Why do people suck at evaluating each other?
Plus, obnoxious Americans in Japan, how to get a job you’re totally unqualified for, and why beautiful women hate Tinder.
One day, when I was 18 years old, I put on my best suit, took the train into San Francisco, and walked into J.Crew.
I was there for a job interview. Of course, I bullshitted my way through it.
“Why do you want to work at J. Crew?” she asked me.
“Because I want to learn about men’s fashion,” I told her. (No, I just wanted a fuckin’ job!)
The lady liked me, and she hired me.
I didn’t really have the social skills to sell clothes at that point in my life. (I probably still don’t.) So I spent most of my time at J. Crew standing around doing nothing. (If anything, I probably cost the company sales by making the customers uncomfortable.)
18-year-old Theo got a job he was unqualified for, because he was misevaluated.
The opposite of 18-year-old Theo is Rich Bisaccia, who didn’t get a job he was qualified for.
In 2021, Bisaccia was the Las Vegas Raiders’ special teams coordinator when full-time head coach Jon Gruden had to resign. Bisaccia was hired as the interim head coach, went 7-5, and led the Raiders to the playoffs.
The Raiders players all said they wanted Bisaccia to get hired as full-time head coach. Raiders fans in internet discussion boards all said they wanted Bisaccia to get hired as full-time head coach. The Raiders let him walk instead. None of the other 31 NFL teams hired him as full-time head coach, either. And today, Rich Bisaccia is once again a special teams coordinator
Why didn’t the Raiders hire Bisaccia full-time? One reason is because he just doesn’t seem like a football coach. When NFL owners look at him, he seems timid and shy. His results should speak for themselves, but they don’t, because he sucks at selling himself.
Rich Bisaccia didn’t get a job he was qualified for, because he was misevaluated.
People suck at evaluating each other.
One of Billy Beane’s big breakthroughs — the thing that helped him consistently turn the A’s into a winning baseball team with the second-lowest payroll in Major League Baseball — was that he stopped seeing baseball players as people.
He ignored his scouting department, who evaluated players by talking to them and watching them play. And he started listening to a bunch of math nerds, who viewed baseball players as rows in a spreadsheet.
He would draft and sign guys who looked good according to the spreadsheets. Turns out, the spreadsheets did a better job than the scouts.
Ray Dalio, the founder of legendary hedge fund Bridgewater Capital, figured out the same thing Billy Beane figured out. Whenever he hired somebody, he had them take a whole bunch of personality tests. He would interview them, too, but he weighed the personality tests more heavily. (He said in his book Principles that if he had to choose between interviewing job candidates and having them take personality tests, he’d pick the personality tests.)
The point I’m trying to make is that people suck at evaluating other people. So much so that businesses can actually get a competitive advantage by ignoring their gut instincts about people and evaluating them in a more impersonal way.
Billy Beane and Ray Dalio were smart enough to realize how dumb they are. But most people aren’t. Most people think they can judge other people well based on a first impression. Usually, they can’t.
That’s true in job interviews. It’s also true in friendship, dating, and just about every other arena on the planet where people make new relationships with people outside their immediate family.
Why do people suck at evaluating each other?
The first reason is because we evolved a set of heuristics for evaluating people. Those heuristics are designed for speed, not for accuracy — because on the African savannah, we had to judge people in just a few seconds, otherwise they might club us to death.
For example, if someone is a different skin color than us, our brains perceive them as a threat — because back on the African savannah, if someone looked different than us, it meant they were more likely to club us to death.
The second reason why evaluating people is hard is because people are always trying to make themselves look better than they are. So if you want to know who someone is, you have to see through their façade first.
A comical example: In the musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, the protagonist J. Pierrepont Finch rushes into his office a few minutes before his boss gets into work. Then he ruffles his hair, undoes the top button of his shirt, and does his best to look tired. When his boss walks in, he thinks Finch has been working all night.
