We’re often drawn to people who appear to be true to themselves. Yet showing our authentic selves to the world can be terrifying. This week, we kick off 2025 with a new series, “Wellness 2.0.” We’ll go beyond New Year’s resolutions to take a deep look at how we can approach our lives with a sense of meaning and purpose. Today on the show, we begin our series with researcher Erica Bailey, who studies authenticity and what it means to truly be ourselves.Happy New Year from all of us at Hidden Brain! If you liked today's episode, please check out our companion Hidden Brain+ conversation with Erica Bailey. We've extended our free trial period to 30 days for listeners who sign up via Apple Podcasts during the month of January. To try Hidden Brain+ on Apple Podcasts, click the "try free" button on our show page in the app, or go to apple.co/hiddenbrain.
Chapter 1: What does it mean to be authentic?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Dance like no one is watching. Sing like you are alone in the shower. Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. Countless aphorisms remind us that as we move through life, we have a choice. We can pretend and disguise who we are, or we can be true to ourselves.
What does it mean to be ourselves no matter what they say, as the musician Gordon Sumner, better known as Sting, once instructed us? Don't we all contain multitudes? Is there really only one true self? And even if there is, how wise is it to always reveal ourselves?
As social creatures, heavily dependent on the people around us, does it really make sense to ignore how others see us and march to our own drummers? The evidence about authenticity seems clearer when the shoe is on the other foot. When we are evaluating other people, most of us are extremely suspicious of people who may not be what they seem.
When we discover someone has lied to us, either implicitly or explicitly, we read this as betrayal. We distrust those who say one thing in public and do something else in private. This is why politicians learn to look you in the eye as they speak to you. Why they master the art of the firm handshake and the steady voice. This is really me they're trying to say. What you see is what you get.
Today on the show, and in a companion episode on our subscription feed, Hidden Brain Plus, we explore new psychological research into what happens when we are true to ourselves and when we are not. It's the kickoff episode to a new series we're calling Wellness 2.0. We'll go beyond the angst surrounding New Year's resolutions and answer a deeper question. What does it mean to live well?
Over the next few weeks, we'll talk about how to keep your cool during stressful times and how to rise to the occasion during moments of crisis. We'll also help you figure out what you actually want in life and how to embrace the role that chance plays in shaping who you are. We begin with what it means and what it takes to live an authentic life. How to be yourself, this week on Hidden Brain.
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Chapter 2: How do we define authenticity in our lives?
Every day, we're called upon to play many roles.
Parent, spouse, employee, neighbor, friend. Some roles may feel like the real us, and some may feel put on, even fake. What are the benefits of aligning who we are on the outside with who we are on the inside, and what are the costs of those two selves being out of alignment? Erica Bailey is a social scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
She has long been interested in the science and the subtleties of authenticity. Erica Bailey, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much for having me.
Chapter 3: What experiences shaped Erica Bailey's understanding of authenticity?
Erica, when you were growing up, you were very involved in the fundamentalist church that was at the heart of your community. What was this church?
So this was a small religious group in central Ohio. It was related through my parents and people that they knew. It had all of the earmarks, I would say, of what you would consider a cult in terms of being a very high control group, having really strict ideologies, and a lot of isolation from people who are not part of the group.
How much of a role did this church play in your life, do you think, as you were growing up?
It started off sort of smaller or a little bit distanced from us. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so a couple hours away. It gradually increased to become an incredibly central part of my life. It was a place we would spend hours and hours every week. with people from the community in the church itself. And by the time I was 19, 20, I was kind of all in.
I was living full time with people from the group. I was evangelizing on behalf of the group. And it really kind of took up my whole identity.
I would imagine now you must have had close friends in the group. And in fact, maybe much of your social community was coming from this group.
Almost entirely, my social community was this group itself. They really discouraged having outside relationships and really told you or taught you both implicitly and explicitly that this should be your whole life, that this message that they had was so important, it was worth sort of forsaking any outside connections that might distract you from what the group was really about.
At the time, of course, Erika didn't think she was in a cult. Like all of us, she wanted direction in her life, and the church seemed to confidently point the way.
Most people are drawn to a group like this, I think, because we are incredibly curious and maybe a little insecure about what is this life all about? What am I all about? What's my purpose? What's my meaning in life? And we're looking for someone who could help provide those answers for us. And the group provided a really appealing idea that we have all of the answers.
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Chapter 4: How does inauthenticity affect our mental health?
You know, I'm 20 years old. And... That felt like very small. I'm sure, you know, no one in the movie theater would have thought I was doing anything brave. But to me, it was a first step towards reclaiming my autonomy and realizing that, you know, maybe it's okay to have the desire to go see a movie and to just follow that desire.
I'm wondering how the church responded to your evolution. You told me in the past they had not looked kindly at people who stepped out of line.
Yeah. So they were not a fan of what I was doing. They were not a fan of the things I was saying. The way that that was communicated was in a couple of one-on-one meetings and then the people really closest to me trying to implore me to sort of step back, to change my behavior, to sort of come back into the fold.
At that point, I felt that that had been so severed that it almost felt like I couldn't come back. It felt like I was living in a totally different reality now from these people. And I couldn't sit in the same rooms that I was in before. So
It started off with these conversations, and then it very quickly escalated into formal excommunication, which is I had to move out of my apartment where I was living with another member of the church. I lost contact with my immediate family at the time. Thankfully, we've reconnected since then.
