How To Win People Over

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. As we go through life, other people often hold the keys to our success and happiness. In school, how your teachers think of you makes a difference in how they evaluate you. Do they see you as a serious scholar or a disinterested student? As you grow older, you might try to impress someone whom you see as a potential romantic partner. You want this person to like you, to date you. In the workplace, we jockey for status and opportunities. We might ask a boss for a raise or a promotion. How you come across to her will influence whether she says yes to you or tells you to take a hike. Countless books and Reddit threads tell you how to navigate these waters. A YouTube influencer might tell you to play nice. A TikTok star might recommend playing hardball. Much of the advice you get will be contradicted by other advice you get. In recent years, social scientists have started to study how we can more effectively influence how others think of us. They've discovered both pitfalls and opportunities in the way we go about trying to influence the opinions of people. Unlike a lot of what you hear on YouTube and TikTok, these researchers are not just sharing their personal opinions, their conclusions are guided by experimental evidence. The science of how to win friends and influence people, this week on Hidden Brain. Let's say you have a job interview. How do you carry yourself? You might wear a nice outfit, walk into the room with your shoulders back, and offer a firm handshake. Or imagine you run into a neighbor. You smile at them, make small talk, give a friendly wave. What about buying a car? Chances are, you speak confidently to salesmen, so they offer you a good deal. Each of these is a small way we interact with other people. At the University of North Carolina, organizational psychologist Alison Fragale studies these interactions and how they shape what others think of us. Alison Fragale, welcome to Hidden Brain.



Alison Fragale: Thank you. So great to be here.



Shankar Vedantam: Alison, I want to take you back to one of your early efforts to win friends and influence people. In your sophomore year of high school, you decided to run for a position on your student council. What was the position you wanted and how did it turn out?



Alison Fragale: Not well. I lost. I had a position my freshman year, decided I was going to run again for sophomore year, felt pretty confident, and was really surprised and disappointed that I didn't win.



Shankar Vedantam: So the fires of your political ambition continued to burn bright, and you decided to give it another shot the following year. Did you decide to do anything differently?



Alison Fragale: I did. I was running for a junior vice president position, and because I thought I had been a little bit complacent in my sophomore year, I put a lot of work into my speech. I thought, this is, you know, it's high school. It's all won and lost in the quality of that speech, and it's got to promise great things. And it also, importantly, has to be funny. So I worked, and my mom tried to help me write a good speech.



Shankar Vedantam: What did she come up with? What did you come up with together?



Alison Fragale: Well, when I told her I was running for vice president, she thought about, you know, the presidency and said, What does the vice president even do except wait around for the president to die? And I said, Maybe that can go in the speech. So I put in there something that seemed a lot funnier in high school, but it did land well, which was that I was well prepared to step in in the event of the untimely death of our president. As I said, we were too young at that point to really have thought about, you know, our death and mortality. But people thought it was funny. So I thought I had a great joke. I'm well known. I'm liked. I'm going to win this.



Shankar Vedantam: Alison thought she had the election sown up. But like countless politicos before her, she was in for a shock.



Alison Fragale: I do remember a friend of mine who I recently reconnected with. She was running unopposed in the same election. So she knew that she was going to have a position, and she was part of counting the votes. And I very much remember her coming into the student lounge after the speeches with the saddest look on her face, telling me everything I needed to know that I did not win. She told me I had lost by a few votes, to whom I no longer remember, but my attempt was a failure.



Shankar Vedantam: So I understand you were quite upset when you didn't win this race, and your mother gave you some advice. What did she tell you, Alison?



Alison Fragale: She told me what mothers everywhere say and what I now repeat to my own kids. She said, don't worry about what other people think of you. It's the kind of thing where all moms say it and no kids actually ever feel one bit better about it. But I think that messaging was given to me at many different times of disappointment in my life. And as a parent, I get it. You feel so bad for your kid when they're suffering, and all you can tell them is to try to detach from the expectations or the judgment of the world around you.



Shankar Vedantam: So you were not successful at changing how your classmates thought of you. But many years later, you found yourself navigating a different problem that was also related to how people think of you. It had to do with how you tell others where you went to grad school. Can you explain, Alison?



Alison Fragale: Well, I've played introduction dodgeball for years and years, that when you meet somebody and they ask for something about you, like, where did you go to college? Where did you grow up? And I developed this habit of not liking to disclose where I went to school. So I went to Dartmouth College for undergrad. I went to Stanford to get my Ph.D. And when people would say things like, where did you go? I would give these vague answers like, oh, in the Northeast, in New Hampshire, on the West Coast. And then they would have to pull it out of me. I remember sitting at a blackjack table in Las Vegas with a stranger asking me where I went to school. And I didn't even want to tell this guy that I was never going to see again where I went. And finally, you know, I said I went to Stanford. And then I immediately, he said, oh, that's very impressive. And then I immediately just went into downplaying it. Well, not really. You know, I just, I applied on a whim. I had some story about how that no one should pay attention to that. And every time I would have to say where I went to school, I would almost choke on the words and avoid eye contact.



