Are You Any Good at Reading the Room?
New research shows the value of correctly reading your audience.
Updated April 29, 2025 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Almost everyone can relate to a time when things went horribly wrong due to misreading “the room.” Perhaps you were in an unusually good mood one day when you joined your friends for coffee. Smiling broadly, you sit down and tell what you think is an amusing anecdote about a mishap on your way there. Clearly, though, this little remark has not landed well. One of your friends was just laid off and the others were commiserating with her. Before opening your mouth, you probably should have noticed the glum expressions on their faces.
The ability to, as the saying goes, “read the room” is one that some people are just naturally good at. They seem to be able to sense, without needing much guidance, what to do and say when they’re in a social situation. These sort of bloopers rarely happen to them. What is behind their social acuity, and should you try to learn from them?
The Concept of Adaptive Personality Regulation
In a new study by University of Manchester’s Paul Irwing and colleagues (2025), something called “Cybernetic Big 5 Theory” could potentially explain why people differ in their ability to sense what to do in a given situation. If you’re familiar with the “Big 5,” also called the Five Factor Model (FFM), you can probably figure out what this theory might be proposing. You may think that extraverts should always carry the day, and people high in neuroticism should flop no matter what. However, Irwing et al. propose that, according to “trait activation theory,” different traits work best depending on the situation people find themselves in.
The goal of the U. Manchester study was to turn these theoretical ideas into a measurable quality that could differentiate people at different levels of social acuity. As that measure, the authors suggested calling it “adaptive personality regulation (APR),” which they define as “the ability or propensity to express personality to meet situational requirements” (p. 660). The two pieces to APR would be (a) what the situation requires in terms of personality and (b) whether those levels are expressed.
This is a neat idea, but it could be tricky to turn into a quantifiable index. How would you define a “situational requirement”? For the APR to work, it would be necessary to design a situation whose requirements were clear, and then see how people change their personality as the situation unfolds. Those who rigidly remain at their initial levels should, according to Irwing et al., be less effective than those who allow their personality expression to drift closer to the situational demands.
Testing the APR Model
The empirical solution the British authors settled on was an innovative one, tested out in two different contexts. In the first, the authors recruited 88 participants from the university community (average age of 28 yrs). Their APR’s were measured by seeing how much their levels of extraversion (one of the FFM traits) as expressed in their behavior shifted over the course of a situation in which extraversion was maladaptive.
The set up was as follows. Participants were placed in a group with 5 other people, all professional actors, and were told to try to be “the most memorable person in the room” by getting other group members to pay attention to them over the course of the next 5 minutes. Then, for the next 9 minutes, participants were told to complete a clerical task. Extraversion would be adaptive for the first task, but not the second. Complicating the clerical task, those actors then put on a show of trying to interrupt the actual participants and draw them into conversation. APR was measured by the extent to which participants behaved in less extraverted ways in round two of the study compared to round one.
To measure extraversion as demonstrated in behavior, two personality experts rated the participants on the following items: talkative, assertive, energetic, outgoing/sociable, reserved, quiet, and shy /inhibited. On average, most participants did show a shift in observer-rated extraversion levels, but there were reliable individual differences not explained by other personality measures (e.g. tendency to be self-conscious). More to the point, those higher in APR also scored better on the measure of task performance.
Moving on to the second study, the authors created a situation with higher stakes, this one involving standup comedians. Using the two pre-eminent UK comedy establishments as the setting, Irwing et al. note that this represents a “make or break” performance. A comic’s being able to adapt to the audience can become the difference between silence and eyerolls vs. laughter and applause.
The 77 participants in this second study included both amateurs and professionals with the amateurs performing at a professional “gong show” and the established comedians told to present only new material. Two experts viewed and rated the performances over a 5-minute period, both for comedic quality (with scales developed by a wide range of subject matter experts) and personality. The 10 specific FFM qualities, falling into the traits of neuroticism and extraversion, were themselves deemed by experts as relevant to success in a comedic performance.
Each of the 10 qualities, in turn, were rated as follows as most important on a 10-point scale (with 10 being optimal):
Angry hostility: 3.67
Self-consciousness 2.58
Openness to experience :
Intellectual curiosity 7.54
Straightforwardness 4.55
Self-discipline 6.95 Deliberation 4.57
Did these ratings surprise you? How would you rate your favorite comedian on them?
Turning to the research question, the issue is whether comedians shifting over the 5 minutes to match this ideal would also be rated as higher in the quality of performance. For this part of the study, quality was defined in terms of material, delivery, and stagecraft. As in Study 1, individuals higher in APR were more likely to rate higher on all performance criteria, explaining between 14 and 35% of the variations above and beyond other predictors in the equation.
Putting these findings together, the authors conclude that their situationally-relevant adaptive measure of personality traits beats out previous approaches in the job world that use static trait measures as predictors of performance. Jobs, they note, “require the ability to adapt personality to a variety of task and situational demands” (p. 673). Think about the first study- being able to impress someone as part of your job (memorability) is one thing, but then you also need to be able to settle down and complete your work (the clerical task).
Putting the APR to Use for You
You may not become a standup comedian at any point in your life, but you certainly will find yourself in situations where some optimal levels of personality traits are required. The issue is whether you’ll figure out, as Irwing et al, suggest, what’s desired and then how to behave accordingly.
Knowing that adaptability is the name of the game, you can then put these findings to use as you take a beat and assess a situation before plunging in. It was assumed, though not studied explicitly, that those higher in APR did just that. You have to be highly tuned in to your audience, but then also be ready to switch gears if your initial assumption is wrong.
To sum up , it’s fascinating to think that the adaptive qualities of personality are as important as the ones that tend to stick with you over time. By tuning into those around you, not only will they think more positively of you, but your interactions will become that much more fulfilling.
Irwing, P., Cook, C., & Hughes, D. J. (2025). Toward an index of adaptive personality regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 51(5), 659–677 https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672231177567
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Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. , is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.