Being less good at something impresses people more

[simont]

A long time ago, I was in a nightclub, with a friend, and we ran into a woman who we'd both met a few times before. My friend struggled visibly for a moment, and then correctly remembered her name. She was pleased and flattered. I had known her name immediately without any struggle, but she didn't look flattered at that!

A while back a group of my friends used to play a general-knowledge quiz game. One question I particularly remember from it was ‘Which Bond film was Ringo Starr's wife in?’, which we only managed to answer as a team effort: one of us knew Ringo Starr's wife was Barbara Bach, and another knew Barbara Bach was in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, but neither of us knew both facts beforehand. That one sticks in my mind as more memorably satisfying than any of the questions that I got right on my own, even though those demonstrated more knowledge on my part.

If you release a piece of software with a security hole in it, and then fix it promptly and competently when someone finds it, users will be vocally grateful. You'll get compliments on your dedication and your integrity, and it will increase general trust in you to maintain a security product – far more so, in my experience, than if you'd never introduced the hole in the first place.

Psychologically, it's easy to come up with reasons why this general pattern of human behaviour makes sense. But it seems like a cognitive weakness nonetheless: surely there must be a multitude of cases where it creates a perverse incentive to pretend to be less competent than you are, or to make deliberate mistakes so you can earn kudos for fixing them…

Comments

[kaberett]

I did not expect the example to spawn heated off-topic discussion because I've been having this kind of conversation with Simon individually, and with larger groups involving Simon, for a very long time now. I trust Simon's ability to think critically and constructively; I believed, on the basis of our pre-existing relationship, that he'd welcome a signpost to other discussions about the phenomenon, even if I wasn't in a position to go into detail myself at that point. My comment was made in good faith, and I'm finding the resulting conversation with Simon interesting.