Shankar Vedantam: So why do you think you have played dodgeball when it comes to this question? What do you think you're trying to hide from others?



Alison Fragale: I feel really grateful and really privileged that I got to go to those institutions, but I never have been able to utter those words without thinking that I sound obnoxious and like a snob. And that's never my intention in any interaction to make anyone feel bad. And so I developed this habit of just going to great lengths to disclose it and then only making situations more awkward. When other people would press, it would then just come off as weird. Why did I have to ask nine questions to get a basic fact out of you? And I do it, I will disclose it now, but it still makes me really uncomfortable.



Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. I'm also wondering if it can communicate the wrong message and a message that you were not trying to communicate at all, which is that you at some level thought that you went to a better school than the other person asking you this question, and you thought they would feel bad as a result of not having gone to such a good school. And so you're trying to hide the fact that you went to an elite school in order to make them feel better. And in some ways, could you be communicating to them in some ways that you actually have a hierarchy of schools in mind and that you actually thought that you did go to a better school?



Alison Fragale: I think that's very much true, because now as we're talking this, and I think when someone then first discloses to me, oh, I went to Harvard or I went to Yale or something, I am much more likely to feel comfortable disclosing in exchange. So I do think there's probably an underlying assumption that if I'm talking to somebody I know nothing about, chances are statistically, they didn't go to a school that was as highly ranked, and I wouldn't want to be in a situation where I was saying that I had done something that was better.



Shankar Vedantam: Yeah, but of course, once they find out that you did go to Dartmouth and to Stanford, then they not only know that you went to Dartmouth and to Stanford, but they know that you think that they might have thought that they might have looked inferior if you told them that you went to Dartmouth or Stanford.



Alison Fragale: It's not a winning strategy, but I just have come to see how many times I confronted it, it makes me uncomfortable, and I start playing dodgeball.



Shankar Vedantam: So these stories reveal the potential errors we make and how we seek to influence what others think of us. I want to look at a couple of other examples before we get to the science of what is underlying these interactions. Early in your teaching career, Alison, you won a prestigious teaching award. What was this award and how did winning make you feel?



Alison Fragale: My second year as a professor, I won what's called the Weatherspoon teaching award. There are several of them at the University of North Carolina named for the wonderful benefactor who funded them. And I won the one for undergraduate teaching, which was the course I was teaching when I started at UNC. So I was in my second year and I won this prestigious award. So one person wins in every teaching category each year.



Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. Yeah. So this is a big deal because to win in your second year means that you really made a very strong impression in your first year. I did.



Alison Fragale: And I felt good about it, especially because I came into UNC. I had never taught a single day in my life because my graduate program didn't give me that opportunity. So I went from never teaching in year one to winning an award in year two. And I did feel very proud about it. And I felt that I had actually earned it because I put a lot of my heart and effort into making that class really great.



Shankar Vedantam: Alison continued to be a great teacher. But as the months unfolded, something strange happened. Year three, she didn't win another teaching award. Year four, same thing. Year five?



Alison Fragale: I'd come off of winning one award, so I thought winning awards wasn't really that hard to do. And I started to think about, surely I'm going to get recognized at some point. They're going to run out of people to award. The school is only so big. If nothing else, the process of elimination is really big. So I was always happy because the other people who would win were also amazing. So there was never any, I'm definitely a better teacher than that person because that's not true. But there was a part of me that always thought, surely at some point I'm going to have to win because I do a really good job at this.



Shankar Vedantam: So a senior colleague comes up to you at one point and makes an interesting suggestion. Tell me what the suggestion was and how you responded. Yeah.



Alison Fragale: So my friend who's the chair of my area at the time comes into my office at the school, shuts the doors, something bad is going to happen. But he says something very kind. He said, I had been teaching this required course. I was getting ready to transition out of it, handed over to someone else. And he said, you haven't won this award yet. And would you like me to put together a group of people to nominate you for the award, essentially to court nominations, so that the award committee would see not just one or two letters, but 10 or 12 letters just from students, from faculty, et cetera. And it was a very, very kind, nice offer coming from a place of respect, I think, for the work that I had done.



Shankar Vedantam: And did you jump at this opportunity?



Alison Fragale: I didn't. I had the opposite reaction. And I feel a little, I said, absolutely not. And my facial expression, like, you know, led on some kind of offense. Like, this was the most unethical, terrible idea I had ever heard of. And I don't know if this person who was asking me had done it, but I came to find out that lots of people did this. And I think in my reaction, it was almost offensive. Like, this thing that many people were doing, which was creating these nominating committees, was so off-putting to me. So I said, no, thanks. I'm not interested. I don't want to win it that way.



Shankar Vedantam: So you wanted to win it in a way where you played no role whatsoever in engineering it. You just wanted to happen organically.



