Attribution theory and Shreddies

I was just reading Guy Kawasaki's blog about the effort effect. Here's an extract:

If you manage any people or if you are a parent (which is a form of managing people), drop everything and read The Effort Effect. This is an article about Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck. It examines her thirty-year study of why some some people excel and others don't. (Hint: the answer is not "God-given talent.")

The article postulates that people have two kinds of mindsets: growth or fixed. People with the growth mindset view life as a series of challenges and opportunities for improving. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are "set" as either good or bad. The issue is that the good ones believe they don't have to work hard, and the bad ones believe that working hard won't change anything.

She recently released a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I have not yet read it, but I ordered it as soon as I read this article. I can't imagine not liking it.

To provide a further taste of the article and her work, here is a sidebar from the article called "What Do We Tell the Kids?" I took the liberty of adding [employee] to show the relevance of this article to business.

"You have a bright child [employee], and you want her to succeed. You should tell her how smart she is, right?

That's what 85 percent of the parents Dweck surveyed said. Her research on fifth graders shows otherwise. Labels, even though positive, can be harmful. They may instil a fixed mind-set and all the baggage that goes with it, from performance anxiety to a tendency to give up quickly. Well-meaning words can sap children's [employee's] motivation and enjoyment of learning and undermine their performance. While Dweck's study focused on intelligence praise, she says her conclusions hold true for all talents and abilities."

There are a lot of things I like here, both in Dweck's original and Kawasaki's piece:

• The update on learned helplessness and attribution theory is good. We almost all have areas where we believe we can't improve. That stunts growth and achievement. It also pisses everybody else off. In this office we have one person who "can't understand computers", one who "isn't clever enough to contribute to the discussion", one who "can't tidy up, communicate or abide meetings", and so on.
• Explaining why it isn't always helpful to tell your child or colleague that they're brilliant is a pure relief. I've always hated this kind of mechanical reinforcement and hated the fact that it probably works. I'm delighted that it doesn't.
• The idea that some people, in some areas, are more concerned with demonstrating ability than improving it (and vice versa) is crucial to improving organizational learning.
• Emerging from the last point, the awareness that putting a lot of people who know they're very good into a football team, board of directors or project team is a potentially dangerous thing to do, is also helpful.

Am I happy that I refused my 2-year-old children Shreddies (or anything else) for breakfast until they had correctly read the word 'Dinosaur'? Not really. But I feel less bad than I did before. Which is indicative of growth and change. Phew.

Lizard brains, heuristics and koalas again

Bruce Schneier, in his absorbing article on the psychology of security, talks about the process of ‘mental accounting’, whereby we use different ‘accounts’ when performing different trade-off calculations. One experiment he describes thus:

• Trade-off 1: Imagine that you have decided to see a play where the admission is $10 per ticket. As you enter the theatre you discover that you have lost a $10 bill. Would you still pay $10 for a ticket to the play?
• Trade-off 2: Imagine that you have decided to see a play where the admission is $10 per ticket. As you enter the theatre you discover that you have lost the ticket. The seat is not marked and the ticket cannot be recovered. Would you pay $10 for another ticket?

The results of the trade-off are exactly the same. In either case, you can either see the play and have $20 less in your pocket, or not see the play and have $10 less in your pocket. But people don't see these trade-offs as the same. Faced with Trade-off 1, 88% of subjects said they would buy the ticket anyway. But faced with Trade-off 2, only 46% said they would buy a second ticket. The researchers concluded that there is some sort of mental accounting going on, and the two different $10 expenses are coming out of different mental accounts.

This probably sounds familiar. We all make this kind of odd calculation all the time: things assume a different value when we’re on holiday, late, sad, in love, angry, etc. So I’ll spend half an hour on the Internet trying to save £5 on the airport car park, and then happily buy a doughnut and coffee for £8.50 or whatever it now costs on Ryanair.

Talking to the Project Red Stripe team recently, they likewise compared the press coverage given to one death in a train crash to that given to any of the 3,500 children killed or seriously injured on Britain’s roads each year. (This relates to another of Schneier’s points about risk perception – that people exaggerate those that are rare and downplay those that are commonplace).

Our views of ‘good causes’ – AIDS orphans, famine victims, maltreated pets, etc. – are also notoriously subject to inexplicable perceptual bias.

