Brain damaged decision-making

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We humans make all the same mistakes, over and over again. It's how we are wired. To neurophysiologists, who research cognitive functions, the emotionally driven appear to suffer from cognitive deficits that mimic certain types of brain injuries. Not just partisan political junkies, but ardent sports fans, the devout, even hobbyists. Anyone with an intense emotional interest in a subject loses the ability to observe it objectively: You selectively perceive events. You ignore data and facts that disagree with your main philosophy. Even your memory works to fool you, as you selectively retain what you believe in, and subtly mask any memories that might conflict.

Barry Ritholtz writing in the Washington Post

Job Hopping

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In 2014, I reported on a new paper about young workers who regularly quit their jobs and ended up better for it. “People who switch jobs more frequently early in their careers tend to have higher wages and incomes in their prime-working years,” one of the co-authors, the economics professor Henry Siu, told me. “Job-hopping is actually correlated with higher incomes, because people have found better matches.”  

Last year, the benefits of role-switching crystallized when I read a paper by the Northwestern University economist Dashun Wang. In a deep analysis of the careers of scientists and artists, he found that their “hot streaks” tended to be periods of focused and narrow work following a spell of broader experimentation. This is sometimes called the “explore-exploit” sequence. The idea is that many successful people are like good oil scouts: They spend a lot of time searching for their space, and then they drill deep when they find the right niche.

Role-switching is important not because quitting is so wonderful, but rather because sampling from different skills and fields is helpful, provided that you’re prepared to pounce on an area that clicks for you.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

Resisting Simple Solutions

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People who have always operated without skin in the game (or without their skin in the right game) seek the complicated, centralized, and avoid the simple like the pest. Practitioners on the other hand have opposite instincts, looking for the simplest heuristics.

People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

Two major problems with IQ

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The first problem with IQ stems from those who misunderstand what it’s trying to measure. IQ measures your score on a test against the averages of everyone else taking that test. It tells you how good someone is at answering certain types of questions, as compared with others. Thus, it’s not about an absolute intelligence, but relative intelligence. The trouble occurs when people misunderstand this point. They assume IQ represents raw “brain power.” Worse, some people equate IQ with worth.    

In short, the data we have — the data some people use to pigeon-hole a person for life — is desperately weak and inconclusive.

The second problem is that IQ is far too narrow a metric to dominate so much of the psychometric landscape. IQ represents only one, or a few, kinds of intelligence. Psychologist Howard Gardener identifies eight different kinds of intelligence, and “IQ tests and other kinds of standardized tests valorize” only two of them.

Jonny Thomson writing in BigThink

 

Inviting Joy

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“Too often, we think of joy passively,” psychologist Marisa Franco said. “We see it as something that comes to us, instead of something we can generate.” But you don’t need to wait for someone else’s good news to exercise freudenfreude, she explained.

Cultivate joy by inviting others to share their victories. You might ask: “What was the bright spot of your day?” or “I could use some good news. What’s the best thing that happened to you this week?” Asking about other people’s wins turns you into a joy spectator, giving you a chance to witness them at their best.

Juli Fraga writing in the New York Times

Stress Can Be Good

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Researchers visited “an investment bank, at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. They split around 400 bankers into three groups. The first watched a video that reinforced notions of stress as toxic, the second watched one highlighting that stress could enhance performance and the third watched no clip at all. A week later the second group reported greater focus, higher engagement and fewer health problems than before; the other two groups reported no changes.”

One of the researchers says, “Google images of stress and you’ll see a guy with his head on fire. We’ve internalised that idea.”

“He instead compares stress to going to the gym. You only get stronger if you push yourself beyond what feels easy, but afterwards you need to recover. The analogy suggests that stress at work may be performance-enhancing, but should be followed by rest, whether that means not checking e-mails on weekends, taking more holiday or going for a stroll in the middle of the day.”

Read more in The Economist

Toxic workplaces

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Toxic workplaces are not only costly — they are also common. Our research on large U.S. employers found that approximately 1 in 10 workers experience their workplace culture as toxic, an estimate that is in line with other studies. Even companies with healthy cultures overall typically contain pockets of toxicity, due to abusive managers or dysfunctional social norms among certain teams.  By identifying and addressing these toxic subcultures, a process we refer to as a cultural detox, leaders can dramatically improve employees’ experience and minimize unwanted attrition, disengagement, negative word of mouth, and other costs associated with a toxic workplace.

Donald Sull and Charles Sull writing for the MIT Sloan Management Review

Experience or Things?

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There's a very logical assumption that most people make when spending their money: that because a physical object will last longer, it will make us happier for a longer time than a one-off experience like a concert or vacation. According to recent research, it turns out that assumption is completely wrong.

"One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation," says Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University who has been studying the question of money and happiness for over two decades. "We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them."

It's counterintuitive that something like a physical object that you can keep for a long time doesn't keep you as happy as long as a once-and-done experience does.

"Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods," says Gilovich. "You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences."

Jay Cassano writing in Fast Company

Hybrid Entrepreneurship

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“There’s this myth that you have to go all in on a project or initiative to be successful, when it’s actually better to do a personal real options approach,” says Nathan Furr.

Nathan and Susannah Furr, authors of The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown, were introduced to the concept after interviewing Ben Feringa, recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on molecular machines. The Furrs asked Feringa if he faced uncertainty on his road to a scientific breakthrough.

“He laughed and said, ‘It was all uncertainty,'” recalls Nathan Furr.

Feringa told the Furrs that he encourages his students to have at least two projects going, one certain and one uncertain. “Striving for certainty will lead you down false paths or lead you to commit too long to projects that won’t work, or to uninteresting projects that will work,” he explained.

Stephenie Vozza writing in Fast Company