Alison Fragale: I had this belief that that was how the people were winning, was that students were just so moved by your teaching that they would just run forward in this nomination process en masse and write these glowing letters. And the committee would read letter after letter of grateful student, and they would have no choice but to award you this. But that really wasn't how these things were actually happening. It was genuine, and it was people saying, this person really deserves to win, so let's put together a strategic approach for helping show this person's great work. But it felt Icky to me.



Shankar Vedantam: Alison's experiences are hardly unique. When it comes to showcasing our achievements, or telling other people about our accomplishments, we often do one of two things. Sometimes, we come across as boastful. Other times, we are so afraid about coming across as boastful that we hide our achievements under a rock. We expect the world to discover our genius and come knocking on our door with accolades. In time, after Alison became a researcher who studies how people win and lose respect, she realized not just that both strategies were flawed, but why they were flawed. You are listening to Hidden Brain. I am Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In one of Aesop's fables, a donkey finds the skin of a lion left in the forest by a hunter. The donkey decides to try it on. He hides in a thicket, and as various animals walk by, he jumps out and scares them out of their wits. The scam works perfectly until the donkey breaks out in laughter at his frightened victims. His braids echo through the forest. A fox walking by gives him some advice. If you had kept your mouth shut, you might have frightened me too. But you gave yourself away with that silly braids. How do you want others to see you? As a powerful lion? A generous friend? A confident colleague? Organizational psychologist Alison Fragale says like that donkey in the story, most of us undermine our own efforts to get people to see us the way we want to be seen. Alison, I want to go back to the advice your mother gave you in high school when you lost that election for vice president. She told you not to worry about what other people thought of you. Was it good advice?



Alison Fragale: It's kind, but if it's taken the way most people take it, it's not good advice because it tells us that we should ignore or stop trying to influence how other people see us. And I do think that is bad advice.



Shankar Vedantam: And do you think it's bad advice because that's an impossibility for us, that we are a social species, that other people's opinions of us do matter, and asking us to ignore those opinions in some ways, you know, goes against every part of our social being?



Alison Fragale: Exactly, because when we think about how many impressions we carry of other people, so if we use ourselves, those impressions guide our behavior. And so when you are negotiating with somebody, if you don't trust that person, if you don't like that person, the thoughts in your head about that other person have a great impact on whether or not you're going to be able to reach an agreement and whether or not it's going to be good. And so if we get into this logic, which I understand it's a lore, is we don't have to care about what other people think or don't worry about what other people think, it can lead us to some really suboptimal problematic strategies that don't serve us well, and then we're left confused as to why I didn't get a good outcome.



Shankar Vedantam: So you've become interested in studying something that many people would like to pretend doesn't matter. You study status. What do you mean by status, Alison?



Alison Fragale: Status, the way we study it is the respect and regard that others have for us. So my status is how much other people respect and regard me. Your status is how much other people respect and regard you.



Shankar Vedantam: So when people say they don't care about status, or that status doesn't matter, you sometimes cite the words of a 16th century English playwright. What did Christopher Marlowe have to say about status?



Alison Fragale: He allegedly said, and it turns out that it's very problematic to quote long dead people because there's very little internet record of it, but allegedly, he said we control 50% of a relationship. We influence 100% of it. And I think that's really wise advice, which is when it comes to status, it exists only in other people's minds, but its effects are very real and significant, and we can influence it. We cannot guarantee that another human being will give us respect and regard, but we can do things that make it more likely that that will be the case.



Shankar Vedantam: So let's look at some of the ways that can make it more or less likely that we can change how other people think of us. One way we try to protect our status is by demonstrating that we are smart and competent people. But the way we do this often doesn't communicate what we think it communicates. I understand this once happened to you in a conversation you had with an employee of yours. Your nanny?



Alison Fragale: Yeah, so I love to be correct, or more accurately, I should say, I find it really hard to be told that I've done something incorrectly, I've made a mistake, because I feel like I do work so hard to try to get all the things done and do all the right things. And so I was on the phone with my nanny, I was on the speaker phone, my oldest child who's 15 is in the car, and I'm leaving on a 6 a.m. flight the next morning. And I said something like, you're going to be here at 6.45 in the morning to take the kids to school. And she said, I figured that might be the case because I saw it on your calendar that you were leaving. Yes, I can be there. And I said, what do you mean you figured it might be the case? We talked about it and you said that you were going to come. And she said, I don't remember that. And to me, my first thought was, and I said it said this to her, I said, it's really important to me that you know that I don't just leave town and assume that you're going to come in the middle of the night. I would not have done that to you without telling you. I really feel like I told you. She said, I don't remember, but she said, it doesn't matter. Either way, I'm available to do it. So there was no problem. She was coming, she didn't seem aggravated. We've worked together for years. But to me, the idea that I was not correct, that I had done something like this was so disturbing that I pulled the car over on the side of the road. And my son said, why are we stopping? I said, because I know I told her. So first thing I do is I search through my emails. I don't find it. So then I have to go through the text thread, which is incredibly inconvenient to search. But there I find it, a few thumb swipes up is me saying to her, can you come at 6.45 on whatever day it was there is it? And she said, yes, not a problem. I'll put it in the calendar. And then that wasn't enough just to know that I had told her. I screenshotted it and I texted it back to her. And I said, I see I did tell you this. And I couldn't help myself even though as I tell it to you, like that doesn't look very good on anyone. And you're like, no, there was no need for that. But I did.



