Self Awareness: You'll Never Know if You're Pushy

Social scientist have determined that there is a huge limitation to self-awareness. No matter how self-conscious you think you are, you likely are completely wrong about your aggressive tendencies, or "pushiness" in the workplace.

According to a new study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, people have a very hard time seeing how pushy they appear to other people. In fact, the average person is only likely to correctly guess how others view them about 50 percent of the time, regardless of whether they consider how other people react to their actions.

"In the language of Goldilocks, many people are serving up porridge that others see as too hot or too cold, but they mistakenly think the temperature comes across as just right - that their assertiveness is seen as appropriate," study author Daniel Ames explained in a statement. "To our surprise, we also found that many people whose porridge was actually seen as just right mistakenly thought their porridge came off as too hot. That is, they were asserting themselves appropriately in the eyes of others, but they incorrectly thought they were pushing too hard."

To determine this, researchers at Columbia Business School conducted four studies, three of which involved students involved in negotiation courses at Columbia, and one of which involved an online survey of approximately 500 working adults.

In the first three studies, students were paired up in mock business negotiations. After each session, the participants were asked whether or not they through they were too assertive or 'just right,' and the same question was asked of their partner. This data was lined up with results from the surveys.

Interestingly, 57 percent of the participants who through they had been appropriately assertive or even too pushy were rated by their partners as under-assertive. Likewise, 56 percent of people who has been actually seen as over-assertive has through they had not been pushy enough.

The researcher determined that for some reason, people are terrible as assessing how other people viewed their aggressive action - with the resulting self-perception being nearly as accurate as a coin flip.