Tag Archives: Performance

Self-Stereotypes Still Limit Women’s Performance

A common cultural stereotype in the U.S. is that women perform more poorly than men on quantitative tasks and that Asians perform better than other groups.

Larry Hedges

Susan L Forman

Test performance data support these perceptions, according to separate findings by Northwestern’s Larry V. Hedges and Amy Nowell, then of University of Chicago, as well as by Susan L. Forman and Lynn Arthur Steen of St. Olaf College.

Lynn Arthur Steen

Asian-American women are susceptible to two conflicting stereotypes regarding quantitative performance.
-*Which stereotype most influences performance?

Margaret Shih

UCLA’s Margaret Shih, Todd L. Pittinsky of SUNY,  and Stanford’s Nalini Ambady activated ethnic identity or gender identity before Asian-American women competed a mathematics test.

Todd Pittinsky

Volunteers performed better when their Asian ethnic identity was activated, but worse when their gender identity as females was activated, compared with participants who had neither identity activated.

Nalini Ambady

The stereotype threat of gender identity contributed to poorer performance among individuals who could perform better.

Claude Steele

This effect was demonstrated among African-American students, who were stereotyped to be poor students.
These volunteers underperformed compared with white students in a study by Stanford’s Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson of NYU.

Joshua Aronson

Yale’s Becca Levy demonstrated the same effect by priming elderly participants with a negative stereotype of older people.

Becca Levy

These volunteers performed more poorly on a memory task in contrast to their superior performance when they were primed with a positive stereotype of aging.

Individuals vulnerable to stereotype threat can mitigate effects by symbolically disconnecting from the self-reputational threat, according to Shen Zhang, then of University of Wisconsin with University of British Columbia’s Toni Schmader and William M. Hall.

Toni Schmader

They asked male and female volunteers to complete a math test using their real name or a fictitious name.
Women who used a fictitious name performed significantly better than those who used their actual names, and they reported less self-threat and distraction.

Zhang and team posited that women performed better when they were not part of a group attributed with poorer math performance.

In contrast, male participants performed equivalently when completing the math problems using real and fictitious names, suggesting that stereotype threat is not activated for men during quantitative tasks.

Stereotyping by others and even oneself can undermine task performance, yet consciously refuting the preconception may mitigate these effects.

-* What other approaches do you use to reduce and manage stereotype threat?

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Least Skillful Performers May Have Greatest Illusions of Competence

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William Shakespeare

“The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himselfe to be a Foole,” wrote William Shakespeare in As You Like It.
Charles Darwin decoded this observation with his update: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

Charles Darwin

Both view are applicable to the workplace and notoriously “clueless” players like Dilbert’s Pointy Haired Boss.

Pointy Haired Boss

Incompetent performance often results from ignorance of performance standards in both cognitive skills and physical skills, found Columbia’s David Dunning and Justin Kruger of NYU in a series of experiments.

David Dunning

Volunteers performed humor, grammar, and logic tasks, then viewed their performance scores and again estimated their performance rank.
Competent individuals accurately estimated their rank, whereas incompetent individuals overestimated their ranks despite actual feedback.

Dunning and Kruger posited that incompetent people:

Overestimate their skill levels,
Overlook other people’s skills,
Underestimate their lack of skill in relation to performance standards.

Justin Kruger

However, training may reverse this “insight blindness.”
Low-skill individuals in some cases can benefit from corrective feedback and recognize their original lack of skill after they participate in skill training.

The Dunning–Kruger effect describes unskilled individuals’ sense of “illusory superiority,” when they rate their ability as much higher than average although it is actually much lower than average.
In contrast, highly competent individuals miscalibrate other’s performance.

Joyce Ehrlinger

Kerri Johnson

These observations were validated by Washington State University’s Joyce Ehrlinger, Kerri Johnson of UCLA, and Cornell’s Matthew Banner.

People also demonstrate “illusory superiority” when they estimate their ability to identify deception and to infer intentions and emotions (interpersonal sensitivity), found Columbia’s Daniel R. Ames and Lara K. Kammrath of Wilfrid Laurier University.

Daniel Ames

Their results replicated previous findings that most people overestimate their social judgment and mind-reading skills, and showed that people who demonstrate least accurate social judgment and “mind-reading” significantly overestimate their relative competence.

Lara Kamrath

Ames and Kammrath suggested that these inaccurate self-assessments are based “in general narcissistic tendencies toward self-aggrandizement.”

Different tasks elicit differing degrees of the illusory superiority bias, according to University of Michigan’s Katherine A. Burson, Richard P. Larrick of Duke University, University of Chicago’s Joshua Klayman.

