Instinct Blindness

I was reading Incognito by David Eagleman and he used the term “instinct blindness” to refer to the lack of attention and resulting lack of memory traces from tasks that have become automatic (or that started out that way – hence the term instinct).  I have used the similar term “inattention blindness” to refer to the similar phenomenon when you don’t notice things write in front of you when your attention is on something else.  I like the use of the term blindness because unlike the novice mental model that the human visual system are like a video camera, it shows how blind we really are.  These events literally never register in our attention or situation awareness and never establish a memory trace.  Unless something salient happens, it will stay that way.  Just as if you were blind.

Teams and Specialization

I read an excellent white paper yesterday on the pros and cons of having teams specialize in particular skills.  The example they studied was searching through knowledge databases, but I think the findings are relevant to all kinds of specialization. 

The basic idea of the study is that you have a few people in a team specialize in a specific task (in contrast to having everyone do the task on their own), there are positive and negative consequences.  On the positive side, these people get very good at the task, so they tend to do it quickly.  The speed of the team’s progress increases.  Using the example in the white paper, when one person becomes a specialist at searching through the company databases, she gets good at creating sophisticated queries navigating through the database, and understanding what content is available and what isn’t. 

BUT there is a downside.  If you ask this person to do your search for you, he/she may be good at searching, but won’t get as much out of the search as you would have.  First, she may not understand the context of the problem you are trying to solve.  So she may miss the most applicable solution while looking for one that seems better from her limited perspective.  Also, there may be gaps in the communication back and forth, so part of the question or part of the answer may be lost or misunderstood. 

They also looked at the effects of teams that are either geographically dispersed or working in highly dynamic environments.  These kinds of teams need to use the organizational database more.  But they are hurt more by this specialization because the problems of misunderstood context or communication are even bigger.  There is less sharing of information when team members are geographically dispersed.  And shared information may no longer be accurate or relevant in highly dynamic environments.  

To take a completely different kind of example, imagine you have someone on the team who specializes is visual design.  By getting more practice and experience, this person may develop a lot of skills in knowing what colors go together or how to arrange objects on a screen to promote symmetry and balance.  But when you ask this expert to do the visual part of your design, she may not understand the message you are trying to get across in your design.  What are the tradeoffs between speed and accuracy?  Friendliness and professionalism?  Brand consistency and task effectiveness?  You can tell her, but she won’t really know it as well as you do.  The design will be done faster, but perhaps not as precise for this specific situation.

Imagine if you have one person in a clothing store who develops expertise in dealing with difficult customers.  Whenever a customer is difficult, you bring in the ‘expert.’  By getting all this practice, the expert gets really smooth at calming people down.  But by not knowing the exact problem as well as you do, there is more chance of a misunderstanding.  

Team management is a particular interest of mine, so I found these findings to be very important.  Did you??

Freakonomics wants you to quit.

NPR played a Freakonomics Radio special on quitting. It was very interesting because it is applicable in two areas that a lot of people have trouble with.

The first is also referred to as the fast fail model.  Try 100 things, quit the bottom 98 as fast as possible so you can do the best 2 effectively.  The faster you can quit the less successful ones, the more options you can try out and the more likely you are to find the best ones.  But it is hard because we have trouble letting go of our ideas.  When you start out thinking an idea might be a good one, we get cognitive dissonance admitting it is not.  We also suffer from confirmation bias (among others) when evaluating the idea, so we may think it is better than it really is.  Developing the skill of failing fast is very useful, especially in areas such as innovation and kaizen.

They also apply the idea of quitting to career development.  Think of the opportunity costs of continuing to work at a job or in an industry that you don't like.  Sunk cost fallacy tells us that we focus on all the years and time we have already wasted in this field so we can't switch now.  But it's called a fallacy for a reason.  It is never too late.  For young IEs out there, think about the industry where you work, the experience you are getting, and the expertise you are building.  Is this what you want to do? If not, the sooner you quit the sooner you can get on a path to what you do want.  And the sooner you do it, the easier it is because you have less cognitive dissonance and less sunk cost bias.  Is it too late if you are 50 and dissatisfied with your career?  Nope!!  Even then, you can apply what you have learned in one area to another that might be more meaningful to you.  There were lots of great examples on the radio/podcast special (no IEs of course :-D). 

Quitting is even harder when the thing you need to quit is part of your identity and self-image.  Musicians who have tried to build their rock band career, actors who have been trying to build an acting career, minor league baseball players after 10 years in the minors, etc.  Rock/acting/baseball isn't just what they do, it's who they are.  We can have similar situations in IE.  Perhaps all your life, even as a kid, you were a "car guy."  You were working on cars with your dad when you were 5 years old.  Everyone knew you would get a job in the car industry.  IE was just the particular path you chose.  But now you are 45 and realize it isn't meaningful any more.  Admitting this to yourself (and to everyone you have known your whole life) is tough.  Many people can't do it.  Some go to therapy to develop the strength to do it.  