One interesting consequence of this: if you just make one mistake, it can ruin everything. For example, if you’re at a job interview, and you’re super nice and polite 99% of the time, and one time you tell the interviewer to go fuck themself, they will ignore all the times you were polite and focus on when you told them to go fuck themself. They will think you are a mean person and that your politeness was just a façade.
(This sucks sometimes, because sometimes you make a “mistake” that’s really just a misunderstanding.)
The third reason why evaluating people is so hard is because people are really fucking complicated.
Imagine how difficult it would be to understand a video game controller with a billion different buttons. Well, that’s how hard humans are to understand. Because you have billions of neural connections in your brain, and all of them influence your personality in one way or another. (That’s why couples who have been married for 20 years are still learning new things about each other.)
How many neural connections can you guess at when you talk to someone for 30 minutes? Maybe 1% of them, tops.
The fourth reason why evaluating people is really hard is because it’s an emotional decision. We’re usually blinded by whether or not we like someone. It can be hard to tell when someone we like is totally incompetent (or the reverse, when someone we don’t like is really good).
For example, when I was 12 I played on an elite travel baseball team. The coach of that elite travel baseball team put his son in to pitch all the time. His son had a good fastball, so he seemed like a good pitcher, except he couldn’t throw a strike to save his life. So we lost all the time because he would walk too many batters and give up too many runs.
The fifth reason is that evaluating people can be exhausting. Beautiful women sometimes complain that when they go on Tinder, they get too many matches, and it’s a pain in the ass to sort through them and decide which guys they actually want to talk to.
Similarly, when I post a freelance job on UpWork, I usually have like 50 people apply within the first few hours.
Now, imagine if you had to hire for a job and there were 50 people applying. How do you decide who to hire? It’s exhausting. Some people get stuck in analysis paralysis and choose based on something superficial or dumb. (Or they give up and choose no one.)
This is one of the fundamental injustices of the world. There are tons of talented people who are bad at getting other people to like them, either because they’re the wrong race, or the wrong gender, or because their social skills suck, or because they have a weird mole on their face that distracts people, or something else.
If we could evaluate each other better, the world would be more “fair”. It would also work better, because people would get sorted into jobs that are more suitable for them. Unfortunately, we suck at evaluating each other, so this is the sort of world we’re stuck with.
If you don’t want to get fucked by the system, you need to understand how people evaluate each other.
So how do people evaluate each other? That’s a complex subject, and I can’t cover it all in one single article, but here’s a few ways people judge each other:
First Impressions
Olivia Fox Cabane, author of The Charisma Myth, says that many executives confess to her that they decide whether or not to hire somebody within the first 4-5 seconds of meeting them. “The rest of the interview is just window dressing,” said one anonymous CEO.
On the plains of Africa, early humans had to decide whether other early humans were a threat. They had to decide within a second or two, because sometimes you only had a second or two before somebody started hitting you over the head with a club. So we evolved to evaluate people within a split second.
Those split-second evaluations usually last for as long as you know somebody. If you meet a coworker and he doesn’t like you, and then you work together for 20 years, chances are he still won’t like you. It’s very hard to undo a first impression.
Many cultures have some sort of greeting mechanism so that people can size each other up in the first few seconds of meeting each other. In the West, for example, we shake each other’s hands. Then, we judge people by the strength and technique of their handshake. In Japan, they bow to each other, then judge each other by how properly they perform the bow. Et cetera.
The problem is that first impressions just don’t tell you that much. You can’t possibly know if someone’s trustworthy or competent based on your first impression of them. All you can really see are surface level details like the clothes they wear and how handsome they are, plus the emotional state they’re in when you meet them.
A lot of great potential relationships don’t happen because somebody gets a bad first impression of a good person.
Plus, some people are systematically bad at making first impressions. Maybe they get nervous. Maybe they get over-excited. Maybe they make some other mistake. Whatever the case, they usually screw up their first meeting with people, which screws up their entire relationship with all those people, forever.
How Confident Are You?
When I was a door to door salesman, I learned to always speak confidently. If my voice ever betrayed a hint of not being confident, I lost the sale.
