Introverts and “The Barbie Problem”
Expectations and the meaning of social gestures can tie introverts up in a knot.
Imagine receiving an invitation to a birthday party for a middle-aged friend. Your friend, like you, is a financially comfortable environmentalist who tries to minimize what her household adds to local landfills. Also, you believe that gifts for grownups on such occasions is a silly custom. You’d prefer to just go and enjoy the evening. But not bringing a gift would seem to falsely send the signal that you don’t much care for your friend – or brand you socially as a boor.
I don’t understand why, but in his book Manipulation: What to Do, Why It’s Bad, What to Do About It, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein calls this dilemma “The Barbie Problem.” You face a situation where an action (or inaction) has a social meaning that is out of your control. You do not intend that social meaning, but it will be there nonetheless. Sunstein says he faces this problem when he visits Ireland with his Irish wife. He doesn’t enjoy alcohol, but he knows that if he declines to drink there, the Irish relatives will wonder whether he’s a recovering alcoholic or, worse, a moralistic jerk or puritan who looks down on drinking.
In other Introvert UpThink posts I’ve explained that self-aware introverts may be less susceptible than extroverts to social pressures. We don’t much care about following the crowd or keeping up with other people’s standards of what’s normal. We treat ourselves well by developing habits that maintain our energy, regardless of how average people judge us. But here we have the added wrinkle of expectations that have specific unwanted consequences if we fail to meet them. The way other people think and act sets us up to give a signal we’d prefer not to give if we follow our druthers.
How can we wriggle out of this kind of social trap?
One solution proposed by Professor Sunstein involves collective action. For instance, women may notice that dressing up seems to now require wearing high heels that are ridiculously uncomfortable and unsafe. If a circle of women agreed to ditch this fashion, one woman deciding to wear low heels or flats would not convey a message that caused people in that circle to narrow their eyes. Likewise, if the friends invited to the birthday party in the first paragraph explicitly agreed, no gifts, the dilemma would dissolve.
You could also try to impress an alternate social meaning on your action. I remember a time a dentist cleaned my teeth, a task normally performed by a dental hygienist. He explained that he liked doing this because it helped him better get to know his patients and their teeth. Unsaid was: Please understand, I’m not too cheap, too ornery or too unsuccessful to have a dental hygienist on staff. At the time I was young, and thought, “Huh. Okay…” I wonder, though, how many people would have felt uncomfortable with this unconventional arrangement.
Professor Sunstein suggests that some “Barbie” setups might count as unfair or even illegal manipulation. For example, if an employer suggested everyone pray together every Monday morning, an employee who doesn’t believe in prayer would face the dilemma of whether to pretend to participate or to explicitly opt out. The employee prefers that the prayer session didn’t happen, but that solution isn’t within their power. They don’t want to dissent. They don’t want to file a legal complaint. They don’t want to appear discontented, because in every other respect they like the job. It’s a trap – and especially painful for an introvert who takes integrity seriously and doesn’t like to pretend.
In Cass Sunstein’s words, “Social dynamics can lead people to make choices they deplore.” Unfortunately, opting out the way introverts might prefer to sometimes carries a distasteful price.
Related posts
Introvert Superpower #5: Independence
Healthy Boundaries for Introverts
Authenticity Dilemmas for Introverts
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