How Sure are You of Your “Memories”? Suggestibility, Insertion, and Construction of Recall

Experimental psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus investigated memory and its quirks, such as mistaken eyewitness testimony and “repressed memory” of pedophilia in laboratory and naturalistic settings for nearly 40 years.

William Saletan of Slate replicated one of Loftus’s experiments in memory insertion by using digitally-altered photos by developing five images of events that did not actually occur:

Sen. Joe Lieberman voting to convict President Clinton at his impeachment trial
Vice President Cheney rebuking Sen. John Edwards in their debate for mentioning Cheney’s lesbian daughter
President Bush relaxing at his ranch with Roger Clemens during Hurricane Katrina
Hillary Clinton using Jeremiah Wright in a 2008 TV ad
President Obama shaking hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

These images were mixed with photos of actual events:

2000 Presidential election recount in Florida
Colin Powell’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction
2005 congressional vote to intervene in the Terri Schiavo’s “right-to-die” case.

Each participant viewed three true incidents and one randomly selected fake incident, and was asked whether the subject remembered each one.
Next, each volunteer was informed that one of the incidents was false and was asked select the fake.

Slate’s results replicated the trend observed by Loftus: Fewer than half of the volunteers correctly detected fake photos and many “misremembered” fake photos by giving detailed explanations of their recollections of events that did not actually occur and photos that did not exist before the experiment.

The findings validate psychologist Frederic Bartlett’s claim wrote almost a century ago at Cambridge University:

Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces.
It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience.

More recently, sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright summarized Bartlett’s point by concluding that “Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation,” and artist Austin Kleon translated these concepts into current vernacular: “you are a mash-up of what you let into your life.”

British psychotherapist Philippa Perry points to the logical conclusion from these observations in advising, “Be careful which stories you expose yourself to. … The meanings you find, and the stories you hear, will have an impact on how optimistic you are…”

-*How do you monitor the accuracy of your memories?
-*How do you detect “memory mash-ups”?
-*How do you select the experiences from which you form memories?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women’s Career Development: Negotiation, Networking-Mentoring-Sponsorship, Skillful Self-Promotion

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Kenexa Career Development Model-Individual Behaviors

Part 1 of this post, Women’s Career Development: Career Planning, Career “Contest”, Sponsorship highlighted Ines Wichart’s model of women’s career development with three levels and 11 components, based on her research as Kenexa High Performance Institute (KHPI), a subsidiary of IBM.

Ines Wichert

She outlined four behaviors that individuals can control or influence toward career advancement:

Career planning
Opportunity-seeking, Negotiation
Career-building networking; Mentoring-Sponsorship
Skillful self-promotion

The first segment of this two-part post considered facets of Career Planning and two independent paths to career advancement: Contest and Sponsorship routes.

Let’s consider the additional elements that respond to individual attention and efforts, including Opportunity-seeking while embracing risk.

Susan Vinnicombe

Val Singh

Highly effective career advancement opportunities include stretch assignments and on-the-job training.

Susan Vinnicombe and Val Singh of Cranfield University report that these development activities are most effective in building credibility, visibility, reputation as a capable, well-rounded leader.

However, their research found that women need more encouragement to take on challenging assignments than men, who are more likely to ask for these assignments.

Linda Babcock

Similarly, Linda Babcock reported that women tend to need encouragement to ask for promotions and salary increases.

Her research demonstrated that women are less likely to negotiate for their first salaries, unless they know that these are acceptable practices.

As a countermeasure, Babcock recommends negotiation practices demonstrated to mitigate negative perceptions by both men and women negotiation partners

Like Babcock, Mary Wade’s research at Manhattan College found that both men and women evaluated more negatively women who negotiated for salary using the same script as men.

Corinne Moss-Racusin

Laurie Rudman

Corinne Moss-Racusin and Laurie Rudman replicated this disconcerting finding at Rutgers University, leading to their formulation of “The Backlash Avoidance Model” (BAM)”.

