Psychologists at Southwestern University sought to determine whether such a thing as male answer syndrome actually exists. Through a series of studies they found three things. One: Men and women alike are indeed aware that when faced with a difficult or ambiguous question some people feel compelled to generate a rational-sounding answer rather than admit that they don’t know. Two: Everyone believes that this tendency is much more common in men. Three: They’re right.4
When you combine the bluster of irrational self-confidence syndrome with the false authority of male answer syndrome, you get yet another more typically male tendency. This one involves a small but vocal minority of uninformed men who nonetheless feel compelled to go out of their way to “enlighten” others, and women especially. And if you’re unaware that it’s happening, it can knock your confidence for a loop.
In a compelling essay in the Los Angeles Times titled “Men Who Explain Things,” award-winning author Rebecca Solnit reflected on the many times men had explained things to her, “whether or not they know what they are talking about.”5 In it she recounts this exchange between herself, her friend Sallie, and their pompous party host:
He … said to me. “So? I hear you’ve written a couple of books.”
I replied, “Several actually.”
He said, in the way you encourage your friend’s seven-year-old to describe flute practice, “And what are they about?”
They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, my book on Eadweard Muybridge, the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”
So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book—with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.…
So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, ‘That’s her book.’ Or tried to interrupt him anyway.
Their host was undaunted, and so it took Sallie three or four more tries before he finally took in what was being said. At which point he was stunned speechless by the fact that she was indeed the author of a very important book that as it turned out he hadn’t even read but had only read about. After a brief moment, Solnit writes, “he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing.”
Of course, men like this explain things to other men too. And there are certainly women who can, in Solnit’s words, “hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories.” But, she says, “the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered.” It’s a lot of other women’s experience too.
Unfortunately, rather than distrust the expounder of misinformation, women often doubt themselves instead. Look at Solnit. She’s an accomplished author of half a dozen well-regarded books. If a woman with this level of success can even for a moment be, in her own words, “willing to believe Mr. Very Important and his overweening confidence over my more shaky certainty,” it’s not hard to imagine the tamping effect the superior tone of presumed greater knowledge can have on someone who perceives herself as having far less under her belt. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this kind of “confrontational confidence,” you know how intimidating it can be, and all the more when the man who is explaining things to you is older, has a bigger title, exercises power over you, or all of the above.
Solnit says it best: “It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”
Certainly the occasional encounter with an egotistical man who explains things is unlikely to affect your confidence in any lasting way. However, if you were raised by, study under, or work for the terminally pompous, your view of “acting as if” may be permanently tainted. You think, If that’s what it means to fake it till you make it, then count me out.
When you do meet an explainer, the first thing you need to do is to see the situation for what it is. First, don’t immediately assume that the person knows what he’s talking about. And definitely don’t question your own knowledge or your better judgment. If your instinct tells you that someone is full of hot air, trust it. This sort of uninformed bluster can be infuriating. If you feel your blood pressure rise, it may help to shift from anger to pity for someone who is so sadly self-important. Most important, remind yourself that what’s happening has everything to do with the explainer’s insecurity or narcissism and nothing to do with you, your intellect, or your abilities.
When an uninformed man is explaining things to you, you have two choices. You can walk away or you can engage him. If you decide to reply with accurate information, recognize that the odds of any sort of admission on his part are next to nil. However, if the situation in any way undercuts you or your work, especially in a public forum, you should push back. You don’t need to be confrontational in order to stand firm in the face of someone else’s confrontational confidence. Instead, calmly but firmly set the record straight and in no uncertain terms.
What about you? Have you ever been on the receiving end of an uninformed man or woman explaining things to you? If so, how did you feel about yourself at the time? To what extent has this experience affected what you think about faking it till you make it? Knowing what you know now about the sometimes false authority of the overly confident, what do you think you might feel, say, and do differently in the future?
The kind of blustery confidence on steroids you’ve just seen is off-putting and potentially dangerous. So it makes sense that you’d have misgivings about anything that seems to suggest you need to become “like them.” Pretending to know more than you really do feels deceptive, phony. It’s the stuff of scoundrel politicians, unscrupulous used-car salesmen, home-repair contractors, and others fairly or unfairly associated with “bullshitting.”
