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Mickey Kaus recently decided that he doesn't like Obama. It's not his policies that bother him, but his pompous attitude when he gives speeches, and his general lack of warmth. (I, for one, disagree - look at that smile!). Kaus admits that likeability may not be all that important in a president, but he wonders whether it might be a problem if Obama thinks he's likeable.
This caught my attention because we've been studying exactly this topic in my lab. Not with Obama (he won't return our calls) but with regular people. Do we know how others see us, and does it matter if we're wrong? My graduate student, Erika Carlson, just wrote a paper that was accepted for publication (co-authors are Mike Furr and myself) in which she showed that not only do people have a clue about how they're seen by others, but they even know when they don't know. That is, when we asked people what impression they made on a person they had just met, they were more often right than wrong, and when they were wrong they were more likely to be uncertain about the impression they made.
Of course people do make plenty of mistakes about the impressions they make on others, and these mistakes can be quite costly. Cameron Anderson, Dan Ames, and Sam Gosling recently published a paper that showed that people who overestimate their status in a group suffer the consequences: they are less well-liked by their group members and their work is valued less. And indeed both Anderson's paper and a more recent paper by Hillary Anger Elfenbein and her colleagues show that people are pretty good at estimating their status and value in a group. Of course, these were business school students, but presumably the rest of us are pretty good, too.
So maybe Mickey Kaus was onto something. Knowing how popular you are is pretty important - we don't like people who think they're more popular than they really are. Like Beyonce, if you talk like that, you'd better back it up.
