Book Review-Games People Play

Robert Bogue January 13, 2025 No Comments

It’s a book to describe the patterns that exist in human interactions – it’s the Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. Described as one of the first “pop psychology” (popular psychology) books, it’s criticized for a lack of research support and for the way that it trivialized psychoanalysis. Despite these criticisms, the book was wildly popular and brought to the cocktail party a language for describing how various people were interacting.

The Parent, the Adult, and the Child

In Berne’s transactional analysis of interactions, he proposes three states that a person can be in while acknowledging multiple levels of interaction. Berne uses the labels parent, adult, and child rather than the more technical labels exteropsychic, neopsychic, and archaeopsychic. Simply, the parent state is concerned with external world judgement and the values, ideas, emotions, and behaviors of others. The adult is concerned with the interpretation and processing of information. The child is characterized by behaviors and attitudes from early childhood.

The parent’s judgement often triggers a child response from others. The child’s response often comes from a place of perceived weakness and the need to defend oneself. This often sets up a series of attacks between the two parties. (See Dialogue – Defensive Routines.) The child’s response includes a judgement (parent) response, which sets the other person into their child state, and the cycle has begun. Some more contemporary work has sought to describe how to avoid these harmful interactions including Marshal Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication and John Gottman’s The Science of Trust.

Relationships between the adult and either the child or the parent state are generally less harmful, but there are times when it’s not one level that a transaction is operating at but several levels at the same time. When this happens, it’s possible that the transaction is still somewhat harmful. Consider a harmless social interaction where one person is triggered and feels defensive. The social level of adult-to-adult communication is happening, but at a psychological level, the second person may be feeling from a child perspective. (See The Fearless Organization for more on triggering.)

Intent

With the understanding of states and the capacity to trigger others, we must realize that intent isn’t the only thing that matters. In many of the games that are enumerated, the intentions are positive or neutral. A few of the games covered do have selfish motives as a part of the story – but not malicious. In most cases, the people who are involved in one of the archetypical responses that the game involves are unaware that the game is being played and their role in it.

The Payoff

Each person is in the game, because they get – or hope to get – some sort of payoff. For the alcoholic, it might be the chance to punish themselves for some real or imagined problem. (See Compassion and Self-Hate for more.) There are many other things that the people playing the game are seeking, including a chance to feel good about how they’re helping.

It’s important – in any interaction – to understand what the expected results, the likely results, and the potential worst results are. The expected results are often more positive than the situation calls for.

The Games

I won’t catalog the games here, because I couldn’t do them justice. There are roles, aims, and types that only make sense in their context. However, as Berne acknowledges, there are many different kinds of games beyond the list cataloged 80 years ago. What is stunning about the list, however, is the degree to which people continue to play the same games generation after generation. Ultimately, it may be difficult to eradicate or even fully understand the Games People Play.

Book Review-Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

Robert Bogue January 6, 2025 No Comments

Sometimes, it takes a quarter century. Such is the case of Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering. Malcolm Gladwell wrote his first book, The Tipping Point, just over 25 years ago, and many suggested that he come back and do a revision or update. However, he recognized that the world has changed, and a more substantial look at the same dynamics would require different stories and different perspectives. That’s what Revenge of the Tipping Point is. To provide some context, I didn’t just read The Tipping Point. I’ve also read Blink and Outliers. I’m familiar with his style of writing and with its strengths and limitations.

Broken Windows

Before I start with the new, it’s appropriate to review the old. One of the theories from The Tipping Point was that the crime rate in New York decreased due to a focus on smaller crimes. The theory goes that broken windows send a signal that crime is accepted, which ultimately leads to more violent crime. Gladwell credits a focus on cleanup and smaller infractions for turning the tide on violent crime.

The problem is that there are alternate theories that are even more probable. On his blog, he acknowledged the work of Freakonomics authors and their alternate proposal that the decrease in crime corresponded to the 18 years following Roe v. Wade and the legalization of abortion. The theory is that the reduction of unwanted or under-supported children led to fewer criminals and less crime.

This starts my review, because in much of The Revenge of the Tipping Point, I was left concerned that there were alternative theories that were left out – and a richness of the story that was left out.

Gay Marriage

With regard to gay marriage, Gladwell oversimplifies the change to a single television show, Will & Grace, that features the relationship of a gay man and a heterosexual woman. There’s no doubt that the show made an impact on attitudes towards gays. However, simplifying it in this way dismisses the hard work that led to that point. It ignores the groundwork laid down by After the Ball and the work of advocates to push for normalization and acceptance.

Opioid Epidemic

Gladwell’s story is that the Sadler family and Purdue Pharmaceuticals are exclusively to blame for the opioid epidemic. It ignores the reality that people turn to pharmaceuticals when there is pain or suffering in their life. (See The Globalization of Addiction, Chasing the Scream, and Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.) He explains how the reformulation that solved the crushability problem with OxyContin made things worse as people transitioned to heroin. It ignores the fact that the heroin supply lines had been perfected by the time this was accomplished. (See Dreamland.)

He does share the challenges with some physicians who are willing to prescribe indiscriminately. He identifies a great public policy that requires state notification of narcotics prescriptions as a way of causing physicians to think about opioids differently than any other kind of prescription. That’s a good recognition of how there were other factors besides a money hungry family and organization.

Suicide Clusters

Perhaps my gravest concern about simplification is his discussion of suicide clusters. He bases his information on the work shared in Life Under Pressure, the research of the authors, and some personal conversations. I was concerned about the body of work failing to represent the situation in a way that led to solutions.

