my pocket. Oh, and every once in a while, you have to punch people. I
did that, too.”
Today
Alex has a folksy, affable, whistle-while-you-work demeanor.
I’ve never seen him in a bad mood. But you’ll see his self-taught bellicose
side if you ever try to cross him in a negotiation. And you’ll see his
introverted self if you ever try to make dinner plans with him.
“I could literally go years without having
any friends except for my
wife and kids,” he says. “Look at you and me. You’re one of my best
friends, and how many times do we actually talk—when you call me! I
don’t like socializing. My dream is to live
off the land on a thousand
acres with my family. You never see a team of friends in that dream. So
notwithstanding whatever you might see in my public persona, I am an
introvert. I think that fundamentally I’m the same person I always was.
Massively shy, but I compensate for it.”
But how many of us are really capable of acting out of character to this
degree (putting aside, for the moment, the question of whether we want
to)? Professor Little happens to be a great performer, and so are many
CEOs. What about the rest of us?
Some years ago, a research psychologist named Richard Lippa set out
to answer this question. He 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 audience when an extroverted speaker would
have held the floor a little longer.
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 act. 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.
One of the most effective self-monitors I’ve ever met is a man named
Edgar, a well-known and much-beloved fixture on the New York social
circuit. He and his wife host or attend fund-raisers
and other social
events seemingly every weeknight. He’s the kind of
enfant terrible
whose
latest antics are a favorite topic of conversation. But Edgar is an avowed
introvert. “I’d much rather sit and read and think about things than talk
to people,” he says.
Yet talk to people he does. Edgar was raised in a highly social family
that expected him to self-monitor, and he’s motivated to do so. “I love
politics,” he says. “I love policy, I love making things happen, I want to
change the world in my own way. So I do stuff that’s artificial. I don’t
really like being the guest at someone else’s party, because then I have
to be entertaining. But I’ll host parties because it puts you at the center
of things without actually being a social person.”
When he does find himself at other people’s parties, Edgar goes to
great lengths to play his role. “All through college, and recently even,
before I ever went to a dinner or cocktail party, I would have an index
card
with three to five relevant, amusing anecdotes. I’d come up with
them during the day—if something struck me I’d jot it down. Then, at
dinner, I’d wait for the right opening and launch in. Sometimes I’d have
to go to the bathroom and pull out my cards to remember what my little
stories were.”
Over time, though, Edgar stopped bringing index cards to dinner
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
