The beautiful mess effect

Since her death in 1997, Princess Diana's life and personality have been the source of endless debate, but even her harshest critics would admit that she had an incredible capacity to connect with people. And that popularity has barely waned over the years since. In 2022, a YouGov survey found that she was still better liked than her ex-husband, Charles, who had just ascended the throne.

The public admiration seems to have arisen because, rather than in spite, of her flaws. In her controversial BBC Panorama interview in 1995, for example, she discussed her husband's infidelities, but also her mental health struggles and her love affairs. Some of these were 'open secrets', discussed in the press, but Diana had never before spoken about them in public and on the record. It was an extraordinarily candid conversation for such a prominent figure in the mid-1990s. Many of Diana's critics believed that she had provided her own character assassination, with one (the estranged husband of Camilla Parker Bowles, now Queen Consort) claiming that she had proven herself to be 'loopy, pretty half-witted, and possibly ought to be locked up'. And they expected the public to agree.

Such predictions could not have been more wrong. Diana's popularity soared in the days after the interview, with the Daily Mirror reporting that an astonishing 92 per cent of the public supported her appearance on the programme. A few weeks later, the Sunday Times ran a survey showing that 70 per cent of the population believed that Diana should be given an official role as a goodwill ambassador abroad (Brown, 2017).

In the decades since, we may have become accustomed to confessional interviews from celebrities, but we don't seem to have absorbed this in our personal lives. We overestimate how harshly we will be judged when we reveal a weakness or failure, and underestimate how much people will appreciate our honesty or courage. In general, people's perceptions of vulnerability are far more positive than we imagine – a phenomenon sometimes known as the 'beautiful mess effect'.

The fast-friendship procedure

Psychologists have long known that 'self-disclosure' about our deeper thoughts and feelings is essential for building strong bonds with others. In an experimental set-up known as the 'fast-friendship procedure' Arthur Aron asked pairs of participants to discuss a series of prompts designed to encourage personal revelation, such as "If you were able to live to the age of ninety and retain either the mind or body of a thirty-year-old for the last sixty years of your life, which would you want?" and "Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be and why?" 

Other pairs took part in more regular small talk. They discussed prompts such as "How did you celebrate last Halloween?" or "Describe the last pet that you owned". They were perfectly reasonable topics of conversation but wouldn't necessarily persuade the conversation partners to reveal much intimate or emotionally charged information.

After the 45 minutes were up, those having the high-disclosure conversations reported feeling considerably closer to their partners than those engaged in the more superficial chat. Indeed, according to one measure of connection, they were as close as you would expect in the average long-term friendship (Aron et al., 1997). 

The power of self-disclosure has now been demonstrated many times. We do not use it nearly as often as we could, though, thanks to generally pessimistic expectations about the course these conversations will take. We assume that they be full of awkward moments, and that others will not be interested in hearing about our revelations, and so we tend to opt for shallower conversations instead (Kardas, et al., 2022).

Courage in failure

As fascinating as they are, these experiments did not examine the 'emotional valence' of the disclosures (whether they were positive or negative). Intuitively, you would expect that revelations of the more embarrassing or undesirable elements of our lives could lose the respect of our conversation partners. Further research, however, suggests that others will most often take a kinder view of our foibles than we expect.

Consider a study in which participants were first asked to complete a questionnaire about various experiences in their lives. They had to say whether they had ever ridden a unicycle, visited a foreign city or wet the bed. After the participants had finished entering their data, they were told that a computer was busy preparing an automated biography of them – which the researcher then printed and handed to them.

In reality, the text was pre-planned in a way that would produce acute feelings of embarrassment. 'Although this student is not without faults,' it said, 'occasionally having some difficulties with bed wetting, he [or she] has continued to excel as a student at Cornell, and considers himself [or herself] to be a friendly, outgoing and caring person.' The texts also listed some hobbies and interests. As the participants were handed the document, they were told that another copy was going to be given to another student to evaluate. The participants then had to estimate how positively the new acquaintance would view them on a scale of 1 (much more negative than the impression of the average student) to 100 (much more positive than the impression of the average student). And the researchers really did give the introductory information to another student, and asked them to rate their impressions of how much they liked the person in question, using the same scale.

We can imagine the alleged bed-wetters' blushes as they read the printout, but the embarrassing information was interpreted far more positively than they predicted. The difference was particularly stark when the new acquaintances were equipped with additional statements about the student's hobbies and interests, in addition to the hints of nocturnal incontinence. With more details to process, they seem to have given surprisingly little weight to the slightly off-putting material; on the 100-point scale, they rated them at 69, an overwhelmingly positive evaluation. Remember that on this particular scale, the average student should receive a score of 50 – so this suggests that they were still highly inclined to make that person's acquaintance (Savitsky et al. 2001). 