Gladwell’s coverage was worse. He explained away the suicide cluster in “Poplar Grove” as being caused by a monoculture – that is, a lack of variation in the city. That is just wrong. It’s wrong, because there are monocultures with protective factors against suicide that will show lower rates. It ignores the central thesis of Life Under Pressure, which argues that it’s pressure that causes the problems.

Perhaps the best way to understand monoculture is the work of Nassim Taleb in Antifragile. In it, Taleb explains that we’ve optimized all the resiliency out of our systems – but those systems are very effective at the one thing that they do. It’s not specifically that the monoculture is the problem. The problem is that the monoculture didn’t include any protective factors any longer.

A monoculture can have cultural components that inhibit suicide just as well as it can have components that encourage it. In the monoculture of a commune (now called “intentional communities” according to Dr. Ruth’s book, The Joy of Connections), the nature of the community would naturally reject the factors that tend to drive people towards suicide.

In a bit of crazy irony, Gladwell uses the work of Rosabeth Moss Kanter to make the point about magic ratios – seemingly ignoring her earliest work. Commitment & Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective explains how the internal characteristics can lead to success or failure. In other words, how the characteristics of the group lead to outcomes – even inside a monoculture.

Ratios

Kanter’s work evolved and spoke to the problem of “token” members of groups. That is what happens when there are too few of any category of people such that the one person must become the representative for their entire group. The answer is that they’re not effective, because they’re too connected to the group identity to make a difference. Gladwell calls it the “Magic Third,” implying that the ratio needs to be roughly 1/3 of the overall population. While some of his supporting examples hold this ratio, others note the tipping point is as low as about 25%.

Certainly, there’s a minimum threshold where members of a category of people do feel on edge, because they’re representing their groups. I can speak from personal experience when I was the “old white guy” added to a diversity panel at the last moment. However, the conclusion about the ratio needed to not feel like a representative for the category seems murkier.

Social Engineering

Gladwell has a different definition from the one I most commonly experience for social engineering. I think of it from the perspective of hacking, as in the book Social Engineering. However, Gladwell is talking about how people manipulate systems to create the outcomes they want. It moves us towards the territory of Nudge and the choice architects who create structures that lead to the outcomes that someone else wants.

He explains how he believes Ivy League colleges maintain their ratios of students. They sort athletes, legacies, Dean’s interest list, and children of faculty differently. In short, there’s a pathway that leads to greater acceptance. You can be a good athlete, a child of an alumni, someone the Dean is recruiting for future donations, or children of faculty.

Of these, athletes seem the oddest until you realize that, natural ability aside, it takes a great deal of money to be the best at almost any sport. (See Peak for the required coaches and training.) What selecting for the very top athletes does is filter the list to those families with money quite effectively.

Gladwell makes a bold claim, “If you don’t think that social engineering has quietly become one of the central activities of the American establishment, you haven’t been paying attention.” It’s bold in part because of the proposed reach and in part because of the jab that you don’t believe him.

At the time I’m writing this, there are conspiracy theorists that say that the government has a weather machine that has been creating hurricanes to devastate the southeastern United States. This is ludicrous on its face partially because it makes no sense to do. In addition, if it were ever proven, there would be serious repercussions. People have died in the hurricanes’ aftermath, and it’s unlikely that families will just say, “Oh well.” It’s much more likely they’d organize to dethrone whomever unleashed a hurricane on their families.

My point isn’t that there isn’t some degree of manipulation in the establishment. The Years that Matter Most explains what it is about college attendance that matters – and the answer is connections to others. It’s not that I don’t believe that there is manipulation happening – I’m sure there is.

My point is that the degree of control implied by this is far in excess of what’s possible with what we know about influence, power structures, and nudges. In short, does it happen – yes. However, like many things, we find that the real power is somewhat limited.

The Overstory

Gladwell’s perspective is that there’s an overstory that colors how we see everything. He speaks about how the Holocaust wasn’t discussed until the miniseries on NBC. He speaks of both the power of the overstory and the degree to which it’s possible to change the overstory with seemingly little force. I’m not convinced it’s as easy as it can sometimes appear. While acknowledging the power of framing on the way that people think, I’m not sure that there’s the capacity to control the masses. I’ve seen too many change initiatives at every level fail.

In the end, perhaps the answer is that tipping points are impossible to find. Maybe that’s the Revenge of the Tipping Point.

Book Review-Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy

Robert Bogue December 30, 2024 No Comments

Positivity isn’t a bad thing. However, there’s a point where it becomes toxic. Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy explores how positivity can go too far. Two other books, Bright-sided and Happier?, have addressed the topic, but there is still room for Whitman Goodman’s work. She explains that, as a licensed psychotherapist, many of her clients just want to be heard and supported. That’s at the very heart of the problem with our obsession with being happy.

Only Happiness

On the surface, it makes sense. No one likes a Negative Nelly. It’s better to be Suzie Sunshine. However, in doing this, we necessarily deny a part of who we are. We can’t be happy all the time, but there is constant pressure to only express our happiness. The tension has us denying parts of ourselves that will necessarily come back to create problems for us. (See No Bad Parts for more.)

It’s not that positivity is bad – it’s bad when that’s all that’s allowed. When we’re not talking about being more positive than negative and instead berate ourselves for the parts of us that aren’t happy, we’ve moved into toxic positivity land. Part of the problem is other people’s discomfort with our reality.

Others Distress Tolerance

Animals and humans move to reduce their distress. This makes inherent sense. However, there are times when we may need to accept distress for the greater good. We accept the distress of achy muscles after exercise for a healthier – and stronger – future. Often, when we see the responses from others to our distress, we can see how they’re trying to relieve the distress that our lack of happiness causes them.

