


To Halvorson, a social psychologist at Columbia Business School who has extensively researched how people perceive one another, Tim’s story captures one of the primary problems of being a human being: Try though you might to come across in a certain way to others, people often perceive you in an altogether different way.








According to the work of the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, there are two ways that the mind processes information, including information about others: through cognitive processes that Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2. These “systems,” which Kahneman describes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, serve as metaphors for two different kinds of reasoning. System 1 processes information quickly, intuitively, and automatically. System 1 is at work, as Halvorson notes in her book, when individuals engage in effortless thinking, like when they do simple math problems like 3 + 3 = 6, or when they drive on familiar roads as they talk to a friend in the car, or when they see someone smile and immediately know that that person is happy.


For example, referring to research conducted about the primacy effect, Halvorson points out that children who perform better on the first half of a math test and worse on the second half might be judged to be smarter than those who perform less well on the first part of the test, but better on the second part. The two students would have performed objectively the same, but one would benefit from the way the primacy effect biases the mind. “The implications of findings like these for late bloomers,” Halvorson writes, “or anyone who struggles initially only to excel later, are terrifying.”

In comparison to the biased and faulty System 1 style of thinking, System 2 processes information in a conscious, rational, and deliberative manner. System 2 is at work, for example, when an individual does more complicated math problems, like algebra, when he is driving on foreign roads, or when he is trying to figure out what his supervisor meant when she left a cryptic note on his desk saying “call me immediately.” Unlike System 1, where thinking is automatic and effortless, System 2 thinking is effortful.

The important point about System 2 is that it can correct System 1 by evaluating, for instance, whether the first impression recorded by System 1—that Johnny is bad at math—should continue to determine how the perceiver sees Johnny. If there is overriding evidence saying that the first impression needs to be updated—Johnny is scoring consistently well on his other math tests—then the perceiver can engage in System 2 thinking to update his impression of Johnny.  

But System 2 demands a lot of effort and mental energy. According to Halvorson, people have to be really motivated to engage in System 2 thinking. For example, the teacher might only feel the need to reevaluate Johnny’s performance after Johnny or his parents complain that he’s not being graded fairly or if Johnny has suddenly and unexpectedly emerged as the star of the class. Halvorson points out that because most people are cognitive misers, content to trade off speed for accuracy in thinking about others, perception usually ends with System 1.

These two systems of reasoning lead individuals to perceive others in two distinct stages—a fast but flawed stage, and a reflective and deliberative stage. One study by the psychologist Dan Gilbert of Harvard University and his colleagues sheds light on how perception occurs in two phases. Participants came into a lab and watched seven video clips of a woman speaking to a stranger. In five of the clips, the woman appeared to be stressed out and anxious. Though the video was silent, there were subtitles indicating the topics that the woman and the stranger were talking about.

Gilbert and his colleagues wanted to see what the research subjects thought of this woman’s personality. In one condition, participants were told that the woman and stranger were talking about neutral topics for all seven clips, like restaurants and books. In the other condition, participants were told that in the five clips in which the woman appeared anxious, she was talking to the stranger about touchy subjects, like sexual fantasies, personal secrets, and life failures. Gilbert also asked some of the participants to memorize the discussion topics that appeared in the subtitles. The point of that task was to keep those participants mentally busy so that they could not enter the second phase of perception, which corresponds with Kahneman’s System 2.

At the end of the experiment, the participants were asked whether or not this woman was an “anxious person.” When the participants were not distracted by the memorization task, they rated her in an expected way: They thought she was anxious when she was discussing neutral topics and acting stressed out, and they rated her as not anxious when she was discussing stressful topics and acting stressed out. These research subjects were able to enter the second phase of perception by taking the woman’s situation into account. Anyone asked about her sexual fantasies would likely feel uncomfortable. But those who were kept mentally busy came to a very different conclusion about this woman’s personality. Regardless of what situation she was in, they concluded that she was indeed an “anxious person.” For these people, acting anxious equaled being anxious.



Given the many obstacles to accurate perception, what do people have to do to come across they way they intend to?

One study hints at an answer. In the study, published in 1998 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, research subjects came into the lab to conduct a mock negotiation with one other person. Each party chose a specific goal for the negotiation, like “gain the liking of the other person” or “hold firm to my own personal opinions,” which they went into the negotiation trying to achieve, but weren’t necessarily trying to reveal to the other person. After the negotiation, each party was asked what the other person’s goal was, which was an indication of how transparent the other person was. In the study, research subjects only guessed the goal of their partner correctly 26 percent of the time. Meanwhile, more than half of them thought that they were clearly relaying their goals and intentions to the other person. The lesson of this study is that people may think that they are being clear, but they’re not.

