[1]A research-backed reason not to worry about what your peers think of
  you by Lila MacLellan:

    Can you ever really know what your colleagues think about you? New
    research suggests there's a good chance you already do.
    In a meta-analysis led by Hyunji Kim, a psychologist at York
    University in Toronto, researchers from Canada and Australia found
    that across more than 150 studies in which subjects ranked
    themselves in personality tests and were rated by peers, the gaps
    between self- and peer-perceptions were not wide. This wasn't the
    case when the subjects of a study were strangers, but it was as true
    for work colleagues as it was between friends.
    We should see the results as good news, says Brian Connelly, a
    management professor at University of Toronto Scarborough and a
    co-author of the research, [2]which was published in Psychological
    Science. "As a general, maybe even evolutionary mechanism, it's
    important for us to have some sense of what we're like and what
    people around us are like, so we can appropriately anticipate where
    we will succeed and where we'll fail," he explains.
    Thanks to the analysis, "[w]e can feel a little bit better knowing
    that people aren't running around self-enhancing and sort of running
    amuck," Connelly says.
    To be sure, this is not the story we've been told by social
    psychologists. For the past 30 or 40 years, several studies using
    self-reported assessments have consistently detected a bias known as
    [3]the better-than-average effect, also known as the Lake Wobegon
    effect or the superiority illusion. If you ask a class of students
    how many of them believe they're more intelligent than their peers,
    90% of hands will shoot up, says Connelly. It's one reason people
    tend to cast doubt on studies that rely on self-reporting.
    Naturally, he entered this research expecting most people would
    believe they're friendlier or harder working than others, but that's
    not what happened. He now speculates that self-enhancement may be
    more common in studies that look at specific skills, like driving or
    athletic skills, within special contexts.
    Connelly and his co-authors on the paper narrowed their scope of
    exploration to personality assessments, and specifically the
    so-called Big Five traits: openness, conscientiousness,
    extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
    The researchers did find a mismatch between rankings on the openness
    score, for which people described "how thoughtful and reflective and
    artistic they are," he says. They also discovered a slight trend
    toward self-effacement on questions about negative emotions, like
    emotional stability or neuroticism. "People describe having more
    anxiety and more depression than their peers see in them," says
    Connelly.
    In both cases, the discrepancy may be explained by what we choose to
    share with others versus how much access we have to our inner worlds
    and deepest thoughts. Unless someone feels close enough to be
    especially candid and vulnerable with you, you'll probably assume
    they struggle with roughly the same amount of angst or sorrow that
    you do.
    Now Connelly is interested in what happens to those outliers whose
    view of themselves as particularly agreeable, or pathetically
    neurotic, is not shared by coworkers. He's studying a group of
    managers who have taken personality tests that are being read by
    colleagues, and he's tracking students who are spending part of the
    college term in co-op placements as part of their studies. He hopes
    to find out whether people with misaligned perceptions will have
    more or less success at school and at work.

  Fascinating stuff. This lines up with the Stoic idea of control in that
  beyond what we think and do, there is little control in what others
  think about us. Being able to read these queues properly can help
  navigate socially, which puts some folks at a disadvantage.
  Also on:

  [4]Twitter
    __________________________________________________________________

  My original entry is here: [5]A research-backed reason not to worry
  about what your peers think of you. It posted Mon, 14 Jan 2019 01:15:38
  +0000.
  Filed under: business,

References

  1. https://qz.com/work/1501741/research-suggests-our-work-peers-see-us-how-we-see-ourselves/
  2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618810000
  3. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/201811/3-healthy-lies-we-tell-ourselves
  4. https://twitter.com/prjorgensen/status/1084620036390699008
  5. https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=2491