The problem isn’t directly that we’re not happy. The problem for them is that our lack of happiness creates discomfort and distress in them. The result is a response that is less about us and more about their distress in being aware of our less happy thoughts. I mentioned in my review of Life Under Pressure how the researchers justified their decision to not attend memorial services, and how I believed these were movements away from their discomfort, not that it was necessarily best for the community.

Limits of Positive Thinking

The problem with most good myths is the kernel of truth that lives at their core. Sure, people would rather work with those who are generally positive and happy. However, the broader benefits of positive thinking are hard to confirm with research. While we find research supporting various forms of positivity – such as gratitude – the performance of this as an intervention doesn’t always exceed the performance of a distraction technique. Let me pause for a second and say it’s like saying that the children in Mishel’s famous Marshmallow Test would have been better off giving themselves a pep talk rather than distracting themselves. It sounds odd on its face.

Complaints

Complaints can serve two purposes. First, they can be an effort to change someone else’s behavior. Second, they can be an attempt to make ourselves feel better.

Persuading others to change their behavior isn’t easy, as numerous books like Influence, Pre-suasion, and Influencer make apparent. Other books like Change or Die and Immunity to Change make it clear that even when someone wants to make the change, it can still be hard. So why do we try so hard?

The answer may come in the form of the same benefits that allowed us to become the dominant biomass on the planet. In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains that our ability to work together is something that separates us even from our closest primate cousins. When we start working together, it’s possible for some of us to try to take advantage of others, and it seems this is why we have a strong aversion to cheating. If we think that something isn’t fair, we will often try to teach the cheater a lesson – even at great cost to ourselves. Books like The Evolution of Cooperation, SuperCooperators, and Does Altruism Exist? explain how this process works to allow for greater, sustained, beneficial cooperation.

Perhaps our desire to get someone to change their behavior is based in part on the mechanisms of fairness. So even though we may not be successful often, we keep trying.

The other side of complaining, to make ourselves feel better, rarely works out as well as we’d hope. We cry out about the injustices done to us and wait for someone to validate that we are, in fact, being treated unfairly. Sometimes this happens, and we move from seeking validation to feel better into a mode of wanting to change people’s behavior – often with very little effect.

Value Driven Life

Happiness isn’t bad, it’s just the road to get to happiness isn’t clear – and it’s not constant. As Daniel Gilbert explains in Stumbling on Happiness, we’re actually quite bad at predicting our future happiness. We believe that what we want will lead to happiness – but that only really happens when we figure out our values and live in alignment with them. (See also Start with Why and The Normal Personality.)

There’s a kind of positivity that’s real, raw, and unfiltered. It’s the kind that accepts the need for sadness, fear, worry, and a rainbow of other emotions. It’s only when we deny that other feelings deserve equal footing that we arrive at Toxic Positivity.

Book Review-The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

Robert Bogue December 23, 2024 No Comments

Every once in a while, it’s good to read the work of people with whom you expect to disagree. Such is The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry by Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake’s world is not that of mainstream science. He prefers places of untested theories and paranormal experiences to what traditional science has to offer. He uses his perch outside of traditional science to criticize it – sometimes appropriately and sometimes less so. With an introduction like this, one might appropriately wonder why they want to know more about what Sheldrake has to say, either translated through this review or directly. However, if you ever enter discussions with people who have radically different views, learning to see into these views is helpful towards improving overall understanding and getting along with others. For that reason, it’s appropriate to get curious and skeptical about science and what Sheldrake shares.

All Reality is Material or Physical

Sheldrake asserts, “Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical.” This is an incorrectly narrow view of science. Science seeks to understand and explain to the limits of what it can measure. It’s the sense of measurement that challenges Sheldrake. Certainly, today science acknowledges quantum entanglement. It’s something that has been and continues to be measured. It’s what Einstein famously called “spooky at a distance.” Science acknowledges that there must be a mechanism for this behavior and is working to understand it.

Similarly, we’ve started to crack the code on how gravity works. We’re a long way from answers, but science acknowledges a boson particle in a Higgs field. It acknowledges the transmission of energy, light, vibrations, and the like.

The underlying assertion Sheldrake is making is that the current state of scientific knowledge isn’t complete. He’s claiming that there are things are outside of knowledge today. I don’t think any scientist could disagree. However, he goes beyond this to imply there are things that science will never know. Most scientists would struggle here.

The initial impetus for reading Sheldrake’s work was a confluence of things, not the last of which was a class on the relationship between science and religion. I can’t say with certainty that science won’t ever be able to explain religion – but I also can’t rule it out.

Unconscious

Sheldrake says that science believes, “All matter is unconscious.” He proposes that this belief is taken for granted. However, consciousness is a funny and fickle thing. The Mind Club explores how we ascribe consciousness to others and other things. Others call into question the conception of consciousness that we have. Jonathan Haidt explains how it might have evolved to provide a capacity for prediction, which had a survival advantage. SuperCooperators, Does Altruism Exist?, and The Evolution of Cooperation share how complex patterns develop that have an impact on the seemingly simple premises, like Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene.

More recently, others have questioned whether free-will is real and if consciousness is just a delusion. Jonathan Haidt proposes that consciousness is a press secretary explaining our behaviors after we’ve already decided to do it. (See The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind for more.) Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit exposes some of the research that implies that Haidt may be right. The tools we have today seem to imply we’ve made too much of consciousness and its power.

All of this is to say that the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness may lie on a degree of complexity – and that’s a weak argument for one side or the other. How do you decide whether the color blue-green belongs in the categories of blue or green? This is a class information architecture problem without a solution. (See How to Make Sense of Any Mess.)

