My mother was a schoolteacher, and many evenings she sat in our living room grading stacks of papers. I listened to her stray comments over the years enough to realize that grading papers is often boring, especially when they all say pretty much the same thing. I started to approach my own homework by first surmising what all the other students were likely to say and then finding something different to say. The hope was that by providing the teacher with a break in the monotony, I would persuade him or her to like my paper better. It probably helped my grades.

The habit of looking where no one else is looking has stuck with me for much of my career. One major theme of my thinking is that inner processes serve interpersonal functions. When I started graduate school in social psychology, I recognized quickly that almost all the ideas that dominated with the field focused on what happens inside one person. So I began to pay more attention to what happens between people.

To be sure, social psychologists were not completely indifferent to interpersonal processes, even though the 1970s were definitely a low point, coming after group research had mostly died out and before the 1980s boom in studying close relationships. But the dominant approach was to explain what happened between people as a consequence of what happens inside people. I tried to look at this in reverse: What happens inside people is often a consequence of what happens between them.

Many researchers were interested in issues of self and identity. Self-esteem was gaining ground as an important phenomenon, and it was common to interpret each laboratory finding about human behavior as reflecting people's concern with sustaining their self-esteem. I climbed on the self-esteem bandwagon too, but soon I began to think about interpersonal aspects. Self-esteem is what you think and feel about yourself. It seemed to me that what people think about themselves is only of secondary importance. It is much more useful and important to focus on how others regard you than on how you regard yourself. After all, your success or failure in life depends very much on whether other people accept you, like you, respect you, trust you, and so on.