That’s because people heuristically assume that confident people know what they’re talking about, and that unconfident people don’t know what they’re talking about. So when I seemed unconfident, people read from my body language that I didn’t actually think they should buy, and they slammed their door in my face.
The interesting thing is that it’s usually the reverse: confident people usually know less, and unconfident people usually know more.
Why? Because most things are far too complex for puny humans to understand. If someone’s claiming that they know a stock will go up, or they know that the economy will crash, tune them out. Because no one knows what the fuck is gonna happen in the stock market, and anyone who says they do is lying.
Instead, trust people who speak probabilistically: if they say the stock market will probably go up (or even better, that there’s a 75% chance it will go up), that’s a sign they actually understand how complex the stock market is.
Being A “Team Player”
Japanese companies often hire a “loud American”.
In Japanese culture, you are not allowed to criticize the boss. If you criticize the boss, you’ll lose face and you could lose your job.
The problem is, the boss is wrong sometimes, and sometimes you need to criticize him. So whenever the company’s employees want to tell the boss he’s being a fucking idiot, they get the American guy to do it for them.
Even in America, which is full of “loud Americans”, there is a taboo against telling the boss he’s wrong. Most big companies don’t want employees who rock the boat. When they’re wrong, they would rather continue being wrong than get humiliated by an underling.
People are always trying to see who is on their side. When someone agrees with us, it means they’re an ally. People like allies. So if you agree with someone all the time, they’ll like you.
One interesting note: in dating, it’s usually the opposite. Beautiful women are used to men agreeing with them all the time. And they know why they’re doing it. So when you disagree with a beautiful woman, it shows that you’re not intimidated by them, and they actually get a little bit turned on.
(A couple months ago I met a beautiful Dutch woman in a café. She started telling me about her healing crystals and about telepathy. I gave her a “you’re-a-fucking-idiot” death stare. Then she started giggling.)
The “One Thing”
One time I was on a call with a potential copywriting client. I briefly mentioned the “marshmallow test” psychology study.
Then the guy hired me a spot. “Yes!” he said. It turns out he was a huge fan of that study.
Pretty much everybody has a bunch of weird ideas that they use to evaluate people. Maybe they will like you more if you have read their favorite book. Maybe they will like you less if you wear a green tie. Maybe they will think you’re a harder worker if you played sports in college. Et cetera. 9 times out of 10, it’s total bullshit.
(I’m guilty of this too. One time I had to hire somebody on UpWork. There were like 50 job applicants and it was really hard for me to tell the difference between them. A guy named “Theophilus” applied, and “Theophilus” is very similar to my name, so I ended up being drawn to him over the other candidates. I gave him the job, and I’ve probably given him around $2,000 worth of work since.)
Everyone has a different “one thing”, and it’s hard to predict what it will be before you know them. It’s usually some weird pet peeve based on some random thing that happened to them 20 years ago, that they’ve never talked about with anyone except their therapist.
There isn’t really a good way to predict what somebody’s “one thing” is gonna be. You just have to stumble around blindly and hope you don’t accidentally fail their tests.
(The only exception is if you can talk to someone else who knows that person well — sometimes they will know what the “one thing” is, and can tip you off. So if you’re interviewing for a job, get there early and befriend the boss’s secretary, then ask her about him.)
How Can You Suck Less At Evaluating People?
One person who was great at evaluating people was the legendary Raiders owner Al Davis.
Davis hired the first minority head coach (Tom Flores), the first black head coach (Art Shell), and the first woman executive (Amy Trask) in NFL history. He didn’t do this for social justice points or for attention. (In fact, nobody gave him any points for hiring Flores and Trask until recently.)
Flores and Trask were both excellent hires. Flores won 2 Super Bowls as Raiders Head Coach, and both Flores and Trask are in the Hall of Fame today. (Shell wasn’t as good, but performed adequately.)
Davis also promoted his linebackers’ coach to head coach when he was just 32 years old (an unprecedented move at the time). People asked Davis whether it was smart to hire a 32 Year old head coach. Davis responded that the coach was a super smart dude and knew football really well, and he had confidence in him. (You might have heard of that coach — his name was John Madden.
