170 - Marginalia Episode: Erica Bailey on Authenticity (REAIR)

0:00Welcome to the Stanford Psychology Podcast, where leading psychologists come to share their most recent work. I'm Ina, and for this week's episode, we have a special collaboration with Marginalia Science. Marginalia Science is a community committed to promoting work of scholars who are traditionally underrepresented in academia. Their mission really resonated with our values at the Stanford Psychology podcast. In an earlier special episode, we interviewed members at Marginalia Science about how the community has come to be. you can find a link to the episode in the show note. For today's episode, we're excited to feature a guest who has appeared in the Marginalia newsletter.

0:44Dr. Erica Bailey is a professor at UC Berkeley Hot School of Business. She broadly studies the construct of authenticity, asking questions like, how do we know who we are? When do we feel the most like ourselves? Why do we often fail despite our best efforts to share our inner world with others. Please join us today as Erika shares her journey in research and talks about her studies on authenticity.

1:35Good morning, Erika. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me, Ina. I read this very interesting paper of yours, and your research challenges some common assumptions about authenticity. Could you talk about what first inspired you to investigate the relationship between self-perceptions and feelings of authenticity? I originally got interested in this question basically because I realized there was sort of this group of people talking about authenticity and what would lead people to feel more authentic, to find their authentic self. And then there was this group of sort of self-scholars who look at all the funky ways that we create this narrative about who we are.

2:20And they were sort of in two separate silos. And the goal of this paper basically was to sort of bring them together. So on the one side, we have this great theory called the multi-component conceptualization of authenticity. And I think that this is sort of aligned with what people think of when they think about how to be most authentic, how to uncover your true self. So in that theory, there's this idea of authenticity as emerging from unbiased self-processing. So that's where you can look at both your positive and negative aspects without biasing them or warping them. You are able to look at really the breadth of who you are.

2:56And the other part of unbiased self-processing is that you're able to sort of take in self-relevant information without distorting it. And I love that as an idea. But as someone who's a social scientist, I also was thinking about that idea in relation to these classic psychology papers and books, probably most inspired by the positive illusions perspective that Shelley Taylor put out, which is that we have this adaptive process whereby we tend to overemphasize the positive aspects of who we are. And that kind of helps us keep going because life is really hard. If we were really faced with how average we were on a daily basis, we might not invest the resources that we need to survive and thrive in society.

3:40So this warped way that we see ourselves and we acknowledge our own contributions is really helpful, she would argue, in moving us along and keeping us focused. So I was inspired by that work. There's another great paper called the totalitarian ego, which is just a classic paper that reviews all the ways that we sort of take in information about our contributions in a group, for example, and we totally distort it, right? So if your paper flies through the review process, you say like, I was driving it the whole time. And if it's terrible, and it takes forever, it's like, well, it was reviewers fault.

4:13And I wasn't really that invested in this project anyway. So we're always spinning these narratives to slightly tip the favor towards ourselves. So that was sort of what I was thinking about when I started writing this paper. And the idea was basically to test, is it really about unbiased self-processing or is it about this more positive interpretation of who we are that produces authenticity? And the core sort of metaphor that I talk about in the paper is like, there's lots of things that are not objectively real, but they feel real to us. So one of the examples in the paper is when you look at yourself in the mirror, that feels like you.

4:49You're like, that's what I look like. But the mirror is not what you look like. The mirror is like an inverted, flipped version of your face. But when people actually look at themselves in what's called a true mirror, where it shows you your unflipped face, they react really weirdly to it. Like, that's not what I look like. Or like, no, that's not me. And so it's this tension between what feels real to us, what makes sense with the narrative of who we are, and maybe what's more sort of like literally or objectively real. And I was hypothesizing that authenticity will flow from these things that feel real rather than something that's objectively real.

5:23Do we actually look better in the inverted mirror compared to how we actually look like? So that's a great question. It gets back to like how I operationalize all of this is it depends on who you're asking or what you want to predict. So in the paper, I mostly care about what you would consider authentic. So probably if I asked you what picture looks best for you or what looks most like you, you would pick a very subset of like selfies that you take. You're like, that one looks like me. And maybe if I asked your friend or your partner, they would say, that's not what looks like you. That doesn't look like you at all.

5:59Because they sort of see you in a different light. Yeah, I hate the inverted picture of myself, which is like, oh, wait, the not inverted picture of myself, which is my actual self, because I'm so used to seeing myself in the mirror. Exactly. That's the inspiration or like the underlying logic of the whole paper. That is very interesting. I really like how you distinguish between what's objectively true about us and what feels true on the inside. Can you talk about how our inner core self relates to authenticity and why a positively biased self-image might actually seem more genuine to us than a completely accurate one?

