Regret is overrated (a quote from Daniel Kahneman who passed away yesterday at the age of 90)

Regret is an emotion, and it is also a punishment that we administer to ourselves. The fear of regret is a factor in many of the decisions that people make (‘Don’t do this, you will regret it’ is a common warning), and the actual experience of regret is familiar. The emotional state has been well described by two Dutch psychologists, who noted that regret is “accompanied by feelings that one should have known better, by a sinking feeling, by thoughts about the mistake one has made and the opportunities lost, by a tendency to kick oneself and to correct one’s mistake, and by wanting to undo the event and to get a second chance.” Intense regret is what you experience when you can most easily imagine yourself doing something other than what you did.

Decision makers know that they are prone to regret, and the anticipation of that painful emotion plays a part in many decisions.

We spend much of our day anticipating, and trying to avoid, the emotional pains we inflict on ourselves. Susceptibility regret, like susceptibility to fainting spells, is a fact of life to which one must adjust.

You can take precautions that will inoculate you against regret. Perhaps the most useful is to be explicit about the anticipation of regret. If you can remember when things go badly that you considered the possibility of regret carefully before deciding, you are likely to experience less of it. You should also know that regret and hindsight bias will come together, so anything you can do to preclude hindsight is likely to be helpful. You should not put too much weight on regret; even if you have some, it will hurt less than you now think.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

How Emotionally intelligent leaders deal with failure and setbacks

Emotionally intelligent leaders expect there to be roadblocks and emotionally prepare for them. They look for the lesson learned and don’t take setbacks personally.   To emotionally intelligent leaders, disappointments are part of their learning and development journey. They understand that these moments will ultimately help them to reach their goals.

Harvey Deutschendorf writing in Fast Company

Emotionally intelligent leader are consistently authentic

An emotionally intelligent leader is always clear about their intentions and where they are coming from. This means employees don’t have to worry about deciphering messages from leadership and keeps them best informed about the organization’s goals and motives. 

Authentic emotionally intelligent leaders share as much as they are able to with their people at all times and expect the same from others in their circle. They don’t feel the need to hide things from others, cover up their mistakes, or play favorites in their workplace. They treat everyone the same, regardless of their position or station in life.  

Harvey Deutschendorf writing in Fast Company

Coping strategies

Psychologists like to group coping strategies into two main types: emotion-focused and problem-focused. Emotion-focused strategies change the way we feel, like distracting ourselves, getting support from friends, or looking at the situation from a different perspective. Problem-focused strategies, on the other hand, involve taking action to solve the problem directly.  No one strategy works all the time, and you’ll often see people get stuck in their favorite way of coping.  If you tend toward distraction and denial, you might avoid dealing with a problem that you actually could have solved; if you’re an inveterate problem-solver, you might feel helpless and angry when confronting a problem—or a loved one’s—that has no solution, when all that’s really needed is support and connection.   

Kira M. Newman writing for Greater Good Magazine

The Appeal of Video Games

Good game designers know how to draw us in by catering to some very basic emotional needs. (Researcher Jane McGonigal) notes that the best games have four elements: clear goals that allow us to feel a sense of purpose; rules that make the task harder and thereby challenge our creativity; rapid feedback to chart our progress; and an experience that is voluntary.

Wouldn't it be nice if work was more like a video game? Your boss would articulate a clear mission and set of milestones you were expected to meet. You would go into the office every day and receive ongoing feedback about your progress so you could see the impact you are having.

The truth, of course, is that reality is messy. Our goals are fuzzy, our progress unclear. Video games, the majority of which now focus on getting us to cooperate rather than compete, offer a more fulfilling existence, McGonigal argues.

"We all want to find more meaning in what we do, like we're part of something bigger," McGonigal said. "Games give us a place to feel that, to cooperate and do something that is more satisfying."

Chris O'Brien, Mercury News Columnist

The Emergency Exit Rule

People who have high emotional intelligence understand that if you want to be more persuasive and even win most arguments, it's important to do two things:

·       Avoid distracting, emotional mini controversies.

·       Offer easy ways for people to overcome emotional objections, and more easily follow the path you want them to take.

I call this whole concept the "Emergency Exit Rule." It's about planting seeds that allow people to save face and maintain their pride--while ultimately agreeing with you.

Imagine a police detective arrests a suspect. During interrogation, he or she uses a common but controversial strategy called the Reid technique. It involves questioning frameworks that can be summarized by example, like this:

·       "We know that you walked out of the store with the jewelry, but you don't seem like a bad person. Maybe you didn't realize how expensive it really was?"

