Awkward

by Ty Tashiro

  Maybe there are some circumstances when it’s helpful not to absorb all of the emotions in a room, when being relatively immune to emotions like panic or demoralization that quickly spread through groups could be good for the group. It’s not to say that only awkward people take on high-risk projects or that they don’t experience negative emotions in the face of major failures, but their unusual emotional wiring might insulate them from becoming panicked after the failure of a major product launch or relatively indifferent after a nasty review in the newspaper.

  Conversely, some awkward people get upset when seemingly trivial details are out of place. In some circumstances, awkward individuals’ agitation with details not being exactly as they wish can be misguided or unnecessarily stubborn. But in some very high-profile success stories, whether of CEOs of successful tech companies, chefs of Michelin-starred restaurants, or scientists who make important breakthroughs, one of the common themes is that they insisted on a passionate attention to details and remained unusually calm when it seemed as though their ship would go under.

  5

  UNLOCKING THE MINDS OF LIKABLE PEOPLE

  Carson sat alone, atop a weathered oak stool, in the middle of a theater in the round and watched as some of the top physicists in the world encircled him. In a few minutes, Carson would present his latest research at the applied mathematics symposium, an honor usually reserved for well-known senior faculty, but Carson was already making a splash in the world of physics as a twenty-five-year-old doctoral student. He had recently published a paper in a leading scientific journal that had generated a great deal of commotion and researchers around the world were eager to learn more about his work. As the auditorium began to reach capacity, Carson felt the gravity of the situation begin to weigh on his slight shoulders.

  Carson had unruly blond curls and big blue eyes that were always darting around the room. He dressed in a semiformal manner, but his oxford shirts and slacks were always a tad too long. He looked like an adolescent who was perpetually on the verge of trouble. Although he had a boyish appearance, his scientific mind was mature beyond his years. Carson was an abrasive brand of awkward. His incisive observations and lack of mental filter made him too unruly for most people’s tastes.

  I knew Carson better than most people. We met during a music appreciation course as undergraduates in which he frequently offered mathematical observations about the music. His comments were accurate and insightful, but in a group of people who were looking for an easy elective, his remarks usually incited eye rolls from other students. I thought that Carson meant well, but he had a hard time showing it to other people. Most people saw him as disrespectful or even malicious and I can see how they reached those judgments. Carson had a sense that others perceived him as overly blunt, yet he felt as if he did not have time to beat around the bush with diplomacy or sugarcoating the facts. Carson was task-oriented rather than people-oriented, but this way of approaching the world had made him a lonely person for twenty-five years.

  After Carson received a glowing introduction from the chairperson of the physics department, he stepped to the podium and pressed the space bar on his computer to begin his presentation. He looked over his shoulder to be certain it was projected on the floor-to-ceiling screen behind him and saw the red letters, in all caps, of the title he had chosen to make a preemptive strike on the presumptive haters in the room:

  EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT GRAVITY IS WRONG!

  When he turned back around, Carson noticed for the first time that there was an unusually large turnout for his talk and knew that this would not be an easy crowd to win over. While most people would have felt their anxiety skyrocket with this realization, Carson felt his nervous energy channel into a hardened resolve to shoot past the expectations of his audience. It’s an uncommon killer instinct, but this instinct is common among people like Carson, who are bursting with a rare mixture of exceptional talent and sharply focused ambition. Such people are captivating to others because they give off the feeling of a nuclear potential, that any day that potential will explode and launch them toward greatness. For Carson, this would not be that day.

  The presentation we speak of took place in 2002, a time in computing history when antivirus software was porous. It was commonplace for viruses to take over people’s operating systems and Trojan horse viruses were particularly menacing. They patiently waited inside computers for days before unleashing destruction or unwanted pop-up windows on a computer. I guess Carson contracted a Trojan horse virus.

  As he advanced to the hypotheses slide of his presentation, the Trojan horse deployed its first attack, an autonomous launch of an Internet Explorer pop-up window. The window displayed a photo of a naked woman, her nurse uniform casually thrown onto a surprised patient’s head, with a caption that advertised: Naughty Nurses! A few seconds later another pop-up appeared: Exotic Asians!! Then a third: Ménages à Trois!!! A fourth, a fifth . . .

  Carson was not known for his ability to pick up on social cues, but even he noticed that there was a collective shift in his audience’s nonverbal cues. The idea that emotional expressions are universal was on full display as everyone from punk rocker undergraduates to stodgy senior professors sat with their mouths agape, eyes wide, and a crinkle in the middle of their brows. As the pop-up windows continued to proliferate, some of the audience members began to slump in their chairs while others shot into hyper-straightened postures. Carson looked over his shoulder just as the seventh pop-up appeared: Horny Coeds!!!

