I told you so!
My happy place this year is counting stuff up and writing about the interesting bits. This week I'm going back into the Big Meeting Corpus to find out which groups of people are the most likely to say "I told you so."
As with the interruptions research I've done, I have a sneaking suspicion that The People Most Likely to Say "I Told You So" might be me. Is every researcher at least a little egocentric in their topic selection, or just me? (Is that an egocentric question?)
But off we go! Who is most likely to say "I told you so?"
So many ways to be obnoxious
It's so satisfying to say "I told you so," and so unbelievably annoying to hear it. Like yeah, you told me so, I get it. But what do I do now? Should I fire myself?
Everyone knows this is obnoxious, but luxuriating in the "I told you so" vibes just feels so good. Even if you have the self-awareness not to say this out loud, you'd have to be superhuman to not feel a little bit of smug satisfaction after the fact, if indeed you did tell them so.
But one of the things mature adults can do is show occasional restraint (or at least this is what I hear). I got interested in who these magical restrained humans are, so into the Big Meeting Corpus we travel.
To look at this, I first had to find all the ways that people have of saying "I told you so." They don't always use those exact words. So many ways to be obnoxious! Like:
- "I predicted this"
- “I was right”
- “I told you this would happen”
- “I already pointed this out”
- “Remember what I said?”
- “This is exactly what I said”
I bet you can write ten more, and AI can write zillions of them in an instant. It's fun! I wrote a little code to be able to detect all the places in my transcripts that someone said "I told you so," even if they didn't use those exact words.
With that behind us, let's find who says "I told you so!"
Men are obnoxious, and women are too!
I have lots of data about meeting participants, including gender, race, role, and industry. I always start from the assumption that any of these things could matter. Looking at behavior by demographic is often fruitful because any statistically significant difference in any direction is interesting.
This time, what I found was not what I expected.
Men and women say "I told you so" at similar rates. They are both more likely to say "I told you so" to people of their same gender.
Men and women and non-binary people are equally likely to say "I told you so," regardless of race, role, seniority, or any other factor I measured. This is itself interesting. This week, no gender has the upper hand when it comes to maturity.
But check it out: When men say "I told you so," a stunning 73% of the time, they're saying it to other men. Only 27% of the time are they saying it to women or people of other genders. Given that men and women are close to evenly represented as participants in the meeting corpus, that data is pretty striking.
The women's data is even more lopsided. 87% of the women's "I told you so"s are said to other women; only 13% of the examples are said to men or people of other genders.
A few weeks back, we saw that both men and women are more likely to take credit for other people's ideas when those people are women. This week's data is a little different. In this case, everyone is a little more obnoxious when they're collaborating with people of their own gender.
I also looked at whether there was any impact by race, and there was. Most groups of people had similar rates of "I told you so," including Latine, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, American Indigenous, and Pacific Islander people. But three groups looked different: East Asian, Black, and white people.
This data suggests that this the social acceptability of "I told you so" is partly cultural. This is what I suspected I would find. (See what I did there?)
The biggest I-told-you-so-ers of 'em all: Software engineers
Because I thought this behavior might be partly cultural, I also sliced the data by industry and role. I wondered if some work environments tolerate or even encourage "I told you so" behavior more than others.
I didn't find distinctions by industry or role, with one significant exception: software engineers.
People across industries and roles say "I told you so" at a similar rate. Except for software engineers, who say "I told you so" an amazing 7.5 times more often than everyone else. Race, gender, and seniority made no difference whatsoever to this pattern!
I have worked with a lot of engineers in my career, and I was 0% surprised by this data. Okay, maybe I was 4% surprised by this data. I wasn't surprised that engineers are off the charts, but I was surprised that I didn't find other meaningful differences by role. (I only measured for 20 role types, so there may be other differences lurking in this data.)
In fairness to engineers, they are also more likely than anyone else to say "You told me so," giving credit when someone else did in fact tell them so. Not 7.5 times more likely, but 2.5 times more likely. I'm not laying out all that data in this piece, but the engineer in me requires me to share this insight.
What do you think?
Thanks for reading!
Kieran
Catch up on nerd processor case studies | Subscribe | nerdprocessor.com