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Running Head: INCISIVE YET MISUNDERSTOOD Perspectives on Psychological Science, in press Asymmetries in mutual understanding: People with low status, power, and self-esteem understand better than they are understood Sanaz Talaifar, Michael D. Buhrmester, Özlem Ayduk & William B. Swann, Jr., Authors’ Note. We thank Ashwini Ashokkumar, Cliff Burke, and Becca Schlegel for their comments on a prior version of this manuscript. Data, code, study materials, and supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/x2bgy/. Correspondence may be sent to Sanaz Talaifar at [email protected].
Abstract All too often, people who develop exceptionally astute insights into others remain mysterious to these others. Evidence for such asymmetric understanding comes from several independent domains. Striking asymmetries occur among those who differ in status and power, such that low status, low power individuals understand more than they are understood. We show that this effect extends to people who merely perceive that they have low status: individuals with low self- esteem. Whereas people with low self-esteem display insight into people with high self-esteem, their high self-esteem counterparts fail to reciprocate. Conceptual analysis suggests that asymmetries in mutual understanding may be reduced by addressing deficits in information and motivation among perceivers. Nevertheless, evidence from several interventions were unsuccessful, indicating that the path to symmetric understanding is a steep and thorny one. Further research is needed to develop strategies for fostering understanding of those who are most misunderstood: people with low self-esteem, low status, and low power. Keywords: interpersonal perception, perceiver effects, target effects, self-esteem, accuracy, status, power, self-verification, self-enhancement, false consensus
Symmetry and Asymmetry in Understanding Others Understanding others involves attaining accurate insight into their thoughts, emotions, motivations, perspectives, experiences, or behaviors. Whereas some perceivers readily attain such understanding, others do not. This raises the questions that we address in this paper: Who are the most astute perceivers? What are the mechanisms that enable them to understand others? Can we bolster the understanding of less insightful perceivers? To address these questions, we begin by comparing the relative ease with which people recognize similar versus dissimilar others. Similarity and Homophily as Sources of Accuracy People will understand others when at least two conditions are met (Funder, 1995 ). First, perceivers must have access to diagnostic information about targets. Second, they must be motivated to process that information. Both of these variables will increase as the similarity of the target to the perceiver increases (Rule, Ambady, Adams, & Macrae, 2007). That is, similarity will not only increase the sheer volume of diagnostic information available to perceivers, it will also increase the concern that perceivers have for targets (Stotland, 1969), concern that may motivate efforts to obtain and fully process available information about them. Whether through increasing information or motivation, similarity may also contribute to the accuracy of inferences at the group level. For example, people’s judgments of ingroup members, who tend to resemble them, are more accurate than their judgments of outgroup members (Judd, Ryan, & Park, 1991; Judd & Park, 1993). Likewise, people are better able to decode the emotions of individuals in the ingroup as compared to the outgroup (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003). And the more similar people perceive outgroup members to be to ingroup
members, the less biased they are when judging the traits of outgroup members (Roccas & Schwartz, 1993; Jetten, Spears, & Postmes 2004). One variable that may increase both information about and motivation to understand others is homophily, the tendency for people to gravitate toward similar others (Youyou, Stillwell, Schwartz, & Kosinski, 2017). Homophily brings together people who share identities, including race, ethnicity, age, religion, education, occupation, and so on (McPherson, Smith- Lovin, & Cook, 2001; Shrum, Cheek, & Hunter, 1988). Homophily may also connect people who are similar on other identity-related dimensions, such as levels of self-esteem. For example, the self-esteem scores of long-term friends, but not short-term friends, are correlated (Hafen, Laursen, Burk, Kerr, & Stattin, 2011). And one’s level of depression—a strong correlate of self- esteem (Sowislo & Orth, 2013)—predicts the depression scores of one’s friends (Rosenblatt & Greenberg, 1991). Homophily can foster understanding directly by increasing the availability of diagnostic information about similar others (e.g., Blackman & Funder, 1998). Such information, in turn, can augment empathic accuracy (Colvin, Vogt, & Ickes, 1997) and mind-reading accuracy (Thomas & Fletcher, 2003). In this way, homophily could explain why perceivers judge similar targets more accurately than dissimilar ones (Funder, Kolar, & Blackman, 1995 1 ; Fox, Ben-Nahum, Yinon, 1989; Kenny & Acitelli, 2001). Homophily may also contribute to understanding indirectly. That is, insofar as people (a) assume that others are similar to them and (b) surround themselves with people who are in fact similar, their assumptions of similarity will allow them to correctly infer the states and preferences of their relationship partners (Cronbach, 1955; Hoch, 1987; Kenny, 2019 ). 1 Although Funder points out that similarity is not required for accurate person perception to occur, actual similarity between the perceiver and target is a particularly robustly predictor of accuracy.
