The Science of Success: In this series, we’ll scan the latest scientific, academic, and professional literature, looking at everything from psychology to physics to bring you new insights on how to be more successful.
I have a bit of news for you. It’s big, and it affects everything from the way we choose our leaders to the way we do business. Best of all, it is predicated on wisdom most of us already picked up in high school. Here goes: really popular people suck.
I’m not just talking about that feeling you get when it’s time to go to prom, and you know that the only kids who will have a grand time while the rest of us shuffle awkwardly in the corner and stare longingly at the dance floor are those who are supremely confident, always outgoing, and perpetually surrounded by hordes of peppy friends. I’m talking about science, which, in its wisdom, has given us the Friendship Paradox.
The idea is simple: when you are very sociable and popular, lots of people consider you a friend. Look at people’s social networks, then—and I mean the real-life ones, not the ones where you can poke and follow folks you’ve never met—and these social butterflies are likely to appear again and again and again, inflating the average of how many friends an ordinary person truly has.
It’s a statistical bias that leads to a real-life one as well. According to research by Professors Adam M. Grant from Wharton, Francesca Gino from Harvard, and David Hofmann from the University of North Carolina, being an extraverted, popular person can actually be a liability for leadership, particularly when leading a team of employees who are also extraverted and proactive. Alpha types, the researchers found, don’t mix well with other alphas; to make a business run smoothly, a good blend of chatterboxes and shrinking violets is key.
And yet, just as was the case in high school, outgoing people seem to seek the spotlight much more frequently than the rest of us. As psychologists Stephan Dilchert and Deniz Ones have found, while only roughly half of the U.S. population can be defined as extraverted, extroverts make up a staggering 96 percent of people in leadership position. Sadly, this doesn’t mean they’re better suited for their jobs. It means that we keep on promoting outgoing people simply because they are outgoing.
Studying 284 incoming MBA students at an Ivy League college, Professors Adam M. Kleinbaum and Daniel C. Feiler, both of Dartmouth, confirmed the existence of the extroversion curve. “Most extroverts tend to have a lot of friends, so their high extroversion score will pull up the scores of friends for a larger number of people,” Kleinbaum recently told the Wall Street Journal. “And the more extroverted you are, the more you are going to have a network that is overpopulated with extroverts.”
The next time you confront that big task, then, or make that crucial hire, stop for a second and make sure you aren’t falling victim to an overabundance of confidence. “Very extroverted people,” Feiler told the Journal, “are less normal than they think. People in the middle are more normal than they think. And the very introverted people have about the right idea about how social they are relative to the general population.” If only we knew it all back in high school.
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