·       "It's clear you were intoxicated when the police pulled you over. Am I right in thinking you'd probably had only a couple of drinks, and didn't realize you might have been over the limit?"

 The Emergency Exit Rule is all about giving them the easiest, most attractive way possible to back down and agree with your position.

Bill Murphy Jr. writing in Inc.

Painting your Internal World

Therapists often run into a curious problem during treatment: Clients aren’t very good at describing their emotions. How exactly do you express the nature of your depression? So this spring, relationship counselor Crystal Rice hit upon a clever idea. She had her clients use Pinterest, the popular picture-pinning social network, to create arrays of images that map out their feelings. It’s a brilliant epiphany: While emotions can be devilishly difficult to convey in words, they’re often very accessible via pictures. “This way we can really identify what’s going on,” Rice says.

As Rice discovered with her clients, Pinterest’s appeal is that it gives us curiously powerful visual ways to communicate, think, and remember. If you see one picture of a guitar, it’s just a guitar; but when you see 80 of them lined up you start to see guitarness. This additive power is precisely what helps Rice’s clients paint their internal worlds.  

Part of the value of Pinterest is that it brings you out of yourself and into the world of things. As the Huffington Post writer Bianca Bosker argued, Facebook and Twitter are inwardly focused (“Look at me!”) while Pinterest is outwardly focused (“Look at this!”). It’s the world as seen through not your eyes but your imagination.  

Granted, Pinterest encourages plenty of dubious behavior too. It can be grindingly materialistic; all those pins of stuff to buy! Marketers are predictably adrool, and as they swarm aboard, the whole service might very well end up collapsing into a heap of product shilling.  

But I suspect we’ll see increasingly odd and clever ways of using Pinterest. If a picture is worth a thousand words, those collections are worth millions.

Clive Thompson, Wired Magazine 

Emotional relief is not the same as emotional recovery

Venting can be like scratching a mosquito bite. It feels like it works at first. Studies have shown a drop in diastolic blood pressure of 1 to 10 points after venting. But they show no attendant drop in hostility. It feels like we release anger or frustration, but we don’t. Even if we didn’t experience this temporary alleviation, there’s the fact that negative feelings naturally dissipate over time. People who do nothing assume the abatement owes to time; people who vent believe venting did the trick. And our choices can be self-reinforcing. If it seems like venting worked, we’re less likely to abide by social norms around holding back in the future. 

Gail Cornwall & Juli Fraga writing in Slate

Venting reinforces negative emotions

Think of our brain circuitry like hiking trails. The ones that get a lot of traffic get smoother and wider, with brush stomped down and pushed back. The neural pathways that sit fallow grow over, becoming less likely to be used. Kindergarten teachers are thus spot on when they say, “The thoughts you water are the ones that grow.” This is also true for emotions, like resentment, and the ways we respond to them, like venting. The more we vent, the more likely we are to vent in the future. 

Gail Cornwall & Juli Fraga writing in Slate

How Feelings Help You Think

If you’re in a grocery store, and you're hungry, everyone knows you're going to buy more stuff. You go into the store, you have certain data. If you go when you're in a non-hungry state, you have all that data in front of you, and all those choices to make, and you make a series of choices. If you go when you're in a hungry state, same data, same information, and you make totally different decisions. That's a good illustration of what emotions do. The emotions are a framework for your logical processing. It affects how you evaluate data, how skeptical you are of certain ideas versus how accepting you are of those same ideas. Your brain doesn't process in a vacuum. 

Leonard Mlodinow, quoted in GQ

The Risk Test shows how well you manage uncertainty

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is a set of three simple questions designed to predict whether you will be good at things like managing uncertainty.  Each question has an intuitive –and wrong –response. Most people need a moment to get the right answer. 

Here are the three questions:

1. A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Everyday, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?

Shane Frederick, assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, devised the test to assess the specific cognitive ability that relates to decision‐making. It has an amazing correlation with people’s ability to evaluate risky propositions and to sort out the time value of money. (A dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future because today’s dollar ears interest.)

For example, those who incorrectly answered the first question thought that 92% of people would answer it correctly. Those that did answer it correctly thought that 62% would get it right. The ones who answered instinctively, and therefore incorrectly ‐ have an over‐inflated sense of confidence, misreading the difficulty of challenges. We have a natural tendency toward overconfidence and bias. Researchers say people consistently overrate their knowledge and skill.

Consider these two alternatives:  Would you rather receive $3,400 this month or $3,800 next month?   

The second choice is better. It is the same as getting 12% interest in only a single month. Of the people who got all three questions right on the CRT, 60% preferred to wait a month. Of the people who got all three questions wrong on the CRT, only 35% preferred to wait.  