is the relative cluelessness of people high in status and power. For example, minority group members are better in judging the emotions of majority group members than the reverse (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002). Similarly, Black Americans and low-income individuals estimate the magnitude of current and past racial economic disparities with more fidelity than high- income White Americans individuals (Kraus, Rucker, & Richeson, 2017; Kraus, Onyeador, Daumeyer, Rucker, & Richeson, 2019). Furthermore, the stereotypes that Black Americans form of White Americans are more accurate than the stereotypes that White Americans stereotypes form of Black Americans (Ryan, 1996). The common theme here is that those who lack status, power, or both (Mattan, Kubota, & Cloutier, 2017) are especially inclined to display greater insight into others than their high-status counterparts. Furthermore, status and power actually seem to play a causal role in diminishing social perceptiveness. People accorded high power or status tend to display less insight into others in the form of empathic accuracy (Gonzaga, Keltner, & Ward, 2008), accurate detection of emotional tone in speech (Uskul, Paulmann, & Weick, 2016), or concern for others (Woltin, Corneille, Yzerbyt, & Forster, 2011). 2 In part, people with low status/power develop especially accurate insights due to greater availability of information about high status/power people. Consider the longstanding idea that low power individuals pay attention to those who control their outcomes—high power individuals (e.g., Fiske, 1993). This effect is amplified by the fact that those who are low in status and power receive less attention because they are often in the numerical minority. Of course, although minority groups typically have less power and status than majority groups, there are exceptions. For example, women have historically held less status and power than men 2 Note, however, that status does not predict less understanding in all domains and contexts. For example, Hall, Mast, & Latu (2015) found that higher status predicted more accuracy in decoding nonverbal cues in test settings but not in real life interactions.
despite comprising half the population. And during Apartheid, the Afrikaners held more power despite being the numerical minority in South Africa. Recent studies conducted in naturally occurring settings have documented the notion that people high in status and power receive more attention. Researchers employing wearable technology and eye tracking have learned that people from lower classes look at and pay attention to other people more than do people from upper classes (Dietze & Knowles, 2016). Complementing this pattern, low status people attract less attention to themselves than do high status people (Foulsham, Cheng, Tracy, Henrick, & Kingstone, 2010; Dalmaso, Pavan, Castelli, & Galfano, 2011; Capozzi, Becchio, Willemse, & Bayliss, 2016). This tendency makes it easier to overlook minority group members, which could explain why majority group members judge the emotions of minority group members with less fidelity than the reverse (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002). Just as people low in status and power are inclined to yield the stage to others, people high in status and power have a tendency to rush to center stage. People high in status and power exercise more freedom to express themselves in conversation, even conversations that occur in the hallowed halls of the United States Supreme Court. There, male justices are three time more likely to interrupt female justices than the reverse. Moreover, female justices only accounted for 4% of all interruptions over the past 12 years, even though they comprised 24% of the court on average (Jacobi & Schweers, 2017). Given the tendency for high status/power individuals to amplify their own perspective and at the expense of others in interpersonal settings, it is no wonder that these dynamics also play out in the larger culture. Consider the emphasis that the popular culture places on historically dominant groups such as White males (Collins, 2011). For example, an analysis of the dialogue in 2,000 films showed that men had more lines than women
are motivated to perceive the systems in which they participate as just and natural. True understanding of the structural inequities and discrimination confronting people with low status would threaten such beliefs. As a result, high status people (who are more likely to view the system as just; Brandt, 2013) may be motivated to avoid understanding low status people. Consistent with this idea, people high on economic system justification show blunted physiological responses to people in need (Goudarzi, Pliskin, Jost, & Knowles, 2019). Similarly, belief in a just world is associated with a tendency for people to underestimate Black-White inequality (Kraus et al., 2017). Simply put, people develop keen insights into people who are high in status and power while the beneficiaries of such insights routinely misunderstand those low in status and power. In the next section we suggest that this phenomenon generalizes to a new domain. Specifically, we suggest that by virtue of their ubiquity and social influence, people with high esteem have helped perpetrate the belief that there is a fundamental human tendency to prefer positive over subjectively accurate evaluations. People with low esteem are also aware of the allure of positive evaluations, but they uniquely recognize a countervailing desire for subjectively accurate evaluations. The result is an asymmetry in understanding, such that high-esteem individuals understand others with high but not low esteem while low-esteem individuals understand others with low and high esteem. People with Low Self-Esteem Understand More Than They Are Understood We chose to focus on self-esteem here because it plays an outsized role in people’s lives (Swann, Chang-Schneider & McClarty, 2007) and is broadly relevant to many areas of psychology (clinical, social, developmental, educational, cognitive). In addition, self-esteem is related to the foregoing analysis because it is a clear cousin to status. That is, self-esteem reflects
the degree to which people have status in their own eyes rather than in the eyes of the larger society. Sociometer theory’s contention that self-esteem is an index of “social inclusion/exclusion,” for example, implies a link between self-esteem and status (e.g., Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995). Even more relevant, hierometer theory argues that self-esteem evolved specifically to track status hierarchies (Mahadevan, Gregg, Sedikides, & de Waal- Andrews, 2016; Mahadevan, Gregg, & Sedikides, 2019). From this vantage point, low self- esteem enables individuals to navigate social hierarchies successfully by avoiding the social costs associated with status violations. Accurate insight into the predilections of those higher in the status hierarchy would serve a similar function. Empirical research also supports the linkage between self-esteem and status. A large meta-analysis indicated that relative to upper class people, lower class people have lower self- esteem (Twenge & Campbell, 2002). Researchers recently replicated this finding in a longitudinal study in which lower socioeconomic status predicted lower self-esteem (von Soest, Wagner, Hansen, & Gerstorg, 2018). Moreover, people with fewer material resources and first- generation students reported more self-related negative emotions than their more privileged peers (Adler, Epel, Castellazzo, & Ickovics, 2000; Covarrubias and Fryberg, 201 5 ; Kraus, Horberg, Goetz, & Keltner, 2011). Having highlighted the links between status and self-esteem, we hasten to acknowledge that historical and structural forces produce the low status and power of oppressed groups (Salter, Adams, Perez, 2018) whereas developmental and interpersonal forces produce the low status of people with low esteem (Harris, et al., 2017; Wagner, Lüdtke, Robitzsch, Göllner, & Trautwein, 2018; Harris & Orth, 2019). In a similar vein, we acknowledge that the experience of
Schachter, it turned out, was the first of many to express doubts about the preference for negative feedback displayed by people with low esteem. For the ensuing 35 years, reviewers, editors, and those who attended talks on self-verification repeatedly dismissed the idea that anyone would seek negative evaluations. Nevertheless, more evidence of negative feedback seeking accumulated. Under certain specifiable conditions, people with negative self-views (e.g., low global self-esteem, negative specific self-concepts) prefer and seek negative evaluations (e.g., Swann, 2012). Researchers reported evidence of this preference for negative evaluations among spouses (Burke & Harrod, 2005; Neff & Karney, 2005; Swann, De La Ronde, & Hixon., 1994), roommates (Swann & Pelham, 2002), dating partners (Katz & Beach, 2000), employees (Wiesenfeld, Swann, Brockner, & Bartel, 2007), and even strangers (Robinson & Smith-Lovin, 1992; Rudich & Vallacher, 1999). Yet skeptics of this phenomenon continue to voice their doubts (see, for example, Sedikides & Gregg, 2008). Why have people doubted the notion that people with low self-esteem