Don’t Let Your Mind Be Your Worst
Enemy
Two new
books reveal the inner workings of human psychology--biases, rationalizations,
and all.
We all
have people to whom we turn when we seek wise counsel. Some of those people may
be friends and family; some may be people we’ve never known, but whose writings
have inspired us. They seem to know what we should do or say in difficult
circumstances and to navigate social relationships and business transactions
more effectively than the rest of us.
Now,
two newly published books—The Wisest One in the Room, byThomas Gilovich and Lee Ross, and Friend & Foe, by
Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer—offer their own kind of wisdom. Looking to
social science research for guidance, they suggest that understanding human
psychology can guide us toward wise action in many areas of work and life.
What
is wisdom?
THE WISEST ONE IN THE ROOM Free Press,
2015, 307 pages
According
to Gilovich and Ross—both renowned social psychologists at Cornell and Stanford,
respectively—what truly makes someone wise is not just knowledge, but also
insight and good judgment, and those are dependent on a deep feeling for other
people’s motivations, fears, hopes, and passions, as well as how they can get
off-track. “To be wise, one must be psych-wise,” they write.
Though
many, if not all, of their insights gleaned from social science research have
been written about before, it’s rare to have them so clearly articulated, well
integrated, and supported by convincing numbers of studies. We see again how
blind we can be to our biases, thinking that our perceptions of the world are
accurate and objective when they are clearly not.
We
also learn of our tendency to accuse others of having bad character when they
behave badly, rather than considering environmental factors that may have
influenced their behavior. These biases make up a sort of “naive realism,”
according to the authors, which can be detrimental to our relationships.
“Naive
realism gives us the impression that we see things the way they are, not as
filtered or constructed in light of our expectations, preferences, or
overarching ideology,” they write. “It is then a short step to seeing
alternative views as the product of hearts and minds that are somehow
defective.”
Our
bias, ourselves
In one
study recounted in the book, participants viewed footage of a protest being
broken up by police; but half were told it involved anti-abortion demonstrators
in front of an abortion clinic, while the other half were told it involved
demonstrators protesting “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policies in front of a
military recruitment center. What people “saw” in terms of actions taken by
police and protesters—i.e., whether or not protesters were blocking the
entrance to the building or how well the police responded—corresponded with
their political views and the context of the protest…not the actual video
footage.
Our behavior can be easily redirected by
environmental cues and circumstances, though we more often recognize these environmental
influences when e ourselves behave badly than when others do.
This is because of the “fundamental attribution error,” or the assumption that
other people’s actions are reflections of the kind of people they are, rather
than their being due to situational factors. Understanding this bias can help
us in our attempts to help people change their problematic behavior—such as a
child who is not studying. It’s often best to consider ways to remove obstacles
that make it harder to change rather than trying to amp up motivation through
rewards and punishment.
“If
you want to be the wisest person in the room, discipline yourself not to rush
to judgment about individuals until you know, and feel you truly appreciate,
the situational forces and constraints that are making their influence felt,”
write the authors.
Gilovich
and Ross go through many of the most important discoveries in social psychology
research and explain how they work. We learn that how an event is framed will
influence how we feel about it; how body sensations like heat and cold, or
pain, can drive our interpretation of our emotions; how imagining an obligation
far in the future makes us more likely to agree to it; how higher rewards for
changing one’s behavior lead to poorer motivation to maintain that change; how
we rationalize our behaviors to avoid cognitive dissonance; and many, many more
findings explaining the connection between our minds and our behavior.
In
their final chapters, they apply this research to important issues of our time,
such as increasing human happiness, reducing conflict between groups, educating
at-risk youth, and combating climate change. We learn that to increase
happiness, we should spend on experiences rather than possessions, try to savor peak experiences, and give to others rather than give in to indulging ourselves. To
reduce conflicts, we must understand how our naive realism thwarts our ability
to compromise. To educate at-risk youth, we must teach a growth mindset and tie achievement to personal goals. And, to
reduce resistance to combating climate change, we must tweak our joint sense of
purpose by creating a community of individuals doing their part.
