Mental shortcuts work — until problems get complex

Franck Schuurmans, a guest lecturer at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, has captivated audiences with explanations of why people make irrational business decisions. A simple exercise he uses in his lectures is to provide a list of 10 questions such as, “In what year was Mozart born?” The task is to select a range of possible answers so that you have 90 percent confidence that the correct answer falls in your chosen range. Mozart was born in 1756, so for example, you could narrowly select 1730 to 1770, or you could more broadly select 1600 to 1900. The range is your choice. Surprisingly, the vast majority choose correctly for no more than five of the 10 questions. Why score so poorly? Most choose too narrow bounds. The lesson is that people have an innate desire to be correct despite having no penalty for being wrong.

Gary Cokins

Labels can be People Shortcuts

Labels are shortcuts. They allow us to easily dismiss the people we associate them with. They give us an excuse not to invest in others because we think we already know them. We avoid treating them as people.

If you ask a blind person what he would like more than anything else in the world (aside from regaining his sight) you’ll invariably get an answer like this: “I want people to accept me as a person in spite of my handicap. I don’t want to be defined as a blind person. I want to be known first as a person — a person who happens to blind. 

What the blind person is asking sounds like something from the Sermon on the Mount”: “Don’t label, and then you won’t be labeled.”  

Labels not only can be turned outward, but they can also be turned inward. Labeling ourselves can propel the user down a pessimistic spiral. “I can’t tell good jokes at parties” soon becomes “I’m no fun at parties” and eventually “People don’t want me around.”  

People who overeat soon find themselves saying, “I’m the kind of person who overeats.” Or it might be, “I’m the kind of person who has to keep smoking.” The shift toward letting a label become our identify is a subtle but damning shift. The label becomes a shortcut way to deny the possibility of change.

Stephen Goforth

In search of the digital facelift

Unsurprisingly, a large body of research shows that viewing idealised or retouched images adds to the dissatisfaction that many people already feel towards their body. Research by Kristen Harrison, a media psychologist at the University of Michigan, shows that even disclosing that celebrity and advertising images are retouched makes many of us feel worse about ourselves. Becoming more aware of what others edit may heighten our awareness of our own supposed flaws. That may encourage us to spend longer using digital tools to repair them. And once you start it’s hard to stop. I felt better about posting my first FaceTuned photo than I would have if I hadn’t edited it. And since we’re more inclined to post images of ourselves that we like, says Harrison, “it’s self-sustaining because you want to do it again and again and again.” Beauty is attainable for all. Just don’t expect it to be more than a pixel deep. 

Amy Odell writing in 1843 magazine

Little Lies

Little Lies

Small, self-serving lies are likely to progress to bigger falsehoods, and over time, the brain appears to adapt to the dishonesty, according to a new study. 

The finding, the researchers said, provides evidence for the “slippery slope” sometimes described by wayward politicians, corrupt financiers, unfaithful spouses and others in explaining their misconduct. 

“They usually tell a story where they started small and got larger and larger, and then they suddenly found themselves committing quite severe acts,” said Tali Sharot, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. She was a senior author of the study.

Erica Goode writing in the New York Times

Why praising people for their intelligence can hurt them

Dr. Carol Dweck gave every child a test that consisted of fairly easy puzzles. Afterward the  researcher informed all the children of their scores, adding a single six-word sentence of praise. Half the kids were praised for their intelligence (“You must be smart at this”) and half were praised for their effort (“You must have worked really hard”).

The kids were tested a second time but this time they were offered a choice between the harder test and an easier test. Ninety percent of the kids who’d been praised for their effort choice the harder test. A majority of the kids who’d been praised for the intelligence, on the other hand, chose the easy test. Why? “When we praise children for their intelligence.” Dweck wrote, “we tell them that that's the name of the game: look smart, don't risk making mistakes.”

The third level of tests was uniformly harder; none of the kids did well. However, the two groups of kids--the praised-for-effort group and the praised-for-intelligence group--responding very differently to the situation. “(The effort group) dug in and grew very involved with the test, trying solutions, testing strategies,” Dweck said. “They later said they liked it. But the group praised for its intelligence hated the harder test. They took it as proof they weren’t smart.

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code

Embracing the Life forced upon You

From the beginning you are in the victim of circumstances. You're born, kicking and screaming, into an unknown family. As a child, you soak up influences that mold your mind in certain ways. When you finally get a driver’s license and move out of the house, you think, you’re free—but you marry someone who looks like your mother and drinks like your father. By the time you figure out who you are or what you want, a life has already been forced upon you. But it’s never too late to change. Although you can’t begin again from scratch, you can make a splendid ragout from the mishmash of damaged goods in your cupboard.