prefer negative evaluations? Part of the answer is that people with low self-esteem do not always prefer negative evaluations. Instead, people seek self-verification only if the belief is firmly held (Swann & Pelham, 2002) and when they are in fairly stable relationships (e.g., marriages) rather than relatively transitory relationships (e.g., dating relationships; Swann, De La Ronde & Hixon, 1994). Moreover, people with low self-esteem have immediate positive affective responses to praise that are later tempered by the more considered reactions (Hixon & Swann, 1993; Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, & Gilbert, 1990). A more important contributor to doubts regarding the existence of negative feedback seeking, however, is hinted in Schachter’s remark “Nothing in my experience supports this idea.” Schachter was likely among the 71.5% of people in the world who have high esteem (Diener &
Diener, 1995). Parallel to high status/power individuals who cannot wrap their heads around the preferences of people who lack status/power, people with high esteem may dismiss the notion that anyone would prefer negative evaluations because this phenomenon is so disjunctive with their past experiences. Simply put, they lack the information and motivation required to understand people who have had vastly different life experiences. At the same time, like those who lack status/power, people who lack self-esteem have ample information and motivation to understand their counterparts who possess high self-esteem. We tested these ideas empirically in two studies. Drawing on several decades of past research (for reviews, see Ashokkumar & Swann, 2020 ; Swann, 1996 ), the criterion for understanding was the degree to which participants predicted that people with high self-esteem would desire praise from their interaction partners but that people with low esteem would eschew praise in favor of relatively negative appraisals. We thus relied on a form of accuracy that has been widely embraced by accuracy researchers (Funder, 1987): understanding how targets are likely to behave. We tested whether participants would display asymmetric insight, with high esteem participants failing to understand the motives of people with low esteem while participants with low esteem would understand the motives of people with high esteem. The Positive vs. Negative Boss and Roommate Studies. Procedure. We recruited undergraduates ( N1a = 139; N1b = 119) with varying levels of self-esteem to participate in two vignette studies. In each vignette, participants predicted whether a target randomly assigned to have low or high esteem would choose a boss or roommate who perceived the target positively or negatively. We focused on evaluations regarding social self- esteem because this aspect of self-esteem has been the focus of several well-replicated findings in the self-verification literature (e.g., Swann, Griffin, Predmore, & Gaines, 1987).
= 3.97, p < .001, R 2 = .13; roommate vignette: b =1.32, 95% CI [.44, 2.20], t (115) = 2.96, p = .004, R 2 = .21). As can be seen in Figure 1a and 1b, the lower the participants’ self-esteem, the more they predicted that the low-esteem target would choose the self-verifying negative interaction partner (boss vignette: b = 1.1 1 , 95% CI [.5 8 , 1. 64 ], p < .001; roommate vignette: b = 1.1 3 , 95% CI [.5 4 , 1. 72 ], p < .001). In contrast, low and high esteem participants were equally inclined to predict that the high-esteem target would choose the enhancing boss or roommate, (boss vignette: b = -. 39 , 95% CI [-. 92 , .14], p = .14; roommate vignette: b = -. 18 , 95% CI [-. 83 ,
. 47 ], p = .58). As shown in Figure 2 a and 2 b, analyses of perceived credibility of the target’s self- verifying choices revealed a similar interaction between participants’ self-esteem and target esteem condition on participants’ perceived credibility of the target’s roommate choice, (boss vignette: b = - 1.02, 95% CI [-1.79, - .25], t (135) = - 2.62, p = .0098, R 2 = .46; roommate vignette: b = - 1.79, 95% CI [-2.69, - .89], t (115) = - 3.94, p < .001, R 2 = .39). The lower the participants’ self-esteem, the more credible they regarded low-esteem target’s choice of the negative, self- verifying partner (boss vignette: b = - .94, 95% CI [-1.49, - .39], p < .001; roommate vignette: b =
- 1.38, 95% CI [-1.99, - .77], p < .001). In contrast, low and high esteem participants were equally inclined to endorse the credibility of the high esteem target’s choice of the positive boss or roommate (boss vignette: b =.08, 95% CI [-.45, .61], p = .77.; roommate vignette: b =.41, 95% CI [-.04, 86], p = .23).