Probabilities

Sheldrake correctly points out that the more we learn, the more we realize that life is not about certainties but instead about probabilities. As Lorenz pointed out with his work on weather predictions, many things are non-linear and inherently difficult to predict with precision. A butterfly flapping wings in Brazil can – but isn’t likely to – set off a tornado in Texas.

This is an appropriate acknowledgement. Humans want certainty, and science often offers answers that imply certainty when the truth is only probability should be stated.

Open Minded Seekers of Truth

In an ideal world – one we don’t live in – scientists would be open minded seekers of truth. They’d be objective. They’d not get wrapped up in the cycle of “publish or perish,” and they wouldn’t constantly be worried about whether their grant dollars would run out. However, the evidence says that all these things are true. We know that scientists are humans just like us who are affected by the same pressures.

When we read a journal article, we need to treat it with a fair amount of skepticism. We have to recognize that the conflicts of interest section doesn’t fully explain all the ways that their work may be biased.

Whole Atoms

In many places, Sheldrake points out the misperceptions of the past. He points out, for instance, that it was once thought that atoms were solid. We, of course, know this isn’t the case, and that an atom is more space than solid. More importantly, we now understand protons, neutrons, and electrons. We further can see into the subatomic particles that we didn’t believe could exist.

Remnants of old thinking prevail in our language. Database technology uses the language of atomic transactions to mean irreducible. It must either be completed or fail. There is no partial commit of the transaction.

Machines or Organisms

Sheldrake also rails against the prevailing mechanistic approach to describing phenomena, instead urging us to use a more organic model. Images of the Organization points out there are many different ways to see an organization with different benefits and weaknesses. So, too, would applying organic models to science. Mechanistic approaches are simple. They remove the details and odd cases. They’re easier to work with than organic models of growth and enabling conditions.

So, like many things that Sheldrake says, there’s an element of truth, but it’s surrounded by overreach.

Perpetual Motion Machines

Sheldrake ponders why we shoot down perpetual motion machines. He says, “But perhaps some of these devices really do work, and really can tap into new sources of energy.” I’ll acknowledge the possibility without accepting any degree of probability. The idea of being able to harness other kinds of energy is a very intriguing one, but it has fallen flat.

One intriguing thing, which he doesn’t cover, is the application of a Stirling Engine at nanoscopic scale. A Stirling Engine isn’t magic, but it does convert differentials in temperature into motion (or electricity). Recent developments still don’t violate the laws of thermodynamics but may be a way that we can take advantage of the extra heat we’ve been experiencing.

Epigenetics and Generations

While we were fascinated with the great work done on genetics and increased understanding of the genetic code, it falls flat in the face of the evidence that not everything is as fixed as we’d expect. Thus epigenetics – which is the way that genes and gene sequences are enabled or disabled as a result of environment – is a richer concept.

This creates the possibility for generics making us susceptible to environmental triggers and allowing for the idea that they may never come. This creates the richness of experience between genetics and the environment.

What’s interesting, and yet unexplained, is some of the research that seems to indicate that exposure to a toxin by a parent can have impacts through several generations. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers explains FOAD – fetal onset of adult disease. We’ve also seen that the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) study showed long term health implications from events that happened in childhood.

Meeting Richard Dawkins

Sheldrake describes a meeting he had with Richard Dawkins. “Dawkins began by saying that he thought we probably agreed about many things. ‘But what worries me about you is that you are prepared to believe almost anything. Science should be based on the minimum number of beliefs.’”

That’s the heart of my concern. Sheldrake seems to have no skepticism whatsoever for any idea that might be interesting. I think we must stay vigilant and look for new ideas, discoveries, and opportunities, but also consider what may make the discoveries questionable. It’s not “either-or,” it’s “and.” It’s knowing that we must remain open to the possibilities and be willing to investigate the realities.

In the end, I decided that there were more delusions than The Science Delusion.

Book Review-Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World

Robert Bogue December 16, 2024 No Comments

It was during a conversation with a friend that Margaret Wheatley’s work first came up. In speaking of the non-linear and chaotic effects of change, he pointed specifically to Wheatley’s work in Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. The heart of the work is the deepening understanding of science that relies on probabilities and chaos to create the predictability that we expect. The work was published in 2006, and since its publication, we’ve learned more about the world we live in and how our belief in formulaic certainty remains a pervasive illusion.

Managing Change

I built the Confident Change Management course with a keen awareness that 70% of change projects fail. In fact, 70% of all large projects fail. They fail to complete their work on time or on budget, or they don’t accomplish the results that were hoped for. Wheatley expressed her confusion that we’d speak of change management – but that change seemed to be overwhelming us, making us feel less capable and more confused.

The answer seems to be found in the realization that change is more complicated and nuanced than we’d like to believe. The good news in the discovery of the chaos that underlies our beliefs of certainty is that the chaos itself has a certain order to it.

The Relationship to Leadership

As we move into deeper understanding, we recognize that everything is about relationships. Leadership is, as Burns and Rost said, about these relationships. (See Leadership and Leadership for the Twenty-First Century respectively.) These relationships hold electrons around the nucleus of an atom and the planets in orbit around the Sun. Even through subatomic particles, we find that relationships rule. Instead of individual parts with their own functions, we find that different parts operate as a part of the whole through their relationships.

These relationships weave together at higher levels of organization, as Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene. Others’ work, like that in The Evolution of Cooperation, SuperCooperators, and Does Altruism Exist?, explains how cooperation is a better strategy for ingroups and competition is a better strategy for outgroups. Collectively, these strategies lead to greater success. However, the dynamics of these benefits change based on relationships. The more cooperative the relationship, the greater the results.