Shankar Vedantam: So, I mean, you are focused both on looking competent, but also on demonstrating that you're not a cruel employer. You are demonstrating that, in fact, that you had been considerate of her earlier. That was your motivation in wanting to do this. But how do you think she saw this note that you sent her, this screenshot, which basically said, look, we had this text exchange, and you, in fact, agreed to come on this day?



Alison Fragale: So, I don't know for sure. I didn't ask. I just felt embarrassed by the whole thing. But I think that essentially what I was doing was saying, I was right, you were wrong. That's the notion of the communication. So, when I've been in that situation, I don't feel very endeared to the person. I feel like I've just been told I made a mistake, and I feel bad about it. So, the irony is, yes, my desire to communicate to her, I care about you, and I would not do something to hurt you. I then, in a desire to not be accused of that, I did something that was unnecessary and certainly didn't have the effect of making me show up as super caring and warm.



Shankar Vedantam: Yeah, I mean, your nanny is not thinking, Alison is so smart and so competent and is always looking out for me. She's thinking, why does Alison have this obsessive need to prove to me that she's right?



Alison Fragale: She might be thinking that. I'm just, again, I'm not going to ask her because I just don't, I'm not psychologically prepared to hear the answer. But exactly, you have this, it starts to seem logical, right? I've been accused of making mistake. I must correct the record that I didn't make a mistake. There's a pretty natural tendency to say, oh, that makes sense. That's going to be reputation saving. But then when you do this, you, I think there are some situations where absolutely correcting the record could be really important. And for me, what I've been able to observe about my own behavior is I have a knee-jerk reaction to anytime somebody says, Alison, you might be wrong. If I really do think I'm right to have to put that information out there. And I can come up with not just this example, but others, where in the act of doing that, I'm probably doing more harm to my reputation, because even when you're not being accused, you got to put in that information that says, just so you know, I was doing everything right.



Shankar Vedantam: There's another way we try to make an impression on others. You recently wrote a book, Alison, and you wrote a very interesting dedication that your editor had some thoughts about. What did you write and what was your editor's feedback?



Alison Fragale: So in the first full version of the manuscript that I sent to the editor, the whole thing's done and the dedication, I wrote it last and I was actually quite proud of it. This is what I wrote. I said, to those who had to deal with me when I was neither likable nor badass, especially my husband and kids who often get the worst of me and love me anyway, anyone who knew me in high school, and those unfortunate enough to talk to me before I've had three cups of coffee. That was my dedication. And her response was, no, you cannot do this. It is way too self-deprecating. You are writing a book to people who do not know you. You cannot start off knocking yourself down on page two of this book.



Shankar Vedantam: So we talked earlier about how you don't like to tell people you went to Dartmouth and Stanford. And it feels like this example is cut from the same cloth. Self-deprecation is all about wanting to come across as humble. But often, people don't see our behavior that way. What happens when we act and talk in self-deprecating ways, Alison?



Alison Fragale: Yeah, so when I failed to mention I'm where I went to school, it's self-deprecation of omission. But then this dedication is a commission. I'm actually putting information out there in the world voluntarily to say, hey, look at how not good at various things I am. And so self-deprecation is a form of humor. So one of the reasons that people use it is to be funny. And humor is a good behavior to put out in the world for our own reputation. It creates social cohesion. Humor is an intelligent act. If it lands well, it's considered smarter. So you know a lot of comedians that have their whole careers are just poking fun of themselves. So self-deprecation can be humorous. And I think part of the reason I have come to use it is partly that, because I have a humorous style, and so it fits in with my forms of joke telling. The challenge with it is why it's not as good of a form of humor as other things, is that people believe what we say about ourselves. We are the experts on ourselves. So if I tell you I'm not very good at something, and we see this, when people make fun of their looks, they make fun of their intelligence, people see them as less funny, as less good-looking, as less intelligent. So we're the experts. So we put ourselves down, what ends up happening is, people say, oh, you just told me you're not very good at that. You must not be very good at it. So any benefit you might get from the social cohesion, and, oh, that's modest, that's nice, you're taking that corresponding hit by telling somebody you're not very competent or skilled in whatever you just put yourself down on.



Shankar Vedantam: There's also the point that if you're good at something, if you've won something and you're trying to appease someone who has not won something, you've won the gold medal in a race and you're trying to appease the person who is not on the medal stand by saying, oh, medals don't count or winning is not everything. In some ways, that doesn't make you more liked. The person who hasn't won the medal doesn't want to be told that medals don't count. They're upset about not having won the medal, and you are standing on the medal stand telling them that medals don't count. It's like the rich person telling the poor person, well, don't really worry about it. Money doesn't really matter.