Katherine Burson

When performing moderately difficult tasks, best and worst performers provided similarly accurate estimates of their skills.
However, when they performed more difficult tasks, best performers provided less accurate skill estimates than worst performers.

Richard Larrick

Burson and team proposed that “noise-plus-bias” explains erroneous judgments of personal skill across competence levels.

Dunning and Ehrlinger showed that people’s views of themselves and their skill change when influenced by external cues.
They note that this effect can limit women’s participation in STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).

Joshua Klayman

The team found that women performed equally to men on a science quiz, yet participants underestimated their performance because they assigned low judgments to their general scientific reasoning ability.
This inaccurate underestimate of abilities can dissuade many women from entering STEM careers.

The Dunning–Kruger effect may be culturally limited because one study found that East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities due to norms of humility, and see underachievement as a chance to improve themselves and cooperate with others.

-*How do you mitigate overestimate and underestimates of your skill performance?
-*Where have you seen inaccurate performance estimate affect long-range career achievement?

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Unrealistic Optimism Drives Profitability

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Overconfident decision-making in financial markets led to myriad negative consequences in the past decade, when companies underestimated business risks.

Gilles Hilary

In contrast to overconfidence, unrealistically optimistic judgments can result in increased profitability and market value, according to INSEAD’s Gilles Hilary and Benjamin Segal with Charles Hsu of Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.

Benjamin Segal

Hilary, Hsu, and Segal demonstrated that over-optimism differs from overconfidence, and may result in larger growth projections.

Charles Hsu

The team drew on earlier work by University of Illinois’s Dirk Hackbarth that showed both overconfident, and overoptimistic managers chose higher debt levels and issued more new debt.
Hackbarth did not differentiate over-confident and over-optimistic investment behaviors, and reported that both tendencies reduce manager-shareholder conflict, which can increase firm value.

Dirk Hackbarth

“Static over-optimism” refers to an unrealistically positive view of the impact of one’s own actions on future outcomes.
In contrast, “dynamic overconfidence” refers to overvaluation of one’s skills and the accuracy of private information.
In addition, “dynamic overconfidence” is associated with underestimates of random events after several positive outcomes, according to Hackbarth.

Together, static over-optimism and dynamic overconfidence lead to “dynamic over-optimism” after successes.

Neil Weinstein

The pervasiveness of this “rose-tinted glasses” view leading to over-optimistic assessments was demonstrated by Neil Weinstein of University of Arizona.
He investigated people’s beliefs about future positive and negative health events, discussed in a previous blog post.
Weinstein reported that people tend to believe negative events are less likely to happen to them than to others, whereas they expect they are more likely than other people to experience positive events.

Hilary’s team built on Hackbarth’s concepts by comparing North American companies’ quarterly earnings forecasts with analysts’ predictions and actual performance.
Then, they calculated the number of company-issued press releases containing optimistic language.

Optimistic performance forecasts were correlated with better-than-expected performance, suggesting that successes led to additional effort and positive expectations.

Hilary noted the potentiating effect of past successful performance, though it may lead to “burnout” after about four quarters due to the challenge of continually exceeding performance expectations.

The team noted that this cycle of over-optimism and burnout might be mitigated by instituting policies to moderate overestimates or underestimates future performance by rewarding executives who provide accurate forecasts.

Sheryl Winston Smith

Similarly, Temple’s Sheryl Winston Smith noted that optimistic entrepreneurs chose higher levels of debt financing relative to equity, facilitating patent-based and product-based innovation among nearly 5,000 US firms tracked by the Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS).

Young-Hoon Kim

In contrast to these financial studies, Yonsei University’s Young-Hoon Kim, Nanyang Technical University’s Chi-yue Chiu and Zhimin Zou of University of Illinois reported mixed results for self-enhancing (overconfident) and self-effacing (pessimistic) biases on performance.

Chiu Chi-Yue

Kim’s team posited that either over-optimistic or pessimistic biases lead to “self-handicapping” behavior, in which people perform under disadvantageous conditions that provide an explanation for any poor performance outcomes.

Although over-optimism may drive innovation and financial results, longer-term consequences may include performance “burnout,” reduced motivation, and lower performance.

-*How to you manage the impact of optimism bias and pessimism bias on judgments and performance?

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Knowing without Knowing – Implicit Learning in Action

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Lyn Abramson

Implicit learning – knowing without conscious awareness – has positive effects like accelerating foreign language learning and developing more secure computer authentication systems.
It also has negative consequences like prejudiced, biased decision-making.
All of these effects require sufficient sleep to enable memory consolidation of implicit learning.

