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There is a psychologist at Harvard Business School who is dutifully working away at solving one of the biggest problems facing knowledge workers today; I am speaking, of course, of the pervasive problem of awkwardness. Over the past several years, Francesca Gino has published academic papers and popular press articles dissecting the particular social discomfort associated with the workplace. Often, her work has focused on networking, or the gentle art of forming relationships with others who work in your field. She’s found, for example, that people associate networking with actual disgust; she’s also found that the activity becomes markedly more palatable if you focus less on yourself.

哈佛商学院一位心理学家几年来锲而不舍对知识型工人今天面临的最大问题进行研究;没错，说的就是「尴尬症」。过去几年里，Francesca Gino发表了许多学术论文和通俗文章，解剖和讨论这种症状。她主要研究如何团队合作及同事关系。她发现，实际上人们很厌恶团队合作;当然，她也发现如果人们不过度自我关注，团队合作会变得更加愉快。

Her latest piece, published last week in Harvard Business Review, provides a third tip that is just as useful as the first two: Meeting someone new in a work context will go much more smoothly if only you would stop trying to guess what it is they want from you. In two experiments — one involving students in a laboratory setting and the other involving actual entrepreneurs — Gino and her colleagues find that “catering to another person’s interests and expectations, as opposed to behaving authentically, harms performance.” For the study on entrepreneurs, for example, the researchers examined real pitches to potential investors, and found that when entrepreneurs tried to shape their pitches around what they believed their investors wanted, they were less likely to receive funding than those who simply stuck to a truthful depiction of themselves and their ideas.

Gino在《哈佛商业评论》上的最新文章提出了一则有用的小贴士：在职场上，不去猜测别人想要什么，与之建立关系会变得更加容易。Gino和她的同事进行了两个实验，一个在实验室环境下进行，对象是学生，另一个的对象是真正的企业家。她们发现，“迎合别人的利益和期望，不表现真实的自己，反而会表现不好”。在对企业家的实验中，研究者发现，当企业家在宣传中试着迎合潜在投资者的需要，比起真实宣传的企业家，他们募到的资金反而更少。

Likewise, in the lab study, the researchers held a mock job interview, and either told the participating students to try to mold themselves to what it seemed like their interviewer wanted (they called that the “catering” condition) or to behave normally, by presenting their strengths honestly and accurately (this they called the “authenticity” condition). The “interviewer” in this case was a study volunteer, too, who wasn’t aware of the purpose of the research. More often than not, the students cast in the role of interviewer told researchers that they’d be less likely to offer the job to the students in the “catering” condition.

同样地，在对学生的实验中，研究者举行了一次模拟求职面试，随机地让一部分学生试着迎合面试官(她们称这些学生为“迎合”组)，让另外的学生表现真实的自己(这些学生为“真实”组)。“面试官”是志愿者，并不了解实验的真正目的。从“面试官”的反馈来看，他们大多不太愿意录用“迎合”组的学生。

One explanation for this: People are generally pretty bad at guessing at what’s going on in someone else’s head. Research has suggested, for example, that your understanding of what others think of you is more informed by your own opinions of yourself than the feedback that others provide. (Perhaps this can help explain the depressing study out this summer, which announced that “Half Your Friends Probably Don’t Think of You As a Friend.”)

对此种现象的一个解释是：人们实在很不擅长推测别人的想法。举栗：研究表明，人们通常都是按照自己的想法，而非别人的真实反馈，来衡量别人如何看待自己。

Beyond that, in the fake job-interview experiment, the interviewees were also asked how nervous they felt, and those in the catering condition reported more anxiety than those in the authenticity condition. So: Trying to guess what a job interviewer or potential investor wants out of you will probably make you nervous, and, chances are, you’ll guess wrong, anyway. As so often is the case, the best advice is the simplest — just be you. Or, at least, a slightly-more-pulled-together and generally-on-top-of-things version of you.

另外，在模拟求职面试的实验中，“求职者”们需要告诉研究者自己有多紧张。结果显示，“迎合”组比“真实”组焦虑感更高。也就是说(敲黑板)：猜测面试官或潜在投资者的想法会引起焦虑，而猜错的比例永远大过猜对的比例。因此最好最简单的选择就是——做自己。至少也得是相对真实的版本。