Recently I was reading research about grammar police, the people who notice every misspelling and usage error in your writing and assume that you are ignorant based on these errors. Evidently they are disagreeable–certifiably disagreeable.
One of the factors in the Five Factor Personality Analysis (often called the Big Five) is Agreeableness. Research has shown that subjects reading e-mails, both with and without spelling and grammar errors, downgraded their estimation of the person the most when they found errors if they also showed a low score on Agreeableness. No big deal, you probably expected that to be true.
One of the other factors of the Big Five is Extroversion. Introverts who indicated that good grammar was important to them, were more sensitive to these errors and downgraded the likability of the author of the e-mail much more severely than did introverts who didn’t care about grammar. Overall introverts where not as generous with their estimation of this unknown person as the extroverts. However, there was a definite correlation between how much (or how little) they cared about grammar and how much they expected to like the e-mail correspondent.
Results for extroverts were a little perplexing. “Surprisingly, extroverts who reported grammar as more important were less sensitive to typos than extroverts who felt good grammar was less important.”[1] Some extroverts said grammar was more important, but behaved as if it was not. Why were they not noticing the typos? Did they over-estimate their ability at spelling and grammar? Or was this lack of self-awareness intentional?
This research may have provided a serendipitous insight into self-awareness and why it is rising on the list of desired traits of business leaders. Past researchers have found that the managers and executives are predominantly extroverts. Self-aware people are introspective and think about their own values and motives compared to their actions. But as hard as they try, they soon realize that they are not capable of behaving consistently according to their own values. There are different ways to respond to this realization: change values to match actions, give up being self-aware because “Nobody is perfect,” or intently focus on every error and spiral into depression.
Extroverts tend to avoid this last option. Evidently, simply avoiding reflecting on the effects of their actions is their preferred way of dealing with internal conflict. However, this lower self-awareness has some negative side effects when leaders fail to accurately estimate their own skill or understand their own motivation. We have yet to see whether self-awareness can be taught, or if it is as difficult as teaching extroverted people not to behave like extroverts.
[1] Boland JE, Queen R (2016) If You’re House Is Still Available, Send Me an Email: Personality Influences Reactions to Written Errors in Email Messages. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0149885. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0149885
According to the original meaning of self-awareness over 99.9 % of humanity qualify for this trait because people are aware of their existence. So, this is not enough to be considered special. However, self-awareness has a new meaning along with a new claim that it distinguishes leaders from others, according to Daniel Goleman.
Whenever I see “problem solving” listed as a component of emotional intelligence, I tend to regard the rest of what the author says on that subject with skepticism. Typically problem solving is a combination of creativity and logic to generate an innovative idea and put it to practical use. Creativity hardly seems related to emotional intelligence, judging by the character of creative people. In fact researchers have found that one recurring trait of this creative group is a lack of regard for social skills. They tend to be less considerate, more likely to find fault, less agreeable and more rebellious than the average person.
Imagine that you are sitting down to holiday dinner at which a number of friends and family have gathered. The host, Micaela is young, a bit nervous, rushing about trying to please the guests. Timidly she offers a plate of brown patties, with a fine grain in plate of broth. When asked “What is it?” she responds smiling, “Pate foie gras… goose liver paste.” Sandy, sitting across the table momentarily curls up the side of her mouth in an sign of contempt.
If you do any research on testing for Emotional Intelligence, you are likely to run into a couple of names repeatedly. One is Howard Gardner who came up with the idea that there are several types or modalities of intelligence.
Search on Google for information on how to be less confident, and over 90% of the hits will actually be explaining ways to increase your confidence. This does have its perks. According to research from Washington University overconfident managers are more likely to get promoted. Then, they are also more like to make investment decisions that hurt their companies.
Have you been a the position in which someone purported to be knowledgeable, or even an expert in an area gave you instructions that were impossible to follow once you got into the details… huge chunks of the process were missing or full of jargon with no real information. However, this person didn’t do it just once or twice, but so frequently you began to wonder if they plotted to destroy your reputation at work, or were just plain stupid. According to recent research on overconfidence there is a good chance that probably did not have as much knowledge in the field as you, but didn’t know it.
Did you ever wonder how researchers determine levels of confidence? Typically this research is perform using a population of college students volunteer to take part in psychological tests (sometimes a requirement for a psychology course). To measure confidence, students take a general knowledge test and estimate how well they did. Most of the students are not very accurate at guessing their performance on the tests. Typically 40-50% typically are over confident, and 30 to 40 % are under confident, and the small remaining percentage accurately estimate how well they have answered the questions.
Many researchers have duplicated the finding that women are more likely to show less confidence than men. Women are told if they want to make their mark in any field they need to believe in themselves and show confidence like men do.
Write about what? 