Last week I attended Sarah Ruhl’s critically acclaimed play “Eurydice” at the famous Avante-garde Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia.
One of the Wilma Theatre’s trademarks is their post-play discussion forum, in which academic experts are invited to engage informally with the audience on a specific topic or theme of the play. Eurydice is the story of a young woman who dies unexpectedly and is cast without any memories to the underworld, where she’s reunited with her kindly father but separated from her still-living, covetous lover. Since I’ve done a fair amount of research on people’s concepts of the afterlife, I was invited to serve on this particular panel along with classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz and poet Eleanor Wilner.
The play itself was stunning and many aspects of it resonated with my own sterile laboratory findings and theoretical ideas regarding people’s thinking about death. As oftentimes happens when I give professional talks, though, the anticipatory anxiety of being “on the stage” and the centre of attention nearly got the better of me, threatening to disarm me of any semblance of an intellect. But then, just before the forum began, I remembered a nifty little study that never fails to lessen my fear of public speaking.
More on that soon, but first I’d like to clarify a common misconception. You might think that professional academics – professors, lecturers, researchers and so on – are so accustomed to giving talks that whatever jitters we have in this area are quickly overcome by teaching experience. But think about it. Most of us got into this business to begin with because we were data hermits, theory ghouls, and trivia mongers, not because of our suave social skills.
In my case, it seems I was working happily on my PhD research, lost in the quiet Eden of the laboratory, when wham! the next thing I know I’m an assistant professor at a major state university in a 9 a.m. lecture hall stuffed with gum-chewing, text-messaging students more eagre to be entertained than educated. We do learn to play the game, but that takes time. In some sense, the more reclusive we are with respect to our myopic and obsessive research activities, the more productive and well-known we become, and the more, ironically, we’re asked to be spokespeople and ambassadors for our disciplines.
Now, when it comes to blowing it in talks, I’ve given some real doozies. One of my more embarrassing faux pas, among many, was accidentally referring to someone who raised their hand by my same-sex partner’s name. Rather than just correcting myself and moving on, which would have been the normal thing to do, I pointed out the exact nature of my mistake to the entire audience, which proceeded to squirm in silent, tense, awkward discomfort. (It probably didn’t help that the seats were filled with officials from the US military.) In graduate school, I blew what I thought at the time was my “big shot” when I flubbed my lines for a Scientific American documentary, and it was so bad they eventually edited me out of the piece entirely. Then there was the time that I had a hypoglycaemic reaction during a job talk. They didn’t know quite what to make of me when I interrupted my speech to dig for loose change in my pockets before instructing my prospective employer to go out in the hall and buy me a Snickers bar.
Fortunately, none of that happened at the Eurydice talk, and overall it went well. (I must say, however, that I did find it mildly disconcerting to stake out my position that the afterlife is simply a cognitive illusion when most of the folks in the audience had retired around the year I was born.) Yet I’ve suffered from social anxiety for years, and nothing exacerbates the condition more than staring into the expectant eyes of a hundred strangers. Other people’s minds are extremely potent. I’ve always liked Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit,” in which he captures this idea very clearly. When one of the characters, Garcin, realises that his suffering is being caused by worrying about what others think of him, another character drives the stake in: “See how weak I am, a mere breath on the air, a gaze observing you, a formless thought that thinks you.” Other minds may well enough be “mere breath on the air” but, again, it’s potent stuff. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that many speakers who suffer from social anxiety take to alcohol and other anxiolytic drugs to dilute the strong presence of other minds. Yet if only they’d read a bit of social psychology research, they might not resort to such extremes.
And this is the nifty little study I was referring to earlier. In a 2003 article published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, investigators Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich asked a group of Cornell undergraduate students to give unprepared speeches before an audience. The authors’ working hypothesis was that an illusion of transparency, whereby speakers believe that their inner anxiety and nervousness is more apparent to the audience than it actually is, triggers a vicious cycle of increasing stress that eventually undermines the speaker’s performance.
In their central study, Savitsky and Gilovich explored the possibility that simply informing speakers about the illusion of transparency may reduce speech anxiety and improve the speakers’ performance. Or, in their words, “disabusing individuals of the notion that their nervousness is ‘written all over their face’ may forestall the spiral of anxiety.” To investigate this, the authors randomly assigned a group of students to one of three speech conditions: (1) the control condition, in which speakers weren’t given any information; (2) the informed condition, in which the illusion of transparency was fully explained to speakers beforehand, and; (3) the reassured condition, in which participants were basically told that anxiety is normal and they should do their best. Specifically, those in the informed condition heard the following before their talk:
I think it might help you to know that research has found that audiences can’t pick up on your anxiety as well as you might expect. Psychologists have documented what is called an “illusion of transparency.” Those speaking feel that their nervousness is transparent, but in reality their feelings are not so apparent to observers. This happens because our own emotional experience can be so strong, we are sure our emotions “leak out.” In fact, observers aren’t as good as picking up on a speaker’s emotional state as we tend to expect. So, while you might be so nervous you’re convinced that everyone can tell how nervous you are, in reality that’s very rarely the case. What’s inside of you typically manifests itself too subtly to be detected by others. With this in mind, you should just relax and try to do your best. Know that if you become nervous, you’ll probably be the only one to know.
Speakers in all three conditions then delivered their talks in front of a videocamera. They also faced a one-way mirror behind which they were told an audience was observing them (when in fact there was nobody there).
The results? Speakers in the informed condition evaluated their own performance more positively than those in the other two conditions, expected their speech to be rated more positively by observers, and judged themselves as appearing significantly more relaxed during their talks. Furthermore, when independent observers actually coded the videotaped talks without knowing which participants were assigned to which condition, those speakers in the informed condition were rated as being more relaxed, more composed, more expressive, more effective, more stylistic, and delivering a better speech overall than those randomly assigned to the other two groups.
Knowing about the illusion of transparency, summarise the authors, allowed speakers to be better speakers.