Patricia Devine

When implicit learning leads to inaccurate beliefs about others, the result is often prejudiced behavior.
In contrast, when biased perceptions are about one self, they can lead to feelings of depression, anxiety, or grandiosity, according to University of Wisconsin’s William T. L. Cox, Lyn Abramson and Patricia Devine with Steven Hollon of Vanderbilt.

Brian Nosek

A validated way to identify hidden beliefs about race, age, gender, weight, and more is the Implicit Association Test, developed by University of Virginia’s Brian Nosek, Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard and University of Washington’s Anthony Greenwald.

Mahzarin Banaji

Banaji and Greenwald’s popular book provides numerous examples of frequently used thinking short cuts that lead to biased beliefs, decisions, judgments, and behaviors.

Anthony Greenwald

Similarly, most people make quick assessments of others based on appearance using habitual strategies that don’t account for perceptual limitations, noted journalist Joseph Hallinan, who summarized research on bias, misperceptions, and judgment errors.

Joseph Hallinan

He cited the impact of situational framing on decision making: When a decision option is posed as a potential gain, most people are less inclined to take risky decisions.
However, they are more willing to take risks if the option is positioned as a possible loss.

Kara Morgan-Short

Implicit language learning was demonstrated by “immersion” listening to multiple native speakers.
University of Illinois at Chicago’s Kara Morgan-Short teamed with Karsten Steinhauer of McGill University and Georgetown’s Cristina Sanz and Michael T. Ullman to conduct brain scans on these language learners, and found they showed “native-like language processing.”
By contrast, explicit grammar training did not improve language learning.

Karsten Steinhauer

Likewise, implicit learning principles can increase computer security authentication, useful in high-security nuclear plants or military facilities that usually require the code-holder to be physically present.

Cristina Sanz

Security can be compromised when attackers:

Steal the user’s hardware token,
Fake the user’s identify through biometrics,
Coerce the victim into revealing the secret key or password (“rubber hose cryptanalysis”).

Hristo Bojinov

“Unconscious knowledge” is a highly secure approach to biometrics authentication, demonstrated by Stanford University’s Hristo Bojinov and Dan Boneh, collaborating with Daniel Sanchez and Paul Reber of Northwestern and SRI’s Patrick Lincoln.

They included implicit learning principles in a computer game to subliminally deliver a security password without the user’s conscious awareness of the password.

Paul Reber

Players “intercepted” falling objects in one of six non-random positions on a computer game screen by pressing a key corresponding to the screen position.
The game repeated a hidden sequence of 30 successive positions more than 100 times during game play.

Players made fewer errors when they encountered this sequence on successive rounds, suggesting they implicitly learned the sequence.
Skill re-tests after two weeks demonstrated that players retained this learned skill, but they were unable to consciously reconstruct or recognize fragments of the planted code sequence.

Patrick Lincoln

Team Bojinov’s implicit learning game demonstrated a new method of highly secure authentication that resists “rubber hose cryptanalysis” by implicitly training the user to enact the password without conscious knowledge of the code.
Their new project analyzes the rate of forgetting implicitly learned passwords and optimal frequency of security authentication refresher sessions.

However, this innovation in security authentication is dependent on the authenticator having sufficient sleep to consolidate implicit learning in memory, found Innsbruck Medical University’s Stefan Fischer, I. Wilhelm, and J. Born, who examined sleep’s impact on implicit memory formation in children ages 7- 11 and 12 young adults between ages 20 and 30.

Fischer’s team measured serial reaction time task before and after eight implicit learning sessions concentrated on rules underlying grammatical and non-grammatical language structures.
Most volunteer responded quickly, demonstrating implicit rule understanding, even though they couldn’t explain why their performance improved.

When adult participants had an interval of sleep between training sessions, their response times were quicker.
In contrast, well-rested children did not show a similar performance improvement, suggesting that sleep actually interferes with implicit performance gains among children.

Implicit learning can boost performance, seemingly “effortlessly,” but requires sufficient sleep to consolidate longer term performance improvements.
These findings are another argument against sleep deprivation in “Crunch Time” all-night work marathons.

-*How do you capitalize on implicit learning to improve performance?

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Stigma Contagion When Women Predominate in Groups

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Women in Engineering or Information Technology organizations may find themselves the only person using the women’s restroom, one advantage in light of well-documented workplace challenges associated with minority status.
Men face similar challenges when they work in Human Resources, Marketing, or Communications, where more women are employed.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Vicki Belt

Despite potential isolation of experiencing gender minority status, Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter advised women who wish to advance: ”avoid the Ps: Personnel, Public Relations, Purchasing, to avoid being “pigeonholed in a female ghetto.”
This recommendation was validated by Vicki Belt, then of University of Newcastle, and noted that technical women often intentionally avoided female-dominated groups.

