This is from an article that appeared on the Freakonomics blog yesterday. It’s a guest post by basketball economist David Berri and he discusses an academic study that basically says that our perception of competence is pretty much related to how much people talk. From the post:
A couple of years ago Cameron Anderson and Gavin J. Kilduff published a study examining how people in meetings evaluate each other. Obviously we would like people in meetings to think we are competent. And one might think, the best way to get people to think you are competent is to just be competent. But that is not what Anderson and Kilduff found. In a study of how people in a meeting – a meeting designed to answer math questions — were evaluated by their peers, these authors found (as Time reported) that actual competence wasn’t driving evaluations:
Repeatedly, the ones who emerged as leaders and were rated the highest in competence were not the ones who offered the greatest number of correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they’d even be able to. What they did do was offer the most answers — period.
“Dominant individuals behaved in ways that made them appear competent,” the researchers write, “above and beyond their actual competence.” Troublingly, group members seemed only too willing to follow these underqualified bosses. An overwhelming 94% of the time, the teams used the first answer anyone shouted out — often giving only perfunctory consideration to others that were offered.
Think about what this study says about meetings. If I want you to think I am competent, I need to talk. But if all of us have this same incentive… well, maybe we better be standing. A sit-down meeting can be endless (or at least seem that way).
I think we finally have an explanation for the Ryan Brothers. They have incentives to be loud mouths! They’ve probably been rewarded for it their entire careers.