Al Davis’s secret is that he was a really good judge of character. He was good at looking past surface level details, and understanding what was going on inside people’s heads.
The lesson you can learn from him is, try and judge people for what’s going on inside their heads, not for surface-level stuff like their skin color, their age, their emotional state, the clothes they wear, et cetera. This won’t come naturally to most people — it requires setting aside your preconceived notions and thinking really hard. But it’s worth it.
Know What You’re Looking For In Advance
The OnlyFans star/sex researcher Aella has a form on her Twitter account where you can apply to date her. If you want to date her, just fill out the survey. If you meet her criteria, she might reply to you.
She says that the guys she dates from her surveys are usually way more compatible with her than the guys she meets at bars or on dating apps.
What can you learn from Aella? If you know what the right person looks like, you’re more likely to find the right person.
Why? Because this helps you avoid making rash judgements about someone because you like or dislike them. When you have objective criteria, you judge people less by their social skills and more by their competency.
So if you’re hiring for a job, make a list of the traits someone needs to actually do the job well. Or if you want to get married, make a list of everything you’re looking for in a spouse. Then, figure out how to test people for those traits.
Understand That Everyone Is Lying To You
When I was 12, my parents got a new couch. It was a really nice couch.
They forbade me from sitting on the new couch. And they covered it up with an ugly sheet so that it wouldn’t get dirty.
The couch stayed covered up 99% of the time. But when my parents had friends coming over, they’d take off the ugly sheet, and show off their new couch proudly.
People are always trying to make good impressions on each other. In order to do that, they present only the best sides of themselves, and they stretch the truth a little.
So if you want to really understand someone, you have to look below the surface. Do not simply take what they’re saying at face value: analyze why they’re saying what they’re saying. Try and see the underlying emotions, character traits, and insecurities that influence who they are.
Create Pressure
Walt Bettinger, the former CEO of Charles Schwab, would take job applicants to breakfast. He would tell the restaurant staff to deliberately screw up their orders. Then when the food came, he would watch how they reacted.
Why’d he do it? He wanted to stress his potential hires out a little bit — because when you’re stressed out, it’s way harder to hide your true character.
The problem with sit-down interviews is that the guy on the other side of the table can just tell you what you want to hear. So find a way to raise the stakes.
You can do this by playing some sort of game together. (In an episode of the TV show White Collar, the main character Neal Caffrey has to beat his interviewer at billiards in order to get a job robbing Yankee Stadium.)
Even better: if you’re hiring for a really important position — like a football coach for your football team, or a general manager of logistics for your worldwide shipping company, or your future wife/husband — then you should take applicants on an “intense date” as early as possible.
An intense date is anything where things will be uncomfortable and are highly likely to go wrong. (For example, going camping.) When things get uncomfortable and/or go wrong, see how your candidate reacts.
If you can’t put pressure on someone, the next best thing is to have an informal conversation with them. (The more formal the conversation, the more bullshit people spew.) So don’t take job applicants to your office — take them to lunch, or take them to the golf course.
If you see someone in a formal setting, pay close attention to them during less formal moments. The legendary sports agent Mark McCormack says that he got a better read on people in the informal first 2-3 minutes of meetings, when people would aimlessly chit-chat, than he did when they actually got down to business. Because during the informal 2-3 minutes, people let their guard down more and showed their true selves.
A Brief Conclusion
I’ll conclude by saying this: the most important skill when evaluating people is, be willing to admit that you’re wrong about somebody.
If someone makes a bad first impression on you, give them a second chance to win you over. And if someone makes a good first impression on you, give them a second chance to piss you off.
Hey! Thanks for reading.
My name’s Theo and every Monday I publish an article about whatever was on my mind the week before. Usually relating to humans, psychology, or how society works.
If you liked this article, you might like my article about how relationships work:
How relationships work
Plus, Taylor Swift rejects Travis Kelce, why mafia dons hire blood relatives, and how to get paid to make friends.
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