Returning to Schneier’s article, he quotes the following words of Daniel Gilbert:

“The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That's what brains did for several hundred million years--and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain's most stunning innovations, and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.”

Schneier then goes on to say:

“A lot of what I write in the following sections are examples of these newer parts of the brain getting things wrong.

And it's not just risks. People are not computers. We don't evaluate security trade-offs mathematically, by examining the relative probabilities of different events. Instead, we have shortcuts, rules of thumb, stereotypes, and biases--generally known as "heuristics."

…Our social and technological evolution has vastly outpaced our evolution as a species, and our brains are stuck with heuristics that are better suited to living in primitive and small family groups.”

All of this is by way of preamble to the Project Red Stripe team’s current deliberations over a target-group or market for their Internet-based business plan. Where relatively simple ‘interest’ equations were involved in deciding what kind of Internet project would be worth pursuing, far more complex equations are now involved in debating the relative worth of plans to offer better education to third-world children, to first-world children (the most influential decision-makers of the future), to women (mothers of the poorly-educated children), etc.

While Project Red Stripe has actively solicited ideas about what they should do, they haven’t solicited the same ideas about the group(s) for whom they should implement those ideas. Should they have invited an archbishop, an aid worker, a genetic researcher and an Australian scientist researching gender issues amongst the koala population to make the case for a particular target market?

I doubt it. But maybe they could still focus on a web-based project to help us bring the heuristics and decision-making capacities of our reptilian brains into line with the demands of the 21^st century.

(As well as Schneier’s article, do also read Daniel Gilbert’s If only gay sex caused global warming.)

Neuroteamwork

Neurobigcheese Zack Lynch recently wrote about delusions, madness and love as follows:

"The defining feature of madness is delusion, however, where the affected person holds a fixed, unrealistic belief despite persuasive contrary evidence.

People in love are notorious for their unusual beliefs and, indeed, research has shown that we tend to hold unlikely and overly positive beliefs about our lovers."

No great surprises there. Though 'overly positive' seems a touch loaded. Nor in the conclusion of the research he links to:

"The results revealed that intimates in satisfying marriages perceive more virtue in their partners than their friends or their partners themselves perceive."

These are the very murky waters of UPR and Positive Thinking/Reframing that Carl Rogers and NLP have been fishing in for some time.

I'm wondering about applications of this type of thinking to teamwork like that of Project Red Stripe (see many previous posts).

Observing a conference call between the team and consultant Javier Bajer, I was struck by the chill factor that accompanied Javier's "this is the biggest question you should have asked for the last two months" (my emphasis), and the radiator effect of his later suggestion that the team "consider being part of something that can change the lives of millions of people".

Over the last eight weeks I have seen (and been excited by) the enormous enthusiasm that can envelop team members at different times. And I've noted the ease with which that enthusiasm can be discredited or lost in the face of technical hitches, criticism from outside, delays and the inevitable tedium of doing something even as riveting as changing the world. This isn't a group that's going to hold hands and count down to the start of the working day whilst chanting, "let's change the world". Praise the lord. But I want to jump out of observer status for a moment and say, "Let me see you change the world. Even just a little. I really, really want you to succeed". On second thoughts, I'd better not.

But there's a reminder of the blindingly obvious here for all teams, everywhere. If we maintain a higher regard for our job/project than others around us have for it, we'll love it more, do it better and get better results.

Ordinariness

In an interview in the current edition of CAM Magazine, the 12th Earl of Drogheda reveals that he didn't join a dramatic society at university. Now why would that be?

The conventional and anticipated reason (too shy) comes first:
"I think this was because of a mixture of insecurity..."
The second, and rather unexpected, one comes next:
"...and fear of not being given star roles."

Hold it. Fear? Of not being given star roles? That looks like an unusual fear. Even in a world where we discover new phobias daily. But it echoes my conviction that much shyness and holding back reflects not our discomfort at being the objection of attention per se, but our grandiosity: our fear that we won't be seen to be as clever, important, noteworthy, funny, beautiful as we think we really are - or could be.

It reflects our unspoken expectation that we should be not just good, but significantly better than anybody else.

So, we're embarrassed to speak in public because we would like to be not just good enough but the finest orator in the land.

I've suggested this to a couple of shy people. They got quite cross. So I think I'm onto something.

I was paralysed by shyness for years.

I see there's now a drug for it. Good-oh.