Alison Fragale: That's exactly right. So when people have outperformed others and then they try to downplay their performance, their high performance, it doesn't land well, exactly in the way that you described. People say, I don't believe you, one, so now you're not an honest person, and two, it doesn't make me feel any better, so I don't actually feel connected to you or appreciate what you've done.



Shankar Vedantam: We've all done things like this to shape how others perceive us. We downplay our accomplishments to seem humble. We belabor a point to appear intelligent. There are certain traits we all want to be known for. Alison's research puts these traits into two distinct categories.



Alison Fragale: Yeah, so these are the two fundamental dimensions of person perception. Some different people call them different names, but you're going to have a dimension of assertiveness. Can you get stuff done? It's going to be decisive and persistent and competent. And then a dimension of warmth. Do you care about people other than yourself? And these are very much linked to status, so when we think about people we respect, we respect people who are assertive and they can get tasks done well and effectively, and we respect people who care about people other than themselves. Those are two fundamental dimensions of person perception. When we pay attention to people and what they're doing, we code their behavior along those two dimensions, and they're very much tied to this idea of status. And there can be attention because you can think about it as a two-dimensional space, so you can be high on one dimension, low on the other, so you can think about doing things that get you a lot of credit for being assertive and competent and decisive, but are seen as less warm. And you can think of situations where you can do things that are going to help you be seen as really nice and kind and likable, but often at the expense of your own competence and capabilities. And so that's where the tension exists, is because there are two cells that people will find themselves, I've found myself in many, many times in life where you're getting one, but you're not getting the other.



Shankar Vedantam: Alison has found in her research that people can be rated low on both assertiveness and on warmth. We don't respect people who are selfish and lack confidence. By contrast, everyone respects people who are seen as both assertive and kind. The most beloved leaders in history invariably combine both qualities. That's the quadrant we should all aspire to inhabit. But you can also be rated high on one dimension and low on the other. A ruthless hedge fund manager might be rated very high on competence and assertiveness, but be widely perceived as a jerk. Or you can have people who are seen as sweet but ineffectual. To complicate matters, these two dimensions are sometimes at odds with one another. To be seen as assertive can make you less likely to be seen as warm and kind, especially if you are a woman. Women are stereotypically expected to be kind and sweet, so if a woman shows up in a meeting as very assertive, people unconsciously assume she cannot be nice. The researcher Jennifer Chapman once conducted a study looking at the teaching evaluations of male and female professors.



Alison Fragale: I thought this was an amazing and depressing study as a middle-aged professor myself. What Jennifer and her colleagues did was, they looked at longitudinal data of 15 years about of professors teaching evaluations. So they would have the same person like me who's taught for 20 years, show up multiple times. They've taught years and years and years, and they would compare each individual to themselves to say, okay, how did your evaluations change over time? And you might think, oh, evaluations are going to get better for the people who succeed and stay because they'll become more experienced professors. And then, I don't know, maybe at the end of their career, they tail off and they get worse. But she and her colleagues found was this curve for female professors only. When they were younger, they would get high evaluations. As they went into middle age, their evaluations would drop, and as they got older, their evaluations would rise again. And that pattern was only observed for women, and it was not observed for the male faculty. And they did some digging, and they had to find support for their theory, which relates to these dimensions of assertiveness and warmth, which is that the women who got the lowest teaching evaluations, which remember the women at the middle age, middle stage of their career, those women were perceived as the most assertive and the least warm. And that pattern of your assertive and cold was the unique perception of the middle-aged women in the faculty but not for the men. And that research is very consistent with the work that I've done, which is that when are women going to be at their highest power in their academic career? Generally at that midpoint, that's when you are tenured, you're serving in major administrative roles, et cetera. And so the story that I could tell from that study is, okay, if your power increases and your status doesn't, guess where you end up? In the low status power holder cell, which is very assertive and very cold. And guess what? People don't like it and they don't treat you very well. And in this case, the mistreatment came in the form of the lower teaching evaluations, the lower performance evaluations that the female faculty got.



Shankar Vedantam: When women acquire power in the workplace, a number of studies have found they are less likely to be perceived as warm and nice. They are seen as powerful, but cruel. Alison says that combination makes us afraid.



Alison Fragale: Because if someone's gonna have control over me, I care a lot about the fact that they are gonna do good things with it, not just to help me, but to make sure they're gonna use it responsibly. If I don't respect somebody, I could be concerned, and wait a second, you're gonna have all this control, and you're just gonna mess it up.



