Erica Bailey
speaker
177 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Erica Bailey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh, thanks so much for having me again. It's so good to see you.
So I had just had my very first paper accepted. And that's a huge accomplishment as a PhD student. You're obsessed with getting a certain number of publications. In my mind, this is one step towards my dream job. You usually share these papers or these announcements with people, other academics. This used to be a space on Twitter. We called it Academic Twitter.
Now I think we're sort of migrating to different platforms. But usually you'll have an announcement. This is the paper I just published. This is who I worked on it with. And it can be a sort of self-promotional impression management self-expression. And I felt that drive to tell everyone how amazing I was that I had just gotten this paper accepted.
But what I thought would be even better is to sort of poke fun at the whole idea, right, that we're constantly trying to show other people this badge of our worth that we get externally. And so I tweeted, I just had my first paper accepted, and I'm happy to report that my self-esteem is now perfect and everything that's broken in me is fixed.
And as you can imagine, that kind of went viral in its own way, because I was poking fun at this idea that, of course, we want to share our accomplishments with other people. But at the end of the day, we're still here living with ourselves. I kind of didn't feel any different two days later after that paper got accepted.
Yeah, part of the pressure of social media that is so maladaptive and harmful for people is this pressure to always be sharing positive things and to only see the positive things that are going on in everyone else's life. This also happens at academic conferences.
I go to talk after talk of an amazing paper and then an amazing experiment and a crazy keynote speech that's summarizing someone's entire career. And that pressure that can make you feel like everyone is living this perfect, glamorous life because you don't see all the messy details that went into what people are going through or the steps that it took for them to get to where they are.
And sometimes sharing that information can be really powerful, especially from people who you think have really figured it out.
So I try and do this with PhD applicants or people that want to work in my lab is to explain, you know, I look a certain way to you and let me show you how much consternation there was to get to this point and how much of it is messiness and figuring it out and luck and chance. And that's as much a part of successes as hard work and timing and effort.
It's an aspect of life beyond social media. It's something we feel in many social contexts. It's almost a quintessential feature of being human. It's balancing this need for impression management concerns with wanting to share with people who you really are on the inside Maybe your deeper insecurities and criticisms. And what we want to try and find is the right balance between those things.
So you talked about people showing their failure resumes. Sometimes I have to look at my own success resume, my actual resume, to remind myself that as much as these stories of grandeur are not true, so too are sort of the overdue criticisms that we kind of put on ourselves. So there's a balance between
being aware of your shortcomings and how you can grow and the messiness of being human, as podcasters like to say, with kind of being aware of your growth and the potential that you have.
In a job interview, I would say that's a classic experience where people tend to feel very inauthentic. And I think those pressures are normalized because we expect that in a job interview, it's only self-promotional or a networking context is something where people feel that they really cannot be authentic. And sometimes what I like to do is just name that pressure.
It can help relieve that for all of us involved. If I'm at a networking event, to tell someone i know this is awkward but we're here to meet strategically this is not like a normal social setting and just by saying that somehow it relaxes the impression management concerns that we have
Buland is, I'm going to hire him to work on this paper together. I think this sense of freedom is related to autonomy or the ability that you have, the sense that you have that you're making deliberate choices of your own free will. He also mentions this sense of frictionlessness or feeling like there's not that external pressure.
And that's what I was getting in that moment in the car from my friends. I could sing with my not amazing Adele-like voice. And we're all laughing. We're all doing this together. So I felt that I could share some part of myself without having to worry how I was coming across. So that's absolutely part of it.
One thing I found in my research is it tends, authenticity also tends to emerge in these social environments where we feel very safe or connected to other people. We are social animals. We really feed on each other and we really desire to share our inner world with other people. So other people can be an important conduit towards feeling more like yourself.
I think of authenticity as really this important alignment between your inner sense of self and how you're expressing yourself in the world. And when I think about how that's experienced in different cultures, the end product to me that end authenticity is the same, but it's that content of either the self aspects that are really salient or the situations that make you feel really authentic.
Those might differ depending on cultural norms or backgrounds or experiences. So, for example, the listener mentioned cultures that are maybe more individualistic versus a culture that's more collectivistic.
And in an individualistic culture, maybe these moments where you feel like I've really found myself, I've really expressed myself, I've reached the pinnacle of self-individualization, that moment might make you feel really authentic. And for someone in a more collectivistic culture, interdependent culture,
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