According to this construct, women may demonstrate traditional gender role behaviors to mitigate “backlash” of negative reaction by men and women to “role discrepant” behaviors like asking for career advancement and commensurate compensation.

What approaches have been effective when you have asked for a salary increase or promotion?
–How did you prepare?
-How did you overcome objections?

When people ask you for a salary increase or promotion, what negotiation approaches have been most effective?
-What have been least effective?

Wichart’s model of individual initiatives toward career advancement points to the importance of skillful professional networking, mentoring, and sponsorship.

National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) reported that nearly half of technical women surveyed said they lack role models and mentors, and 84% said they lack sponsors.
The result is that these women are four times more likely to leave the current job role.

One reason that women’s professional networking efforts and seeking mentors may yield less effective career advancement than men: Women tend to engage in professional networking for affiliation and emotional support with people close to their job level whereas men tend to network for career development with people significantly above the job level, according to Adelina Broadbridge of University of Stirling.

As a result of these differing approaches to professional networking, men may enjoy more rapid career advancement due to visibility and sponsorship.

Pamela Perrewe

F. Randy Blass

In addition, women are likely to demonstrate less political understanding and insight because mentors are not sufficiently senior, according to Florida State University’s F. Randy Blass, Pamela Perrewe, and Gerald Ferris with Robyn Brouer of SUNY Buffalo.

Gerald Ferris

Robyn Brouer

Organizational support for formal and informal mentoring has been shown to increase employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention.

Therefore, organizations concerned with retaining talented women and minorities can increase the likelihood of keeping skilled employees by initiating structured mentoring programs and encouraging selective sponsorship.

How have mentors and sponsors enabled your career moves?
How do you decide who you are willing to mentor or sponsor?

Previous posts have shared much current research and leading recommendations in building personal brand and practicing skillful self-promotion:

In light of the potential negative perceptions of women who showcase their accomplishments as they ask for salary increases and role advancement:

How do you raise awareness of your accomplishments’ impact to avoid “backlash”?
How do you define, develop, and communicate, “skillfully promote” your personal brand?

These research findings suggest three parting suggestions for women who want to Play Bigger:

Question the thought that “I’m not ready yet.”
Develop resilience and “a thick skin”: If you are doing something innovative or important, you may draw both praise and criticism when you are noticed.
Filter advice: Implement recommendations that have “the ring of truth” and “resonate”;
leave the rest.

What is the most helpful career advice you implemented?
What career advice have you decided not to implement?

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©Kathryn Welds

Decision Maximizers, Satisficers and Potential Bias

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Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College differentiates two decision styles:

“Maximizers”, who persistently seek “the best” by performing exhaustive comparative evaluations
“Satisficers”, who quickly accept a “good enough” after a limited number of comparisons in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less .

Satisficers tend to be more satisfied with decisions and take less time to take a choice — significant benefits in time-constrained work environments.

Conversely, “maximizers” can experience stress in a quest of the best available option, along with risking obsessional focus on a decision at the expense of “the bigger picture.”
Schwartz asserts that it is nearly impossible to reach this alleged ‘best’ result, given the abundant choices available for most things.

He suggests that people assess previous relevant experiences personally experienced or observed in others. After the experience, people typically compare the experience to hopes, expectations, and the actual event.

Schwartz thinks that people risk errors in comparisons because these are constructed from the most attractive parts of each potential outcomes, and may not actually exist.
He observed that when this occurs, any comparison to an idealized image is disappointing.

He suggests a “hedonic treadmill” in which things that were satisfactory in the past fail to satisfy a new, idealized standard.

Schwartz advises that a way off the treadmill is to differentiate what one actually needs from wants, and consciously moderating expectations and the pull to maximize most every outcome.
His recommended tactics guide people to:

Adopt satisficing in low-stakes situations
Beware of comparison and maximizing, common thinking errors
Set and adhere to a deadline for the maximum time to take a decision.