  Carson stood motionless for a few seconds, immobilized by his flood of emotions. Then he lurched toward the mouse pad and began a frenzied effort to close the windows, but it was too little, too late. He looked like someone trying to behead a Hydra, with each pop-up window closed sprouting two or three more. As this panoply of pornographic windows proliferated like fireworks, Carson’s desperation shifted to resignation. Then, the projection screen suddenly went dark.

  Carson looked to the left of the podium. His advisor, a stately professor emeritus in the department of physics, held the cable that had connected Carson’s laptop to the projector. Everyone knew that Carson’s advisor did not gladly suffer foolish behavior. The advisor’s glare demanded that Carson look him straight in the eye. While Carson’s advisor stared him down, everyone else tried to avoid looking at Carson, or anyone else in the audience, which is awkward when you are seated in a theater in the round.

  The professor asked only one question, “Do you not get it?” This was the most helpful question anyone had ever asked Carson and one that would guide him toward a more likable manner of interacting with the world around him.

  Theory of an Awkward Mind

  ONE OF THE best feelings is to find someone who just gets you. People who get you not only understand your quirks, they are oddly endeared by them. It’s the rare breed of individual who bursts into uncontrollable laughter when no one finds your inappropriate jokes funny or who sends your cat a birthday card because they know you love your cat just a little too much. When someone gets you, she sees the world through your eyes, she experiences your joys and sorrows as her own, and sometimes she knows what you are thinking before you do. People who get us are also the people we find most likable because who’s better than someone who fully understands your good, bad, and weird qualities, but decides to love you anyway? Conversely, we can be hurt or offended when people misread what is on our minds. Teenagers and their parents are the classic case of two groups of people with a high probability of misunderstanding each other and at some point most parents will hear their teen exclaim, “You just don’t get it!”

  When people get you, psychologists would say that they have formed an accurate theory of mind. The term refers to developing an organized framework (theory) about how other people think and feel (mind). As people get to know each other better, their theories about that person usually become more intricate and accurate, which allows them to predict what the other person might be thinking or how they might
feel in various situations. Theory of mind is similar to character development in books or movies. Readers make inferences about characters’ characteristics and beliefs by picking up on telling details about those characters, such as their style of dress, habits, or responses to pressure. For example, a character with shifty eyes who presents contentious PowerPoint titles written in red font could give readers the sense that this character is edgy or aggressive.

  As stories of our real lives unfold, it’s human nature to form theories about the characters we encounter along the way and try to read their minds to gain a deeper understanding of their personality and values. We are all scientists conducting single-person case studies on each person we encounter. We constantly make observations about other people’s behaviors to formulate theories about whether they are likely to act as a friend or adversary.

  Socially fluent people form theory of mind so quickly that they are often unaware of how they reach their conclusions. It’s remarkable that they are capable of triaging dozens of social cues in a split second, then quickly assemble those cues into patterns that allow them to intuit whether someone is happy, angry, or impatient. Yet many times a day, socially fluent people formulate theories of mind and adjust their style of interaction to match the mood. Within seconds of the Monday-morning meeting at work, they can judge whether their boss is feeling agitated or laid-back and use that judgment to inform whether this is the day to ask for the extra vacation days.

  Carson’s book smarts allowed him to quickly pick out relevant data and organize those observations with existing physics theories or algorithms. He did these complex computations without pen and paper or a calculator; they somehow came naturally to him. But Carson had trouble picking out the right social cues and organizing that data to figure out what was going on in other people’s minds. He is not alone because numerous studies have demonstrated that awkward people have trouble forming theory of mind. Colin Palmer at the University of New South Wales and colleagues investigated how awkwardness was related to theory of mind in a sample of more than two thousand adults from the general population. Palmer found that people who were more socially awkward were much more likely to have trouble forming theory of mind about other people’s intentions, thoughts, and feelings.

  Given what we know about awkward individuals’ processing of social cues, it’s not surprising that they have difficulty with theory of mind, but this difficulty can leave them feeling as if they have lost the plot in social life. When people have difficulty with theory of mind, it’s hard for them to create continuity across repeated interactions with the same person. When people are slow to form an organized understanding of how someone else’s social mind works, they feel as if each social interaction is unfamiliar even though they have interacted with that person many times before.

  Socially fluent individuals instantly recognize what is on other people’s minds by seeing recognizable patterns from the social cues available. Consider the following thought experiment from eighth-grade algebra. The layout of the problem on the next page implies you should solve for x on the left side by adding the neatly organized numbers on the right side:

  (x = 3 + 2 + 1)

  (x = 6)

  The problem becomes unsolvable when a variable becomes unknown on the right side of the equation: (x = 3 + 2 + c). Likewise, awkward people have social difficulty because of those variables that are unknown in social situations. They are likely to be missing some key social cues because they have trouble remembering to look at people’s faces for those cues or do not naturally hear cues from people’s intonation as they try to solve the mystery of what other people are thinking or feeling. But if someone provides the value for x, then it’s possible to solve the problem by working backward: (6 = 3 + 2 + c).

