Worrying What others Think of Us

Useful piece, we all practice this. 

Why We Should Stop Worrying About What Others Think of Us
Mar 31, 2020 Research North America  In Knowledge@Wharton

Standing in the spotlight can be daunting. Giving that third-quarter report to shareholders, pitching your idea at a team meeting, even competing in the state fair to win first place with a batch of your best chocolate chip cookies makes most people feel the uncomfortable pressure of being judged. But there’s new scientific evidence to bolster the anecdotal advice that mom always gave you: Just relax and do your best.

A study co-authored by Alice Moon, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, finds that when people perform tasks in front of others, they tend to believe they are being judged harshly on their performance. But in reality, actors are much harder on themselves than the observers who are watching them. People also worry that they will be unfairly judged on the whole based on a single part. For example, a driver who can’t parallel park worries that people watching him from the sidewalk now think he’s lousy at all aspects of driving. But in reality, observers would evaluate his skills behind the wheel based on a number of measures, such as his awareness of blind spots, maintaining a safe distance, his attention to road signs, his use of turn signals, etc.

All that worry and stress can lead to what Moon calls the “overblown implications effect.” When people are so preoccupied with the judgment of others, they tend to believe that that judgment is far worse than it is. Through a series of experiments, Moon and her colleagues found that actors consistently overblow their failures — and even their successes — because they often don’t see things from the broader view of the observer. “Actors see their own performance as having more evaluative impact on observers than it actually does.… Successful parallel parkers will be mistaken in thinking their full driving skills are on display,” the researchers write in their paper titled, “The Overblown Implications Effect.”

Moon wrote the paper with Clayton Critcher, associate professor of marketing at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Muping Gan, a former UC Berkeley graduate researcher who now works for YouTube. Moon recently discussed the implications of their research with Knowledge@Wharton.

Knowledge@Wharton: What piqued your interest in this topic?  ... '