Dan Ariely

Duke University’s Dan Ariely considered the ways emotion, social norms, and relative evaluations can shape and bias decisions in ways other than satisficing and maximizing:

Relativity, or comparisons to contrast differences such as in price, quality, desirability.
As Sheena Iyengar noted, more choices do not result in greater satisfaction with selections
Anchoring or fixating on any arbitrary starting point, such as price
Free offers, more powerful than deep discounts
Social norms, in which people may pay for services on one situation, but expect them as part of social reciprocity in another situation (such as staying at a hotel vs with friends or paying for pet-sitting services vs having a friend perform this services at no cost)
Compliance pre-commitments and removing obstacles in advance
Overvaluation of possessions, accomplishments
Overvaluation of “optionality” or “keeping options open”
Expectations, including perceptual heuristics like stereotypes
Placebos, or inert agents
Easy opportunity for non-compliance. Overcome by reference to shared ethical norms.

Ori Brafman – Rom Brafman

Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman added three decision biases in Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior:

Loss aversion, leading to compensatory actions to avoid perceived loss
Diagnosis bias, resulting in difficulty reevaluating initial impressions of a person or situation),
“Chameleon effect” or “Zelig effect”, assuming arbitrarily-characteristics or implied expectations, as in the “Pygmalion effect”

Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine added to the inventory of potential thinking errors that undermine people’s efforts to critically evaluate decisions and supporting evidence for arguments after he embraced fundamentalist Christianity, alien abductions, Ayn Rand, megavitamin therapy, and deep-tissue massage.

He adopted the motto “Cognite tute–think for yourself“ and asserts that people hold unfounded beliefs for:

Consolation
Immediate gratification
Simplicity
Moral meaning
Continuing hope

We might add to his list:

Belonging to a group or idea

-*How do you balance Maximizing with Satisficing?

-*What tactics help monitor potential thinking biases and decision fallacies?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women Hedge Fund Managers Outperform Male Counterparts

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Meredith Jones

Meredith Jones of Rothstein Kass, reported that female hedge fund managers significantly outperform their male counterparts in Women in Alternative Investments: Building Momentum in 2013 and Beyond .
In the third quarter of 2012, women scored a net return of 8.95% compared to a 2.69% net return overall on the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index.

Given women’s superior contribution to profitability, they would seem qualified for leadership roles in organizations seeking to maximize financial returns.
However, women hold fewer than 20% of top jobs in “alternate investment” organizations, according to 366 senior women in hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital.

Respondents attribute this low representation of women in executive roles to:

Low interest in remaining in this “alternate investment” sector due to limited opportunities for work-life balance.
More than 18% of respondents said they wanted to work part-time or flex-time.
Few positions available for skilled women to establish a strong performance record.

Similar issues were discussed in Women’s Post-Business School Work-Life Issues .

Jones of Rothstein Kass suggested that some of women’s effectiveness is based on their greater patience and risk-averseness so they are “…potentially better able to escape market downturns and volatility.”

She continued, “…if women do in fact have a different, more risk-averse investing profile, then at least theoretically, their returns, particularly in difficult markets, should be higher than those of their male counterparts.”

Kelly Easterling

Kelly Easterling and Camille Asaro, also of Rothstein Kass, contributed to the report, which found women’s assessment of their most important professional assets:

Professional networks
Strong personal and support networks
Strategic career planning
Willingness to take considered risks

Jean Brittingham

Jean Brittingham of The Smart Girls Way posited additional correlates of women’s effective financial performance:

Systems-thinking skills
Seeking balance between work and life
Caring more about solutions than who gets credit
Strong collaboration competencies
Persistence when “passionate about something”

Camille Asaro

The Rothstein Kass report noted that some U.S. states have mandates for diversity in their asset management firms, and observed an increase in state public pension plans with stated or implied preference for women-owned investment managers.

-*In which industries have you observed women delivering equal or better results than male counterparts?