  It’s not as easy to see how everything fits together in the second problem because with the missing value for c, it’s not as neatly organized as the first problem. But with some mental maneuvering the problem is solvable if people can find out the answer to x. In the same way, awkward people take longer to add up social cues while they try to solve what is on other people’s minds because they may have missed a key social cue, and social information does not appear neatly organized in their minds. Fortunately, researchers have figured out the x-factors that govern most social interactions, which creates an opportunity for awkward people to reach the same conclusions as non-awkward people, but the order of operations to reach a solution looks a little different.

  A Theory of Being Likable

  IF YOU HAD a superpower that gave you mind-reading abilities, what would you discover on the minds of the most likable people? The first task would be discerning the right targets because there is a difference between people who are likable versus people who are popular. Developmental psychologists define likability by how much others perceive someone to be a cooperative and pleasant person. They define popularity by how much others perceive someone to be influential or powerful. When researchers analyze social perceptions among middle school and high school students, they find that likability and popularity are only weakly related to each other.

  Both popular and likable people tend to be socially fluent, but people motivated by popularity use their mind-reading skills to boost their social status or protect their position in the social hierarchy. Conversely, likable people are more likely to use their mind-reading skills to ensure that they act in fair and collaborative ways. Put differently, people driven by popularity approach situations thinking, “What’s in it for me?” whereas likable people are thinking, “What can I do to contribute?”

  People who are motivated by popularity tend to focus on short-term social gains, but these grabs for power come at the cost of burning social capital. They are more likely to use tactics that erode social capital such as manipulation, gossip, and degrading others for personal gain. Although likable people may not always win the contest for having the most Instagram followers or win the nomination for homecoming king or queen, they are more likely to be happy, have higher self-esteem, and find more reliable friendships. Likability is like trying to achieve financial security through investing in a blue-chip stock portfolio whereas popularity is like trying to achieve financial security by investing in trendy, high-risk companies without a sustainable business plan.

  If people who are likable are more likely to find sustained belonging, then it’s worthwhile to take a look at what runs through their minds. Thomas Berndt at Purdue University has spent his career researching how people form and maintain friendships. In his reviews of research on friendship, he reports that likable people hold distinctive views of friendship that influence their social perception and behaviors. If you search #friendship on Facebook or Instagram, it’s easy to find hundreds of memes with heartwarming hypotheses about what makes someone a good friend, but the empirical answer turns out to be pleasantly straightforward. Likable people are driven by three core values: be fair, be kind, and be loyal.

  Fairness is one of the first social expectations children develop. Whether it’s taking turns during a game or sharing toys of similar desirability, fairness is about the perception that things are equal. When a peer takes two turns in a row or hoards too many of the best toys, kids respond with tears or tantrums because they are upset that their expectation of equity has been violated. In adulthood, fairness is still expected about concrete things like taking turns doing the dishes or sharing the remote control for the television. In adulthood, fairness can be more complex because the things being exchanged can be abstract concepts such as empathizing with people who have shown you empathy or forgiving someone who previously forgave you. Adults grow tired of friends, coworkers, or romantic partners when they feel like their empathy or thoughtful gestures are unreciprocated.

  Children eventually understand that relationships can be viewed as more than a one-for-one exchange. They begin to see the limitations inherent in the mind-set “I’ll scratch your back, but I’ll only scratch your back again if you scratch mine
in return.” Children begin to proactively offer more than what is fair by saying things like, “You can go first,” or “You can play with the best toy.” They learn that these small sacrifices have a way of moving relationships forward and subtly send a message that they are invested in the well-being of others in the social group. Kind children and adults give freely early in relationships because they start with the assumption that most people can be trusted to be fair. Kind people hold a karmic belief that when everyone proactively looks for opportunities to contribute, there are more benefits for everyone in the group.

  When we appreciate people who exceed our expectations of fairness we feel grateful. The function of gratitude is to direct our attention to people who exceed expectations, and this emotion motivates us to reciprocate the kind act. Sara Algoe is a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has found that people who experience gratitude tend to overshoot when they give back. People probably give more to make sure that they restore a sense of fairness, but giving more than expected is an act of kindness as well. Gratitude creates an upward spiral of helping behaviors because people feel grateful when we reciprocate kind behaviors, which motivates them to be kind in return.

  Kindness begets the third characteristic of likable people: loyalty. Friendships exist in an open social market. People are free to enter and leave relationships at their convenience, but a loyal person will stick with you through the times when it would be easier for them to exit the friendship. When our life circumstances take a downturn, whether it’s hitting a low point in your career, getting dumped by a boyfriend, or getting shunned by a group of friends, even the best of us can feel bad about our self-worth. Yet when our views of our self-worth take a dip, some friends refuse to change their valuation of us and some even increase their investment. This seems illogical from a short-term perspective because the amount each person has to offer in the friendship is unequal, but the logic behind being loyal is not always readily apparent.