6:40Yeah, I make this diagram in the paper, which isn't it's not great to talk about a figure on a podcast, but think about the schema of the self as like you have all of these observations about who you are and there's built up over your life and your experience and things people tell you about yourself. And some parts of those aspects feel really core to who you are and some sort of feel like they're more on the peripheral. And it's really those sort of core aspects that really relate to what makes you feel authentic. So something that's core to your identity might be being an academic. And so things that sort of tap into that identity feel really authentic to you.

7:16And the things on the outside can induce authenticity, but they're just more distant from who you are. And my idea is basically that the things that fall into that central circle tend to be more positive than negative. So I try to elicit participants to tell me what they consider to be in that middle center, what they consider to be authentic. And I usually allow participants to tell me how positive or negative they think those aspects are. So I try to be as close to the participant's point of view rather than laying on top of that what I think is positive or negative or what I think is authentic or not.

7:53And I let participants sort out those self-aspects for me. And that's where I saw these patterns emerge that people consider that central circle to be mostly positive things. But, of course, it's not completely positive. So we do recognize that we have flaws and we have things that we're working on. We have aspects that are maybe not socially desirable. It's just that on average, it tends to lean towards that more positive view. I was thinking about if I was asked the question, I wonder how many words do people come up with to describe themselves at their core? Oh, it's such a good question. I forced them to come up with 10.

8:32And most people would say like seven positive and three neutral or negative things, something like that. It is a classic sort of induction of self-knowledge that people are pretty good at listing a couple of things about who they are. And then when they have to list like 12, 15, 20, they start to realize, oh, gosh, who am I? You know, there's a classic like, tell me about yourself or what do you like to do for fun? And all of a sudden I'm like, I have no hobbies. I'm not fun at all. Who am I even? So it can actually be hard to articulate who you are. Recently, I played this game that's called We Are Not Really Strangers, where we're asked to describe ourselves or each other.

9:15Who are we at our core? And I think it's really challenging to define one person. But that also makes me think about describing oneself versus another person. We use relatively more positive words to discard ourselves. Do we also do the same for other people? We tend to show this positive view also of people that we're close to. But you're tapping into something interesting about part of why I love studying authenticity. Authenticity is not just a product of the self. There's sort of authenticity under the self umbrella, which is when I feel authentic or when I consider parts of myself to be authentic or not.

9:53I could also think about like personality consistent or state consistent behavior, which is where I'm thinking, okay, inside I feel this way, and I'm expressing something that's either aligned or not. But authenticity is also a property of interpersonal relationships that I'm making some attributions of your authenticity or of a politician's authenticity or of a product's authenticity. So it also exists sort of out in the social world. and one interesting thing I found in this paper is this positivity bias exists for self-rated authenticity but when you look at other rated authenticity someone who is overly positive in their self-expressions people actually say they're less authentic and part of the mechanism is they think oh you just maybe are being less honest or you don't know yourself as well and so there's an interesting flip of how you view the aspects that make you authentic and then also if you describe yourself in all overly positive terms, people actually think you're being less authentic.

10:52Wow. Do you feel like our close others would actually use the same set of adjectives to describe ourselves compared to like adjectives that we use on our own? It's a great question. It's an empirical question. I would love to test that. I think in some ways what you're tapping into with the playing the card game with your friend is it's really hard to define ourselves. And something that I've found in my own life is my friends make a lot more sense to me than they make to themselves. And I can recognize patterns and what they do better than they can. My friends are like, I don't know how to describe my research identity.

11:31To me, it's like perfectly clear. I know exactly what sets you apart from other people, but it's hard to see that from the inside. We almost have too many data points that can describe ourselves. It's really hard to sort of make sense of those data points alone. And part of how we can think about how they fit together or what makes us distinct from other people is by talking to our close friends and learning more about how they see us. That was very interesting. I also really like that when we learned about how people who love us see us, it is a more positive view of ourselves, even more so than our own positively biased view.

12:07Dan Cable has a great paper that looks at newcomer socialization into organizations, which is a really difficult time because you're trying to figure out, do I belong in this new organization? What's my contribution? You're trying to figure out the lay of the land. You're taking on a new identity. It can be a really difficult time for people. And he has an induction where he solicits letters from people that you know. And you read those letters and And it helps you navigate that identity transition because you hear these stories from people that know you best. And they sort of tell you about yourself in this time where you feel uncertain or unsure about who you are.

12:44And I just think that's a really beautiful induction. One thing that he told me that is interesting is it works really well when there's a common theme throughout the letters and everyone is telling you that you're so inquisitive and curious and compassionate. And you hear that told to you a couple of times. But something that can happen is you get different stories about who you are from other people. That can actually be confusing. So it sort of like works contingent on the fact that the people who are around you agree about who you really are. That is related to another thing that I think about a lot in my daily life.

