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from the unfortunately-I-cannot-appear-to-be-less-competent dept.
You hear a lot about fears of heights or spiders or clowns, but down deep, most people are most afraid of this one thing: sounding dumb. New research shows that people shy away from asking for help for fear of appearing less competent, but that this is an unfounded fear: Asking for advice actually makes you seem more capable.
Across five studies, a research team led by Harvard Business School’s Alison Wood Brooks finds that people think better of others when they ask for advice — mostly because people really love to give advice. Being asked for advice seems to give us a self-confidence boost, which in turn enhances our opinion of the advice-seeker, Brooks and colleagues write in the paper, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Management Science.
[Paper] (PDF)
(Score: 2) by gringer on Tuesday August 26 2014, @01:25AM
Asking anything in the wrong set of people, actually most people make them think you don't know how to handle the subject in question.
This sort of belief leads to people not asking anything ("What if they're not the right person to ask?"), creating silly little obstacles because they're concerned about acting less competent (which is the whole point of this article -- did you read the summary?).
I much prefer sending questions to the person who I think is most appropriate, but putting a disclaimer in my requests; something like "If you're not the right person to ask, could you please forward this onto someone more appropriate?"
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday August 26 2014, @02:21AM
I read the SN summary. Anyway, these upholding the image of competence may certainly create all kinds of crappy obstacles. But they are just a result of people not thinking their thinking through. One way to handle it is to remove that kind of people from your circle of people that you communicate for real with or just go the anonymous path.