Deborah Gruenfeld on Acting with Power at Stanford (Full Transcript)

Full text of Deborah Gruenfeld on Acting with Power at Stanford conference.

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TRANSCRIPT: 

Thank you. Thanks Leticia, it’s really nice to be here.

I’d like to start with an observation, which is that most people when preparing for a situation in which you want to have power will start by thinking a lot about what we’re going to say, and we don’t think twice about this it seems reasonable. We assume going into situations like this that it’s better to be right than wrong. We assume that it’s better to be smart, sound smart than not. We assume it’s better to come off competent and critical rather than incompetent and easily misled. And we assume that it’s better to tell people things they didn’t already know than just a repeat back to others what they’ve already said.

I’m not going to tell you that these beliefs are wrong exactly, but what I want to tell you is that they’re not nearly as important as we think they are when it comes to trying to have impact.

What’s really important for you to understand is that people are forming impressions of you and making judgments all the time, in the blink of an eye with their attention on very fleeting aspects of behavior. I want to tell you about just a few findings from my field, which is social psychology, I think lend support to this idea that people may not be listening as carefully to you as you might think.

One of the things that I think you should know is that whether you’re perceived as competent in groups actually has very little to do with the quality of the arguments that you make, but it’s very tightly connected to the quantity arguments that you make. It turns out this has been shown in many studies now the more a person contributes in a conversation, the more status they acquire. And again I’m not going to say this is entirely independent of argument quality, but it’s less tightly connected than we would like to think it is.

You should know also that when we look at personality traits and try to predict status or ascendence to leadership positions in groups, we found another interesting set of patterns. The qualities in people that predict status are not tightly connected at all to how much people know and how good we are articulating what we know. The single strongest predictor of status on a personality level is extroversion. Extroversion is simply the extent to which you’re outgoing and talkative. This is highly predictive of status in both men and women.

I should tell you about a couple of other data points in this chart that you may find interesting.

Neuroticism has an interesting relationship to status. So you can see is a correlational data. Neuroticism is bad for status in men, the good news ladies is it doesn’t matter for us at all. And finally, I just want to point out that, you know, consistent with this idea that your ability to make sound arguments is not the most important predictor of your status. Physical attractiveness is highly predictive of status in almost every situation and here again it looks like this is only true for men, but in fact that’s not true. Physical attractiveness is predictor of status in women as well, but it’s not a linear relationship. So what you’ll see with women is that physical attractiveness helps with status up to a point and then once you’ve passed that threshold, it kind of starts to work against you, which is why you don’t see statistical relationship here.