The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias

"This is a book about how good people fight bias. This is in a different domain: it’s not necessarily about impression management, it’s not a book about how to make everyone like you or adore you. The term impression management suggests that we are trying to control what other people think about us. This is part of it, but there is also another element to it: we want to influence the way we think about ourselves. Most of us would like to think that we are good people. We believe we are objective, fair, ethical, nice, thoughtful, and considerate. To preserve this view of ourselves, we might overlook our own shortcomings. Just as it is difficult to admit to our flaws, it’s difficult to admit to our biases. We don’t want to think that our ethics may be flawed. This book reveals the ways in which we are not perfect. We may not be as good as we believe ourselves to be, because we all have these implicit forces at work within us. We all are biased in certain ways. Chugh suggests that we aim for being a good-ish person in our interactions. It may be more effective to hold a realistic view of our shortcomings and strive to be good-ish than it is to cling to the delusion that we are perfect individuals who never do anything wrong. The book addresses how our internal impression management works to prevent us from admitting our biases or from initiating real change. It challenges us to re-examine our values and to recognize where there is room for improvement, so we might better understand how we can cultivate equality and diversity in our society. Yes, ultimately there are two aspects to impression management. One aspect relates to our need to ensure that other people like and respect us. The other aspect is intrapsychic. It concerns the way our behavior makes us feel about ourselves. Goffman talks about this a little bit in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . Let’s say you are ravenous and you are eating a juicy burger. If you were eating in the company of another person, you would observe the proper dining etiquette because you’re trying to manage that person’s impression of you. If you were eating alone, you would behave a little more freely, but you wouldn’t be completely uninhibited in your behavior. You would maintain a certain level of conduct, in order to preserve the view you have of yourself. In my dissertation, I examined the concept of humblebragging. This is a fun thing to talk about, because we see it so often. A person might say, Why do people hit on me even when I’m in my sweatpants? This is an attempt to seem both competent and likable. It fails because the speaker is trying to assert both power and humility, which require two opposite strategies. Humblebragging feels better than bragging, because the assumed modesty helps to mitigate the embarrassment factor of bragging. We do this to manage the impression we make on others as well as the impression we have of ourselves. I am currently conducting a research project on the universal phenomenon of the phrase I told you so . Every language has an expression of this sentiment. In our study, we ask people to reflect upon why they say it. No one says it because they want to make a good impression; they say it because it feels so good to be right. There is tremendous power in being right. As much as we dislike being wrong, we love to be right. It’s even more enjoyable when we are right and someone else is wrong. These are a few examples of how impression management serves not only interpersonal perception but also intrapsychic feeling. Our decisions about whether or not we will say or do certain things are guided by how they make us feel about ourselves and whether they support the ideas we have about ourselves. We will do, or avoid doing, all sorts of things. Yet these strategies are not always the most productive."