Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [66]
Third, people engage in behavior that helps make their initial impressions of others come true. One study of interviewers of job applicants examined the impressions interviewers formed on the basis of test scores and resumés. Then the actual job interviews were analyzed. When interviewers had formed an initially favorable impression of an applicant, they showed positive regard toward that person, engaged more in “selling” of the company, provided more information about the job and the company, and asked for less information from the candidate. Interviewers built more rapport with candidates they thought they would like.8 Other research shows that when people believe they are interacting with a qualified, intelligent individual, they ask questions and provide opportunities for the other to demonstrate competence and intelligence. Behavioral dynamics tend to reinforce initial impressions and reputations, making those impressions become true even if they weren’t originally.
And yet another process, biased assimilation, involves taking later information and reinterpreting it in ways consistent with our original beliefs and judgments.9 When Charlie Varon, a comedian, playwright, and performance artist, was asked by the California Medical Association in 2001 to give a speech, they expected some comedy over lunch. But Varon, with the cooperation of his hosts, reinvented himself as Albin Avgher, PhD, and gave a talk about his theory of human communication using all sorts of made-up statistics and facts to an audience filled with physicians and attorneys. Until they were let in on the joke, the audience almost to a person believed Varon was who he was introduced as being—an expert on human genomics. The audience interpreted the fact that some of his talk made no sense as coming from their own inadequacies and absence of particular specific knowledge. Had Varon been introduced as the comedic impostor that he was, the talk and his expertise would have been interpreted very differently.10
Many behaviors are ambiguous—is someone eccentric and brilliant or just socially incompetent? How people interpret what they see depends on their expectations that precede their observations. We see what we expect to see, so entering a situation with a reputation for power or brilliance is, other things being equal, more likely to have you leave the setting, regardless of what you do, with your reputation for power or brilliance enhanced. Impressions and reputations endure, so building a favorable impression and reputation early is an important step in creating power.
There are two important implications of the durability and rapid creation of first impressions. First, if you find yourself in a place where you have an image problem and people don’t think well of you, for whatever reason, it is often best to leave for greener pastures. This is tough advice to hear and heed—many people want to demonstrate how wonderful they are by working diligently to change others’ minds and repair their image. But such efforts are seldom successful, for all the reasons just enumerated, and moreover, they take a lot of effort. Better to demonstrate your many positive qualities in a new setting where you don’t have to overcome so much baggage.
Second, because impressions are formed quickly and are based on many things, such as similarity and “chemistry” over which you have far from perfect control, you should try to put yourself in as many different situations as possible—to play the law of large numbers. If you are a talented individual, over time and in many contexts, that talent will appear to those evaluating you. But in any single instance, the evaluative judgment that forms the basis for your reputation will be much more random. This advice is consistent with that offered on network building, where again the best practice is to widely disperse your network building efforts and