The Psyche hough snap judg- on was riding in a car whose driver ements get no respect, fell asleep at 4:00 a.m. while doing they are not so much a 90 miles per hour in Wyoming; the bad habit as a fact of life. accident landed Cuddy in the hos- Our first impressions pital with severe head trauma and register far too quickly Automatic “diffuse axonal injury,” she says. for any nuanced weigh- “It’s hard to predict the outcome ing of data: “Within less than a sec- u u u u u after that type of injury, and there’s Tond, using facial features, people not much they can do for you.” make what are called ‘spontaneous Cuddy had to take years off trait inferences,’” says Amy Cuddy. Amy Cuddy probes from school and “relearn how to Social psychologist Cuddy, an learn,” she explains. “I knew I was assistant professor of business ad- snap judgments, gifted—I knew my IQ, and didn’t ministration, investigates how think it could change. But it went people perceive and categorize oth- down by two standard deviations ers. Warmth and competence, she warm feelings, after the injury. I worked hard to finds, are the two critical variables. recover those abilities and stud- They account for about 80 percent and how to become ied circles around everyone. I lis- of our overall evaluations of people tened to Mozart—I was willing (i.e., Do you feel good or bad about to try anything!” Two years later this person?), and shape our emo- an “alpha dog.” her IQ was back. And she could tions and behaviors toward them. dance again. Her warmth/competence analysis She returned to college as a illuminates why we hire Kurt in- u u u u u 22-year-old junior whose experi- stead of Kyra, how students choose ence with brain trauma had gal- study partners, who gets targeted by CRAIG LAMBERT vanized an interest in psychol- for sexual harassment, and how the ogy. A job in a neuropsychology lab “motherhood penalty” and “father- proved dull, but she found her pas- hood bonus” exert their biases in the workplace. It even suggests sion in social psychology. Cuddy graduated from Boulder in 1998, why we admire, envy, or disparage certain social groups, elect pol- then began a job as a research assistant to Susan Fiske at the Uni- iticians, or target minorities for genocide. versity of Massachusetts at Amherst. Fiske became her mentor Cuddy also studies nonverbal behavior like the postures of for the next seven years; in 2000 they both moved to Princeton, dominance and power. Intriguingly, her latest research connects where Cuddy earned her doctorate in social psychology in 2005; such poses to the endocrine system, showing the links between her dissertation investigated aspects of warmth and competence stances, gestures, and hormones. This work may help clarify perception. (Fiske remains on the Princeton faculty, and the two how men and women rise to the top—or fall by the wayside—in women still collaborate on research.) school and at work. And it relates to some surprising findings Cuddy taught at Rutgers, then was recruited to join the faculty about how venture capitalists decide where to make their high- at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. She spent risk investments. two years in Chicago before moving to Boston in 2008 to join the faculty at Harvard Business School, where she teaches courses in Quite literally by accident, Cuddy became a psycholo- negotiation and power and influence. gist. In high school and in college at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she was a serious ballet dancer who worked as a roller- Warmth—does this person feel warm or cold to me?—is the skating waitress at the celebrated L.A. Diner. But one night, she first and most important interpersonal perception. It no doubt 48 November - December 2010 has roots in survival in- In other words, peo- stincts: determining if ple feel that a single another human, or in- positive-competent, or deed any organism, is negative-warmth, act “friend or foe” can mean reveals character. “You life or death. can purposely present Warmth is not only yourself as warm—you perceived first, but ac- can control that,” Cuddy counts for more of some- explains. “But we feel one’s overall evaluation that competence can’t be than competence. The faked. So positive com- warm/cold assessment petence is seen as more amounts to a reading of diagnostic. On the other the other’s intentions, hand, being a jerk— positive or negative. well, we’re not very for- Competence is as- giving of people who act sayed next: how capable that way.” is someone of carrying out This principle has those intentions? “If it’s powerful leverage in an enemy who’s compe- public life, where a single tent,” Cuddy explains, misstep in the warmth- “we probably want to be negative category can vigilant.” Surprisingly, prove fatal. In the 