Red Light, Green Light

In praise of honest signals

Image created with DALL-E 3

Imagine yourself ordering a sandwich at a deli counter.

Here’s what you don’t do: casually mention that Thanksgiving is your favorite holiday so the deli guy will deduce you want smoked turkey; question his sandwich-construction abilities so that he is motivated to prove you wrong with an exceptionally tasty meal; get the sandwich on ciabatta because you’ve heard ciabatta eaters are considered charming and intelligent, even though you’d really prefer a bulky roll.

These behaviors are weirdly indirect and manipulative, and that alone is reason to avoid them. But even from a lens of self-interest, they defy a basic insight—one most children know by the time they reach preschool: Usually, the best way to get what you want is to ask for it.

At the deli counter or the shoe store, when seeking a dogsitter or deciding what restaurant to go to—in all the banal  transactions and negotiations of our lives—the appeal of transparency is obvious: Your preferences are only visible to others if you reveal them. Yet for some reason when it comes to big life choices—career, friendship, and especially romance—many of us are tempted to throw transparency out the window. Instead, we drop subtle hints and obsess over minute interactions—the equivalent of “ordering” a turkey sandwich by mentioning you like Thanksgiving; we neg and play hard-to-get. These strategies are not just unnecessarily deceptive—they actually decrease the likelihood we’ll end up happy.

There’s an expression I like (I’m not sure its origins) that is apropos here: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. The point is that when you misrepresent yourself or resort to hacky solutions, your “successes” are not actually in line with your true interests. If you say on a first date that yes, you too are a huge Taylor Swift fan, then don’t be surprised a year later when you find yourself shelling out hundreds of dollars for a concert you don’t really want to go to. If you assure your future boss that yes, actually, you really enjoy repetitive menial labor, don’t be surprised when she hands you a shovel.

Of course, in the big life domains, the reason we often don’t just say what we want is because they’re so high-stakes. We’re afraid of rejection or causing offense, or we’re so overwhelmed by the panoply of options that we don’t know our own preferences.

When it comes to rejection, a good deal of anxiety is reduced when we remember that giving honest signals and getting denied is itself a kind of victory: You have avoided sinking time into a job or relationship for which you are not actually a good match. To be sure, this rejection stings when you’d previously been under the impression that it was a good match, but all you’ve really done is hasten the inevitable—and when you give honest signals, you’re at least clear on why you got rejected. By contrast, if you put forward an inauthentic version of yourself and get denied, you never know whether it was because they saw through the mask or because you selected the wrong mask. Your face, by contrast, is always your face.¹

This is literally true. I was recently reminded, for example, of some research about what works for online dating. The classic mistake people make is trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible by presenting a conventionally appealing version of themselves: sunsets, vanilla ice cream, etc. If they have a big nose, they choose only straight-on photos; if they have a gap between their teeth, they show only soft smiles. The end result is a profile that everyone agrees is a B+/A-.

What you should do instead, according to the data, is exaggerate anything that makes you distinctive: Choose pictures that emphasize the shnoz and the gumline (or the tattoos, model train collection, etc.) These honest signals will rule out a number of people who are turned off by them—probably a majority of would-be suitors. But the minority who remain will be those who are extra into them, and a small but effusive response is much better than a large lukewarm one. (Besides, if everything goes well, they’re going to find out eventually.)

To be fair, the reason we don’t always give honest signals is because we ourselves are uncertain. If I’m not sure what I want, we reason, why should I pigeonhole myself and rule out a bunch of possibilities? In theory, this is sound logic. In practice, the best way to figure out what you want is through experimentation: try something and see what happens. If there’s only one small piece you’re sure of, play that up, or take a best guess and gather some data. You can always change your mind. At the very least, try to be transparent about your uncertainty—that is, present a clear yellow light rather than leaving others to guess whether you are red or green on any particular issue.

Sending honest signals requires practice and faith. It does restrict your options in the short-run, but the ones that remain are of higher quality, and the bad matches are eliminated faster. When we cease with stupid games, we give ourselves a better shot to win the ones that matter—the prizes we were born for.

1. Giving honest signals doesn’t mean going out of your way to divulge all your flaws—it just means giving the other party information that accurately reflects your character. As psychology and nonverbal communication expert Blake Eastman puts it: “Everybody’s got a song playing, and sometimes you just need to dial the volume up and down. Some people try to play a completely different song.” Trying to pass off someone else’s song as your own is stressful, unethical, and usually sounds like shit.