Change Happens when Necessary

There’s a venture capitalist way of thinking about opportunities as either vitamins or antibiotics. The point is that people buy antibiotics because they must – because there’s an immediate and critical motivating factor that causes them to take immediate action. Vitamins are, of course, a good idea, but they’re only a good idea when people have the resources for them and when they remember. The former are better candidates for investment (though this is only one dimension), because the demand system is built into the model.

In organizational leadership, organizations only change when they need to change to preserve at least some of themselves. Organizations have come and gone because they didn’t change fast enough. Organizations that did change may have changed so much that they’re very different organizations than when they started – but at least they’re still alive. Success stories for radical organizational transformation are less prevalent, but it happens.

When we look at the successes and failures for organizational transformation, we can hone in on timing. Organizations like Kodak had everything they needed to be successful. They invented digital photography, but they failed to see the need because their core photochemical business was so profitable. Organizations like IBM made it because of leadership that recognized the end was coming before it arrived.

Thus, even in the “necessity” category, some organizations won’t recognize the necessity quick enough and won’t pivot fast enough (because of capability or willpower). As a result, the organization may die. Resilient organizations are those that can detect when a change is necessary sooner – and can react quicker.

Probabilities Not Predictions

Jonathan Haidt proposes that the reason for consciousness is the ability to predict. (See The Righteous Mind.) The ability to predict future dangers justifies the massive cost that cognition requires. Our brains consume 20-30% of our glucose (energy) while accounting for only 2-3% of our body mass. They’re very expensive to operate even when they’re designed for energy savings. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow.) It’s easy to see how our evolutionary history would lead us to crave the ability to predict in every area of our life.

However, as we reach a subatomic (quantum) level, we see the language shift from prediction to probability. Instead of A+B=C, we get A+B will yield C 37.6% of the time. Gone are the assurances of certainty, replaced by the bookie’s statistics and probabilities.

Some would argue that we can achieve certainty. After all, we were taught that combining chemicals in a beaker would result in a new thing. Despite the inexperience of the high school class doing the work, the results largely came out as expected. The real difference between our high school chemistry and the lives we lead is scale. When you’re scaled to billions and billions of atoms, the result may not be what’s expected in every case – but the number of cases where it didn’t are rounding errors, undetectable, incomplete reactions. The other variable is time to completion. Normally, these reactions are complete in seconds or minutes – not the months or seasons that most leadership challenges take.

We don’t want to know what the average result is for a set of circumstances like ours. We want to know what will happen to our change, our initiative, our pet project. We’re stuck with probabilities, and that’s not satisfying.

It Feels

Some things are hard to measure. Some things that are measurable don’t have a measurement framework that make them useful. Gary Klein explains in Sources of Power about the fire captains that knew how fires work and how to direct firefighters safely into battle a blaze, but they couldn’t describe how they knew these things. Klein called it recognition-primed decisions (RPD). More broadly, in the field of knowledge management, it’s called tacit knowledge, and some of it is difficult, if not impossible, to articulate. (See Lost Knowledge.)

There’s a lot of interest, and some promising results, for artificial intelligence in the detection of medical diseases. (More specifically, it’s the machine learning branch of artificial intelligence.) The computer can consistently evaluate more criteria than a human can. They’re getting better detection rates. The problem – and one that we’re likely to wrestle with for a while – is that we can’t exactly explain what the models are looking for. There’s no clear set of articulatable criteria that the system is using. Even when we build systems to solve some problems, we can’t articulate why it works the way it does. Sometimes, intuition and “feel” is all we have.

However, the work on prediction tells us that our “feelings” are notoriously biased. They say that they’re too easy to lead us astray. So, while we must consider how we feel about something, we must simultaneously be suspicious. (For more, see The Signal and the Noise, Superforecasting, and Noise.)

Information as Nourishment

The Information Diet calls for conscious consumption of information. It uses a new metaphor. Instead of information being power, it’s nourishment. (Although it doesn’t express this quite as clearly as Wheatley.) Instead of looking at the collection of information to consolidate power, it’s a way to nourish and grow. The model exposes the downside of information. It’s possible to become overwhelmed by information. Like overeating, too much information can make it harder for us to do anything. The Age of Overwhelm focuses on the impacts of being overwhelmed and the need for better strategies for managing information.

Information managers, information architects, and librarians have long known that our current strategies for information management are failing us under the weight of an overwhelming amount of information. They’ve been working to improve the tools we have – but the rate isn’t keeping up. (See also The Organized Mind.)

I Crave Companions

Wheatley closes with a comment that is worthy of quoting: “I crave companions, not competitors.” We need more people who are willing to support us and to journey with us through Leadership and the New Science.

Book Review-Changing the World: A Framework for the Study of Creativity

Robert Bogue December 9, 2024 No Comments

What does it take to change the world? Depending on who you ask, you may hear different answers. Perhaps diligence, ingenuity, or innovation make the list. For the authors of Changing the World: A Framework for the Study of Creativity, the answer is creativity. It’s important to note that the authors are David Feldman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (see Flow), and Howard Gardner (see Changing Minds) – so, well-respected authors who have made substantial contributions and have demonstrated considerable creativity themselves.

Novel Insights

The sense is that if we want to get to originality and productiveness that can drive economies and nations forward, we need novel insights. We elevate them to a sense that they’re rare, special, and exalted. However, what Howard Gruber found while reviewing Darwin’s writings is that they were quite common and generally don’t stand out from the flow experience.

This is important, because it means that these insights won’t necessarily jump out as something profound. It can be that they’re just the refinement of something people already knew. Consider the fire captains that Gary Klein interviewed who couldn’t explain how they guided firefighters safely. It was just “obvious” to them. (See Sources of Power for more.)