Shankar Vedantam: From friendships to job promotions, there are many consequences to how we go about interacting with others. Despite the great deal of time and effort we spend in managing how others see us, our efforts often backfire, and people don't come away thinking of us as warm, competent, and humble people. When we come back, better ways to win friends and influence people. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. We spend a lot of time and effort trying to paint a certain picture of ourselves in other people's eyes. Organizational psychologist Alison Fragale is the author of Likeable Badass, How Women Get the Success They Deserve. She says that when we try to burnish our status, many of us use the wrong brush. Alison, we've been talking about status, how much we are respected, admired and valued in the eyes of others. And the wrong ways we often go about trying to build our status. A lot of people believe that you have this trade off. Either I come across as assertive or I come across as warm, or I come across as really likeable, but then I sacrifice being seen as competent. You say that being successful involves eliminating this trade off and coming across as both assertive and warm?



Alison Fragale: That's right. So, status is how much we're respected and regarded. It's critically important to our life satisfaction and our career success. It's a fundamental human need. Lacking status is physically and psychologically as damaging as living a life without friends. So, building status is critical. How do we do it? We do it by showing up as assertive and warm. There's no doubt that for some people, women included, that getting to that quadrant feels elusive. But what I help people think about is it doesn't have to be elusive. And the first step in making it work and getting to that quadrant is not unintentionally doing things that are going to keep, put you somewhere else in that two-dimensional space. And there's a phenomenon in psychology known as compensatory impression management. And that's the tendency that human beings have, not just women, but human beings, that when you want to show up as really strong on one of those dimensions, you do it in a bad way. You do it by making yourself look worse on the other. You want to show up as really assertive, you do it by showing up as less warm, which makes no sense. If you want to show up as assertive, you should show up as assertive. That's not what people do. They say, I want to be really assertive, so I'm going to be less warm. I want to be really warm, so now I'm going to be less assertive. And that we compensate when we don't have to. So that quadrant, assertive and warm, it's possible to get there. It can be harder for some people, but we also make it harder on ourselves than it has to be by engaging in behaviors where we're deliberately only showcasing one and not the other when that is a false choice that doesn't have to be made. And so one of the things I help people think about when they're thinking about how can I show up in this assertive and warm cell is I say, start with who you naturally are and then add, don't subtract. So if you have something that's very natural and authentic to you, even if it's more submissive, like your speech style or if maybe if it's not as friendly, like you're not a great smiler, okay, fine, it is what it is. But what are the things that you can add in that are going to get you more recognition on the other dimension where you think you might be lacking?



Shankar Vedantam: So Alison, you say that one of the ways we can try and get the best of both these worlds is to try and offer help to other people. What do you mean by this?



Alison Fragale: Well, helping another person is definitely a warm act, is a giving act, it's in service to somebody else. And if the help that you're offering also showcases that you are highly capable, then you can, in the act of helping, get credit for assertiveness as well. So if a friend needs a ride to the airport and I drive them, very warm thing to do, not particularly assertive, everybody else can drive to the airport as well. It doesn't help me show up as very unique or talented in any way. But if I have something that I do have a unique contribution, I always pride myself on being a good child care evaluator and hirer. I could not do my work without the support of a lot of people in my life who take great care of my kids. And I feel over the years, I've gotten really good at finding great people, setting up the expectations of the relationship very well, and creating a good environment for them to work in that has really been very successful. And when I see other people struggling, other parents, I'm quick to jump in and offer some advice or help because it's unique. It's something that I can offer that another person couldn't easily offer just at that moment. And so when we help in big or small ways that showcase our talents and give assistance to other people, that's an example of something that gets you credit for the assertiveness and credit for the warmth.



Shankar Vedantam: Alison says another way to come across as both assertive and warm has to do with how we respond to praise and how we engage in self-promotion.



Alison Fragale: A lot of information that people know about you, it ultimately originates with you. It's either interactions they've had with you, it's information you've put out into social media or on a website, something like that. And so, we control a lot of the information that people get about us. So we want to make that information, certainly as positive as possible, on both dimensions, right, on assertive and warm. So there was some research that I thought was great that supported a technique that I had adopted myself years and years ago. And I call it brag and thank, and the psychologist who looked at it called it dual promotion, or promoting self and other people at the same time. So when we promote ourselves and we say something good, we can imagine we're going to get an assertiveness bump, but oh, maybe it's not so modest. So now we get a warm hit. Well, what if you also at the same time are offering sincere promotion and praise for somebody else who did something great in the process, without diminishing yourself deprecating what you did, but to say, hey, I had this great success, right? I got to achieve something. And special thanks go to people A, B, and C, without whom this could never happen. So you're telling your story, but you're at the same time saying something positive about other people. That's an example of where you could use something that we've been told to do, self-promote, and tweak it, just add to it, in a way that's promoting the other people, you get more credit for the warmth.



Shankar Vedantam: You talk about another idea called humor bragging that could help us in some ways resolve this tension between coming across as assertive and coming across as warm. What is humor bragging, Alison?