Tessa West

In fact, both women and men held implicit biases against women-dominated groups, found Research by NYU’s Tessa West, Madeline Heilman, Lindy Gullett, and Joe Magee with Corinne Moss-Racusin of Yale University.

Madeline Heilman

The team organized five-person groups to perform “a male-typed cooperative task” as quickly as possible.
Groups differed in proportion of women to men:

2 women and 3 men
3 women and 2 men
4 women and 1 man.

Lindy Gullett

Groups with more women performed equally well as the group with more men.

Joe Magee

However, when the number of women increased in the work groups, participants’ evaluations of the group’s effectiveness decreased. Similarly, both women and men offered lower ratings participants’ contributions when more women were in the work group.
Both men and women in the same group judged their own team mates more harshly when their groups have a greater proportion of women.

Corinne Moss-Racusin

Group gender composition also negatively affected team cohesiveness: After 10 weeks, those who worked in groups with more women said they were less interested in working together again.

West and team suggested that women in work groups may be subject to “stigma-by-association,” when negative evaluations of a stigmatized individual spread to an associated individual.
As a result, men who work with women may be subject to a “contagion effect” and may be perceived as having similar stereotypic strengths and weaknesses.

Carol Kulik

Hugh Bainbridge

The prevalence of stigma-by-association in the workplace was conceptualized by University of South Australia’s Carol Kulik with Hugh Bainbridge of University of New South Wales and University of Melbourne’s Christina Cregan in a “masculine” performance task.
Women were evaluated as less competent at “masculine” tasks, and this negative evaluation was also assigned all group members through stigma contagion.

Michelle Haynes

NYU’s Heilman extended her work on women’s perceptions of their capabilities in an ingeniously-designed study with Michelle Haynes of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

They asked participants to work remotely with another person on tasks traditionally associated with a male role: Acting as a managing supervisor at an investment company.
Volunteers were paired with male or female “partners,” but each volunteer actually acted alone without a teammate.

When female participants received positive group feedback, they “gave away” credit to men “teammates” unless their contribution was specific and indisputable.
However, women showcased their accomplishments when they worked with female “partners.”
Women systematically undervalued their contributions to group problem-solving when they collaborated on teams with men, but not when they work with other women.

This study demonstrated that women’s expectations and beliefs about their work contexts, themselves, their peers, and organizational superior influence how they construe group feedback on performance.
Women may continue to limit their advancement when they implicitly accept micro-inequities and limiting performance stereotypes.

Anita Wooley Williams

An unexpected positive finding about women’s role in work groups emerged from work by Carnegie Mellon University‘s Anita Williams Woolley, with Christopher F. Chabris of Union College, and MIT’s Alexander Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone, who demonstrated that the “collective intelligence” of collaborative group members exceeds the cognitive abilities of individual members.

Christopher Chabris

In fact, the average and maximum intelligence of individual group members did not significantly predict the performance of their groups overall.

Alexander Pentland

This means that a group’s performance is more dependent on interaction behaviors and norms than on individual cognitive capabilities.
These findings support Emotional Intelligence theory’s assertion that self-management and interpersonal behaviors are more important to individual achievement than measured intelligence.

Nada Hashmi

Wooley’s team assigned nearly 700 volunteers to groups ranging between two and five members to work on visual puzzles, negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments.
Collective intelligence of each group accounted for only about 40 percent of the variation in performance on this wide range of tasks.

Thomas W. Malone

The remaining 60% contribution to collective intelligence depends on members’ “social sensitivity“: Accurately perceiving each other’s emotions, and ability to more equally share conversational turns.
Groups with more women excelled in both capabilities, and the team noted that accurate social perception and conversational turn-taking skills that may be further developed with attention and effort.

-*How can workplace Inclusion and Diversity programs mitigate the impact of stigma-by-association?

©Kathryn Welds

Asking Yourself Questions Enhances Performance More Than Self-Encouragement

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-*Do affirmative self-statements actually help people perform better?

Joanne Wood

It depends, found University of Waterloo’s Joanne Wood and John W. Lee with Wei Qi “Elaine” (Xun) Perunovic of University of New Brunswick confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective.

However, two experiments demonstrate that the value of positive self-statements depends on the individual’s level of self-esteem.

Participants with low self-esteem who repeated a positive self-statement (“I’m a lovable person”) felt worse than people who used no positive self-statement.
They also felt worse than the comparison group when they focused on how the statement was only true.