The Individual, Field, and Domain

It’s good to consider the factors that influence creativity. First, there is a field which encompasses the social and cultural aspects of a profession, job, or craft. Second, the domain is the structure and organization around a body of knowledge. Finally, it’s the individual person who is the site of the acquisition, organization, and transformation of knowledge that can change the field and the domain.

Howard Gardner dedicated his Extraordinary Minds to looking at individuals that transformed both the field and domains with their work.

Conscious and Unconscious

In most conceptions of the human brain, there’s a hard line between consciousness and what happens underneath. However, these lines are probably not as clear as they might at first appear. While models like Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant-Rider-Path create a separation between conscious processing (the rational rider) and emotions (the emotional elephant), these distinctions are only useful as a model. (See The Happiness Hypothesis and Switch for more on the model.) As Lisa Feldman Barrett explains in How Emotions Are Made, they’re not a completely unconscious process. Elements of our conscious processing seep into our emotions and vice versa.

There’s a parallel in knowledge management to conscious and unconscious processing. It’s the difference between explicit knowledge that can be decontextualized, written, recalled, and repeated – and tacit knowledge, which exists outside of these concepts. In Lost Knowledge, we see a continuum of types of knowledge, including knowledge that is currently tacit but, with work, could become explicit, and tacit knowledge that may be impervious to conversion into explicit form. Similarly, we may find that some things are more or less conscious – rather than being conscious or unconscious.

An interesting observation is how information flows between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind and vice versa. Experiments have shown that we’ll make up conscious explanations for our behavior – even if they’re fiction. (See The Righteous Mind.) We know there’s a conversation going on between our consciousness and our unconscious brain. However, it’s almost as if we’re listening to it from another room. We can occasionally hear parts of the conversation punch through the noise, but most of the time, the conversation happens unnoticed.

One of the things that sometimes rises to conscious awareness is lucid dreaming. That is the ability to recognize that you’re in a dream – in the moment – and to take control of it. We recognize when we wake and can recall the dream that there is some interaction – even if it’s rarely discovered.

Creativity = Novelty + Acceptance

To understand something, to study it, we need to be able to define it, even if the definition isn’t perfect. In studying creativity, the authors settled on creativity as the combination of novelty – it’s something new – and acceptance – others accept it as a part of the broader field and domain. In change circles, we’re clear that anyone can advocate change. The challenge is to advocate for the right change at the right time. Anyone can be novel – but to have that novelty accepted at some level yields creativity.

Of course, this definition isn’t precise, but it provides a framework for exploration. It allows for others’ perspectives on creativity to be accepted. Consider Tom and David Kelley’s work in Creative Confidence, where they believe that creativity is an inherent part of our humanness, and it’s only through our socialization and schooling that we refuse to try to be creative any longer. Connecting the views, we try novelty, and it’s not accepted, so we stop trying to be novel.

The Cruelty of Genius

When we think about extraordinary people, we think about people who made great contributions to society, but rarely do we stop to think about the price that these men paid – and the pain they inflicted on those that were closest to them. (See Extraordinary Minds for examples of the people.) Being different isn’t easy in a world where we need acceptance, and we like people who are like us. While extraordinary people are often capable of connections with others – even quite deep connections – they are often arbitrary in their willingness to discard relationships. Their relationships to others are, perhaps inherently, unstable.

The same kind of focus that creates results can have disastrous consequences – even if the relationships aren’t severed. In The Assault on Truth, Freud’s decision to look past sexual assault is discussed – including how it severed several of his relationships. Jung’s intimate relationship with Toni Wolff (a former patient who was 13 years younger) was known and at least tolerated by his wife. (See Translate this Darkness and Love’s Story Told.)

At the time of the creators’ greatest breakthroughs, they were in at least one sense very much alone. While they required secure, strong support from other individuals, they were either literally or figuratively alone. (See Attached for more on the importance of secure, strong support.) Loneliness is a dangerous place with serious health implications – but one that the creators embraced. (See Loneliness for more.) Ultimately, the focus that the creators embodied may have been a Faustian bargain. They may have sold their soul for their desire to create.

General Creativity

Much like Howard Gardner’s beliefs in multiple intelligences, it is believed that creativity doesn’t exist generally. (See Extraordinary Minds.) Creativity can only exist inside of a domain. The creativity itself may represent the importation of ideas, concepts, and models from other domains. However, even the polymaths had a limited number of domains that they could operate in. In these domains, they may be creative, but there is no guarantee that they would be creative in another domain.

To some extent this is because the creator needs to be accepted in the field to get to the acceptance component of creativity – and that isn’t possible across every field.

Measuring Creativity

Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” In this, he focuses our attention on the need to well understand and define the problem – before trying to solve it. This is a problem, because the typical way that we measure creativity is by assessing the creativity of the solutions.

That makes sense. To find a way to get to a structured evaluation, you must have some structure. You define the scenario and the problem to determine how people will respond. Drive mentions research that included supporting a candle without dripping with only a box of tacks. Creativity is expressed in realizing the box for the tacks is a part of the solution: it can be tacked to the wall as a shelf. This necessarily defines the problem as supporting a candle without dripping – no alternative approaches to the larger problem are acceptable.

If you’ve spent much time on a farm, you learn how to adapt with what you have on hand. Going to town for a part isn’t a practical option because of the distance to town and the reality that they are often likely to not have the part when you get there. The result is a sort of see-saw between trying to solve the problem with what you have on hand and trying to redefine the problem in a way that it’s solvable.