But do it, whatever it takes.  You spend more time at work than doing anything else.  It should be something that makes you feel good at the end of the day.  When you love what you do, you don't have to "work" a day in your life.  And this happiness transfers to other parts of your life.  You become a better spouse, parent, friend, and more. 

Compensation v Incentives

The last couple of papers from the Happiness Research Conference had an interesting point-counterpoint kind of style regarding taxation and incentives.

Let's assume for a moment that married people have approximately $100,000 worth of extra happiness over their lifetime (this is the population average for the U.S.).  So if you were creating an ideal tax system, would your goal be to compensate for this by creating a marriage penalty that over a lifetime would give a single person an extra $100,000?  Or would you create an incentive for people to get married by giving a tax deduction for it and expect that the lost tax revenue is worth the extra happiness you have created.  But would marriages that are pushed by tax incentives create the same happiness as natural ones?  Maybe you are decreasing happiness because you are motivating some mad marriages.  Wow, this social engineering is tough.

There was a similar debate on age.  We have all heard that it is important to invest when you are young because of the magic of compound interest.  This article complements that thought by suggesting a high consumption tax on status-building goods.  If one person buys a status-building product, he/she gets happier but everyone else gets less happy.  So the aggregate societal happiness goes down.  We should discourage this (according to one argument) by having high taxes on these goods.  It is worse when young people do it because it creates a lifetime of one-ups-man-ship and middle aged people feel worse when younger people have status products that they don't.  So we could have high taxes on status-building products that are graduated so that we let older people enjoy the money they have earned but tax the young people;s status consumption and try to shift their money into investment.

The papers really are putting up strawmen as examples of what governments could do.  None of the authors are suggesting actually doing any of this.  But it does get you thinking.

Jury awards for pain and suffering

A paper by Cass Sunstein (Harvard B-School prof and currently in Obama administration) has some interesting insights into jury awards for pain and suffering.  It turns out, they usually have it backwards.  The kinds of injuries/conditions that people tend to get used to over time are the ones that juries see as very salient and so they make big awards.  This includes things like lost limbs.  But over time, the injured starts focusing on other things.  When eating a good meal, you can forget about a lost leg for a while.

On the other hand, chronic issues that we never habituate to are underestimated by juries and get small pain and suffering awards.  Things like chronic pain continue to ruin that good meal for the rest of your life.  But it is less salient to juries, so the awards are smaller.

He recommends creating guidelines based on a series of detailed studies that measure (at a general level) how bad different kinds of injuries/conditions are over time and creating award guidelines that reflect the experience the injured party will really go through, not just what it seems like to an ignorant jury.

Something I had never though about.  But it makes sense.  For a deeper and broader analysis, here is a Yale Law School prize winning paper on the topic.

Subtle Persuasion

The Skeptic column in Scientific American has a great article on decision making biases.  It’s like Michael Shermer (the columnist) took my class.  His basic message is that our decisions are based more on emotions and frames than they are on the actual facts.  He highlights confirmation bias, anchoring, and authority.  Then he has a great addition – the meta-bias.  This is the bias blind spot – we see bias in others but not in ourselves.

Then the Anti-Gravity column was about persuasion.  Steve Mirsky (columnist) uses car salesmen as an example but is really talking about persuasion strategies in general.  He mentions some of the good ones.  Establishing rapport creates in-group bias and likeability bias.  Then he said the salesman told him the price was available just for that day (scarcity).  The salesman also did some nice extra things to create reciprocity bias.  

These are very good things to know before getting into a persuasion environment (either as consumer or persuader). It works on juries, consumers, an even dealing with relatives.

Quieting the Self

Another paper on happiness that I was reading had some very interesting advice.  The researchers mentioned three ways that one can quiet the self and become part of an emergent social entity, which leads to a unique kind of hive happiness.

One was is individual.  You can quiet yourself through productive means like yoga and meditation.  You can also quiet yourself through less productive means like drugs and alcohol.  In both cases, you quiet yourself, but don’t necessarily join a collective. So this is only second best (the yoga/meditation, not the drugs/alcohol).

The second is in “hives.”  This is the term they use for groups of 10-100.  They are large enough that your personal contribution is not essential/salient but small enough that you are not meaningless/anonymous.  This is the one they consider ideal.

