The Meeting Was Fine. You Decided It Wasn’t.

In the mid-1980s, researchers at Dartmouth ran an experiment that should unsettle anyone who has ever received challenging feedback.

They applied realistic makeup to give participants a visible facial scar, then showed each one a mirror so they’d know exactly what it looked like. Then, under the pretense of “keeping the makeup from smudging,” a researcher applied a bit of moisturizer — and secretly removed the scar entirely.

The participants had no idea. As far as they knew, they still had a prominent scar on their face. Each one was then sent into a room to have a short conversation with a stranger, who had no idea any of this had happened and saw an ordinary, unmarked face.

Afterward, the participants were asked how the conversation went. Overwhelmingly, they reported that the other person had treated them differently — stared more, seemed uncomfortable, was less friendly, avoided eye contact. None of that could have been true. There was no scar. The other person was reacting to a completely normal face.

What the participants were actually reporting was their own expectation, played back to them as observed fact.

This experiment has been repeated in various forms over the decades — different perceived “flaws,” different contexts, always the same result. When people believe something about themselves that they think others can see, they reliably find “evidence” of it in ordinary interactions, even when that evidence isn’t there.

I say often that your imagination never goes to the rational middle. Give it an ambiguous signal and it doesn’t shrug and consider the boring, neutral explanation — it sprints straight to an extreme. Either the meeting went great and you’re getting promoted, or it went badly and you’re getting fired. There’s no unicorns-and-rainbows version of a slightly terse email, and there’s no apocalyptic version either — but that won’t stop your imagination from creating one. The rational middle is almost always where the truth actually lives, and it’s almost never where your instinctual reaction takes you.

For leaders, this has two possible interpretations, and both are something to consider.

When you’re on the receiving end of feedback. If you walk into a review already believing you’re bad at public speaking, disorganized, or “not strategic enough,” you will find confirmation of that belief in ambiguous signals — a raised eyebrow, a slow response, a pithy text message — regardless of what the other person actually means. The scar isn’t there. You’re supplying it.

The insidious trap here is that you can never really know whether the feedback you’re receiving is genuinely biased or whether you’re the one distorting it. The uncomfortable answer is that you often can’t tell from the inside. The Dartmouth participants were completely convinced their perception was accurate. That conviction is exactly what the distortion feels like.

When you’re giving feedback to someone else. If a subordinate seems defensive, oddly quiet, or reads undue criticism into something you said, it’s tempting to conclude they’re “too sensitive” or hearing things that aren’t there. Sometimes that’s true. But it’s just as often true that they’re carrying their own invisible scar into the room — a past experience, an insecurity, a story about themselves — and interpreting your very ordinary comment through that distorting lens.

Knowing about this lens doesn’t mean walking on eggshells. It means recognizing that the gap between what you said and what they heard may not be about you at all.

Leaders especially struggle with this because most leaders operate from what researchers call an “internal locus of control” — the belief that your own actions are the main driver of the outcomes you experience. People with an “external locus of control,” by contrast, tend to believe the world happens to them regardless of what they do.

When you believe your actions drive outcomes, it’s natural to assume your own behavior is what caused the subordinate’s reaction. But that mindset — the one you, the leader, bring into the interaction — can crowd out the other person’s mindset entirely, replacing the scars they walked in with with a story that’s really about you.

You can’t fully escape this effect — even knowing about it doesn’t make you immune, the same way knowing about an optical illusion doesn’t stop you from seeing it. But you can build a habit that catches it more often.

When you notice yourself reading a strong negative signal into someone’s tone, silence, or body language, ask one question before reacting:

What’s the most neutral explanation for what just happened?

Not the most generous explanation, and not the catastrophic one your imagination already wrote — the rational middle. Often it’s simply that the other person is tired, distracted, or thinking about something unrelated to you entirely.

And when you’re the one giving feedback and it lands harder than you intended, resist the urge to assume the other person is simply overreacting. Consider what scar they might be walking in with. You don’t need to know the specifics to adjust how you deliver the next piece of feedback.

The scar experiment’s real lesson isn’t about scars. It’s a reminder that a meaningful amount of what we experience as “how people are treating me” is actually a mirror — reflecting back the story we already believed about ourselves before we walked in the room.

The best way to insulate yourself from these common potholes in communication is to acknowledge they exist, and to widen your view of the road ahead. That usually looks like questions, not statements. When something doesn’t add up — a change in tone, a furrowed eyebrow, a flash of expression that doesn’t match the words — slow down, ask questions, and try to understand the scar that might be distorting the lens you’re each looking through.