Our egocentric thinking may lie behind these false expectations; we focus on the detail that is most salient to us – the source of our shame or embarrassment – while others are seeing the big picture. People are much less likely to think about your bedwetting if they know that you are someone who regularly helps their friends, who aces their exams, or who has excellent music taste. But we easily forget this, and expect that one embarrassing detail will override all other information.

In many cases, people will see a confession of vulnerability as a sign of authenticity. So even if the information that we provide is not, in itself, positive, it does at least show us that the other person is striving to create the joint understanding that is essential for a close bond to form, which could fuel people's desire to connect.

Dena Gromet and Emily Pronin at Princeton University asked students to imagine picking a few statements that might represent their inner life to a stranger. Some were asked to select from a list of fears and insecurities:

• I get frustrated easily and tend to give up on things before I should
• I'm overly critical of myself and often feel inadequate around others
• I can be closed-minded to ideas and opinions that are unlike my own
• I can be extremely impulsive and often regret the decisions I make

Others were asked to pick a few apt statements from a list of strengths, such as:

• I am pretty secure in who I am
• I am open to new ideas and opinions that are unlike my own
• I am level-headed and good at keeping my cool when making tough decisions
• I don't give up, and always try to see things through to the end

In each case, they were told that these statements would then be shown to another student, and were asked to answer the following question: How much on a scale of 1 (not very much) to 7 (very much) do you think this student would like you?

You can try it for yourself. What kinds of statements are more likely to foster connection? If you are like me, you would expect people to value the strengths over the weaknesses – and that's what the Princeton students thought, too. They assumed that their admissions of bad temper, closed-minded thinking and impulsivity would be rather off-putting.

To test whether those assumptions were justified, Gromet and Pronin next passed each set of statements on to a separate group of participants – and asked them to rate, on the same scale, how much they thought they would like the person who had written them. And their answers did not correspond at all to the first group's predictions. When reading someone's strength statements, this set of participants gave an average likeability rating of 3.8; when reading the vulnerability statements, they rated them as 4.3. As hypothesised, perceptions of authenticity seemed to drive this. When someone read about someone's vulnerabilities, they assumed that this person was more genuine, which increased their likeability (Gromet & Pronin, 2009).

Multiple psychological experiments have now replicated these findings. Whether it's declaring a secret crush, revealing our physical insecurities or admitting to a serious mistake at work, we assume that we will be judged harshly for our confessions. But many people will be more capable of empathising with our situation and appreciating our bravery in opening up (Bruk et al., 2018). Embracing our vulnerability can even benefit people in positions of power, who may strive to present a strong and flawless image to their followers. Leaders who disclose a potentially embarrassing weakness – such as shyness, anxiety about public speaking, or a fear of flying – score more highly on ratings of authenticity and engender greater loyalty from their workforce (Jiang et al., 2022).

Such findings chime with the qualitative research of the writer Brené Brown, who has spent years interviewing people about their feelings of shame. 'We love seeing raw truth and openness in other people, but we are afraid to let them see it in us,' she wrote in Daring Greatly (Brown, 2012). 'I'm drawn to your vulnerability but repelled by my own.' We should all feel less shame for our imperfections, and the latest scientific findings should give us the confidence to bond over the beautiful mess of our lives.

David Robson is an award-winning science writer and author of The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Transform Your Life, published on 6^th June by Canongate. 

References

Aron, A., Melinat, E., Aron, E. N., Vallone, R. D., & Bator, R. J. (1997). The experimental generation of interpersonal closeness: a procedure and some preliminary findings. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(4), 363–377.

Bruk, A., Scholl, S. G., & Bless, H. (2018). Beautiful mess effect: self–other differences in evaluation of showing vulnerability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(2), 192; Jaffé, M. E., Douneva, M., & Albath, E. A. (2023). Secretive and close? How sharing secrets may impact perceptions of distance. Plos one, 18(4), e0282643.

Brown, T. (2017). The Diana Chronicles (p. 354). Random House. Kindle Edition.

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. London, UK: Penguin. 

Freud, S. (1958). The dynamics of transference. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12. (pp. 97–108). London: Hogarth Press (Original work published 1912).

Gromet, D. M., & Pronin, E. (2009). What were you worried about? Actors' concerns about revealing fears and insecurities relative to observers' reactions. Self and Identity, 8(4), 342–364.

Henretty, J. R., & Levitt, H. M. (2010). The role of therapist self-disclosure in psychotherapy: A qualitative review. Clinical psychology review, 30(1), 63-77.

Jiang, L., John, L. K., Boghrati, R., & Kouchaki, M. (2022). Fostering perceptions of authenticity via sensitive self-disclosure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 28(4), 898-915.

Kardas, M., Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). Overly shallow?: miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(3), 367.

Savitsky, K., Epley, N., & Gilovich, T. (2001). Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Overestimating the impact of our failures, shortcomings, and mishaps. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 44-56.