Related posts

Credit Suisse Research Institute presented related findings in a report outlined in Large-Cap Companies with Women Board Members Outperformed Peers
Similar challenges for qualified women entrepreneurs, who continue to receive less venture capital than their male counterparts are cited in Investing in Women for Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors
Lean In: Sheryl Sandberg launches Book, Foundation to Advance Women in Organizational Leadership
Leadership Qualities that Lead to the Corner Office?

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How Well Do Today’s Career Choices Endure Over Time?

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Donald Clifton

Career development and job search are founded on uncovering individual skills, competencies, strengths, capabilities, interests and likes.

This discovery can involve introspective “personal archaeology,” often enabled by standardized career and personality assessment tools.

However, social science research suggests that it is difficult to “know” preference – career and otherwise – in order to map this “supply” to the “demand” in available career roles.

Gilbert Ryle

More than 60 years ago, acclaimed Oxford University philosopher Gilbert Ryle foreshadowed the philosophical and cognitive problems entailed in “knowing one’s own mind.”

Rene Descartes

Ryle considered how people acquire attitudes, traits, and their dispositions to act in The Concept of Mind , an erudite attack on Cartesian dualism of mind and body

Daryl Bem

Two decades later, Daryl Bem of Cornell University substituted laboratory research for Ryle’s philosophical reasoning, and demonstrated that people may not know what they like or their skills until they observe their behavior in studies of “self-perception theory.”

Bem found that people draw inferences about who they are and they “become what they do,” particularly when people are not certain of what they think or feel, and when they believe that they freely chose to behave as they did.

Bruce Hood

Bruce Hood of University of Bristol expanded the self-perception argument to posit that “the self” is an illusion, so it is difficult to “know” what the “self” likes, values, and prefers.

However, behaviors can be shaped and constrained by external social standards: People learn to become themselves by interacting with others, according to Charles Horton Cooley, who coined the term “the looking glass self” more than a century ago.

Charles Horton Cooley

Therefore, people may choose a career acceptable to parents or social observers who attribute “respect” and “prestige.”

Hood showed that the fluid process of constructing the self is a created narrative which is experienced as “a cohesive, integrated character.”
Since the “self” is constructed, it changes over time, and people significantly and consistently underestimate how much they will change in the future.

This finding has important implications for anyone seeking to distill values, strengths, and preference a job search “elevator speech,” “value proposition,” and “pitch.”

Introspection, therefore, offers limited career insight and guidance: People need to see how they respond, then infer attitudes and preferences for career and other life choices.
This argues for taking exploratory action to “try on” choices, such as in “realistic job previews” found in internships and other on-the-job experiences.

The challenge to career development and decision-making doesn’t end there.
Even if it’s possible to infer preferences from one’s behavior, those inferences are likely to change – a lot – over time.
This means that today’s career may not change in synchrony with one’s personal changes.

Daniel Gilbert

Daniel T. Gilbert and Jordi Quoidbach of Harvard collaborated with Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia demonstrated this shift in in personalities, values, and preferences over decades of life – and people’s underestimate of these changes – and called it the “end of history illusion.”

Jordi Quoidbach

They surveyed more than 19,000 people ages 18 to 68 and found that young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past decade but would change relatively little in the future decade.

Timothy Wilson

The researchers reported that the typical 20-year-old woman participant’s predictions for her next decade were not nearly as radical as the typical 30-year-old woman’s recollection of how much she had changed in her 20s, with this trend holding for volunteers into their 60s.

They found that participants were able to accurately recall personality changes that correlated well expected results, based on independent research charting of personality trait shifts with age.

Gilbert, Quoidbach and Wilson conducted lab studies that found people tend to overpay for future opportunities to indulge their current preferences due to this “end of history” illusion.
This trend may have significant consequences when choices involve potential life partners, long-term financial commitments, and career choices.

These researchers suggest that people underestimate future changes because people may be threatened by the idea that current values and preferences are transitory.
They speculate that such a realization may lead people to doubt many decisions, and experience decision-slowing due to anxiety.

An alternate explanation is that the mental energy required to imagine future changes exceed the effort of recalling the past, so “people may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself.”

