It Pays to Be Yourself

Francesca Gino
hbr.org
Originally posted 13 Feb 20

Whether it’s trying to land a new job or a new deal or client, we often focus on making a good initial impression on people, especially when they don’t know us well or the stakes are high. One strategy people often use is to cater to the interests, preferences, and expectations of the person they want to impress. Most people, it seems, believe this is a more promising strategy than being themselves and use it in high-stakes interpersonal first meetings. But research I conducted with Ovul Sezer of the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill and Laura Huang of Harvard Business School found those beliefs are wrong.

Our research confirmed that catering to others’ interests and expectations is quite common. When we asked over 450 employed adults to imagine they were about to have an important professional interaction — such as interviewing for their dream job, conducting a valuable negotiation for their company, pitching an entrepreneurial idea to potential investors, or making a presentation to a client — 66% of them indicated they would use catering techniques, rather than simply being themselves; 71% reported believing that catering would be the most effective approach in the situation.

But another study we conducted found that catering was much less effective than being yourself. We asked 166 entrepreneurs to participate in a “fast-pitch” competition held at a private university in the northeastern United States. Each entrepreneur presented his or her venture idea to a panel of three judges: experienced, active members of angel investment groups. The ideas pitched were all in the early stages; none had received any external financing. At the end of the event, the judges collectively deliberated to choose 10 semifinalists who would be invited to participate in the final round. After entrepreneurs made their pitches, we had them answer a few questions about their presentations. We found that when they were genuine in their pitches, they were more than three times as likely to be chosen as semifinalists than when they tried to cater to the judges.

The info is here.

Rationalization is rational

Fiery Cushman
Preprint
Uploaded July 18, 2018

Abstract

Rationalization occurs when a person has performed an action and then concoct the beliefs and desires that would have made it rational. Then, people often adjust their own beliefs and desires to match the concocted ones. While many studies demonstrate rationalization, and a few theories identify its underlying cognitive mechanisms, we have little understanding of its its function. Why is the mind designed to construct post hoc rationalizations of its behavior, and then to adopt them? This design may accomplish an important task: to transfer information between the many different processes and representations that influence our behavior. Human decision-making does not rely on a single process; it is influenced by reason, habit, instincts, cultural norms and so on. Several of the processes that influence our behavior are not organized according to rational choice (i.e., maximizing desires conditioned on belief). Thus, rationalization extracts implicit information—true beliefs and useful desires—from the influence of these non-rational systems on behavior. This is not a process of self-perception as traditionally conceived, in which one infers the hidden contents of unconscious reasons. Rather, it is a useful fiction. It is a fiction because it imputes reason to non-rational psychological processes; it is useful because it can improve subsequent reasoning. More generally, rationalization is one example of broader class of “representational exchange” mechanisms, which transfer of information between many different psychological processes that guide our behavior. This perspective reveals connections to theory of mind, inverse reinforcement learning, and reflective equilibrium.

The paper is here.

Asking patients why they engaged in a behavior is another example of useful fiction.  Dr. Cushman suggests psychologists ask: What made that worth doing?