As Wikipedia defines it Social Perception is the the study of how people form impressions and make inferences about other people. Simply put, your social perception is what everybody thinks about you. Have you ever stopped to wonder what your social perception is? Deep inside everybody cares about this. A lot. For many people this is subconsciously the single driving force that shapes many of the daily decisions. Most people have some general idea about what their social perception is. Often this is part hypothesis, part guesswork by the individual. Yet if you ask the average guy on the street if he knew or cared about what everybody thought of him, his response would probably be IDGAF (google that if you don’t know what it stands for)
Studies show that we consistently overestimate how much others think about us and our failings. An unfortunate consequence of this is that we are far more inhibited about understanding what our social perception is. Why is it that we are inhibited to find out what others think of us. I believe it is primarily driven by two fears / apprehensions:
- We believe people may mostly only say negative things.
- Hearing even one negative thing about yourself can get very disturbing so why try.
Isn’t it paradoxical that something we care so deeply about is also something we hesitate to find out? Its true that people will not see only positive traits in you. Nor would they only see negative traits. If we only learn to be objective about ourselves and overcome the above two apprehensions, we could find out something valuable about ourselves that we do really want to know about too.
Mark Twain famously said. “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened”. So why worry about it – even if there’s something negative, its only a perception and not necessarily the reality. Its a way to know how to improve yourself and who else needs to know it more than the individual himself / herself.
One may still ask, “What’s in it for me?” Fine, I’ll get to know what my perception is or my strengths and weaknesses are, but how does that change anything? What difference does it make? Well, the fortunate or unfortunate reality is that a lot of things that happen behind the scenes for us are often impacted by our social perception, rather than the reality.
The impression we convey when giving our first job interview, the time we got selected to represent the company for the first time in front of a client, or the time when the new girl in college agreed to go out on a first date – all of these are a result of the perception you have. If you don’t really know which of your traits or behaviors led you to win that engagement, how will you capitalize on that strength the next time you are in a situation? On the other hand if you do not know which trait of yours is holding you back from climbing the ladder, how will you overcome it and get better?
It is this thought that kept coming back to me and inspired my next venture. What if we could create a platform that helps us capture social perception? A seed was sown and it has germinated to bear first fruits – a platform called WeSay (which informally expands to “What Everybody Says About You”). Its a platform to help you understand your social perception and also share your perception of others around you. Look out for the launch … its coming soon! I look forward to sharing it with all of you.
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