In 2012 Cameron Anderson and three colleagues published six studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They found that “overconfidence leads to higher social status in both short and longer-term groups.”
The mechanism was how others saw the overconfident person. “Overconfidence leads to a behavioral signature that makes the individual appear competent to others.”
In 2010 Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap reported in Psychological Science that holding an expansive “power pose” raised testosterone and lowered cortisol. The study had 42 participants. In June 2012 Cuddy presented the idea in a TED talk. By 2017 about 47 million viewers had seen it.
In 2015 a larger replication found that people felt more powerful after posing, but it found no physiological or behavioral effects. In 2016 Carney wrote: “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real.”
“I see a therapist and this is usually the time I go each week.” This was one of the disclosures used in a study by Kerry Roberts Gibson, Dana Harari and Jennifer Carson Marr. They published it in 2018 in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Across three lab experiments with 762 participants, higher-status people who disclosed a weakness suffered what the researchers called a “status penalty.”
Peers who disclosed the same kind of weakness did not pay this price. The University of Maryland’s business school summarized the research under the headline “Avoid Oversharing at Work.”
In 2021 Brené Brown spoke about vulnerability at work on Adam Grant’s TED podcast WorkLife. “Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability,” she said. She tells people to ask themselves a question: “Are you sharing your emotions and your experiences to move your work, connection or relationship forward?” Working through private problems with a colleague is something else. “Work is not a place to do that.”
Some of the most vulnerable and authentic leaders she has worked with, she said, “personally disclose very little.” For hard times she suggested a short script: “I’m really struggling right now. I’ve got some stuff going on and it’s hard, and I wanted y’all to know.” In the script, support means “being able to bring it up with you when it’s helpful for me but not having to field a lot of questions about it.”
In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino and Michael Norton studied humblebragging, a boast disguised as a complaint or as modesty. They found it “less effective than straightforward bragging.” It backfires because it is “seen as insincere.”
Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, by Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith. Its Twelve Steps were first published in 1939. Step One reads: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”
More than 200 self-help organizations now use the twelve-step model. Many keep the sentence and change one word. Narcotics Anonymous is powerless over “our addiction,” Overeaters Anonymous over “food,” Gamblers Anonymous over “gambling” and Debtors Anonymous over “debt.”
In 1954 Paul Meehl, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, published Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction. He compared the judgment of experienced clinicians with predictions made by simple formulas. His analysis favored the formulas and “caused a considerable stir amongst clinicians.” Meehl described the clinicians’ preference as “using our heads instead of the formula.”
Meehl later reported that “half the clinical faculty at one large Freudian oriented midwest university were plunged into a 6-month reactive depression.” Later meta-analyses supported his claim. On average, mechanical prediction was about 10 percent more accurate.
In 1974 Phillip Kunz, a sociologist at Brigham Young University, picked 600 names at random from the phone book. He mailed the strangers Christmas cards. Many wrote back. Some replies were “three, four pages long.” Some people kept sending him cards for 15 years.
Reports of how many replied differ. A newspaper account says more than 200 of the 600. Time gives about 20 percent for studies published in 1976 and 2000.
In a study reported in 2015, the social psychologist Brian Meier repeated the test. He mailed hand-signed cards to 755 randomly chosen people. Only 2 percent replied. Meier called the result “unexpectedly low.”
In 1736 Benjamin Franklin was chosen clerk of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The next year, when he stood again, a new member made a long speech against him, to favor another candidate. Franklin did not try to win the man over with flattery. He heard that the man owned “a certain very scarce & curious Book.” He wrote him a note and asked to borrow it.
The man sent the book at once. Franklin returned it about a week later with a note of thanks. The man then spoke to him for the first time. They stayed friends until the man died. In his Autobiography, Franklin explains it with a maxim: “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago and Juliana Schroeder asked commuter train and bus riders to do one of three things. Some were to talk to a stranger. Some were to sit alone. The rest were to do what they normally did. The riders who talked to a stranger “reported having the most positive experience.”
When asked to predict, people “predicted precisely the opposite pattern of experiences.” They “underestimated others’ interest in connecting.” The university announced the study in July 2014 under the headline “Mom was wrong: You should talk to strangers.”