Page 386 - The Social Animal

368 The Social Animal

responsible for a major blunder, could have served to make him
more human in the public eye and, hence, more likable.
Alas, this is only one of several possible explanations, and, as you
know all too well by now, the real world is no place to test such a hy-
pothesis. In the real world, too many things are happening simulta-
neously, any one of which could have increased Kennedy’s popularity.
For example, after the fiasco occurred, President Kennedy did not try
to make excuses or to pass the buck; rather, he accepted full respon-
sibility for the blunder. This action could have done much to make
him more attractive in the eyes of the populace.
To test the proposition that evidence of fallibility in a highly
competent person may make that person better liked, an experiment
was needed. One of the great advantages of an experiment is that it
eliminates or controls extraneous variables, such as the assumption of
responsibility, and allows us, therefore, to assess more accurately the
effect of one variable on another. I performed such an experiment in
collaboration with Ben Willerman and Joanne Floyd. The partici-
24
pants were college men at the University of Minnesota. Each student
listened to a simple audio tape recording featuring one of four stim-
ulus persons: (1) a nearly perfect person, (2) a nearly perfect person
who commits a blunder, (3) a mediocre person, and (4) a mediocre
person who commits a blunder. In preparation, each student was told
he would be listening to a person who was a candidate for the then-
popular “College Bowl” quiz show, and that he would be asked to rate
one of the candidates by the kind of impression he made, by how lik-
able he seemed, and so forth. Each tape consisted of an interview be-
tween a young man (stimulus person) and an interviewer and
contained a set of extremely difficult questions posed by the inter-
viewer; the questions were like those generally asked on “College
Bowl.” On one tape, the stimulus person showed a high degree of
competence—indeed, he seemed to be virtually perfect, answering 92
percent of the questions correctly—and in the body of the interview,
when asked about his activities in high school, he modestly admit-
ted he had been an honor student, the editor of the yearbook, and a
member of the track team. On another tape, the stimulus person (ac-
tually the same actor using the same tone of voice) was presented as
a person of average ability: He answered only 30 percent of the ques-
tions correctly, and during the interview he admitted he had received
average grades in high school, had been a proofreader on the year-