Dan McAdams

Dan McAdams of Northwestern University seconded this view and added, “The end-of-history effect may represent a failure in personal imagination,” based on his observations of how people construct stories about their past and future lives in Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative (The Narrative Study of Lives).
He noticed that many people tell complex, dynamic stories about the past but then make vague, prosaic projections of a future similar to the present.

These findings suggest that introspection and standardized assessment instruments may have more value when coupled with observing one’s actual behavior and reflected impressions from others.

Additionally, it is wise to:

Anticipate the value of changing, expanding, or modifying one’s job role over time
Develop a wide array of transferrable skills, applicable across a variety of domains to increase the breadth of options for later preferences.
How do you uncover or infer your career strengths and preferences?
How do you monitor a possible “end of history” illusion when making career plans?

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©Kathryn Welds

Why Organizations Care about Employee “Happiness”

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“Command-and-control” managers of the past might have scoffed at current business research on happiness.
Under their spans-of-control, employees ought to have been happy to have a job from which they derived an income.
This view has been supplanted by widespread recognition that desirable outcomes like innovative problem solving, flexible decision making, and workplace productivity are associated with employees’ positive mood.

Research by the Gallup Organization offers further justification in its finding that disgruntled employees disengage and cost the American economy up to $350 billion a year in lost productivity.

Therefore, organizations can increase financial performance by improving operational efficiency in the many processes involving people.

Sigal Barsade

Sigal Barsade of the Wharton School of Business contributed to the investigation of happiness’s impact on organizational productivity.
She found that positive moods prompt “more flexible decision-making, wider search behavior and greater analytic precision,” which enable the organization to take considered risks.

Jennifer Aaker

On the other coast, Jennifer Aaker, award-winning professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, links workplace happiness and a sense of meaning.

She asserts that having a meaningful impact on the world is a strong predictor of happiness and that it’s possible to cultivate mindfulness and awareness of meaning in work and personal activities.
This cultivated awareness, she said, influences people’s subjective well-being and may positively affect that of others in a contagion effect.

Jonathan Haidt

New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist in the Stern School of Business, takes a more philosophical view of happiness.
He redefines “wisdom” – other might say “leadership” or “self-management” – as the ability to adapt, shape the environment, and know when to move to new environments.

His moral and ethical framework includes high-level philosophical “virtues” associated with a sense of well-being and shared across cultures:

Courage
Humanity
Justice
Temperance
Transcendence

Haidt’s book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom , specified contributors to well-being:

Strong marriages
Physical touch
Meaningful relationships
Religious affiliation
Autonomy
Meaningful engagement in work
Contributing to a community through voluntary effort

Engineering organizations analyze issues according to “Is-Is Not.”
Using this approach, Jonathan Haidt’s research offered some surprising happiness detractors or “is-nots”:

Persistent noise
Long commutes
Lack of situational and person control
Shame
Dysfunctional relationships

Matthias Mehl

Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona offered an additional contributor to happiness: Interpersonal dialog.
He found that volunteers who engaged in a meaningful conversation create shared meaning, strengthened their connections, and reported feeling happy.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s The Happiness Myth, offers a framework for types and levels of happiness:

Good day, awareness, savoring, and gratitude for the fortunate conditions of one’s life
Good life, engaging in meaningful and challenging tasks that help provide a material quality of life and doing one’s best in any endeavor
Peak, choosing experiences that inspire awe and a sense of the eternal, connect to families and communities.

She cites familiar recommendations to:

Cultivate self-knowledge
Develop a clear view of one’s worth
Moderate desires
Appreciate mortality and time limits
Try new things
Increase involvement with others and the community.

Organizational policies can contribute to employees’ sense of well-being through establishing:

Opportunities for career movement and development
Regular acknowledgement and praise for a job well done
Focus on well-being as individuals through health and work/life integration programs

The payoffs to organizations include increased productivity, innovation and engagement.

-*How have you seen efforts to increase organizational “happiness” result in improved employee engagement, productivity, or decision-making?

