© Flicker/Reinhard
We quickly sense how others view us and play up to these expectations.
A good exercise for learning about yourself is to think about how other people might view you in different ways. Consider how your family, your work colleagues or your partner think of you.
Now here's an interesting question: to what extent do you play up to these expectations about how they view you?
This idea that other people's expectations about us directly affect how we behave was examined in a classic social psychology study carried out by Dr Mark Snyder from the University of Minnesota and colleagues (
Snyder et al., 1977). They had a hunch that people automatically sense how others view them and immediately start exhibiting the expected behaviours.
Feeling the attractionTo test this in the context of interpersonal attraction they had male students hold conversations with female students they'd just met through microphones and headsets. One of the quickest ways that people who've just met stereotype each other is by appearance. People automatically assume others who are more attractive are also more sociable, humorous, intelligent and so on.
So to manipulate this, just before the conversation, along with biographical information about the person they were going to meet, the men were given a photograph. Half were shown a photograph of a woman who had been rated for attractiveness as an 8 out of 10 and half were given a photo of a woman rated as a 2 out of 10.
Then the men talked to the women but without seeing them so they didn't know they weren't actually talking to the woman in the picture. Half expected to be talking to the attractive woman, half to the unattractive woman. The question is, would the women pick up on this fact and unconsciously fit into the stereotype they had been randomly assigned. By doing it this way the experimenters could rule out the influence of individual personalities and focus on the effect of expectations.
When independent observers listened to the tapes of the conversation they found that when women were talking to men who thought they were very attractive, the women exhibited more of the behaviours stereotypically associated with attractive people: they talked more animatedly and seemed to be enjoying the chat more. What was happening was that the women conformed to the stereotype the men projected on them. So people really do sense how they are viewed by others and change their behaviour to match this expectation.
Now this experiment just happened to be carried out by manipulating the stereotype of attractiveness but the same rule applies to many different areas of life. Think of any of the standard stereotypes about class, race and nationality. Each of these create expectations in other people's minds, expectations that are difficult for us to avoid playing up to.
Changing others' behaviourUnderstanding that
other people's expectations about us directly and immediately affect our behaviour is a vital component in understanding how we can come to be quite different people across various social situations.
I leave you with one final thought: in the real world two people are influencing each other continuously, trying to live up (or down) to each other's expectations. Of course
we only have direct control over our own expectations of others, so one implication of this study is that by changing our expectations of others we can actually change their behaviour for worse or, should we choose, for the better.The effect may be subtle, but it's a powerful realisation that other people's behaviour is partly derived from how we view them, just as our behaviour is partly derived from how others view us.
I've been watching this phenomenon for a long time. I sometimes find it nauseating. Especially when I see it in myself. It is especially pronounced in the work environment. You can always tell who's going for the promotion or the raise. Some people seem to lose themselves completely.
It's probably a key component of how people get dissolved into hierarchies, even hierarchies hostile to their own interests. Think police and military training academies. And for that matter, think basic training for any branch of the military. For military and police the process is accelerated, with many of the expectations stated quite openly and plainly. The flinch of obedience is beaten in, so even they have a hard time escaping.
It reminds me of an article I once read. Not sure if it was here or not. The article was about, "talking in tongues." Or being possessed by the Holy Spirit. The article described how new members of a christian congregation were gradually introduced to the concept and practice of, "speaking in tongues." The new comers were encouraged by their new peers, and over time, the, "miracle," happened. They learned how to, "speak in tongues." Of course what really happened was they let the holy spirit in...
Yeah. Right.