2006 in their self-perceptions, U.S. senatorial campaign individuals value com- in Virginia, for example, petence over warmth. Republican incumbent “We want other people George Allen had a wide to be warm, but we want lead over challenger Jim to be competent,” she Webb, but stumbled at says. “We’d rather have a campaign event in Au- people respect us than gust. Allen singled out a like us.” (Cuddy thinks young man in the crowd, this human tendency S.R. Sidarth, a U.S. citi- represents a mistaken zen of Indian descent, judgment: “Social con- who was filming Al- nections will take you len’s campaign stop as a farther than respect.”) “tracker” for the Webb There’s an interesting campaign: “This fellow asymmetry. Many acts Amy Cuddy, over here with the yel- at Harvard can indicate competence: Business School’s low shirt—Macaca, or scoring well on a College Baker Library whatever his name is….” Board exam (SAT), for “Macaca” was widely tak- example, or knowing how to handle a sailboat, or deftly navigat- en as a derogatory racial epithet. Allen’s lead in voter polls tum- ing through a software application. Demonstrating a single pos- bled, and Webb won the seat. Another example is the sudden itive-competent behavior tends to broaden into a wider aura of destruction of Hollywood actor Mel Gibson’s image wrought competence: someone with a high SAT score, for example, will be by his alcoholic anti-Semitic rant after being stopped for drunk viewed as generally competent. In contrast, a single negative-com- driving in 2006. petent behavior—not knowing how to sail, for example—does The human tendency to generalize from single perceptions not generalize into a perception of overall incompetence: it will produces the familiar “halo effect,” the cognitive tendency to see simply be dismissed as, say, an unlearned skill. “Positive compe- people in either all-positive or all-negative ways that psycholo- tence is weighted more heavily than negative competence,” Cud- gists have documented since at least 1920. Certain central traits, dy summarizes. like attractiveness, tend to affect perceptions of unrelated di- With warmth, the inverse applies. Someone who does some- mensions and induce a generally positive take on someone. (“At- thing nice, like helping an elderly pedestrian across an inter- tractive people are generally seen as better at everything,” says section, is not necessarily seen as a generally nice person. But a Cuddy.) But the halo effect “assumes that you’re not comparing single instance of negative-warmth behavior—kicking a dog, the person to anyone else,” she adds. “And that’s almost never say—is likely to irredeemably categorize the perpetrator as a true. Unless you’re a hermit, social comparison is operating all cold person. the time.” Photograph by Fred Field Harvard Magazine 49 Very often, what’s really being com- tence map, and that quadrant will predict pared are not individuals, but stereotypes. The The more how it is treated. halo effect hints at the power of mindsets, The most advantaged category, of course, which are strong enough to override direct competent you are, is warm/competent; that perception evokes perceptions. And in rating warmth and admiration and two kinds of behavior: active competence, we inevitably take cues from the less nice you must facilitation (helping) and passive facilita- stereotypes linked to race, gender, age, and tion (cooperating). At the other extreme, nationality—assuming, for example, that be. And vice versa: the cold/incompetent group elicits contempt Italians will be emotionally warmer than and two markedly different behaviors: pas- Scandinavians. Someone who sive harm (neglect, ignoring) and active Some stereotypes lean on each other. harm (harassment, violence). In both cases, “Let’s say you’re down to the final two in comes across as really the emotions and behaviors are unambigu- a hiring situation,” Cuddy says. “This is ous, predictable, and directly linked to the where ‘compensatory stereotyping’ kicks warmth/competence perception. in. The search committee is likely to see nice must not In contrast, groups seen as cold/com- one candidate as competent but not so petent evoke envy, and “envy is an ambiva- nice, and the other as nice, but not as com- be too smart. lent emotion—it involves both respect and petent.” In other words, the lens of social u u u u u resentment,” Cuddy explains. Envy also comparison distorts perception by exag- drives ambivalent behavior. In 1999, for gerating and polarizing the differences. This clarifies the compar- example, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Matthew Hale, de- ison, but does so by introducing incorrect information. The same spite his strong anti-Semitic beliefs, hired Frankfurter profes- rule applies in a political election.