By Robert Hogan and Adrian Furnham
Before you’re tempted to take out your bad day on your Uber driver, you might want to remember that you’re under assessment.
Over the decades, psychologists have devised wide array of psychometric tests for use in an equally broad range of purposes. Some may be thought overly academic for the real world. In this article, Robert Hogan of Hogan Assessments and Adrian Furnham of the Norwegian Business School consider a different kind of “psychological evaluation”, one that could scarcely come from a more real-world context.
There are not many business situations where the staff officially rate the customer. In many service roles, the staff may share opinions about customers with colleagues, family, and friends but almost never “officially and publicly”. Get some cabin crew or waiting staff together and they can really “get going” on customers from hell. The stories are often funny (in retrospect) and surprising, but the best part is how the staff got their revenge. Fewer stories seem to be about kind, thoughtful, and generous customers.
Those of us in the assessment business know about 360 ratings first used in the 1950s and 1960s and called multi-source feedback. The idea is that whilst most people believe they know themselves (well) it is often others:—:the boss, peers, reports, clients—who really know them better and are more honest. Of course, what your boss knows is mainly your output, while your peers know your values and abilities, and your staff your work style. These can be compared with your personal ratings.
You want them to know the way and have a clean and comfortable car. But what do they want from you?
But there is one very unusual and interesting example of where you rate your supplier / customer and they rate you: Uber. Uber uses a two-way, 1–5-star rating system where both drivers and riders rate each other after every trip, impacting ride acceptance, wait times, and account status. Both the rider and the driver have 48 hours to rate each other on this scale. Ratings are of course anonymous, so neither party knows who gave a specific rating. The overall rating is calculated as the average of the trips taken. Certain ratings are supposedly excluded, such as those affected by technical issues, serious driver violations, or ratings flagged as discriminatory or retaliatory.
Most regular Uberites know their score. Many are concerned to keep their numbers high so as to guarantee a better service in the future. They argue that the drivers look at your score and decide whether or not to pick you up. Anyone stuck to get somewhere in a great hurry or in a secluded place knows the value of Uber.
So what you want in an Uber driver is someone who arrives as soon as possible and as promised. You want them to know the way and have a clean and comfortable car. But what do they want from you?
We are told that Uber drivers rate you immediately after dropping you off, and recurring negative behaviors will quickly lower your score. It is suggested that there are a number of reasons for poor ratings. These include
Making the driver wait: Time is money. Waiting provokes anxiety and anger and, more importantly, leads to less income.
Slamming the doors: Heavy door-slamming can be seen as damaging to the car and disrespectful to drivers.
Eating or drinking in the car: This easily lead to spills and unpleasant odors. Sucking on sweets may be acceptable.
Being rude or aggressive: Pissed, pissed-off, argumentative, demanding passengers or those critical of the ride are quickly subject to revenge by means of low scores.
Adding unannounced and unplanned stops: Requesting sudden stops or changing directions or destinations while in the car lead quickly to falling ratings.
Smoke smells: Passengers who have been smoking or vaping brings an odor that may suggest to subsequent passengers that someone has been smoking in the car.
Legal or safety violations: Not fastening the seat belt, having too many people for the vehicle size, or asking the driver to infringe traffic regulations.
So what can we conclude about a person with a very high or very low Uber score, particularly if they were consistent across drivers over time? Could it be considered a good psychological test?
How to Flunk Uber
Some years ago a best-selling American author, screenwriter, and playwright published an essay in the New York Times entitled “Ouch, My Personality, Reviewed”, which is a superb example of what Freud called “the psychopathology of everyday life.” She started the essay by noting that she recently used Uber and that the driver told her that if she received one more bad review, “… no driver will pick you up.”
She reported that this feedback triggered some “obsessive” soul searching, in the course of which she wondered how she could have created such a bad score as an Uber passenger when she had used the service only six times. She then reviewed her trips, noting that, although she had often behaved badly (“I do get short-tempered when I am anxious”), in each case extenuating circumstances had caused her behavior. She even got a bad review after a trip during which she said very little—“Perhaps I simply am not a nice person and an Uber driver sensed it.”
The reflective essay is interesting because it is prototypical of people who can’t learn from experience. For example, when this author reviewed the situations in which she had mistreated Uber drivers, she spun each incident to show that her behavior should be understood in terms of the circumstances—the driver’s poor performance—and not in terms of her personality.
In addition, although the situations changed, she behaved the same way in each of them: she complained, she nagged and micro-managed the drivers, she lost her temper, and she broadcast her unhappiness to the world. Positive behavior may or may not be consistent across situations, but negative behavior certainly is. And the types of negative behaviors she displayed fit the typology defined by the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), an inventory of the maladaptive behaviors that occur when people are dealing with others with less power and think that no one important is watching them.
All her actions had a manipulative intent: the author wanted to compel a fractious driver to obey her. Her behaviors were tactical in that they gave her short-term, one-off wins: she got her way. But the behaviors become counterproductive when she had to deal with the same people repeatedly, or when she was dealing with NYC Uber drivers. Strategic players carefully control what Irving Goffman called “their leaky channels”, the behavioral displays that provide information regarding a player’s character or real self. Our tactical friend seemed unable to control her leaky channels.
All the data suggest that she will have the same reputation with hairdressers, psychotherapists, and purse repair people as she does with the Uber drivers of New York.
It was also interesting to learn that, although the author had been in psychotherapy for years, the way she mistreats “little people” seemingly never came up. This highlights the difference between intrapsychic and interpersonal theories of personality. From an intrapsychic perspective, emotional distress creates problems in relationships; fix the emotional problems and the relationships will take care of themselves. From an interpersonal perspective, problems in relationships create emotional distress; fix the relationships (behave better) and the emotional problems will take care of themselves. In the first model, intrapsychic issues disrupt relationships; in the second, disrupted relationships cause intrapsychic issues.
As further evidence that the author lacks a strategic understanding of social behavior, she was surprised to learn that other people keep score of her behavior. This means that she pays no attention to her reputation. But her reputation is the best source of data that other people have concerning how to deal with her. She might not care about her reputation, but those who deal with her do. All the data suggest that she will have the same reputation with hairdressers, psychotherapists, and purse repair people as she does with the Uber drivers of New York.
Finally, people flunk Uber in the same way as they become unemployable and then flunk life: they flunk one interaction at a time. After every interaction, there is an accounting process, after which something is added to or subtracted from people’s reputations. The score accumulates over time and, at some point, the Uber drivers refuse to pick them up. Our “case study” was a successful artist, and her success bought her a degree of idiosyncratic credit—she is allowed to misbehave in the artistic community—but there are consequences when she misbehaves in the larger community of ordinary actors.
So…
Could we use Uber scores as a reliable psychometric test? Are high scorers agreeable types who understand the world of work, and low scorers egocentric, curmudgeonly, and just “difficult”? Are Uber sitting on a wealth of data of interest to all those in the assessment business? Just a thought.
