to a break in any of the other links in the causal chain. Success, on the other hand, implies that the chosen strategy and all other links in the chain functioned smoothly. Otherwise things would not have worked.

This logic suffers from two flaws. First, a given success could have been produced by an entirely different causal chain. A triumph can occur in spite of, rather than because of, one’s efforts. Second, although a given failure
can
be due to some other link in the chain, it does not follow that it
is
produced by such an extraneous element. We are often too quick to externalize our failures in this way.

At first glance, the class of erroneous beliefs that serves as the focus of this chapter might not seem to be terribly consequential. Indeed, a questionable social strategy that leads one person to alienate another may, in some real sense, be less harmful than a misguided belief that causes the deterioration of a person’s physical health. Nevertheless, the impact of dysfunctional social strategies should not be underestimated. One of the primary human struggles in today’s world is the effort to achieve meaningful and gratifying personal relationships. At a time when less of a human connection is guaranteed by family relations or by membership in close, stable communities, we must form, indeed earn, our social relations through our own efforts and the strength of our personal and social attributes. To the person who seeks more gratifying relationships but cannot achieve them, to the person whose misguided attempts to get closer to others only serve to drive them away, the questionable beliefs discussed in this chapter are surely consequential enough.

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The explanation for much of this curious preference in self-presentation is that it is not acceptable in certain domains to be merely “good” (i.e., above average); one must be—or be seen to be—“exceptional” (say, in the top percentile). Unfortunately, often one cannot be exceptional on effort alone; one must have unusual ability as well. Thus, if a person cannot actually perform at a level equal to the top percentile, he or she can at least try to create the impression that that level would have been reached if not for some handicap. This form of self-handicapping, then, may be a strategy in which a person willingly sacrifices a probable moderate outcome (i.e., being perceived as “good”) for a chance at a much more positive one (i.e., being perceived as having exceptional potential, but at the risk—if the ploy is unconvincing—of being seen as a posturer).