How do people decide whether or not they can trust you?

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Before you’ve even said a word, they’ve already made a gut-instinct decision. And throughout the conversation, with every sentence you utter, they’ll be re-evaluating your level of honesty. But where exactly will they look for clues? In your body language, particularly your facial expressions, and even more specifically, your eyes.

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“The eyes are the window to the soul,” indeed. For good reason: because the area around the eyes has the most muscle mobility of the entire body, it is also the most expressive. Thus, your eyes are what others focus on to know whether you’re really listening or whether your thoughts are meandering about. Just think of the number of ways we have to describe eye-expressions: we say someone’s eyes “glaze over”, or that they “spewed fire.”

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But here’s the rub: these muscles react not only to internal stimuli, but also to external, physical stimuli. And they’ll react in the same observable manner: your eyes would equally tense in response to emotional discomfort with regards to an idea you’ve just been presented with, as they would to the physical discomfort if the sun were in your eyes. The person facing you could thus easily misinterpret the tension as a reaction to what they’ve just said. In fact ,they probably will, since most people tend to interpret events as relating to them (Rain on the day of my picnic? How could they do this to me?)

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But what can we do to fix this? After all, conscious control of this multitude of muscles is virtually impossible. Instead, you can try to focus on the one thing you have some degree of control over: your mind. If you focus on feeling relaxed, and try to be absolutely present (rather than thinking about another subject which might induce tension) you’ll have a greater chance of achieving “trustworthy eyes”. A good image is to “bring the walls down” between yourself and the person you’re listening to; or “letting your soul pour out of your eyes.” The reason such images are so effective is that the brain thinks in pictures, and that your subconscious mind cannot distinguish between imaginary pictures and real ones (see the “mind over matter” article.)

(Disclaimer: this post will no doubt incur the disapproval of all manner of people & political views, from feminist to traditionalist– please send all rotten tomatoes are to be sent to our office address. We need the compost.)
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Women are notoriously and tragically bad at “tooting their own horn.” Men, on the other hand, are not just unafraid of self promotion–they often brag about how well they do so! And the effects are drastic–I’ve even heard women executives admit they give higher raises, bonuses, and promotions to men rather than women simply “because the men asked for it”.

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Not only do women have an evolutionary inbred tendency to nurture others, even at the expense of their own needs–to make matters worse, we’ve traditionally been taught to be “good girls,” including cheering for others rather than for ourselves (When is the last time you saw a male cheerleader?) Another factor could be our well-documented tendency to lower self-confidence and lower self-esteem, and thus a tendency to ask for less in just about everything– promotions, raises, interesting projects, etc.

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Men, on the other hand, have a nearly obsessive search for recognition is hard-wired into their brains. Why? Because recognition is one of the contributing factors to social status which, in evolutionary terms, determined who got the lion’s share of the food–and females. In essence, recognition had a direct link to both survival and reproduction– not matters to take lightly. Today, recognition is still one of the factors leading to promotions, better assignements, and career advancement.

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So what if a natural comfort with self-promotion wasn’t pre-programmed in your basic software package? There are several excellent books on the subject, but the one I particularly recommend– and the one to which, in many ways, I owe my career– is Kate White’s “Why good girls don’t get ahead, but gutsy girls do.” The title says it all…

Rising retail superstar Whole Foods has taken teamwork empowerment to a whole new level. Not only do teams operate as independent unit within a store–to the extent of setting their own prices or deciding which items to stock–they even have final say on which applicants are accepted on board.

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This makes a lot of sense in a multitude of ways–after all, they’re the ones who will be spending the most time with these new hires, and good teamwork is obviously a key component to the organization’s success. But there are also dangers to this voting power, one of which originates in our natural tendency towards rationalization.

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In this vein, the team members who’d voted to accept a new hire might subsequently be prone to overlooking this person’s deficiencies, since admitting they were not up to par could be felt as admitting a failure of their own judgment. On the other hand, those who’d voted against the hire, and were overruled, might harbor some resentment over the fact and be more difficult to work with; or they might wish to find fault in the same way the supporters would wish to see stellar behavior. Both sides would simply be seeking to prove their initial judgment right.

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As John Kenneth Galbraith said– “When faced between the choice of changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost every man gets busy on the proof… “

Proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, this number would indicate “the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”. Just like the much-maligned Mehrabian study, this finding was extrapolated to all manner of situations– some declared that this indicated the highest number of people you could have in your address book; others declared it was the ideal operating unit size– many companies, including W.L. Gore, organize their workers accordingly. As one of my favourite colleagues laments, “the numbers were tortured until they confessed.”

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But what is this “golden number” actually based on? According to Wikipedia’s excellent synthesis, Dunbar noted that, due to their highly social nature, primates need to maintain personal contact with the other members of their social group, which is usually done through grooming. The number of group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of their neocortex. This would indicate a species-specific social group size, depending on the species’ mean neocortex volume.

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In a 1992 article, Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans of about 150, a result he considered exploratory. He then compared this prediction with various human group sizes recorded throughout history.

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Dunbar’s surveys of village and tribe sizes seemed to confirm value, from the estimated size of Neolithic farming villages to the splitting point of Hutterite settlements or the basic unit size of professional armies from Roman antiquity to modern times since the 16th century.

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Dunbar further suggests that language may have arisen as a “cheap” means of social grooming, allowing early humans to efficiently maintain social cohesion. Without language, Dunbar speculates, humans would have to expend nearly half their time on social grooming, which would have made productive, cooperative effort nearly impossible. Language may have allowed societies to remain cohesive, while reducing the need for physical and social intimacy.