William Swann

Wood’s teamed referred to William Swann’s Self-Verification Theory, which suggests that people prefer that others see them as they see themselves as an explanation of these results.

Swann, of University of Texas at Austin posited that if someone has low self-esteem, a positive self-statement is inconsistent with the person’s experience and self-assessment.
As a result, it would not have “the ring of truth”, and would not have the intended bolstering effect on self-confidence and self-esteem.

This view was validated when participants with high self-esteem felt better when they repeated the positive self-statement statement and when they focused on how it was true.

Ibrahim Senay

Ibrahim Senay of Istanbul Sehir Universitesi, Penn’s Dolores Albarracin, and Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi investigated the relative impact of “declarative” self-talk, such as “positive thinking” or affirmations (“I will prevail!”) espoused by Maxwell Maltz, Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Anthony Robbins.
They compared this well-known self-improvement practice with “interrogative” self-talk, such as introspective self-inquiry (“Can I prevail?”).

Dolores Albarracín

Half the participants spent one minute asking themselves whether they would complete a series of anagrams before that actually began to work on the anagrams, whereas the other half to told themselves that they would complete the task.
Surprisingly to advocates of self-affirmation, the self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.

Kenji Noguchi

The researchers extended and replicated the finding by asking one group of volunteers to write “Will I” 20 times before attempting to solve the anagrams.
Another group wrote “I will” 20 times, and the third group wrote “Will” 20 times.
Those were “primed” with the self-questioning “Will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other groups.

Albarracin suggested that “asking questions forces you to define if you really want something…even in the presence of obstacles,” so is more effective than possibly unrealistically-positive self-affirmations.
The researchers suggest that interrogative self-talk, like interrogative discussions in behavioral counseling, persuasive messages in advertising, editorials, or legal settings, and culturally “polite” behavioral requests, may elicit more intrinsically-motivated action and goal-directed behavior.

Mark Lepper

Routinely predictable extrinsic rewards can extinguish intrinsic motivation, found Stanford’s Mark Lepper and David Greene collaborated with Richard Nisbett of University of Michigan.

Richard Nisbett

In fact, interrogative self-talk may counteract suppressors to intrinsic motivation and seems to be a learnable practice that may be transferred or “generalized” from individualized learning in counseling settings.

Robert Burnkrant

This form of inquiry can be persuasive because it focuses the listener’s attention to the argument itself if the question isn’t especially relevant to the listener, or to the message’s source if is more pertinent, reported Rohini Ahluwalia of University of Minnesota, Ohio State’s Robert Burnkrant, and Southern Methodist University’s Daniel Howard.

Min Basadur

Subjunctive interrogative self-talk, rather than its rhetorical counterpart, can ignite innovation and creativity in organizational settings.
Min Basadur suggested that asking oneself and other How Might We (HMW) ….? enables innovators to defer judgment and create more options without self-conscious limitations.

Tim Brown

Embracing the uncertainty of “might” enables innovators to propose ideas “that might work or might not — either way, it’s OK. And the ‘we’ part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas,” said Ideo’s CEO, Tim Brown.

This type of self-interrogatory, sometimes presented in group innovation “sprints” at Google Ventures, IDEO, Frog Design or other thought-leading organizations has been effectively been combined with structured innovative problem-solving:

Understand by analyzing problems and requirements through process evaluation,
Diverge by applying constraints to “think differently,”
Decide by selecting solution to develop,
Prototype by “storyboarding” the user experience, process, obstacles,
Validate by testing prototypes with potential solution users.

-*Under what circumstances have you found ‘interrogative’ self-talk to enhance performance more than affirmative self-talk?

©Kathryn Welds

Action vs Visualization to Improve Performance

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Richard Wiseman

University of Hertfordshire psychology researcher and magician Richard Wiseman refuted the popular belief that visualizing desired outcomes achieves results more effectively than direct action.

Lien Pham

In fact, students who visualized the outcome of a high grade actually received poorer outcomes that those who visualized a better process to achieve a higher grade in research by Orange Coast College’s Lien Pham.

Gabriele Oettingen

Similarly, Gabriele Oettingen of New York University asked students to record the duration of fantasies about leaving college and starting a “dream job”.
She found that students who spent more time imagining these positive outcomes, but had lower expectations of actually achieving these goals received fewer job offers and lower starting salaries.

From these studies, Wiseman argued that action rather than imagined rehearsal, fantasy or visualization leads to successful performance outcomes.

