Depression is NOT sadness

In memory of Robin Williams' passing yesterday, apparently from a depression-induced suicide, I wanted to clarify something that can be very misleading.

We often use the word depressed colloquially to mean very sad.  But clinically, it does not mean this at all.  It is actually a lack of emotion.  It is a lack of energy.  It is a lack of interest, even in things that used to be interesting, important, or engaging.  There is a reason that the opposite of depression is mania rather than bliss.

You could see the manic states (which means high, uncontrollable energy, not happiness) in a lot of his standup and many of his characters (especially the voice of the genie in Aladdin).  And I would imagine that he was forced to fake the big grins he often wore. That must have been very difficult, fatiguing, and hard to maintain. 

This is a reason depressed people might turn to drugs or alcohol.  Especially people in the public eye who are forced to fake happiness or at least mask the depression.  For a comedian, I can't imagine how hard that must have been. 

My heart really goes out to him.  I enjoyed his whole body of work.  I laughed hysterically from the first time Mork appeared on Happy Days.  On the flight home from Singapore just last Thursday I sobbed uncontrollably while watching him in "The Angriest Man in Brooklyn." (In full view of the other passengers, who were not watching the movie and probably wondered). 

The world has lost a real treasure.

Team Building

Here is a team building exercise that you all should try. It is a guaranteed success. 

First, organize one of those silly team building exercises that many corporations seem to love – getting the entire company together, break them into small groups that have nothing to do with the employees’ real teams, and then do some link building, get-to-know-you activities like treasure hunts and ropes courses. 

Then end the day about an hour before your employees usually go home and watch the magic begin.  The real teams will congregate and start grumbling about how huge a waste of time this day was.  What ignoramuses our upper management must be to think this could work !!!!  They may even all go out to happy hour or dinner together to keep the gripe-fest going.  It may even last all week.  And THIS is the team building that is my guaranteed success.  You would be amazed at how unifying against a common adversary can bond a team together.  This is real bond-building, not the link-building that the ropes courses create.

But in all seriousness, there is a potential consequence that you need to worry about.  Who is it that they are bonding to oppose?  You can’t let this turn into longer term negative competition between workplace teams or disruption against organizational principles once they get back to their real work.  But that is not too hard as long as you follow a few basic guidelines.

·         Make sure that the groups inside the fake team building exercises are orthogonally created to their real work teams so there are no out-group identity schema created during any competition.  If you have any questions about this, please ask me about it in the comments because it is really important.

·         Make sure that the rules of the fake team building exercises are structured using good gamification principles to discourage any cheating, even in fun.  If you have any questions on this one, read my new book when it comes out in the fall. (Yes, this is a convenient plug.  So sue me !!).

Anyone feel like giving this a try?  If you do, let me know how it goes.  I think all of us reading this blog would be interested in your results.

Are prejudicial defaults more likely than tolerant defaults for "The Other"?

I just heard this story on PRI’s The World and it made me think again about defaults.  Bear with me for a minute and you may see why.

 

The story is about a County Commissioner in Tennessee who posted something quite racist against Muslims on Facebook.  A Muslim who was running for a different seat on that same commission called him up to talk about it and invited him over for dinner. (It would be nice if we all handled problems this way, but that is a topic for another post).  The conversation was quite interesting.  The racist commissioner was completely unaware that he had said anything wrong or that anyone could be offended.  He didn’t know there was a difference between “Muslim” and “terrorist” because of everything he heard in the media.  He had never been “up close” to a Muslim or asked about their beliefs. Is the default schema when someone has zero information about a group to assume the worst??

Most (mainstream) media outlets are relatively careful to say somewhere in their reports that terrorists compose a small minority of the Muslim population and they also compose a small minority of all the rest of the world’s religions.  Timothy McVeigh is a common example I have seen used in these cases.  But it seems that people who have never seen a member of a minority “up close” seem to default to negative stereotypes because of what they see on the media.  News media are always showing negative stories (for all groups) because that is what drives ratings.  Movies and TV shows often write scripts to fit stereotypes, which often are negative for minorities.  So in the absence of other interaction, people develop generally negative schema of minorities.

So here is my thought today.  What do you think is the minimum exposure that would be necessary to overcome this schema development process?  We have a natural in-group preference that creates a bias towards positive opinions of people similar to us and negative towards "The Other."  The younger we intervene the better because we start developing these “out-group” schema before we are even one year old (I have blogged about this before with research of infants as early as 4-6 months).   Is there a strategic intervention process we need, particularly for more isolated populations?  Would it work?  Could it work?

Using empirical results to guide foreign policy

Stephen Walt has an interesting suggestion for US foreign policy in the Middle East.

If you look back over decades and decades of US actions in the Middle East, whether you are talking about Israel/Palestinian, North Africa, Arab Spring, Iraq/Afghanistan, Syria, Al Queda, and on and on, the results are not so hot. 

So what if, he suggests, we take that as a hint that our intervention doesn't do much good, despite the investment of significant amounts of blood and treasure?  Of course, they may be brief humanitarian necessities if we see genocide.  But other than that, what if we experiment with doing nothing for a decade or two and see what happens?  We can always re-intervene at that time if the results are even worse.  But what if it gets better? 

We may not have a logical or geopolitical reason for it to get better from inaction, but clearly the logic and geopolitics leading our interventions simply hasn't worked either so perhaps our models and instincts are all wrong. 

It's funny how the scientist in me really wants to run the experiment, but the risk-averse geopolitician in me just can't bear the thought.

This Week in EID – Episode 15

I missed a lot of this week because of my trip to Singapore.  I wrote the articles the week before and Keith did his magic to queue them all up so that nothing would be amiss on the site.  But I was not keeping track as closely about what came out when.  So this weekly wrap-up is also a good chance for me to remember what it was exactly that I talked about.

