When Authority Figures Unwittingly Foster Failure
Let me start with a favorite song. I’m not sure if many millennials or GenZs are familiar with the 1983 movie, Flashdance. The plot revolves around a working class woman, a welder called Alex, who wishes to break into the barricaded world of ballet. Her underdog origins preclude an audition, till her elite boyfriend sets one up. The story is dated and problematic in contemporary times, but if we suspend our “woke” selves for a brief spell, it’s a heartwarming romcom. I’m not dwelling on the movie as much as on its hit song – What a Feeling sung by Irene Cara.
In the video, the nervy Alex faces a group of stiff judges, all of whom look markedly old-fangled. Signifying how forbidding Establishments and Institutions must seem to fearful outsiders, especially to those pulsing with desire to infiltrate such settings, the judges’ expressions are glassy eyed and discouraging. Before Alex has made a single move, they’re expecting her to falter. They signal distraction: doodling on pads, shunning eye contact, rustling pages, smoking cigars. At first, Alex does trip up. Why wouldn’t she? After all, like in most interview panels or college admission committees, the sheer spectacle of power has distortive effects on candidates or wannabes.
Here’s Alex, the unlikely entrant, voicing her feelings:
First, when there’s nothing
But a slow glowing dream
That your fear seems to hide
Deep inside your mind
All alone, I have cried
Silent tears full of pride
In a world made of steel
Made of stone
Then magically, the dance possesses her. Her passion, nursed for years despite the odds, explodes in faultlessly executed flips and breakdance spins gleaned from Pittsburgh streets. The judges, despite their initial recalcitrance, are riveted. Talent shatters prejudices, and hurrah! a worker outclasses the creaky elite. Then again, that’s a movie. Stories can be whimsically wrapped up with red ribbons and fairytale impulses. Protagonists or hypothetical Best Candidates don’t always crumble gates in the more messy settings that constitute Real Life.
Beginning with interviews which, as research indicates, are laden with various types of biases. According to a Forbes article, 85 years of research has thrown up one alarming finding: that unstructured interviews are as good as tossing coins in predicting candidate success. Besides, interviewers are fallible human beings, susceptible to a host of explicit and implicit biases. For instance, confirmation biases reinforce preconceived notions that interviewers hold about a candidate. If they believe that someone is “weak with words”, they might overlook any unexpected dexterity demonstrated during the meeting. Then there are affinity biases, which predispose interviewers to people they “like” – which usually means, persons of a similar gender, class, caste, language, age, region, college or other cultural marker.
Prejudices are not restricted to interviews. Subsequent performance on the job is often determined by manager expectations – with many candidates unable to demonstrate their potential, because their bosses wield low expectations. Such expectations are often communicated by nonverbal means – by gestures and expressions, by exasperated sighs or by tightlipped disapproval. The manner in which all beings including animals are vulnerable to subtle cues was demonstrated by the widely circulated Clever Hans story. In this account, the horse trainer Wilhelm Von Osten claimed that his horse, Clever Hans, could perform remarkable mathematical feats. In other words, Osten was convinced that Clever Hans could add, subtract, multiply, divide et al.
When intrigued researchers visited the horse, they were initially taken aback by the animal’s flair with numbers. After all, the horse, by beating its hoofs on the ground, seemed to correctly answer many arithmetic posers. But closer observations yielded the real workings of the animal’s smarts. The horse was playing close attention to the questioner’s expressions – to very minor non-verbal cues that indicated a certain answer was right. On observing a slight head tilt, Clever Hans tapped out the correct response. When the horse’s eyes were masked, or the interviewer hidden from view, the mathematical wits vanished. The bigger takeaway, however, was the manner in which nonverbal cues affect all of us.
Bosses and parents, who expect poor performance, might unwittingly guide their subordinates or children towards self-fulfilling errors or failure. You can, as the adage goes, lead a horse to the water. If you’re a boss, judge, parent or any other authority figure, your very presence can, without your knowing it, turn the water distasteful. While you certainly can’t make the horse drink, you can cue it to solve clever puzzles or muzzle its strengths altogether.
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