Ted Koppel Changed My Life
He doesn’t know it, but I can honestly say Ted Koppel changed my life. Or at least his words did. The broadcast journalist and longtime host of the award-winning late-night news program Nightline spent the better part of his career interviewing world leaders, scientists, and leading experts from a myriad of fields. In a 1985 special student edition of Newsweek, senior editor and columnist Jonathan Alter turned the tables on Koppel by asking, “Do you ever feel you don’t know enough about a subject to ask the tough questions?”
Koppel’s answer forever changed how I looked at the world. He said: “No. When I can, I’d rather go into a program knowing as much as possible about the subject, but I don’t consider it a handicap [when] I know next to nothing.” Part of the reason is that Koppel saw himself as a conduit for the audience. If he didn’t understand, he figured, his audience probably didn’t either. Even with this explanation, when you’re accustomed to disqualifying yourself from applying for jobs because you lack one or two minor requirements, the idea that someone could be unperturbed at knowing “next to nothing” is both stunning and illuminating.6
But that wasn’t even the part that changed my life. What changed my life was the reason Koppel gave for being so unfazed: “[I figure I can] pick up enough information in a short period of time to be able to bullshit my way with the best of them.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a key difference between most women and most men. When I mad
e this point during a talk at Cornell University, a professor in the audience piped up to concur: “Not only do males consider bullshitting to be a skill, but if you’re really good at it,” he said, “you’re considered a bullshit artist!”
Obviously there are plenty of men (my father among them) who either couldn’t or wouldn’t BS to save their own life. Still, on the whole, males really are more comfortable with this kind of winging it—a difference that goes a long way in explaining why the fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy comes more naturally to men. It also makes you wonder whether everyone is even on the same page about what it means to be an impostor.
After all, one of the statements researchers use to gauge whether a person identifies with the impostor phenomenon is, I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am. A high score on this question would ordinarily indicate the shameful impostor feelings talked about here. But what if by answering this question in the affirmative what the person really means is Sure, I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am, and it’s pretty great that I can pull it off! The reason I ask is because I’ve met more than a few men who see it exactly this way. I’m not referring to the blowhards you met earlier. I’m talking about honorable men who readily and, like Koppel, proudly admit to occasionally faking it but who don’t experience faking as a problem. When viewed in this light, the notion of being an impostor takes on an entirely new meaning.
Neither perspective is right or wrong. That said, you should at least be aware that the distinctively female bias against faking it can hold you back. Because while you’re waiting until you’ve got it all together, dotting every i and crossing every t, getting more and more credentialed, a lot of your male colleagues are taking full advantage of the healthy benefits of the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach.
The Real Poop on Bullshitting
People who do make it up as they go along are often considered “bullshitters.” But what exactly does that mean? Answering that question requires you and I to wade knee-deep into a big old pile of, well, bullshit. I’ve met a lot of women who have a strong aversion to the notion of bullshitting. If you do too, then the first thing I’m going to urge you to do is to frame it in a way you can live with. The reason I want you to replace one word or phrase for another is not to obscure what’s happening, it’s to clarify what’s really going on.
Remember, part of the reason Ted Koppel said he “does not consider it a handicap when [he] knows next to nothing” is because he knows he can “pick up enough information to be able to bullshit his way with the best of them.” I’ve emphasized these last few words so you understand what he’s really saying. The guy is a distinguished broadcast journalist. Was he talking about lying or deceit or manipulation? No.
Okay, then what are some ways of describing what Koppel meant that you would feel more comfortable with? What about winging it … holding your own … rolling with the conversation … being in the moment … trusting your instincts … improvising? What you call it doesn’t matter. What is important is recognizing that there are times in life when you have to be able to fly by the seat of your pants—and that this kind of going with the flow can be very freeing. But unless you’re open to rethinking BSing as it relates to the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach, you may never get to experience that kind of freedom.
To help us understand some of the reasons it’s harder for you and a lot of other women to make it up as you go along, we’re going to turn to someone who has distinguished himself as the leading authority on, what else, bullshit. His name is Harry G. Frankfurt and he’s a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University. A short essay Frankfurt wrote in 1986 called “On Bullshit” went on to become a pint-size book and a surprise bestseller. Frankfurt’s observations about the nature of bullshitting provide a useful jumping-off point for exploring some common female misgivings about faking it in general and BSing in specific.7
Before we begin, I want you to read my lips: You absolutely do not have to become “a bullshit artist” to overcome the impostor syndrome. But you do need to understand any unconscious resistance you have to the advice to “Fake it till you make it.” That way you can decide for yourself whether you see some advantages to acting as if.
