Our Own Worst Critic

In the classic film "Play It Again, Sam," Woody Allen is the nervous and insecure Allan Felix, who has recently been dumped by his wife. When his best friends set him up with a blind date, the character blunders his way through the evening with one gaffe after another, ending with an appalling display of table manners at a Chinese restaurant. When his visibly dismayed date excuses herself to go to the restroom, Allen turns to his friends: "She likes me," he says confidently. "I can read women."

Say what? How could Allen get it so completely wrong? How could he not know what everyone else at the table knows, that he has completely embarrassed himself?

Psychologists are very interested in this kind of disconnect. We are all called upon everyday to read others, to interpret how we look in their eyes. Whether in a job interview, a musical audition or a first date, it's basic human nature to calculate how we're doing as performers in life. But we so often get it wrong, believing we did far better or far worse than we did in fact. Why are we so poor at intuiting what others think of us?

Some newly reported experiments may offer at least part of the answer. John Chambers of the University of Florida has been studying how people often confuse private and public information. Think of it this way. We are constantly experiencing the world, and incorporating some of that experience into our sense of self. Say you totally blow a job interview; that botched performance becomes part of who you are, and it will color your experience of your next job interview. Or you play a virtuoso violin solo or act courageously in battle. Each of these experiences—and even imagined experiences—is encoded into our memory of who we are, sometimes indelibly.

But here's the rub. Other people have no access to that information. They don't know that you're a hero in your own mind—or a bumbling fool. So when they meet you for the first time, they have no reference point. They only know what they observe at that moment in time.
That, at least, is the theory, which Chambers and his colleagues have explored in a series of innovative laboratory studies. Here's an example. The psychologists asked a bunch of volunteers to publicly perform the R.E.M. song, "It's the End of the World As We Know It." This song is very challenging, with rapid-fire lyrics. And the volunteers were all Harvard students, so presumably educable but not necessarily great singers.

They let all of the volunteers practice the song once in private before performing it. But they only gave half the volunteers the printed lyrics for this practice session. The other half got the lyrics for the actual performance. The idea was that having the lyrics would make the performance easier, so that some would do better in the real event than they did in rehearsal, and some would do worse. Or at least they would judge themselves that way, based on their two performances. And they did.