Napoleon Bonaparte

This principle was implied by Napoleon Bonaparte more than two centuries ago as he anticipated battle: On s’engage et puis on voit, translated as “You commit yourself and then you see.”

In the 1880s, William James, brother of novelist Henry James and considered “The Father of American Psychology,” asserted that action precedes emotional experience: “You do not run from a bear because you are afraid of it, but rather become afraid of the bear because you run from it.”

William James

This notion contrasts popular concepts, which led to numerous books encouraging people to change their thinking to change their behaviors and feelings.

Since the 1970s, research has focused on whether changing behavior can change feelings.
To test this relationship, James Laird of Clark University asked volunteers to create an angry facial expression by drawing down their eyebrows and clenching their teeth and to create a happy facial expression by drawing back the corners of the mouth.

James Laird

Participants reported feeling significantly happier when they forced their faces into smiles, and much angrier when they were clenching their teeth.

“Acting ‘as-if’” and “faking it until you make it” are examples of initiating behaviors to drive emotional and attitudinal change.

Wiseman offered ten actions – not just thoughts – that can lead to feeling better and improved performance.

David Neal

INCREASE:

Happiness: Smile as widely as possible, extend eyebrow muscles slightly upward, and hold for 20 seconds
Willpower: Tense muscles – Make a fist, contract biceps or press thumb and first finger together
Health Eating: Eat with the non-dominant hand to increase “mindful” awareness of eating, based on research by University of Southern California’s David Neal, Wendy Wood, Mengju Wu and David Kurlander of Duke University.
David Neal

Persistence: Sit up straight, cross your arms, from research by Ron Friedman of University of Rochester.
He found that volunteers who sat with erect posture and crossed arms persisted nearly twice as long to solve challenging problems as volunteers who didn’t assume this posture
Confidence: Adopt expanded chest posture
Sit down, lean back, look up, and interlock hands behind your head.
Stand up, place feet flat on the floor, push shoulders back, and chest forward.
Negotiation Effectiveness: Use soft chairs
Joshua Ackerman

University of Michigan’s Joshua Ackerman of conducted simulated negotiations for a used car, and found that volunteers who sat on soft chairs were more flexible in their negotiations and likely to pay higher prices than those who sat on firm chairs.
Persuasion: Nod
Gary Wells of Iowa State University reported that when volunteers nodded their heads, they were more easily able to learn and retain information with which they didn’t agree or that wasn’t true.
Love: Open up
Robert Epstein

Cambridge Centre for Behavioral Studies’s Robert Epstein found that eye contact, self-disclosure, sharing vulnerability increase perceived liking, loving, and closeness.

DECREASE:

Procrastination: Start for Five Minutes
Do the task for five minutes, and ask yourself if you want to stop or continue at the end of the time.
Often, it is easy to continue after 5 minutes.
If not, stop and begin again for 5 minutes several hours later.
Guilt: Wash your hands
Chen-Bo Zhong

Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto found that volunteers who carried out a perceived immoral act, then cleaned their hands with an antiseptic wipe felt significantly less guilty than others who didn’t wash.

Kim Silverman

If magic seems more appealing that intentional action, Wiseman’s psychologist-magician colleague, Kim Silverman of Apple, and the Academy of Magical Arts, notes that ma that magic can change the way we think about our lives:

-Things that seem impossible may be possible,

-Things that are separated and broken may be rejoined,

-There is always a way,

-We can get free from something that holds us back,

-When we feel trapped by a problem, it is just an illusion.

He asserts that magic provides a change of perspective from negative thoughts, and provides a broader perspective because “things may not be as they appear.”

These varied streams of research support intentional action over contemplation and magic to improve mood and initiate positive behavior changes.

-*How can the metaphors of perceptual illusion accelerate problem-solving in complex situations?

-*What counterarguments would you offer to Wiseman?

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Learning Mindsets Enable Employee Development at Work

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David Perkins

People adopt differing mindsets when trying to achieve quality results and increase learning at work, according to Harvard’s David Perkins, Michele Rigolizzo, and Marga Biller.

They expanded the distinction between fixed mindset and growth mindset described by Stanford’s Carol Dweck, and assessed with a brief questionnaire.

Michele Rigolizzo

Completion mindset focuses on finishing a routine task with little mental investment.
Accidental learning occurs with this stance, and employees who experience fear of failure, impersonal work environments, and monotonous tasks usually operate with this mindset.
Performance mindset aims to complete a task without reflecting on how to can re-apply the process in the future.
Marga Biller

An example is temporarily using a technology but not investing attention to become an expert user.
Incidental learning is a by-product of this mindset, described by Columbia’s Victoria Marsick and Karen Watkins of University of Georgia.
Development mindset seeks to complete a task and to learn applicable approaches when completing similar future tasks.
An example is leading an effective kickoff meeting to set the tone for productive work sessions.