And I lost connections with pretty much every single person that I knew, including people I would consider family at that point.
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Chapter 5: What is emotional labor and how does it relate to authenticity?
Wow. Wow. That must have been extraordinarily destabilizing, Erika.
It was really destabilizing and it was really, really painful. Some of these relationships have still not been repaired. I still feel them like open wounds of these people that I really cared for. And what I try to remember is they believe that they're doing the right thing. They think that you have to cut someone out of the group in order to maintain the functioning of the group.
And also in order to teach that person a lesson that if we release you out into the world, you'll sort of learn the world is wrong and you'll want to come back in. So slowly but surely, every person that I knew gave me a call and said, hey, you know, I'm sorry, but we can't we can't talk anymore.
At one time or another, we've all felt the painful disjunction Erica is talking about, a mismatch between how we feel on the inside and how we're expected to be on the outside. When we come back, the costs of being inauthentic and the benefits of being your true self. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Social life often calls on us to act in ways that don't match up with what we feel or believe. What are the consequences of this mismatch? And what do we gain when we bring our inner and outer selves into alignment? Erica Bailey is a social scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the psychology of authenticity.
Erika, we just heard about how painful it was for you to feel that your inner self was not in accord with the community that surrounded you. Scholars in your field have found that your experience was not unique when the inner self is not in alignment with the outer self. This can produce feelings of stress and exhaustion.
Yeah. So this feeling we refer to as inauthenticity and inauthenticity has a couple of sources or variants. On the one hand, you can feel inauthentic because you don't know who you are. So you feel like yourself is somewhere separate. You feel disconnected from that true self and it feels inaccessible almost to you.
On the other hand, inauthenticity could also be, I know very well who I am and what I want to say in this moment, but for whatever reason, I'm choosing to deny that. I'm choosing to express myself in a way that's counter to that internal experience.
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Chapter 6: What are the consequences of being inauthentic?
So basically, the idea is that you're not just being hired to do a job, but you're required to manage and produce feelings that you might not actually be feeling, which, of course, is another way of saying you're required to be inauthentic.
Exactly. Or at times you're required to be inauthentic. As someone who worked in restaurants, sometimes you are having a great conversation with someone. You are smiling because you're having a good day, but that's not always the case. We've seen a lot post-COVID of these videos of customer service representatives, essential workers, airline attendants that are having to deal with
people who are speaking to them in a way that's inappropriate or not respectful. And, you know, deep down, they must be hurting. They must be upset. But they have to maintain that air of professionalism, even under those high pressure situations.
You know, I was at a bar in Chicago a couple of days ago, and there were these two men sitting at the bar who were having a debate with one another about
and and the bartender was standing behind the bar and she had this you know this fixed smile on her face and i was wondering what was going through her head because these two guys were really going at it and they were just going on and on and on and she kept this smile on her face and i couldn't help but think that she probably was rolling her eyes on the inside and smiling on the outside
She might have been rolling her eyes, looking at the clock, pretending to wash some cups underneath the, you know, far down at the other end of the bar to stay away from them so she doesn't get dragged into it. Yeah. Yeah. You really see everything working in restaurants.
I understand that early in your career, you worked as a consultant at IBM. And in your first weeks, you got some training that showed you not just what the company expected of you in terms of the work you had to do, but also what they expected of you in terms of your emotions. Tell me a little bit about that, Erica.
Like many companies, IBM has what we call newcomer socialization, which is where they try and teach you about the organization's norms, the culture, help you understand the broader mission of the company. And as a consultant, that was particularly important because we would be going out to client site on behalf of IBM.
So they wanted us to have a clear sense of that organizational identity and be able to sort of bring that persona to our clients. So this came in the form of sort of how we looked, looking professional, being on time. You know, we even had everybody had the same ThinkPad computers. We had the same cell phones. You know, we were really well branded as IBMers.
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Chapter 7: How can we create a more authentic workplace?
And that separation allows people who see themselves as otherwise moral to engage in immoral behavior.
Hmm. I mean, at an extreme level, I can see somebody who's a mobster who basically says, you know, I can go out and kill someone as part of, you know, something that's happening in my quote unquote professional world. But I can come home and I can love my, you know, my partner and my children. And I'm a good I'm a good husband. I'm a good father.
I'm a good person, even though I've done something terrible 20 minutes ago.
Exactly.
Or on the other hand, some people become so invested and so their identity becomes such a part of their work identity that the only thing that matters to them are these work successes or achieving something at work or climbing the corporate ladder and sort of what happens, how they treat their friends, their family members, people outside of the workplace are irrelevant to sort of where that source of self-esteem comes from.
Some years ago, the comedian Ellen DeGeneres came under fire for creating a toxic work environment at her show. Ultimately, three producers were dismissed and Ellen DeGeneres apologized to her staff. You say that this story has something to say about the nature of authenticity. How so, Erica?
Ellen DeGeneres, like many social figures, looms sort of large in people's minds. We all felt or most people who watched her show felt like we knew her or felt like we understand this person. She presented sort of this image of someone that's kind, someone that's very easygoing, lighthearted. and very authentic.
Well, from these reports, what we've heard is that she could be very different to the people that were working with her directly and create an environment where they did not feel that she was really accepting and open the way she was presenting herself to the world.
Let's talk a moment about some of the benefits of authenticity. What are the effects of authenticity on our well-being and self-esteem, Erika?
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