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Extract More Value from Meetings with Effective Questions

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Shane Snow

Shane Snow, co-founder of Contently.com advocates asking incisive questions to extract more value from meetings, mentors’ guidance, and chance encounters with thought leaders and influencers.

He notes that expert journalists, researchers, innovators, and therapists are trained to ask effective questions, and their common “best practices” include:

Listening more than talking
Asking open-ended questions to avoid suggesting responses: “Who?”, “What?”, “When?”, “Where?”, “How?”, “Why?”
They use closed-ended questions sparingly: “Is?”, “Would?” and “Do?”
Posing one concise question at a time.
They avoid multiple choice questions
Waiting for an answer without interjecting more questions or comments.
They rarely interrupt themselves or others
Tolerating the other person’s silence for several seconds before talking
Directly, repeatedly probing for insightful, revealing replies
Nodding only when the response is intelligible, logical, and understandable
Interjecting questions or rephrasing the original question to redirect tangential responses
Cross-checking information and following up possible inconsistencies with more probing questions

Sakichi Toyoda

Nearly a century earlier, Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota Industries introduced an iterative problem-solving approach based on posing “Five Whys” to uncover the root cause of an issue.

This technique is now-widely applied in Lean Manufacturing, and is advocated by Eric Reis in The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses .

‘”Five Whys” were reduced to “Three Whys” to uncover customer objections in sales situations, and was modified Judith Beck in cognitive therapy to identify underlying Core Beliefs that lead to negative automatic thoughts.

Judith Beck

Beck softens the “Five Whys” by repeatedly asking “If that were true, what would it mean?”
Her model that suggest connections among:

Early experience->Core beliefs (schemas) ->Underlying assumptions (if/then – conditional) ->Automatic thoughts-> Physical Experiences->Self-Limiting Behaviors

Lois Frankel

Therapist and writer Lois Frankel illustrated the similarity of effective questions in psychotherapy sessions with those used to spur inquiry and innovative breakthroughs.
She advises interviewers and consultants to:

Use questions to define your purpose:
What do you want to gain from this conversation?
- Help
- Advice
- Information
- Commitment
- New ideas
- Clarification of opinions or attitudes
- Decision
- What is the “real” problem? Engineers and business people answer this question using a “Root Cause Analysis”
  - What are the options?
  - What are the likely consequences?
  - What results will justify the invested time, effort or money?
  - Ask specific questions:
    - What could we do differently?
    - Why is this important?
    - How can we best meet our objective?
    - What do you want to happen?
      - What don’t you want to happen?
      - What is the best thing that could happen?
      - What is the worst thing that could happen?
      - How will you react if you don’t follow this course of action?

Frankel advises to

Maintain eye contact:
Focus full attention on the interviewee
Repeat and summarize important points to verify accurate understanding

Listen for:
Content (facts)
Intent (feelings)
The way these are expressed (process).
Warren Berger

Journalist Warren Berger applied refined questioning in Design Thinking processes to produce innovative solutions in Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your World .

He advocates continued exploration of meaningful “big” questions in his blog, A More Beautiful Question.

-*What effective questioning practices have you found most helpful in achieving business results?

Related Posts:

Tim Hurson recommends New Questions, “Senses” for Innovative Thinking and Problem-Solving
John Miller, Dennis Matthies, David Cooperrider suggest Effective Questions as Change and Innovation Catalyst

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Beware of Seeking, Acting on Advice When Anxious, Sad

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Just as wise grandmothers advise, it’s best to avoid decisions when upset, anxious, or sad.

Maurice Schweitzer

Maurice Schweitzer and Alison Wood Brooks of Wharton validated Grandmother Wisdom in eight experiments that demonstrated anxiety’s impact on lowering self-confidence, impairing information processing, and impeding ability to distinguish advice from neutral advisors and those with a conflict of interest.

Alison Wood Brooks

They found that people experiencing anxiety tend to seek advice and act on it, but they are less able to differentiate poor advice from valid recommendations, and these results are applicable to making decisions about crucial medical treatment, financial investments, or even guidance counseling.