13:21Sometimes I feel like people have different sides of themselves in different situations. I wonder to what extent we value someone who is consistently the same self versus you can adjust to different contexts with a different side of yourself. What do you think about this idea? This is a great body of research and psychology on a construct called self-monitoring, which is where you adapt yourself to different social settings. To some extent, doing that is perfectly normal and totally acceptable. And if someone did not self-monitor at all, we would think they're incredibly strange. It's just natural that you and I are talking differently on this podcast than I would talk to my sister, for example.

14:10That's just its roles, social performances, different aspects of my identity are salient at different times. So to some extent, the self-monitoring is normal. Some people tend to. So self-monitoring is what we call an individual difference, where some people are high on self-monitoring and some people are very low. So some people think it's perfectly natural that I'm a very different person in the boardroom, for example, than I am at home. To them, that's totally fine. And I would say if you're asking them, are you authentic when you're yelling in the boardroom and when you're whispering at home, they would say, yeah, of course I'm authentic.

14:43That's a very natural, normal thing that I do. Some people are the opposite. it. They're like, I never self, I am the exact same person. To me, the quintessential example of this is a college professor who's always wearing the same scruffy sweater and curmudgeony and always wants to talk about research ideas. And it doesn't matter if it's their 12-year-old kid they're talking to or a classroom, they're like exactly the same kind of person. To them, inconsistency feels very inauthentic because they have this belief that I should be exactly the same in every situation. And I shouldn't monitor myself depending on what the social setting needs.

15:19But what you raise again is this fun dichotomy and why I love authenticity research. And I encourage everyone to join the authenticity train is that all that logic makes total sense when I'm looking within your head and I'm asking you about your own authenticity and your own self-monitoring behaviors. But now what if I show someone a movie of you and in one scene you're in a boardroom being very assertive and aggressive and commanding the room. And then I show you at home and you're in a very different role with your partner or your mother, for example. Now, do we still think that that person is being authentic?

15:56That is a really interesting question because we have different narratives about how other people should behave versus the affordances that we give ourselves. I started thinking about this idea because one of my friends at grad school, Raphael Eureker, he started this line of very interesting research on how this type of mirroring or adjusting yourself across different contexts would be valued across some cultures, but not others. And the tendency that you're finding, the tendency to feel more authentic with a positive self-view, do you feel like that vary across cultures? I here's what I can say.

16:41My sample is almost all Americans. So I don't have data to support this. But my intuition would be that the theory would hold it would be the content of those self aspects that would be different across culture across personality. But the valence might be the same. So if you're someone who's in a more interdependent control or mindset or culture, your positive self aspects might be more relational in nature. You being a daughter or a sister might be something that's a valued aspect of who you are. And maybe in a more individualistic context for a more individualistic culture, it's more about your own achievements.

17:20But to you, they're both positive. It's like the content of the aspects are different by culture. And that's part of why I wanted to talk about this paper. I think it's a flexible way to understand authenticity because I'm not forcing the content of these aspects to be the same across participants, it doesn't make sense to me that they have to be, right? What makes you feel authentic should be different from what makes me feel authentic. But there are ways to generalize and to move the theory along. It's not impossible to predict when someone will feel authentic. It just takes some thinking through how that would apply.

17:56The other idea that is related to something we were talking about are these beliefs that people have about who they are, about how stable they are. There's this idea among authenticity scholars about the true self, which is that you one core true self who's in there, and all you have to do is uncover that person, and then you'll be your most authentic self. And that relates to the stability consistency idea we were talking about. What I found in one of my studies is a marginally significant moderation in this positivity induction by true self-belief. So I'll explain that. That's a very academic way to say what I found.

18:32But basically, there's people who have really strong beliefs that I am one core true self that does not change. And that's my stable, internal, concrete self. For them, the relationship with positivity is less strong than for people who are like, myself is constantly changing. Growth is a natural part of who we are. You could think about they're thinking about progress and evolution rather than stability and consistency. And for people who have that more flexible, malleable belief in the self, they're looking more towards these positive self aspects to inform their authenticity. And that makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.

19:11If you're someone who's always trying to grow and change, you're looking towards those positive self aspects as clues about where you want to go to become your true self rather than to find that true self that's in you somewhere, if that makes sense. So we have these different metaphors or beliefs about the self. And to me, authenticity is like breadcrumbs or truths that help me figure out that narrative that people have or uncover these beliefs that they hold. So is this one true self-belief tied to the idea of growth and fixed mindset such that a growth mindset is related to the belief of myself can be malleable and can improve?