Monday looked at the website Pinterest Fail and realized that the examples there are not always failures, they are often satisficing successes.  Just because the chocolate cookies don’t come out looking perfect, doesn’t mean they are not perfectly yummy.  That is an important design distinction because a lot of people care about the look (especially if they are baking the cookies as a gift) and lot of other people don’t (comfort food scenarios often are better when mushy).

Tuesday was a great post because it is one of those things that just slaps you in the face – a common, obvious, important design decision that I never realized was being made.  I will let you read the details in the original post, but I really wonder if companies realize the important decision they are making when they require (or don’t require) unique user names.

Wednesday was one of my favorite posts ever and others seemed to agree with me based on the emails I got (yeah, a lot of folks don’t comment directly on the site for some reason). This was the post about how people create their on-line dating profiles and whether they are completely misjudge what the people who they are trying to attract are looking for or whether they are just too insecure to tell the truth.  What do you think?

Then Thursday was one of my favorite topics because of its importance rather than just being fun.  How much do your principles impact your design choices?  Not legal or ethical decisions where there is a clear line that you are not supposed to cross.  I mean the ones where you have to willingly give up some usability or profitability, or something else more tangible in order to make your design conform to a principle that is not mandatory, just important.

Breakfast at the Royal

If you remember my trip to Singapore last year, you will remember that one of my favorite things about the Royal on Scots hotel is their amazing breakfast.  It is not just a buffet or even like one of the fancy buffets you would get at an upscale hotel.  Probably because of the location, they have six very unique buffets: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Malaysian, British, European, American.  It is amazing to go around and try some curry, congee, Belgian muesli, roti canai, dim sum . .   The problem is knowing when to stop, which I usually get totally wrong.  An hour later I am pretty ill, but not regretting it at all - I must admit.

I love it when I see something that really breaks with stereotype.  Like this morning there was a table of Muslim women in full black burka, barely slits for their eyes, and they had plates of British sausages (halal issues aside) and baked beans, chocolate cereal . . .

But then on the other hand, I think it is a shame when people stick to their stereotypes - Americans having only Fruit Loops or Indians having only curry.  It could be that they don't do this often and are having their first "reminds me of home" meal in ages, but I kind of doubt it. 

Related to this last point, I got kind of insulted by the woman doing the freshly made noodle soups.  She saw me getting some congee and asked if I wanted to "try" some soup, as if I were a sheltered American who had never tried real Chinese food before.  When I declined, she even tried goading me a little - "oh just try some, I will just give you a little bit to taste."  Her tone made it clear what she meant.  Almost out of spite I ordered the most un-American mix I could think of - full of pickled items, hot chilies, tofu and then no basic tame ingredients.

The Future of Work

There was a very intriguing debate this week on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.  They titled the show “The End of Work” but the two (very famous) thought leaders they had as the main guests were not in agreement that it was over. 

Andrew McAfee, MIT Professor and co-author with Erik Brynjolfsson of the book “The Second Machine Age,” took the position that over time we will create really smart technology that will be able to do all of our work for us.  We can spend our time playing sports, sitting in cafes talking philosophy, and otherwise scratching our butts.  This is the End of Work.

But Ray Kurzweil, currently chief futurist at Google and author of “The Singularity in Near,” took a much different position.  He says that we will indeed automate the jobs that we don’t want to do.  But that will free us up to take on meaningful, and intrinsically motivating jobs. 

Much of the show talked about how to get to either of these two endpoints and what kinds of turmoil there will be between now and then as the less skilled get left behind and unemployment becomes hard to manage economically and socially.  But I am more interested in the difference between the endpoints.

On one hand, there might not be a difference.  If the work someone is doing is so profound and meaningful, is it even work?  Maybe it is the same thing that McAfee’s someone is doing in the café. 

But on the other hand, I think there is a fundamental difference between doing the activity for fun and doing it as part of intrinsically motivating work.  Both might have the same tangible goals, but the intangibles can make all the difference.  That is what I have learned through my work (and writing my in-process book) in gamification.  Intrinsic motivation can be incredibly powerful and even more so when the goal adds value to the world, which is what “work” is supposed to be.  The flow state that we reach from the opportunity to apply our skills and abilities to challenging problems can be incredibly powerful.  If it is set up right (which is why I am writing the book). 

What do you think?

This Week in EID – Episode 14

Did anyone catch Thursday’s post on the Airbus bicycle seat?  Of course, pretty much everyone panned the idea and Airbus quickly released a statement that it was just an idea, just a patent, and they had no plans to actually implement them in any airplanes any time soon.  But I think my idea is a good way to salvage it.  Sitting on a bicycle seat would really suck in a transatlantic flight.  But if you are actually in a transatlantic spinning class . . . .

On Wednesday, we talked about the fundamental differences between designing a training program to teach a skill versus a training program to teach knowledge.  The way these types of information are structured in memory is completely different and even in different parts of the brain. So getting it in there has to be different as well.

My metacognition story got more response than any post in EID history. As I write this, there are 20 comments on one Linked In group and 10 on another.  And they just keep coming.  Too bad no one comments on the EID site !!!  That would make it so much easier to keep track.  Oh well, that is what happens with reposting social media strategies.

But Monday was my favorite because it is a topic that I care so much about.  It covered motivation and priming, self-delusion and ethics, and cites one of my top 100 thought leaders – Francesca Gino at Harvard B-School.  Turns out that when you prime people with thoughts of money, they get selfish.  But when you prime them with thoughts of time, they get less selfish.  Apparently, time makes us appreciate the really important things in life, like spending time with friends.