Academic Reading — Test 40

Reading passage

In everyday social life, we tend to assume that flawless performance is the surest route to admiration. Yet a body of research in social psychology suggests that this assumption is only partly correct. Under certain conditions, a minor and harmless mistake can actually raise rather than lower the esteem in which a capable person is held. This counter-intuitive phenomenon is known as the pratfall effect, a term that borrows the old theatrical word for a clumsy, comic fall. The central claim is that competence and a touch of human fallibility, when combined, can be more appealing than competence alone. The idea was first investigated systematically in the 1960s by the American psychologist Elliot Aronson and his colleagues. In a now widely cited experiment, participants listened to a recording of a person answering a series of difficult quiz questions. In one version, the speaker performed brilliantly, answering almost every question correctly; in another, the same impressive performance was followed by a small embarrassing accident, in which the speaker appeared to spill a cup of coffee over a new suit. When participants were later asked how much they liked the speaker, the highly competent person who suffered the blunder was rated as more likeable than the equally competent person who did not. The mishap, far from damaging the speaker's image, seemed to make him more appealing. The explanation most often offered concerns the gap between an audience and a person who appears almost perfect. A flawless individual can seem distant, intimidating or even slightly irritating, because their faultlessness highlights the shortcomings of those watching. A small slip narrows this gap. It signals that the competent person is, after all, an ordinary human being who can be approached without anxiety. Psychologists describe this as an increase in relatability: the blunder makes the admired figure feel warmer and more genuine, and warmth is a powerful ingredient in liking. Importantly, the effect depends on the mistake being trivial. A serious error that calls the person's ability into question does not produce the same warmth; instead it simply confirms incompetence. A crucial qualification emerged from later studies, however. The pratfall effect does not work for everyone in the same way. Researchers found that it benefits people who are already perceived as highly competent, but it can harm those who are seen as average or below average. When a person of ordinary ability commits a blunder, observers tend to view the mistake as further evidence of weakness, and their liking falls. The same coffee spill, in other words, can be charming when an expert does it and damaging when a novice does it. The audience's prior expectations therefore shape how a single action is interpreted. The observer's own self-esteem may also play a role, although the evidence here is more mixed. Some research has suggested that people with average self-esteem respond most positively to a competent person's blunder, perhaps because they are most reassured by signs that admired individuals are not so different from themselves. People with very high self-esteem, by contrast, were sometimes found to like the flawless performer just as much, since they do not feel threatened by another person's excellence. Such findings indicate that the pratfall effect is not a simple, universal rule but a tendency that interacts with the characteristics of both the performer and the audience. The principle has attracted interest well beyond the laboratory. In marketing and advertising, brands sometimes admit to a minor flaw or a past failing in order to appear more honest and human, a tactic that can build trust when handled carefully. Public figures, including politicians and celebrities, are often advised that a small, self-deprecating admission can make them seem more approachable than a polished but cold image. Even in the design of artificial assistants and robots, engineers have explored whether occasional, clearly minor errors might make a machine feel more agreeable and trustworthy to the people using it. In each case the underlying logic is the same: a controlled display of imperfection can humanise an otherwise daunting impression of excellence. None of this means that mistakes are generally desirable, and the research carries an obvious warning. The advantage applies only to small, forgivable slips made by people whose competence is not in doubt, and it can quickly reverse when a blunder is large, frequent or genuinely consequential. A surgeon who drops an instrument inspires very different feelings from a quiz contestant who spills coffee. The pratfall effect is best understood, then, not as an invitation to be careless but as a subtle insight into human judgement: we warm most readily to those who are clearly skilled yet visibly, reassuringly human.