The team evoked anxious feeling among volunteers by presenting potentially frightening film clips and music, and asked them to judge a person’s weight based on a photograph or number of coins in a jar or solve a complex math problem.

Participants were offered money for correct judgments, and the opportunity to receive advice from others when they were uncertain.
Those who heard the scary music or saw the alarming film clip rated themselves as less confident of their decision, and were more likely to ask others for advice.
These effects were not observed when volunteers were shown a film clip that could provoke anger.

Schweitzer and Brooks concluded that people vary in their receptivity to advice based on:

Advisor’s characteristics, such as expertise, consistent with Cialdini’s observation
Robert Cialdini
Perceived difficulty of the decision
Decision maker’s emotional state when receiving advice

The researchers advised decision-makers to:

Monitor their internal states for anxiety
Use feedback from multiple sources when making important decisions
Work toward developing increased self-confidence
Evoke calm state, often possible with systematic breathing or mindful attention and equanimity

Catherine Hartley

Catherine Hartley, then of New York University and Elizabeth Phelps of New York University contributed to the neuroeconomic analysis of anxiety’s impact on decision- making when they reported that brain structures responsible for regulating fear and anxiety are also involved in economic decision-making under uncertain conditions.

Elizabeth Phelps

Specifically, the amygdala is crucial in learning, experiencing, and regulating both fear and anxiety and it is also implicated in decision-making in situations of potential loss.
The prefrontal cortex is specialized in controlling fear and is also involved in decisions containing risk elements.

Hartley and Phelps suggest that techniques for altering fear and anxiety may also improve economic decisions-making.

Rajagopal Raganathan

Rajagopal Raghunathan, then of New York University and Michel Tuan Pham of Columbia University demonstrated the same connection between anxiety and making decisions about gambling and job selection.

Michel Tuan Pham

They conducted three experiments and found that sad individuals select high risk / high-reward gambling and job options, whereas anxious individuals are biased in favor of low-risk / low-reward options.

Raghunathan and Pham posit that anxiety tends to motivate people to reduce uncertainty whereas sadness moves people to replace rewards.
They suggest suggesting two different decision biases related to mood states.

Raghunathan and Pham add to Schweitzer and Brooks’s recommendations for mitigating decision bias:

“Monitor feelings”
Consider alternate options
Speculate on future moods and preferences if each option were selected: “What would I feel better about . . .?”

-*How do you mitigate the potential decision bias when anxious or sad?

Health Benefits of Positive Emotions, Outlook

7 Replies

Barbara Fredrickson

Barbara Frederickson of University of North Carolina posits that negative emotions aid human survival by narrowing and limiting people’s perceived range of possible actions, whereas positive emotions enhance survival by “broadening and building” options for action.

She detailed her lab-based research in Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life and her talk at UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center

Her lab’s findings suggest that positive thinking expands awareness and perception of the surrounding world, so can lead to innovative solutions to problems.

She suggests intentionally implementing a “broaden-and-build” approach to emulate this expanded view: Choose a degree of focus and perspective depending on requirements.

For example, to garner more clout in a discussion, she suggests involving more people who will provide support.
Similarly, to mitigate negative thinking or “tunnel vision,” think more broadly by viewing “the big picture.”

Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School referred this perceptual shift as “zooming in” and “zooming out”, depending on the perspective requires.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Frederickson found that people who experience positive thinking are:

* Healthier
* More generous
* More productive
* Bounce back from adversity more quickly
* Are better managers of people
* Live longer
than those with a bleaker outlook.

Fredrickson’s research implies that positive emotions can mitigate the cardiovascular effects of negative emotions and stress.

In these activated conditions, people generally have increased heart rate, higher blood sugar, greater immunosuppression.
These conditions tax physical systems and can lead to life-threatening illnesses like coronary disease.

