Why Certain People Constantly Put Others on the Spot

A person feels most comfortable in a relationship, whether romantic, professional, or even casual, when they trust the other person to be accepting and supportive. However, not everyone abides by this set of social norms, either inadvertently or due to a desire to hurt others.

Perhaps you fall into the first category. You’ve been assigned to a neighborhood committee that is holding monthly virtual meetings. Some of the people on this committee are good friends of yours. On more than one occasion, you’ve found yourself asking questions you’re pretty sure they can’t answer. As they squirm uncomfortably to come up with something to say, you realize you’ve violated those norms of friendship.

At school or work, situations involving tough questions are a part of the cost of doing business. Students know they can be given a pop quiz at any moment or be expected to respond correctly when the teacher calls on them. Depending on the nature of the boss-employee relationship at work, tough questions can still be a part of daily interactions. Still, a good boss will try to avoid embarrassing an employee who doesn’t have the technical expertise or knowledge to answer questions out of their area. People don’t expect to be put under duress with tough questions in friendships or close working relationships. This is why your grilling of a fellow committee member is so problematic.

A sign that you’re not as sensitive as you could be when you pressure people is that others try to stay away from you to the extent that they can. New research by Cornell University’s Soo Kim and colleagues (2021) on how people feel when their inadequacies are exposed suggests that if people are afraid of having their friends see them as weak, they’ll be less likely to confide in them. Those people you’ve made to feel insecure will find someone else to be friends with who will not present as much of a threat. If they don’t have a choice, as in a work environment, they will presumably follow the same principle and keep to themselves as much as possible.

Emotional Intelligence and Your Sensitivity to How Others Feel

You may be aware of having violated someone’s trust by their immediate reaction or by their gradual distancing from you, but by then, it’s too late. Instead, it’s far better to recognize this behavior in yourself and make preemptive changes so these situations don’t recur in the future.

This ability to tune in to how others feel before you cause them to feel bad about themselves fits into the general category of emotional intelligence. As noted by Ulm University’s Sally Olderbak and colleagues (2021), “The ability to perceive emotion expressed by another person is a skill considered critical for the navigation of social relationships” (p. 1). When you bulldoze through other people's feelings, relationships will suffer accordingly.

There are many ways to measure this key feature of emotional intelligence, ranging from those that assess judgment accuracy to those that measure the speed with which people make these judgments. The focus of the study by Olderbak and her colleagues was on those measures that assess accuracy. Test-takers must select the emotion displayed on a face pre-programmed to show a particular emotion by giving the task their best effort (rather than trying to be speedy).

The German authors defined emotion perception as “the ability to identify emotions expressed by another person, through their voice, face, and/or body.” Still, for their study, they used only measures based on reading emotions through the face. By using maximum effort tasks based on accuracy, the research team ruled out the possibility that people who respond quickly in general to perceptual tasks also do better on an emotion perception task.

Testing Your Emotion Perception

The best place to start to improve your ability to read people’s feelings is by assessing how well you’re able to do so, and the tests investigated by Ulm et al. suggest some methods you can try on your own.

For their study, the authors took a hard-nosed empirical approach to evaluate the available tests in the literature, noting that some of the investigators who developed these tests were less than rigorous. For example, researchers may find that their test doesn’t meet the standard of reliability or consistency but report the results anyway. Others rely on only one measure of reliability rather than test out a range of test quality standards. Perhaps most importantly, though, Ulm et al. maintain that it takes more than one test to provide an accurate assessment of emotion perception ability. This is perhaps the tallest order and one to consider in evaluating your own baseline.

You can begin by adapting a task developed by the first author and colleague Oliver Wilhelm, also of Ulm University (2017). This was one of the methods that held up the best in terms of its statistical qualities. It’s a simple one in which you view a video of a face that represents one of the 6 basic emotions (anger, fear, surprise, happiness, disgust, and sadness) and guess which emotion the person was attempting to portray.

Although this method wouldn’t hold up to the standards of a published journal article when you try it on your own, you can still get some valuable feedback. To do so, record or stream a movie or television show in which there are closeups of the actors (i.e., not an action film). Play the video alone without the audio and see if you can figure out the actors' emotions. Watch the scene again with the audio turned on and compare your guesses with the emotions that the actors say they’re feeling.

The next test the authors recommend uses static photos (Palmer et al., 2005). This is perhaps even simpler than the video test. You can adapt this test (again, not exactly like the test itself) by looking at photos of the people you follow on social media without the captions. See if you can guess their emotion based on their faces alone. Then compare your guesses with the content of the posts. Someone who looks afraid while riding on an amusement park ride might actually post that she was having a great time and enjoyed every minute of it.

Finally, recognizing that facial expressions of emotions can vary according to an individual’s cultural background, you can use a method developed by Matsumodo et al. (2000), which was also recommended by the Ulm University research team. For this, you would deliberately select faces reflecting different racial/ethnicity combinations and rate the emotions (without other cues) from these. The original measure involves having test-takers rate all emotions from each face rather than decide which one the faces reflect. This makes the job more challenging, and so you may want to leave it for last.

Improving Your Emotional Intelligence from Your Baseline Scores

Now that you have an idea of your emotion-reading strengths and weaknesses, you can then practice improving your skills. You can try to achieve that high accuracy regarded by Olderbak et al. as a more effective indication of ability than speed.

Next, move on to practicing on people in your life who you trust to give you accurate feedback. Ask them to give you the equivalent of the emotion perception task using their own faces while you try to guess which emotion they’re demonstrating. You might realize that the emotion you perceived to be happiness is actually sadness or fear. If that’s the case, then this realization can serve as a guide to be more sensitive to their feelings the next time you’re ready to expect them to answer an unfairly tough question.

To sum up, reading other people’s emotions is the first step toward stepping back from your tendency to put them on the spot. Over time, as you gain in this key ability, not only will your relationships improve, but so will the trust that people are willing to place in you.

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