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People Will Misjudge You Unless You Manipulate Them | Big Think.

Big Think | November 7, 2025



People Will Misjudge You Unless You Manipulate Them
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“Perception is tricky,” explains Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson, an associate director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia Business School. There’s this notion that the way we see ourselves is the way others see us as well — not true. In her book No One Understands You and What to Do About It, she talks about the two phases of perception: automatic and thoughtful. People rarely try to move past that first phase where people have a “gist” of who you are as a person — most of the time, that’s all they want. Halvorson explains some of the barriers that hinder people from going into that second phase and looking at you as a more nuanced person.
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HEIDI GRANT HALVORSON:
Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson is a social psychologist who researches, writes, and speaks about the science of motivation. She is the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia Business School, Senior Consultant for the Neuroleadership Institute, and author of the best-selling books:

Succeed: How We Can All Reach Our Goals, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing The World for Success and Influence (co-written with E. Tory Higgins), and The 8 Motivational Challenges.

Halvorson is also a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, 99u, Fast Company, WSJ.com, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today.

In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Judgment and Decision Making. She has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation for her research on goals and achievement.

HGH is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and was recently elected to the highly selective Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She gives frequent invited addresses and speaks regularly at national conferences, and is available for speaking and consulting engagements, primarily in education, marketing, and management. She received her PhD in social psychology from Columbia University.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Heidi Grant Halvorson: One of the challenges I think that we need to face head on when we think about how we come across to other people is really understanding that perception is tricky and that for your perceiver, the person who’s trying to understand you, it’s really kind of an uphill battle. They’re operating on very little information trying to get the right, accurate image of you. But the good news is that the kinds of mistakes that perceivers make are very predictable. It’s not random. We know a lot about the kinds of signals a person sends and how they tend to be perceived by other people. President Obama, when he was running for reelection, had his first debate with Mitt Romney and he went into it, according to everything that was said afterwards, he had gone into it really trying to seem presidential and not wanting to rise to debate, kind of trying to take advantage of the fact that he was coming in as an incumbent president. And it turned out that at the end of it people who were in the audience, even people who were fans of President Obama, thought that he had come across as lethargic, as disengaged, wondering if he had had enough sleep that night. And afterwards he was really quite surprised when he spoke to his aides to find out how poorly he had done because he really thought he was very successfully coming across as above the fray and presidential when, in fact, he was actually seeming sort of out of it. And so you can think if someone like President Obama who’s really a gifted orator and has a lot of experience trying to come across to other people in a particular way, if he can be so wrong about how he’s coming across, then it’s obviously pretty easy for the rest of us to make the same mistake.

We tend to think that other people are really paying attention, really trying to understand us. I mean most of the time they’re happy to just get the gist of you and the gist can be totally wrong. The first phase of perception, what Kahneman calls system one thinking,……

To read the transcript, please go to https://bigthink.com/videos/heidi-grant-halvorson-on-innaccurate-perceptions

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Comments

This post currently has 25 comments.

  2. @Wm_Mack

    November 7, 2025 at 12:01 am

    Years ago, I gave this issue a title Perception Management, before it was even a thing that people discussed. I want to write a book and get the credit for this term.

  3. @molekulaTV

    November 7, 2025 at 12:01 am

    I figured it out (a note for those who are looking for the meaning in the video):

    They cut the juice part out. I'm sure. She surely did come to a conclusion after the laborious intro that was actually a good intro (!) (…but only if it was just the intro)

    Something was edited out like: you have to persuade them… you have to call the attention of people by preparing something that will make them worth some brain work.

    Hm? Makes sense …no?

  7. @McMurchie

    November 7, 2025 at 12:01 am

    Title is misleading. Additionally phase 2, requires more mental resources and time, which is why we don't profile everyone we meet in huge depth – its not possible. Phase 1 is a evolutionary tool we inherited, and whilst the PC brigade are like 'don't ever generalize' – they know shit, its an involuntary mechanism we are all bound to…. its useful too!

  8. @Navaura

    November 7, 2025 at 12:01 am

    I think just being yourself should be enough. I think that people don't be enough of who they are. She sounds like she's saying you can pretend to be who you are not for the intent of being who you want to be well guess what…all masks fall off. I usually don't get misjudged nor do I judge people when I meet them. I actually see the bad but I see the good and it's the good that I tend to connect with. The bad will still be there. If I can't accept the bad, then I keep things at arms length. If I can accept the bad then I let you in my inner circle, but one of the bads that I don't like to accept is people who always speak negatively about others. That I hate with the utmost.

  10. @thekeithchannel

    November 7, 2025 at 12:01 am

    I feel like she should be trying to research on what motivates people into phase 2 and not marketing a book on how to mimic people who are trustworthy, competent, caring, etc… 

    Quit acting competent, pick up a book. Quit acting trustworthy, BE trustworthy. Quit acting like you care. If it's something you don't care about, there's a reason.

  11. @txixm

    November 7, 2025 at 12:01 am

    Why doesn't she just admit that the average person is not intelligent, and that they will respond better to false confidence, smugness, flattery, snark, or threats than actual meaningful conversation?

  13. @funkyboodah

    November 7, 2025 at 12:01 am

    It's difficult because if you read her book and go into a situation being like "oh, I'll just do A B and C and then I'll convey X" – even having that attitude in mind will put a hidden agenda in your interaction and will show in your body language.

  16. @happybird4942

    November 7, 2025 at 12:01 am

    Seriously? 
       This is, uhm, the exact wrong approach. 
       Instead of focusing on telling people how to "seem like" how they in fact are, we should be talking to perceivers about how to pay attention and make only logical inferences based on relevant information.  It's not the perceived subject's fault if his perceivers' are presumptuous, inattentive, or just retarded.  It'd be the perceivers' fault.
       A person can only be so clear.  He can only be himself, act how he really is, and say what he really means.  If other people still don't get it, then that's their shortcoming, not his.

  17. @ElectricChaplain

    November 7, 2025 at 12:01 am

    This talk is vague to the point of being useless.
    No shit, you perceive yourself differently than other people do.
    No shit, you have to make an effort to get people to be interested in you and manipulate them.
    What's next in Being a Human 101, it's not a good idea to walk around naked in public?

Comments are closed.

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