Victoria Marsick

Intentional learning occurs with active involvement in observing, analyzing, and reflecting on the process.

To move beyond a Completion stance, Perkins and team suggested that organizational leaders encourage quality work and active reflection on that work to set the expectation of a Development mindset.
In addition, leaders can also implement collaboration and feedback systems with time for reflection on completed tasks.

-*How do you enable team members to adopt a Development Mindset?

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Related Posts:

Developing a SMARTER Mindset to increase Resilience, Emotional Intelligence – Part 1
Developing a SMARTER Mindset for Resilience, Emotional Intelligence – Part 2
Mindfulness Impedes Implicit Learning, but May Enhance Explicit Learning
Knowing without Knowing – Implicit Learning in Action
Organizational “Learning Agility” Interventions

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Implicit Discrimination Associated with Meritocratic Beliefs, Low Empathy

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Michael Young

Americans more than other nationalities, embrace the idea of meritocracy – that rewards are distributed based on merit, a combination of ability + effort with success, described by University of London’s Michael Young with Sheri Kunovich of Southern Methodist University, and Ohio State’s Kazimierz M. Slomczynski.

Satya Nadella

Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, made headlines when asked his advice for women who are uncomfortable asking for a raise at the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
He told more than 12,000 women: “It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise … It’s good karma. It will come back.”

Although his response resulted in widespread criticism, he may have been referring to the social penalty women experience when negotiating for salary increases and promotions.

Hannah Riley Bowles

Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles with Linda Babcock and Lei Lai of Carnegie Mellon demonstrated this social penalty when they showed volunteers videos of men and women asking for a raise using identical scripts.
Participants agreed to give both genders a pay increase, but evaluated women as “too aggressive” and not someone they would want to work with.
However, men in these salary negotiation situations were seen as “likable.”

Emilio Castilla

The unequal impact of merit-based compensation on minorities was demonstrated in MIT’s Emilio J. Castilla’s analysis of almost 9,000 employees in support roles at a large service-sector company.
The organization espoused commitment to diversity and had implemented a merit-based compensation system intended to reward high-level performance and equitably reward employees.

Lei Lai

Despite these egalitarian goals, women, ethnic minorities, and non-U.S.-born employees received smaller increases in compensation compared with white men, despite holding the same jobs, having the same performance score, working in the same units for the same supervisors.

These results illustrated what he called the performance-reward bias – the need for minority groups “to work harder and obtain higher performance scores in order to receive similar salary increases to white men.”

Stephen Benard

With his Indiana University colleague, Stephen Benard, Castilla uncovered the “paradox of meritocracy” – organizations that espouse meritocratic values awarded a larger monetary reward to male employees compared with equally performing female employees.

Despite their positive intentions and policies, these organizations perpetuated unequal evaluations and rewards across equally performing employee groups.

Eric Luis Uhlmann

In fact, people who think they are the most objective exhibited greatest evaluation bias, found Northwestern’s Eric Luis Uhlmann and Geoffrey L. Cohen of University of Colorado.
They attributed this finding to overconfidence in objectivity, leading to lack of self-scrutiny and self-assessment of potential and implicit bias.

Corinne Moss-Racusin

This bias was also demonstrated when volunteers provided significantly more positive evaluations of resumes were attributed to whites and men than identical resumes linked to minority-group members and women, reported by Yale’s Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, John F. Dovidio, Victoria L. Brescoll, Mark J. Graham, and Jo Handelsman.

John Dovidio

Since egalitarian aspirations and performance management systems do not result in equitable reward distribution, MIT’s Castilla advocated increased transparency and accountability by creating a performance-reward committee to monitor compensation increases and to share information about pay segmented by gender, race, and nationality.
Five years after these changes were introduced in companies Castilla studied, he found that the demographic pay gap had disappeared.

Grit Hein

Another way to reduce bias is to increase empathy, found Universität Bern’s Grit Hein, Jan B. Engelmann of Tinbergen Institute, and University of Zurich’s Philippe N. Tobler, with Marius C. Vollberg of University College London, in their study of 40 young men of Swiss or Balkan descent.

Participants and two research confederates received an electric charge on the back of the hand.
Next, one of the two confederates was attributed a typical Balkan name or a Swiss name, and was designated a “decision maker.”

Jan B. Engelmann

Volunteers were then told they would receive “painful shocks,” but the “decision maker” could prevent this “by giving up money he would otherwise earn.”
Participants received help from the other person 15 times out of 20 trials, and received a shock five times.