To mitigate these negative health consequences, Fredrickson recommends observing positive emotional experiences of joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.
Besides noticing these experiences, she advocates writing and meditating about these to increase grateful awareness.

In addition, Frederickson echoes common wisdom:

Spend time in nature to appreciate the natural world
Develop interests
Invest time in relationships
Reduce exposure to negative news
Practice kindness
Dispute negative thoughts and replace them with more positive, realistic thoughts.

Frederickson extends her research agenda on positive emotions in her latest book, Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become.

She broadens the concept of love to suggest that love – or an intense connection – occurs when people share positive emotion.
This lead to alignment between people’s biochemistries, particularly the release of oxytocin and vagal nerve functioning.
Related emotions and behaviors synchronize and mirror each other, resulting in shared interest in mutual well-being in a three-phase “positivity resonance.”

She argues that love “literally changes your mind.
It expands your awareness of your surroundings, even your sense of self.
The boundaries between you and not-you – what lies beyond your skin – relax and become more permeable.
While infused with love, you see fewer distinctions between you and others.”

Fredrickson argues that this intense connection requires physical presence, and cannot be replaced by existing digital media — reinforcing her recommendation to invest in relationships with others.

-*What practices enable you to cultivate and sustain positive emotions?

Reduce Evaluator Bias: Showcase Best Features in Any Offer

3 Replies

Less can be more when designing offers, whether when offering services in job applications, crafting sales offers, or positioning for advantage in any negotiation.

Kimberlee Weaver

Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Tech and University of Michigan’s Stephen Garcia and Norbert Schwarz showed that more is not better in augmenting offers when additional elements are of lower quality.

Stephen Garcia

Using the Presenter’s Paradox in a series of studies, they showed that positive impressions can be reduced when they are presented in the company of lower value items.

Norbert Schwartz

Weaver, Garcia and Schwarz offered volunteer “buyers” different iPod Touch packages: iPod and cover OR this package with a free music download.

“Buyers”, on average, offered to pay more for the lesser package, and sellers inaccurately expected that buyers would prefer the fully-featured package.
This suggests that expectations about consumer preferences may be poor predictors of people’s actual selection and purchasing behaviors.

The average price offered for the basic package, iPod and cover was $242, but the package with one free song download averaged just $177.
The additional feature reduced package’s perceived value by more than 25%.

Those designing and evaluating offers can mitigate the impact of this judgment bias by considering the value of the overall offering, then eliminating lower-value components that might reduce the comprehensive value.

This is relevant to job seekers who might be tempted to “pad” a resume with low-value activities, accomplishments and skills.
Weaver, Schwartz, and Garcia’s findings suggest that showcasing most compelling capabilities provides a more power presentations of personal and product attributes.

Santa Clara University’s Jerry Burger might argue that “more might be more” when he found that Steve Jobs’s “that’s-not-all” (TNA) technique was more effective than the much-researched “door-in-the-face” (DITF) approach in gaining agreement to sales propositions.

Jerry Burger

“That’s-not-all” offers a product at a high price, then doesn’t allowing the volunteer to respond immediately.
The procedure follows up by augmenting the offer with another product or lowering the price.

Burger found “that’s-not-all” produced superior simulated sales outcomes to the much-researched “door-in-the face” (DITF) approach, which presents an unreasonably high offer, then follows with a more acceptable proposal.

Numerous replications of “door-in-the-face” have shown than people are more likely to agree to a second more modest request after an unreasonable high first proposal.
Even when the same offer is presented as a single offer, people are significantly more likely to accept it when it’s presented after an unreasonable proposal.

Burger suggested that “that’s-not-all” may have produced greater compliance because people felt obliged to respond to a new offer through an implicit norm of reciprocity, and because the augmented offer changed the perceived anchor point that volunteers used to evaluate the offer.

-*How do you mitigate bias in evaluating offers?
-*How do you design the most attractive offer when offering something for sale?
-*Which technique for designing offers has been most persuasive to you as a purchaser?

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Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

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Reduce Evaluator Bias: Showcase Best Features in Any Offer

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