We may never get to a good way of testing creativity because of the intersection of the domain-specific nature and the need to accept that problem definition is an important part of creative problem solving.

For Love or Money

What matters most in terms of professional success and creativity? Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Peak explain that purposeful practice results in long term success. We get to purposeful practice by having an initial and sustained interest. (See also No Two Alike.) Repeatedly, we find that those who have the greatest probability of success are those that do it for the love of it – rather than for the money. That isn’t to say that we don’t all need to support ourselves, but rather the greater the focus on the activities rather than the outcomes, the better off we’ll be – and the more creative we’ll be.

Maybe if we’re interested in what we’re doing and are creative, we can start Changing the World.

Book Review-The Quest for Identity

Robert Bogue December 2, 2024 No Comments

What is it like for an entire country to lose its identity? That’s what The Quest for Identity is about. It speaks of the identity of America in the middle of the 20^th century. The book documents a shift from one of personal responsibility and accountability to something else. It makes sense, as Tom Brokaw wrote about The Greatest Generation – the one that Chuck Underwood called the G.I. Generation in America’s Generations. Somehow, their focus made it easier for them to find themselves. That is to say that they had the same struggles in identity formation – but it didn’t seem as severe or last for as long. (See Childhood and Society for identity formation.)

Progress Democratizes

The first radio broadcast in the US was on November 2, 1920; in 1931, a majority of homes had a radio; and in 1937, 75% of homes had one. Not even 20 years, and it radically changed music in the United States. Prior to the introduction of radio, few people could hear an orchestra play – because they had to be physically present. After the introduction of the radio, people anywhere within the reach of the station could hear the best that the United States had to offer.

Radio made good music available to everyone, just as the internet has democratized access to information. Technological innovations necessarily democratize what used to be luxury items in the past. The How of Happiness makes the argument that your current material comfort would have been the comfort of the top 5% of people just fifty years ago.

Changing Morality

Wheelis makes a few arguments about how morality works. He believes that morality is derived from social mores. This is slightly inconsistent with the view of Chris Lowney in Heroic Leadership and the approach taken by the Jesuits. They, he explains, are aware of core beliefs and values as being nonnegotiable. However, everything else was subject to the mores of the societies they were in.

Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind explains his belief that morality is based on six pillars. These aren’t about mores but are written into our very being. Certainly, the research starting with Darwin and continued by Robert Dawkins in The Selfish Gene point to a set of traits or drivers that reinforce survival of the species. Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation demonstrated computationally that these advanced capabilities would have survived. Does Altruism Exist? continues this work towards an understanding of how what we call “morals” may have been mechanisms of our survival.

Ignoring the Facts

Not liking a fact doesn’t stop it from being a fact. When we ignore facts – or fail to look for them – we end up trapped in cults (see Terror, Love, and Brainwashing) or take extreme positions (see Going to Extremes). We cannot ignore the changes to culture except at our own peril.

More Diverse but Less Variety

If you were to travel back to the early 1900s, you’d find a great deal more diversity, but less variety. You wouldn’t find the consistency of large organizations and franchises that are indistinguishable from other franchises in other cities, states, and countries. Each city would have family-run stores. There would be diversity.

In 1924, a few hardware store owners in Chicago pooled their buying power into what would eventually become ACE hardware stores. It wouldn’t be until 1926 that the Independent Grocers Alliance brought together the family-owned grocery stores in small cities and linked them in a way that gave them better buying power and better distribution. These moves (and many others) reduced the diversity in the American landscape while increasing the efficiency.

This efficiency and the demands of the American public ultimately led to an explosion of options. According to Daniel Levitin in The Organized Mind, the average grocery store in 1976 stocked 9,000 items. By 2013, the average store had 40,000 different options.

The landscape changed to conformity while allowing for individuals to maintain or increase their individuality.

Protecting Memories

One of the first things that professionals do when they encounter someone who is suffering from trauma is to assess whether they’re alert and oriented. Alert more or less means that they’re responsive. Oriented is a bit more complicated; it involves their understanding of who they are, where they are, when they are (year), and some degree of awareness of current events.

Being connected to people, places, and time is a fundamental part of our psyche. Our feelings of nostalgia invoke the desire to remain connected to people, places, and times. Sometimes, this desire for connectedness shows up as a desire for mementos from our experiences.

No matter what tourist destination you go to, there will be some objects that have the name of the destination on it. From keychains to kayaks, are things that you can use to remember where you were. With clothing, you can even encourage others to comment on your travels and perhaps share stories if they’ve been there, too.

The mementos that we keep need not have the name on them as long as we can still remember where we got them from. Some things that I have aren’t important because of what they are, they’re important because of what they remind me of. Almost everyone has this tendency to some degree.

Public Health and Personal Approaches Differ

One of the real challenges in trying to understand how to make an impact is understanding the difference between public policy approaches and individual efficacy. There are factors that are associated with the increased risk of suicide. We know that from a mathematical point of view. However, this information does little to help you when you’re speaking with an individual who is struggling and suffering and looking at suicide as an option.

It’s the core behind the myth that we can predict who will and won’t attempt suicide in the near term. The factors that operate in aggregate don’t operate at the individual. Consider the example that Craig Bryan used in Rethinking Suicide. We know what risk factors cause automobile accidents. However, we can’t say which people will be in accidents.

Follow Through

I picked up this book because Roy Baumeister in Willpower spoke of Wheelis’ claim for greater insights during therapy but less follow through work on resolving the issues. I didn’t see these statements play out in any major way through the work, but I developed an understanding of how societal shifts shape The Quest for Identity.

