Should you “fake it ‘til you make it”?

Hello, and welcome to the?Kindred Letters -?my newsletter for 500,000+ introverts and other kindred spirits who prefer quiet to loud, depth to superficiality, sensitivity to cool.?

Today, we’re talking about “faking it ‘til we make it” – and where you fall on the "Self-Monitoring Scale".

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Do you ever feel like a totally different person, depending on whom you’re spending time with?

Or do you feel you have one, unvarying, core self?

Should you “fake it ‘til you make it”?

And, even if you *want* to do this – can you pull it off?

These questions come up a lot for introverts living in extroverted cultures, or really for anyone who ever feels out of step with social norms.

And the way you answer them may have a lot to do with how you score on something called the Self-Monitoring Scale.

Recently, I got together with my friend Rufus Griscom*, and he told me about a fascinating guest on his Next Big Idea podcast – the Stanford business school professor Brian Lowery, who argues that we’re all just a reflection of the people around us.

“You are not autonomous,” explains the podcast show notes. “You are not an island unto yourself. You, my friend, are a social construct. The “self” you haul around — that yammering voice in your head — was entirely shaped by your relationships and social interactions. That may be upsetting for “you” to hear. But our guest today, Brian Lowery, prefers to see it as pleasantly humbling because if you can learn to let go of the idea that you have an essential self, you can embrace a more expansive view of who you are and who you can be.”

As Rufus explains it, Lowery’s point of view is optimistic; he sees this level of interdependence as a net positive.

But I found myself reacting strongly against this idea, thinking: “No, that’s not right at all.” To me, we all have a core self that belongs to?us?- whether we’re living on a desert island or a commune.

Sure, we act and feel differently in different social situations – maybe one person taps into your sense of humor, for example, and another your serious side.

And sure, we sometimes have to do a little faking it ‘til we make it – especially in the service of a goal that’s important to us.

But I’ve always felt that there’s a fundamental essence to who we are, that is deep and unvarying and dare I say sacred.

Even when doing a little strategic “faking it”, my preferred method is to channel an aspirational role model who feels “genuinely like me” in some way. For example, during the years when I was working to overcome my terror of public speaking, I watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity a thousand times, because there was something in her language and preoccupations that felt deeply familiar.

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Anyway, that’s how I happen to see it.

But it turns out that people have VERY different intuitions about these questions.

Some years ago, a research psychologist named Richard Lippa called a group of introverts to his lab and asked them to act like extroverts while pretending to teach a math class. Then he and his team, video cameras in hand, measured the length of their strides, the amount of eye contact they made with their “students,” the percentage of time they spent talking, the pace and volume of their speech, and the total length of each teaching session. They also rated how generally extroverted the subjects appeared, based on their recorded voices and body language.

Then Lippa did the same thing with actual extroverts and compared the results. He found that, although the latter group came across as more extroverted, some of the pseudo-extroverts were surprisingly convincing. It seems that most of us know how to fake it to some extent. Whether or not we’re aware that the length of our strides and the amount of time we spend talking and smiling mark us as introverts and extroverts, we know it unconsciously.

Still, there’s a limit to how much we can control our self-presentation. This is partly because of a phenomenon called behavioral leakage, in which our true selves seep out via unconscious body language: a subtle look away at a moment when an extrovert would have made eye contact, or a skillful turn of the conversation by a lecturer that places the burden of talking on the students when an extroverted speaker would have held the floor a little longer.

So how was it that some of Lippa’s pseudo-extroverts came so close to the scores of true extroverts? It turned out that the introverts who were especially good at acting like extroverts tended to score high for a trait that psychologists call “self-monitoring.”

Self-monitors are highly skilled at modifying their behavior to the social demands of a situation. They look for cues to tell them how to behave, and they act on them. When in Rome, they do as the Romans do, according to the psychologist Mark Snyder, author of Public Appearances, Private Realities, and creator of the Self-Monitoring Scale.

In contrast, low self-monitors base their behavior on their own internal compass. They have a smaller repertoire of social behaviors and masks at their disposal. They’re less sensitive to situational cues, like how many anecdotes you’re expected to share at a dinner party, and less?interested?in role-playing, even when they know what the cues are. It’s as if low self-monitors (LSMs) and high self-monitors (HSMs) play to different audiences, Snyder has said: one inner, the other outer.

If you want to know how strong a self-monitor you are, here are a few questions from Synder’s Self-Monitoring Scale:

• When you’re uncertain how to act in a social situation, do you look to the behavior of others for cues?
• Do you often seek the advice of your friends to choose movies, books, or music?
• In different situations and with different people, do you often act like very different people?
• Do you find it easy to imitate other people?
• Can you look someone in the eye and tell a lie with a straight face if for a right end?
• Do you ever deceive people by being friendly when really you dislike them?
• Do you put on a show to impress or entertain people?
• Do you sometimes appear to others to be experiencing deeper emotions than you actually are?

The more times you answered “yes” to these questions, the more of a HIGH self-monitor you are.

Now ask yourself these questions:

• Is your behavior usually an expression of your true inner feelings, attitudes and beliefs?
• Do you find that you can only argue for ideas which you already believe?
• Would you refuse to change your opinions, or the way you do things, in order to please someone else or win their favor?
• Do you dislike games like charades or improvisational acting?
• Do you have trouble changing your behavior to suit different people and different situations?

The more you tended to answer “yes” to this second set of questions, the more of a LOW self-monitor you are.

People can get very worked up about whether it’s ethical to be a high or low self-monitor. To high self-monitors, low self-monitors can seem rigid and socially awkward. To low self-monitors, high self-monitors can come across as conformist and deceptive -- “more pragmatic than principled,” in Mark Snyder’s words. Indeed, HSMs have been found to be better liars than LSMs, which would seem to support the moralistic stance taken by low self-monitors.

But the personality psychologist Brian Little, an ethical and sympathetic man who happens to be an extremely high self-monitor himself, sees things differently. He views self-monitoring as an act of modesty. It’s about accommodating oneself to situational norms, he says, rather than “grinding down everything to one’s own needs and concerns.”

Not all self-monitoring is based on acting, or on working the room. A more introverted version may be less concerned with spotlight-seeking and more with the avoidance of social faux pas and scanning for appropriate conduct. Professor Little is a gifted public speaker, and he says that this is partly because he’s self-monitoring every moment, continually checking his audience for subtle signs of pleasure or boredom and adjusting his presentation to meet its needs.

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So. If you?can?fake it -- if you master the acting skills and the attention to social nuance that self-monitoring requires – to what extent do you feel you should? Are you a high or low self-monitor? And, to what extent do you feel you have an essential self that inheres -- regardless of your surroundings?

I’d love to know where YOUR intuitions lie.

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And, if you enjoyed this letter, you can sign up here for?my other (free) Kindred Letters newsletter, WHICH HAS DIFFERENT CONTENT from what I post on LinkedIn! For example, recently I wrote about how to protect yourself emotionally from unfair accusations.

See you next week!

my warmest,

Susan

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