Figure 2a and 2b. Low self-esteem participants found verifying choices to be more credible than high esteem participants did. Note. Figure 2a (left panel) depicts the boss vignette, whereas Figure 2b (right panel) depicts the roommate vignette. High values on y-axes indicate high perceived credibility of the target’s choice of a self-verifying evaluator (i.e., the positive evaluator in the positive self-esteem target condition and the negative evaluator in the negative self-esteem target condition). Shaded regions denote 95% confidence intervals. TSBI = Texas Social Behavior Inventory measure of social self-esteem. Discussion. Consistent with research on asymmetries involving status/power, the results of these vignette studies showed that when it came to understanding similar others, both high and low esteem participants displayed insight. In contrast, when it came to understanding dissimilar others, people with low esteem outperformed those with high esteem: Whereas low self-esteem participants predicted that the high self-esteem target wanted praise, high esteem participants failed to predict that the low self-esteem target desired an interaction partner who provides negative feedback. In fact, even after high-esteem individuals learned that the low self-esteem target preferred the negative interaction partner, they expressed disbelief. Low self-esteem participants expressed no such incredulity regarding the choices of high-esteem targets.
Diener’s [1995] large international study). This imbalance means that low self-esteem people will meet high self-esteem people more than high self-esteem people will meet low self-esteem people. In addition, people with low self-esteem tend to socialize less than people with high esteem, thus diminishing opportunities for high self-esteem people to meet them (Robins, Tracy, Trzesniewski, Potter, & Gosling, 2001). Moreover, when people with low self-esteem do socialize, they do not necessarily gravitate toward people with positive self-views (Rosenblatt & Greenberg, 1991). Second, both low self-esteem and the associated preference for negative evaluations may be difficult to detect. For example, people often misjudge neuroticism, a correlate of low self- esteem (Vazire, 2010). Also, preferences for negative evaluations are often automatized and thus outside of conscious awareness (Kraus & Chen, 2009). In such instances, people with low self- esteem could not explain that they enacted a preference for negative evaluations even if they wanted to. Which brings us to a third point: people with low self-esteem may not want to report their preference for negative evaluations. The high value that Western cultures place on high self- esteem and its pursuit may motivate people who suffer from low self-esteem to conceal their preference for negative evaluations from others. Concealment incentives may be especially strong when interacting with people who possess high esteem, for low self-esteem individuals will have sound reasons for anticipating that their counterparts will have little understanding of active attempts to maintain low esteem. This relative invisibility of low self-esteem may encourage their high self-esteem counterparts to overlook their goals, needs, and desires. With this in mind, in this section, we explore several strategies designed to correct the tendency for people with high self-esteem to
misunderstand the motivational inclinations of people with low self-esteem. Our starting point was the evidence presented in Section II that people with low esteem understand what it is like to possess low esteem. Apparently, their experiences provided them with the information and motivation needed to recognize that others with low self-esteem are drawn to negative interaction partners for the same reasons that they themselves were. The question, then, is this: How can one inform and motivate high self-esteem individuals to peer into the realities that low self-esteem individuals routinely confront? Based on the authors’ collective experience teaching self-verification theory and interacting with individuals with low self-esteem, we generated four distinct strategies for encouraging people with high self-esteem to understand their counterparts. First, in the Tommy study, we provided information about someone with low self-esteem who sought self-verifying evaluations. That is, we had perceivers with high esteem read an account of a young boy with low esteem who solicited negative evaluations (i.e., displayed a preference for negative evaluations). Second, in the overly positive feedback study, we focused on motivation. That is, we gave people overly positive evaluations that we believed would motivate a desire for negative feedback. Third, in the study of clinical students, we focused on a group of participants who presumably possessed high levels of information and motivation to understand people with low self-esteem. Finally, in the gone-but-not-forgotten study, we examined a group of people whose experiences provided them with an extra dose of information and motivation to understand people with low self-esteem: those who had actually possessed low self-esteem in the past. The Tommy Study: Augmenting Information About Preference for Negative Evaluations If people with high self-esteem rarely gain insight into people with low esteem in the course of their everyday interactions, they may encounter vivid images of such individuals in