In other words, people with higher scores indicated a greater tolerance for risk when the odds where in their favor. 

This is shown by another option offered to participants. People were asked which they would prefer, $500 for sure or a gamble in which there was a 15% chance of receiving one million dollars and an 85% chance of receiving nothing. 

Most of the people who scored zero on the CRT took the money while most of those who scored a perfect three on the test took the gamble. The later group instinctively understood the concept of the expected value, which is the sum of possible values, multiplied by its probability (15% of $1 million plus 85% of zero equals $150,000). The gamble is well-worth the $500, but many people don’t naturally see it that way.  They are basing their decisions on emotions rather than logic. 

This can be seen in what’s known as the Prospect Theory developed by two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They found that people take greater risks to avoid losses than they do to earn profits because the pain of losing is greater than the joy of winning. That’s why people hang onto stocks and other investments (including people) when they should have let go of them long ago.  

Oh, and the answers to the CRT? 

1. Five cents, not ten cents.

2. 5 minutes, not 100 minutes.

3. 47 days not 24 days.

Read the original study here. 

Are we immune to manipulation?

We like to think of ourselves as independently minded and immune to manipulation, and yet imagine others — particularly those of a different political persuasion — as being fantastically gullible. The reality is probably something in between. 

We do know that the posts we see on Facebook have the power to alter our emotions. A controversial experiment run by Facebook employees in 2013 manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 users without their knowledge (or consent) in an attempt to control their emotions and influence their moods. The experimenters suppressed any friends’ posts that contained positive words, and then did the same with those containing negative words, and watched to see how the unsuspecting subjects would react in each case. Users who saw less negative content in their feeds went on to post more positive stuff themselves. Meanwhile, those who had positive posts hidden from their timeline went on to use more negative words themselves. Conclusive: we may think we’re immune to emotional manipulation, but we’re probably not.  

Hannah Fry, Hello World

The Seesaw

I am sitting on a seesaw with my past. As long as I can put Hitler, or Mengele, or the gaping mouth of my loss on the opposite seat, then I am somehow justified, I always have an excuse. That’s why I’m anxious. That’s why I’m sad. It’s not that I’m wrong to feel anxious and sad and afraid. It’s not that there isn’t real trauma at the core of my life. And it’s not that Hitler and Mengele and every other perpetrator of violence or cruelty shouldn’t be held accountable for the harm the cause. But if I stay on the seesaw, I am holding the past responsible for what I choose to do now. 

Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice

The Caring Effect

Patients with irritable bowel syndrome were told they'd be participating in a study of the benefits of a acupuncture—and one group, which received the treatment from a warm, friendly researcher who asked detailed questions about their lives, did report a marked reduction in symptoms, equivalent to what might result from any drug on the market. Unbeknokwnst to them, the researchers used trick needles that didn’t pierce the skin.

Now here’s the interesting part. The same sham treatment was given to another group of subjects—but performed brusquely, without conversation. The benefits largely disappeared. It was the empathetic exchange between paractictioner and patient. Kaptchuk concluded, that made the difference.

What Kaptchuk demonstrated is what some medical thinkers have begun to call the “care effect”—the idea that the opportunity for patients to feel heard and cared for can improve their health. Scientific or no, alternative practitioners tend to express empathy, to allow for unhurried silences, and to ask what the meaning patients make of their pain. Kaptchuk’s study was a breakthrough: It showed that randomized, controlled trials could measure the effect of caring.

Nathanael Johnson, Writing in Wired magazine

How does this information make me feel?

We don’t need to become emotionless processors of numerical information – just noticing our emotions and taking them into account may often be enough to improve our judgment. Rather than requiring superhuman control of our emotions, we need simply to develop good habits. Ask yourself: how does this information make me feel? Do I feel vindicated or smug? Anxious, angry or afraid? Am I in denial, scrambling to find a reason to dismiss the claim?

Before I repeat any statistical claim, I first try to take note of how it makes me feel. It’s not a foolproof method against tricking myself, but it’s a habit that does little harm, and is sometimes a great deal of help. Our emotions are powerful. We can’t make them vanish, and nor should we want to. But we can, and should, try to notice when they are clouding our judgment.

Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up

Conditional Acceptance

Too often we claim that we accept others for what they are when we truly mean that we accept them as long as they do what we want them to. When we truly accept others the way they are we no longer have to take unnecessary responsibility for others’ emotions an behaviors, we maintain emotional balance at a time when it is most needed, and we encourage the other person to be more responsible for his own emotions and behaviors.

Les Carter, Imperative People: Those Who Must Be in Control