How to
know friend from foe
FRIEND & FOE Crown Books,
2015, 312 pages
While
Gilovich and Ross’s book is detailed and focused on how being “psych-wise” can
improve society at large, Friend & Foeauthors Galinsky and
Schweitzer (both business professors) have a more narrow agenda: exploring how
our psychology impacts our decisions to cooperate or compete with one another,
mostly in the business world.
According
to Galinsky and Schweitzer, research supports the notion that we are both a
cooperative and competitive species, and, because of that, we experience some
puzzling paradoxes. For example, we sometimes feel more threatened when those
closest to us succeed than when others succeed, because we are “hardwired to
seek social comparisons.”
As
experiments with capuchin monkeys have shown, we primates are not pleased and
will not work cooperatively when we see our neighbors getting something better
for the same effort. Social comparisons can make us feel resentful or
self-inflated, depending which side of the comparison we’re on, though we make
allowances for those we consider “above” us in the social hierarchy, such as a
boss.
So,
why is this helpful to know?
The
authors suggest that understanding social comparison helps you anticipate
charged emotions around losing out (relatively speaking). For example, if your
friend gets a raise at work and you don’t, you can be prepared for the
inevitable let down and let it motivate you to work harder. Contrarily, ifyou get
the raise, you can level the emotional playing field by sharing some negative
information—perhaps explaining how the raise means longer work hours for
you—and allowing your friend to indulge in some “schadenfreude”—the positive
feeling you sometimes get from the misfortune of others.
Creating
psychological safety at work
More on the Brain
Discover how to use
neuroscience to tune up your brain.
Learn
about the neuroscience
of prejudice.
Read three other
books on psychological change and decision
making.
The
book is full of similar treatises on dichotomies in human behavior, along with
tips for working with them more effectively. For example, the authors explore
how to manage our desire for forming hierarchies with the need to work more cooperatively;
how to use power wisely so we don’t create more social isolation for ourselves
or incur resentment; and how to inspire trust and know when to trust, rather
than be taken for a ride.
With
hierarchies, it’s important that higher-ups provide “psychological safety” for
those in one-down positions so they will feel safe to input into
decision-making, especially in situations that require group effort. With
power, it’s important to know when to show deference toward others and when to
show confidence—too often, the powerful focus on appearing confident, but
forget to recognize contributions from others, which leads to resentment. And,
with trust, it’s important to display competence and warmth, but to also form
long-term relationships and employ “gossip”—a natural system for checking on
the reliability of others.
In a
chapter on women in the workplace, the authors explain how women often find
themselves in a double bind needing to appear competent and competitive to get
ahead at work, but facing resentment from colleagues for these very qualities.
Many of the attributes we associate with women—both negative, like “not being
good at math,” and positive, like “being warm and caring”—are actually
influenced by power, write the authors, and research has shown that they are
quite malleable. If we are to rectify gender discrimination, we need to use
techniques that reduce bias in hiring, as well as mentoring women who are
already on the job, they argue.
“Whether
it is in the classroom, on the athletic field, in the pitch room, or in the
boardroom, a culture of equality can lead a group to have a competitive
advantage over its less equality-minded rivals,” write the authors. “When it
comes to gender, it is the cooperative and inclusive approach that increases talent
levels and predicts competitive success.”
The
strength of Friend & Foe is in utilizing social science to
advise those who want to navigate work relationships (or any relationships)
more thoughtfully. But sometimes the book feels like a collection of interesting
counterintuitive study results rather than a cohesive whole with a clear
viewpoint. Certainly, the book has plenty of interesting stories and good
prescriptive advice. But, it would have been nice if it were just a bit more
inspirational, perhaps…and less focused on aims for success in business.
Still,
in combination, these two books provide a powerful treatise on why we need
social science to help us understand our human natures better so that we make
wiser decisions of all kinds. The ultimate challenge of our time seems to be to
“know thyself,” and both books enlighten us on that topic. Only by knowing
ourselves—our instincts and biases—can we work toward a better society without
being fools about how we go about achieving it.
By Jill Suttie
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/dont_let_your_mind_be_your_worst_enemy?utm_source=GG+Newsletter+Jan+13+2016&utm_campaign=GG+Newsletter+Jan+13+2016&utm_medium=email
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