Alison Fragale: So, humor bragging is saying something positive about yourself, while also using humor that is not self-deprecating. And this is one of my favorite findings that just recently came out, and I think it's brilliant. And what the research team found was that when people in a context where you might need to self-promote or brag, like searching for a job, where somebody said something positive and then added in something humorous, those people were granted more status and were more likely to be seen as viable candidates in a job selection process, for example, than for people who simply said something self-promoting. One of the examples they had in the study was a job applicant who wrote a purely self-promoting statement that said, I'm highly motivated and detail-oriented sales representative with experience and a proven track record of people skills. I look forward to supporting your company's goals dedicatedly. And then in another version, offered a humor-bragging statement, I'm a driven sales representative whose detail-oriented and passionate about serving your company's goals. I have a proven track record of turning caffeine input into productivity output. The more coffee you can provide, the more output I will produce. And they found that when it was, again, a positive statement combined with some humor, there was more interest in the candidate. The candidate did a better job building their status and being able to be seen as a viable candidate for the job. That's what humor-bragging is.



Shankar Vedantam: So you've talked about how we sometimes hide our successes in order to come across as more warm and more likable. So when we think our accomplishments will intimidate someone else, we sometimes mistakenly downplay them. You say that if someone is worried about coming across as intimidating, one way to buffer against that is to highlight their similarities with others. And you have a friend named Greg who exemplifies this strategy. What does Greg do?



Alison Fragale: So Greg Northcraft, co-author of mine, former colleague, long-time professor at the University of Illinois, who is now retired. And what I think Greg does now the most is play a tremendous amount of golf after he moved to California. So he's an incredibly avid golfer, and everyone who knows him knows that. In fact, his strategy for showing up as assertive and warm really relied on golf. And what he understood as a psychologist was he understood similarity attraction. The greatest basis of liking an attraction that psychology has ever documented is similarity. We like people who are like us. And because we think positive things about ourselves, someone who's like us is very likely to get respect because what a brilliant and loving person that person is. So what Greg always told me is he said, the first thing I always try to do whenever I'm talking to a new person is figure out if there's any chance they like golf. Does that logo on their shirt represent a golf course? I wouldn't know because I don't golf, but Greg did. And if he saw any opportunity to bring golf into the conversation, he would. And he told me a story once about his biggest win, which was talking to somebody else at the university. They didn't know each other. And the subject of the conversation was probably money, but some scarce resource where you have every reason to think it's going to be a bit of a territorial battle. But he did something deliberate. He said, I had the status to ask this person to come to my office. I was the senior person in this exchange, but I didn't do that. I specifically offered to go to the other guy's office for one reason only, was I wanted to see his physical space. And so I could figure out what is this guy like? What does he do? How could I make a connection with him? And he went into the office and he said, I couldn't believe my luck. I go in, and what is behind this guy's desk? He tells a story like he's shaking his hand, and as he does it, he's kind of peering over his shoulder trying to see what's there. He says, behind the desk, you're not going to believe it, there's a hole in one trophy. He said, if you're a golfer and you ever see a hole in one trophy, you know two things are absolutely true. There has to be a heck of a story behind the trophy, and the person behind the desk is just dying to tell you what it is. He asks with genuine sincerity and interest, oh my god, you have a hole in one, you need to tell me this story. And the guy does, and Greg had had one hole in one in his life up until that point. He shares his hole in one story, and you know exactly how this goes, because we've all been in these situations at times too. Maybe not about golf, but if 60 minutes are on the calendar for that meeting, 55 minutes are spent talking golf, and by the end, they're friends. And so I always say there's a tremendous amount of luck in that story. He did not know when he walked into the office that day he was going to get an avid golfer. But the part that's not luck is that Greg spent his 30-year career always looking to find genuine points of commonality with people and bringing them up. And that's the, you know, the scientist in him was able to say, I know that that really is how we influence people and how we can build our status. And so the golf had nothing to do with whatever money discussion they were going to have, but it built that rapport. And that's the part where we could be more intentional about saying to somebody, like, I see you and we have something in common. And that is an easy tool we can all use, start to build the relationship and build status.



Shankar Vedantam: So your point here, Alison, is that in some ways, maybe if you're a woman, maybe if you're a person of color, maybe if you're an elderly person, you might be seen as different from the get-go. And so the importance of finding similarities in some ways becomes more important, because you actually want to show the other person you have a point of connection. There's an element of this that also sounds really unfair, because you're asking the person who is being unfairly perceived as being different, different because she's a woman, different because you're old, different because of something that's outside of your own power to change. You're asking them to do the heavy lifting and the hard work to establish similarity in some ways to compensate for the stereotypes that might be in the mind of the other person.