Two new confederates, one with a Swiss name and one with a Balkan name, replaced the first two and the participant watched as one of them received the painful electrical pulses.
A brain scan measured the volunteers’s level of empathy for the person receiving the shock.

Philippe Tobler

When the confederate with the Balkan minority name “helped” the participant avoid a shock by “sacrificing” a payoff, the volunteer’s brain scans demonstrated increased empathy for both the specific helper, and for other Balkan people.

The team interpreted this finding to suggest, “…empathy with an out-group member can be learned, and generalizes to other out-group individuals.”

If this trend can be replicated in the workplace by increasing organizational and managerial empathy for members of minority groups during the appraisal process, organizational rewards may be more equitably distributed.

-*How do you reduce bias in appraisal and reward processes?

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Increase Self-Control with Purpose in Life, Positive Outlook, Humility

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Anthony Burrow

People with a sense of purpose are more likely to make choices with long-term benefits like saving for retirement and children’s education.
In addition, they are less likely to be diverted by short-term gratification and impulsive actions like such as cigarette smoking, drug use, gambling, and driving under the influence, found Cornell’s Anthony L. Burrow and R. Nathan Spreng in work with more than 500 adults.
As a result, Purpose in Life was related to reduced impulsivity and increased self-control.

Nathan Spreng

Volunteers completed a personality inventory and a self-rating of Purpose in Life before making choices about whether to take a smaller amount of money immediately or a larger amount at some later date.

Waiting times and amount of the payoffs differed during each trial.
Participants who said they had a clear life purpose made longer-term, higher-payoff choices, suggesting greater ability to curb the impulse for an immediate reward, and greater self-management capacity.

Chai Jing

Another factor in reducing one type of impulsive behavior – dangerous driving – is a “positivity bias,” hallmarked by seeing positive events as more salient than negative incidents, reported University of Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Chai Jing , Weina Qu, Xianghong Sun, Kan Zhang, and Yan Ge.

Weina Qu

They studied more than 40 non-professional drivers using electroencephalograph data, self-reports of driving, violation reports, and International Affective Picture System (IAPS) scores to measure negativity biases.

Volunteers identified whether a series of 80 pictures had blue borders or red borders around images that implicitly evoke negative, positive, or neutral emotions.
Dangerous drivers took longer to respond on the border-color task when the image was negative, suggesting greater attention to negative input.

Patrick Hill

Sense of purpose is also linked to greater longevity in a study by Carleton University’s Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano of the University of Rochester, in their study of more than 6100 Americans followed over 14 years.

Rachel Sumner

Purpose in Life can increase White adult’s comfort with diverse groups, and may be associated with reduced prejudice, noted Cornell’s Burrow and Rachel Sumner, Maclen Stanley of Harvard, and Carlton University’s Patrick L. Hill in their study of more than 500 Americans.

Maclen Stanley

Participants who received an experimental prime of life purpose also reported less preference for living in an ethnically homogeneous White city.
These effects persisted were independent of volunteers’ positive affect and perceived connections to ethnic out-groups.

Eddie M.W. Tong

Humility is another characteristic associated with reduced impulsivity and greater self-control in research by National University of Singapore’s Eddie M.W. Tong, Kenny W.T. Tan, Agapera A.B. Chor, Emmeline P.S. Koh, Jehanne S.Y. Lee, and Regina W.Y. Tan.

Defined as the ability to tolerate failures without self-deprecation, and to view successes without developing a sense of superiority, humility primes were associated with improved performance in a physical stamina (handgrip), resisting chocolate, and an insoluble tracing task.

Kenny W.T. Tan

Humility’s effect on self-regulation was significantly different from self-esteem, which had no impact on self-control.
Likewise, achievement motivation and compliance motivation did not explain increased performance.

Taken together, these findings suggest that effectively managing oneself in the face of challenging and tempting circumstances is enhanced by having a clear purpose in life, cultivating a positive bias and humility.

-*To what extent does having a sense of purpose make it easier to maintain self-control in challenging situations?

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Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

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

Tag Archives: Performance

Self-Stereotypes Still Limit Women’s Performance

Least Skillful Performers May Have Greatest Illusions of Competence

Unrealistic Optimism Drives Profitability

Knowing without Knowing – Implicit Learning in Action

Stigma Contagion When Women Predominate in Groups

Asking Yourself Questions Enhances Performance More Than Self-Encouragement

Action vs Visualization to Improve Performance

Learning Mindsets Enable Employee Development at Work

Increase Self-Control with Purpose in Life, Positive Outlook, Humility

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