The third is subservience.  In this way, you let someone else make all the decisions and you are an anonymous part of the group.  Fascism does this at the political level and some cults do this at the religious level.  This is the one these researchers dislike the most. 

I find it interesting because I will expand it to workplace management. Can we use the idea of hive happiness to make our workplace more productive.  I know this sounds kind of touchy-feely, but there is research behind it.  The first insight is to create a sense of community among your team.  Not just work collaboration, but things like a softball team, group happy hours after work, or getting together to watch the local sports team.  Something not work-related that creates a social bond.  The second comes from Robert Sutton at Stanford. He calls it the no a--hole rule.  Just one of these can ruin the hive happiness, even if everyone else gets along.  It’s up to the manager to remove the a—hole from the team.

The pursuit of happiness

As many of you know by now, I am a dedicated reader of the happiness literature. Not the touchy-feely stuff, but the real academic scholarship on the subject. Despite large individual differences, there are several insights that are consistent around the world.

The old stuff you already know. In brief, long term happiness is frequently based on who you are comparing yourself to, which is usually

• your work and life community (office, church, neighbors),
• celebrities (which us unhealthy because they are all rich and beautiful),
• your own past (the most memorable parts, which are often extremes of the good and bad),
• the previous generations you can remember (parents, and for some of us grandparents).

This is why when national GDP or standards of living are growing fast, we tend to be happier, but then if it then plateaus, we lose that extra happiness. It’s not being well off that makes you happy, its comparative well-being that matters.

Some new research I have been reading lately adds to this. They discovered that we are more likely to habituate to some happy experiences than others. For example, when something is constant (the size of your home), you get really happy when you first move in, but then that happiness wears down as you get used to the new house. On the other hand, the length of your commute is hit or miss because of traffic, accidents, etc. So moving to a house that has an easier/shorter commute makes you happy for a much longer time, although the initial boost is not as large. One challenge of this is that human cognition is very focused in instant gratification. So the big initial boost of happiness from the big house usually dominates our choice of where to live. So we pick the option that gives us more short term happiness but less long term happiness.

This study also looked at easy to measure things v hard to measure things. If your happiness is more focused on the past (your own or generational comparisons), measurable things are more effective. The size of your or your parents TV in the 1980s will never change. And it is probably bigger now. So the comparison is favorable and the happiness boost will be more consistent. But if your happiness is more focused on the present (community or celebrity), then measurable things are not effective. Celebrities TVs will always be bigger than yours (just watch “Cribs” once to see what I mean). And at least one of your neighbors will always be boasting about his new big screen high-def TV. The ones with the small ones keep their mouths shut, so all we usually hear about are the ones that are bigger than ours and the comparison is not happy.

On the other hand, unmeasurable things can really make you happy, even comparing to your neighbors. So for example, volunteering at a local charity. You feel good about it and your neighbors can’t really do it “better.” Or watching a good TV show (often with your celebrities in it and maybe even watching with your neighbors). Everyone gets the same options and people all have different tastes. Listening to music, reading a good book, etc. People who enjoy these are happier because they are not always comparing. The study uses the example of investing in a better heating system or in jewelry. The heating system will give you more long term happiness, but the jewelry gives you more instant gratification, so you are more likely to think jewelry will make you happier.

Customer experiences are more complicated than they appear

This is a great example of understanding the complexity of the customer experience. I just bought eggs at CVS. Usually the expiration date is on the outside of the container. But because there are always one or two cracked eggs in each container, you have to take two or three out and find 12 that are whole. But if there are different expiration dates, you can mix up your own as well as the next persons.

So this company (not sure of the vendor) stamps each egg with the expiration date. They understand these two competing customer requirements (expiration dates and no broken ones) and were willing to spend a little extra on their packaging process to give it to them.

Salmonella is not pretty. I'm not sure a new container design would be better at preventing breakage. So a good tradeoff I think.

Heat and revenge

Two different streams of research have found the same conclusion. When it is hot, your aggression goes up, but not in general. Mostly it is the revenge component that goes up.

One of the studies looked at baseball. The chance of a pitcher retaliating for hit batsmen is much higher in 95 degree weather than 55 degree weather.

The other study looked at indoor environments. People were more likely to view others’ actions as hostile and it lowered the threshold at which people took revenge for the hostile action.

The benefit of the baseball study is that it isolates all of the other cultural variables that interact with perceptions and actions. The benefit of the second study was that it is more ecologically valid (more like our real lives).

So if you are managing a hot workplace, whether it’s outdoors or just near hot machines and processes, this is something you have to worry about. Try to keep the temperature below the 90s. And if you can’t, take some preliminary actions to prevent revenge and hostility. That can really destroy workplace morale and productivity.