I choose how to live a life I didn’t choose.

Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflications

Your Sweet Spot

Once you understand introversion and extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you can begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favorable to your own personality--neither over-stimulating nor understimulating, neither boring nor anxiety-making. You can optimize your life in terms of what personality psychologists call "optimal levels of arousal" and what I call "sweet spots," and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before.

Your sweet spot is the place where you're optimally stimulated. You probably seek it out already without being aware that you're doing so. Imagine that you're lying contentedly in a hammock reading a great novel. This is a sweet spot. But after half an hour you realize that you've read the same sentence five times; now you're understimulated. So you call a friend and go out for brunch--in other words, you ratchet up your stimulation level--and as you laugh and gossip over blueberry pancakes, you're back, thank goodness, inside your sweet spot. But this agreeable state lasts only until your friend--an extrovert who needs much more stimulation than you do--persuades you to accompany her to a block party, where you're now confronted by loud music and a sea of strangers.

Your friend's neighbors seem affable enough, but you feel pressured to make small talk above the din of music. Now--bang, just like that--you've fallen out of your sweet spot, except this time you're overstimulated. And you'll probably feel that way until you pair off with someone on the periphery of the party for an in-depth conversation, or bow out altogether and return to your novel.

Imagine how much better you'll be at this sweet-spot game once you're aware of playing it. You can set up your work, your hobbies, and your social life so that you spend as much time inside your sweet spot as possible."

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that can't stop talking

Courage

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 2005

Sabotaging Yourself

From time to time a project will come along that seems so big and challenging you start to question your ability to succeed. It could be as epic as writing a book or directing major motion picture or it could be something more pedestrian like passing a final exam or delivering an important speech to your corporate boss. Naturally, some doubts will float through your mind when ever failures possible.

Sometimes, when the fear of failure is strong, you use a technique psychologist call self-handicapping to change the course of your future emotional state. Self-handicapping behaviors are investments in a future reality in which you can blame your failure on something other than your ability.

You might wear inappropriate clothes to a job interview, or… or stay up all night drinking before work – you are very resourceful when it comes to setting yourself up to fail. If you succeed, you can say you did so despite terrible odds. If you fall short, you can blame the events leading up to the failure instead of your own incompetence or inadequacy.

When you see your performance in the outside world as an integral part of your personality, you are more likely to self-handicap. Psychologist Phillip Zombardo told the New York Times in 1984, “Some people stake their whole identity on their acts. They take the attitude that ‘if you criticize anything I do, you criticize me.’ Their egocentricity means they can’t risk a failure because it’s a devastating blow to their ego.”

David McRaney, You are Not so Smart

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 

The Illusion

Self-evaluation involves interpretation. We’re all heard the studies showing that the vast majority of us consider ourselves above-average drivers. In the psychology literature, this belief is known as a positive illusion. Our brains are positive factories: Only 2 percent of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average. A full 25 percent of people believe they’re in the top 1 percent in their ability to get along with others. Ninety-four percent of college professors report doing above average work. People think they’re at lower risk than their peers for heart attacks, cancer, and even food-related illnesses such as salmonella.

Most deliciously self-deceptive of all, people say they are more likely than their peers to provide accurate self-assessments. Positive illusions pose an enormous problem with regard to change. Before people can change, before they can move in a new direction, they’ve got to have their bearings. But positive illusions make it hard for us to orient ourselves – to get a clear picture of where we are and how we’re doing.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

A step into authenticity

Transition may not be simply a step toward an outlook that is more appropriate to the life-phase that we are actually in. It can also be a step toward our own more authentic presence in the world. That would mean that we come out of a transition knowing ourselves better and being more willing to express who we really are, whenever we choose to do so. It would also mean that we are more often willing to trust that who-we-really-are is all right—is valid and a person capable of dealing with the world.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Self-renewal and Failure

The self-renewing man is versatile and adaptive. He is not trapped in techniques, procedures, or routines of the moment. He is not the victim of fixed habits and attitudes. He is not imprisoned by extreme specialization.  

For the self-renewing man, the development of his own potentialities and the process of self-discovery never end. It is a sad but unarguable fact that most human beings go through life only partially aware of the full range of their abilities. By middle-age, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves. How long is it since you have failed at anything? If it is long, you are in poor shape. If you are sufficiently adventurous, sufficiently willing to try new things, you will stumble fairly often.  

John Gardner,  published in the Saturday Review XLVI, Jan. 5, 1963

Alone

What can you ever really know of other people's souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. 

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity