Our Own Worst Critic

When the scientists asked the singers to guess how their public performances were judged by others, they inevitably thought that the audience would share their self-judgments. In other words, they irrationally expected the audience to compare their private and public experiences, to evaluate the relative merits of the two performances, even though that was clearly impossible. When they actually asked members of the audience what they thought, they were neither as harsh nor as laudatory as the performers expected.

I know what you're thinking: It's unlikely you'll have to sing an R.E.M. song in public anytime soon. But the fact is we do "practice" for most important events in our lives. Often these practice sessions take place only in the privacy of our mind; we imagine ourselves in a job interview or on a date before we actually experience it. The psychologists ran another experiment to specifically explore this idea, that our secret run-throughs can skew our perceptions as much as actual experiences.

In this study, they simply had two strangers engage in a brief conversation. But beforehand, they had some of them imagine things that might create a bad impression, while others imagined creating a good impression. Afterward, they asked them how their new acquaintance would rate them on traits like humor, charm and intelligence. The results were interesting. As described in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers' imagined performances were assimilated into their predictions of how they would be seen, so that those who had imagined themselves as charming and witty beforehand expected others to see them that way, as well, and vice versa. Fans of "Play It Again, Sam" will recall that in his fantasy life Allen is Humphrey Bogart, the gallant antihero who melts every woman he encounters. No wonder Allen was so far off the mark when it came to the real event.

So why are we so bad at this? It seems so obvious that people can't know us as intimately as we know ourselves. Chambers and colleagues have an idea. People probably incorporate their private experiences into their self-perceptions at the moment they are encoded into memory, so that they are highly difficult to expunge, perhaps impossible. Think of a juror who hears inadmissible testimony in the courtroom, and is then instructed by the judge to disregard it. Could you do that? I know I couldn't. Our private sense of self is contaminated by all sorts of inadmissible evidence, so how can we expect to get the verdict right?

Wray Herbert writes the blog We're Only Human… at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman .

© 2008