“It Feels Too Much Like Lying”
By far the loudest objection I hear from women is that faking it feels dishonest. Obviously, if you think bullshitting is just another word for lying, and authenticity is important to you, then the very idea of faking it is going to be a turn-off. However, Frankfurt invites the reader to consider a line from Eric Ambler’s novel Dirty Story, in which a character recalls a lesson he learned as a boy from his father: “Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.”
In other words, unlike the liar, Frankfurt maintains, the bullshitter “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.… He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Often that purpose is to cover for some sort of error, mishap, or lack of knowledge. Clearly, talking your way out of a serious breach of ethics or the law is objectionable. But some situations really are harmless and the quick thinking it takes to get out of a jam can actually be to humorous effect.
Shortly out of college, Tom worked as a recreational counselor at a YMCA. He was only a few weeks into the job when the director asked him to teach a cross-country ski class. There was just one problem. Tom didn’t know how to cross-country ski. But he did know how to read. So he bought a book on cross-country skiing for beginners and within days was leading his first class. All things considered, Tom did quite well. That is, until they came to the first hill. Tom went first to show how it was done and upon reaching the bottom promptly wiped out. When I asked if he was embarrassed Tom positively beamed. “Not at all! I just leapt up, turned to my students and said, ‘And that’s how you get out of a fall!’ ”
You’d think that after spending decades studying differences in male-female communication, Georgetown professor Deborah Tannen had seen it all. Yet even she was amazed by her attorney’s response to a disconnected conference call caused when he accidently bumped the phone with his elbow. Once the other party was back on the line Tannen just assumed he’d apologize and move on. But that’s not what happened. Instead he said, “Hey, what happened? One minute you were there, the next minute you were gone!”8
As she thought about her attorney’s “knee-jerk impulse not to admit fault if he didn’t have to,” Tannen decided it could be “a very adaptive strategy in many settings.” It’s also an approach women rarely use. As importantly, we tend to judge those who do. In her review of Tannen’s book, Newsweek contributor Laura Shapiro’s response was, “Knee-jerk? or just plain jerk?” before voting for the later. You may agree. As tempting as it may be to lay claim to superior ethics, the research as to whether females are more ethical than males is mixed.
Boys grow up learning how to exaggerate. More happened in the backseat of the car with the girl than really did. The fish was “this big.” Other things are larger than life. When you grow up playing sports, you learn that bluffing and exaggerating are part of the game. You learn to fake a pass, to fool the other team by changing up your play, and to use bravado to psych out your opponent and “get inside his head.”
There are no comparable lessons in traditional girls’ games. No one tries to bluff her way through dolls or fake a move in hopscotch. That’s not to say girls don’t argue over whether a player stepped outside the line or went out of turn. But if there is a disagreement over the rules, girls will stop and renegotiate for the sake of the relationship. To girls, rules are flexible and can be adjusted depending on the players or the situation. But in traditional boys’ games, rules are sacred. Players never change the rules to accommodate a less skilled player, for example.
Cover-ups aside, the reality is that there are times when you need to appear calm and coll
ected even when you’re nervous as heck. To do that really does require that you pass yourself off as something you’re not. In other words, you have to be able to bluff. It may seem like a fine point, but Frankfurt says that bullshitting is actually “closer to bluffing than to telling a lie.” It’s not so much about trying to deceive, he says, as it is an attempt to convey a certain impression of yourself.
You see this kind of impression management all the time in the business world, especially early in one’s career. After all, everyone has to start somewhere, and that includes you. “Even if you haven’t encountered great success yet,” says Donald Trump, “there is no reason you can’t bluff a little and act like you have.” Doing this involves a certain amount of posturing—something that definitely comes more naturally to males. Even in the animal kingdom, survival of the fittest often means that the male of the species has to appear bigger than he really is. “Display behavior,” as it is known, is used to attract females and ward off rival males. Two-legged males also recognize the value of such behavior.
Drawing on his animal instincts, Pierce Brosnan told a reporter, “You’ve got to be a fighting rooster, man. You’ve got to get out there and preen those feathers and look like you know what you’re doing and hope you know what you’re doing and have a good time.”9 That’s not to say Brosnan or anyone who knows how to bluff is insensitive to failure. When he was unexpectedly replaced as the lead in the James Bond movies, he too had to deal with “the punch and the pain of being passed over or rejected.” Nor is he fearless. The idea of singing and dancing in the film Mamma Mia! made him “terrified to my core.”
The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It Page 19