19:51I don't know that anyone has linked those literatures, but I love where you're going with this. And I want to run this study now. I imagine they're very similar, and it shapes how we process this information. Originally, true self-beliefs were embedded in authenticity. Authenticity was being your true self. And then Rebecca Schlegel and her colleagues have identified that true self-beliefs are an individual difference, where some people hold these beliefs more strongly than others. So it's not necessarily a linear relationship with authenticity. Instead, we have to understand how you think about yourself to try and predict when you'll feel the most authentic or how you relate to information that comes in about who you are.

20:30In your other studies, you also found that showing all positive traits might not appear authentic to others. Can you talk a bit more about how you conducted the study? So in that study, I used a superficial profile of a man named Brad, if I remember that right, And Brad was describing himself. He either used words. So I took adjectives or traits that people mentioned in earlier studies and looked at some of the common ones, some of the common positive and negative and neutral ones, and either tip the scale. So he was describing himself more negatively, more mixed or more positively. And people thought the more negative Brad was more authentic.

21:15Now, they didn't like him as much. That's sort of he's sort of a Debbie Downer. about himself, but they're like, he really knows himself. That's, yeah, Brad gets it. He's being authentic, like maybe a little too much. So there is a sort of a difference in perceptions of authenticity and self-rated authenticity. I have a science paper that also tries to look at where these beliefs diverge. So people tend to think that they're really good at identifying who is authentic and not. People also think if I'm authentic, everyone will know. It will just be so manifest that I'm being authentic. But, you know, deception detection research or like research to ask this question, can you tell when someone is lying to you have found that humans are not good lie detectors.

22:00We're really bad at picking up what other people are suggesting. Oh, wow. So I applied the same logic to perceptions of authenticity and found basically a zero correlation between self-rated authenticity and other rated authenticity in randomly assigned groups. I am so surprised about that. I wonder when people think about the concept of being authentic, what are some traits of others that they identify as authentic? For example, like in Brad's case, it seems like being vulnerable and even a little negative or associated being authentic. You're right on, we're on the same wavelength. I did this exact study.

22:43So I asked people like, what do you look for? Okay, you say that you can recognize authenticity when it's in front of you. So what are you looking for? And basically, people are looking for all kinds of different information. Some people are looking at physical cues, like whether they're making eye contact, whether they're smiling, whether their body language matches what they're saying. So if you're saying that you're angry, do you have your shoulders scrunched up and look angry? Other people are thinking about something you mentioned earlier, that consistency across time. Other people still are thinking about things like honesty, or do they do what they say they're going to do?

23:20So it's not just consistency across time, but maybe future behavioral consistency in line with like your expressed opinions or how you say you want to come across. But those are all very different cues towards the same authenticity attribution. And that might be why authenticity can get a little funky when we look at it from the perceived side, because everyone is using different cues or different information to come to the same attribution of who they think is being authentic or not. I think politics is a great example of this. Like, lots of people would say that Donald Trump is authentic, even though he lies a lot, allegedly.

24:01And, you know, but and some people would say he's completely inauthentic. How can you say that that person is being authentic? And I think that's because people have an intuition that someone who's disinhibited is authentic, and other people hold a very different opinion about authenticity. That makes sense. So from our own side, authenticity is related to more positive self-view. But from the perceiver side, authenticity may be related to mixed valence words, but an even slightly more negative. Is that right? Yeah, that could be the case. It also could be that these more negative attributes, and again, these are people who are not saying I'm immoral, necessarily.

24:44It's more like I'm impatient, or I am too meticulous, and sometimes that can hold me back. And I think those things are very human, right? That we're not perfect. We're just mostly perfect, but we're not perfect. And so when someone else is willing to be vulnerable or to admit something that's maybe not socially desirable, that's a clue that, oh, they must really feel that way. and it doesn't occur to us that anyone would lie in a way to make themselves seem less positive. So it's a very costly signal almost, and I think that's why people interpret it as being authentic. So if we're presenting ourselves too positively, it makes other people doubt our authenticity.

25:28But in Brad's case, when he's talking about some negative things about himself, which comes across as very genuine, but at the same time could make some people feel uncomfortable. Like, why are you sharing this with us? How do we strike a balance between honest self-disclosure and also maintaining a healthy, positive self-view? It's such a good question. It's the puzzle of all puzzles, right? How do we in real life, how do we know when it's appropriate? How do we balance the needs of authenticity with professionalism, with success, with seeming competent, I tend to talk about my findings in the perceptual realm about authenticity as evidence that you should basically almost never think about how you're coming across.

26:15Because other people are so stuck in their own heads, they're looking at you through a very specific egocentric lens. They're looking at people based on biases, based on assumptions. And that almost has nothing to do with you as a person. But authenticity research is very clear that being authentic, being more authentic, being authentic, especially around people who you feel like will accept you, that's a really important thing for your well-being, for meaning in life, which is something that I know you care about in your research for being pro-social. And I suggest people pursue authenticity for authenticity's own sake and try and basically ignore what attributions other people are going to make of you.