Alison Fragale: Yeah, thank you for asking that. It's something I think about in my work a lot, because I do spend a lot of time counseling women and helping them excel, essentially figuring out how to take the rules of an unfair game and succeed anyway. And so I admit there's many things in all of this that are incredibly unfair. But I look at Greg's example, right? Human beings like people who are like them. That's not a standard that only applies to women, people of color, somebody who lacks an ascribed status characteristic. Greg is a white man. He still benefited tremendously in his career from establishing real relationships that started by people saying, we have something really in common. But what he did was he went looking for it. So one of the ways that I feel really good about working with women in particular and counseling them on things they can do is that I would give the exact same advice to everybody, because these are the things we see in psychology are the good things. The humor bragging, as an example, it could be a great tool to overcome a status disadvantage that you don't deserve, but it's just as good if you already were born with a status privilege. So the same science and solutions are universal and they apply to everybody. It's just that people who have been handed disadvantage that they don't deserve could really benefit from them.



Shankar Vedantam: So Alison, in 2021, the former Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams was on CBS Sunday morning, when she was asked the question, do you want to be president? Now, this was a very tricky question for her. She had just lost her bid for governor a couple of years before. So it might have been seen as overly ambitious to answer yes, and her critics might have even said it would be delusional. I want to play you a clip of her response.



Stacey Abrams: Do I hold it as an ambition? Absolutely. And even more importantly, when someone asks me if that's my ambition, I have a responsibility to say yes for every young woman, every person of color, every young person of color who sees me and decides what they're capable of based on what I think I'm capable of.



Shankar Vedantam: So, Alison, you say that this response is a masterclass in how to think about warmth and assertiveness. How so?



Alison Fragale: So she's asked a direct question. And in situations like this, many people might feel like they want to deflect. They don't want to self-promote. They don't want to come across as being overly ambitious or self-aggrandizing. But she essentially has a two-sentence response. It is not long, but the first sentence hits on assertiveness and the second sentence hits on warmth. Is this my ambition to be the President of the United States? Absolutely. Sounds pretty assertive. The second one, I have a responsibility to answer that question because I'm a role model for other people. And in that, she is saying I care about other people. So what I think about this that is brilliant is that she didn't lead with this information. She was asked a question. But when she had an opportunity to put something out into the world that originated with her, she had a two-sentence response that put out, I am assertive and I am warm. People like Stacey, I've become more aware of thinking about at any given moment, there are multiple truths. And what's my goal in this interaction? You may not want to run for the President of the United States. You may never end up on a CBS national show, but you get a million opportunities to be interviewed every single day. Every time someone says, how are you? How's work? What's up? Those are opportunities to tell a story. And I think what's a good example of what she did is someone gave her an opportunity and she didn't waste it.



Shankar Vedantam: Alison Fragale is an organizational psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's the author of Likable Badass, How Women Get the Success They Deserve. Alison, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.



Alison Fragale: It is such a pleasure. So happy to be here.



Shankar Vedantam: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. We end today with a story from our sister podcast, My Unsung Hero. This My Unsung Hero segment is brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. Today's story comes from Molly Baker. In March of 2018, Molly lost her husband Marlin in a skiing accident. In the first few weeks after his death, her community provided a lot of support. But after a while, the cards and meals started to slow down.



Molly Baker: People have, you know, families come into town and families left. People have to get back to their jobs. People have to get back to their normal life. And so things kind of drop off. I had a dear friend of mine, Carla Vale, who came up with this idea that maybe she could set up a calendar of sorts that would assign people a particular day. And what that looked like for them was that on that day, they would reach out to me in some tangible way, maybe via text, maybe a phone call, maybe a card. They would drop off a card. Maybe they would drop some chocolates or something off of my door. It didn't have to be anything big. And then also for me, I could look at the calendar. I was given the names. And so I could look at the calendar and be like, oh, it's the sixth today and so and so is assigned. And I could reach out to them as well if I needed some emotional support or just needed something like maybe I needed them to run an errand for me or, you know, if that was possible. So it worked both ways. A lot of people are really, really uncomfortable around grief and loss. And so what they do is instead of doing something, they just do nothing and they don't say anything. And that's the worst. I mean, I remember going to the grocery store and I would see someone in the distance that they would know me and they would literally turn around and walk the other direction because they were so uncomfortable. They were so uncomfortable with my loss that they didn't know what to say to me. So that's why it was nice to have that calendar set up so that that was tangible, like, oh, you could send a text, you could do this, you could do that. Some ideas of tangible ways was very helpful. I love that Carla did this, and it was a way that she was able to use her unique gifts to help other people love on me. And I will always be grateful, forever grateful for that year in my life.



Shankar Vedantam: Molly Baker lives in Sammamish, Washington. This segment of My Unsung Hero was brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. If you love the ideas that we feature on Hidden Brain, and you'd like to help support our work, please consider signing up for our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. It's where you'll find conversations you won't hear anywhere else, like our segment, Your Questions Answered. And your membership in Hidden Brain Plus helps to fund the many hours of research, writing, and production that we put into every episode of the show. You can sign up for Hidden Brain Plus by going to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you have Apple devices or listen on Apple podcasts, you can also find Hidden Brain by going to apple.co. slash hiddenbrain. We truly appreciate your support. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.