Book Review-Social R&D: Research and Development in Human Services

Robert Bogue November 25, 2024 No Comments

It was 1980 when Jack Rothman wrote Social R&D: Research and Development in Human Services. His big idea was the application of knowledge from industry into social services. Specifically, he was focused on approaches and patterns that resulted in new solutions to problems. His insight was the application of these approaches to human services when people didn’t believe that human services could have innovation.

Scientists and Practitioners

The walls have come down somewhat between the ivory towers of academia and the gritty reality of the way things get done. Schools have learned that all the valuable wisdom and studies that they’d been developing weren’t what industry wanted – and it’s not what they’d pay for. The result was a focus on what might be called implementation science or application research as opposed to primary research, which was purer.

Despite this narrowing gap, there’s still a bit of disdain that reflects the different values and focuses between the pure researcher, who is interested in controlled environments and predictable results, and the practitioner, who just needs to solve a problem – even if the answer isn’t pure.

Social Science

Another gap that must be addressed to get to social research and development is to accept that the two terms are compatible. While science seems to have clean edges and rigorous proof, social interactions appear to be messy, unstable, and beyond reduction to the levels of science. However, this perspective ignores the chaos that the physical sciences had prior to the introduction of the periodic table of elements. Marie Curie received Nobel prizes for both physics and chemistry, but her work with radioactive materials likely led to her death. It’s not that the “hard” sciences were without complexity, it’s that through hard work, dedication, and persistence, we continue to peel back the complexity to reveal the obscured rules of operation that govern the field.

Decades after Rothman published his work, we still struggle to find the core patterns in social work that drive towards science. Rothman reminds readers that 90% of all scientists who ever lived were alive at the time of his writing. Obviously, there’s no statistical measure here. His statement is likely as true today as it was then not because people haven’t died but rather because the rate of expansion in the number of scientists far exceeds the number of previously living scientists.

This gives us enormous capacity to pursue social sciences and better understand the drivers that create the richness of life.

The Role of Technology

Rothman explains that when Everett Rogers wrote Diffusion of Innovations, he did so using manual indexing and research techniques. By the time he co-authored Communication of Innovations with Floyd Shoemaker, the process had already converted to being electronically supported in 1971. In the intervening 50 years, we’ve seen the rise of personal computers, the internet, search, and artificial intelligence that make the problems of conducting secondary research (discovering primary research) more about being able to consume the overwhelming amount of research being done and synthesize it into a coherent whole.

Where databases were complicated and access to research was severely limited, we can now find mountains of data while sitting in our offices by merely flicking our fingers across the keyboard. We can find rare and out-of-print books – like this one. The world of research that I live in would have been unimaginable to Rothman and his contemporaries. Fredrick Kappel of Bell Laboratories said, “I would say that the prime need in modern technology is for wiser, smarter thought and action about what we have…” His comment is a stark balance against the concerns today that AI will somehow take away jobs and livelihood.

Profitability

The hidden force that drives research and development is profitability. Organizations (and individuals) make investments, which means short-term sacrifice is made with the hope of long-term gains. There is, of course, the opportunity for great rewards, but those rewards are not guaranteed. This game of chance is what underlies all investments in corporate research and development. Academic research based on pure science is based on curiosity about a topic.

In a sense, the payoffs for the academic are even longer term than the corporate research and development team. The academic researcher may find something useful – or they may not. Largely, they’re not expecting their gambles to pay off.

One of the challenges as we bridge the gap between the earliest forms of research and the corporate world is the need to find good probabilities for future returns. We can’t blindly explore every interesting path – it must be connected to some prediction of future success.

This means that the best academic researcher, who is able to find great things, may be lousy at corporate research and development when that future focus must be held. It also means that, in social research and development, we must remain cognizant of the desired outcomes and how we believe we can achieve them through the work being done.

Better Research and Development

The goal is better research and development in the social space. To get it, we can lean on what we know about innovation (see The Art of Innovation) and creativity (see Creative Confidence). We know that there are multiple components to creating results. It starts with psychological safety (see The Fearless Organization) and it is better when people come from diverse backgrounds. (See The Difference.) Collectively, this creates an engine for innovation.

To really make a difference, we must interact with the world to do what would today be called implementation science. What we know about this is, when it comes to efficacy, experts are naturally drawn to high-intensity interventions that completely immerse the recipient in a new mindset. (See The Art of Explanation.) However, what is often much more effective are low-intensity easy interventions that can be deployed more widely. Like all generalizations, there are exceptions, but by-and-large, we need to find interventions that are just good enough – not excellent.

Ultimately, when we’re working with social sciences, what we need is to leverage what we know about other industries and areas of study. It’s through integration that we get to Social R&D.

Book Review-Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – And How to Think Deeply Again

Robert Bogue November 22, 2024 No Comments

One of the benefits of learning software development early is that I got a chance to learn how to pay attention. Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again, argues that our ability to pay attention has been stolen from us as a society by forces of technology and media companies’ incentives that lead us away from focus. To understand how I got to this book, I need to acknowledge Jonathan Haidt’s reference in The Anxious Generation and my recognition of Hari’s name from Chasing the Scream. It pulled the book to near the top of the stack as I wondered what Hari would have to say on the issue of attention.

Partial Immunity

Before I dive into Hari’s narrative, it’s worth explaining that my life is – and has been – largely immune to the pressures that both Haidt and Hari share. It makes me no less aware of the problem, but it does change it from a largely personal problem to one of those I love. Hari himself credits his realization through his godson, Adam, and his desire to see Graceland being stolen from him.

Even today, I spend a generous amount of time in flow. (See Flow, Finding Flow, and The Rise of Superman.) It can be its own addiction, as I ask my family to give me space for focus – but those boundaries are carefully negotiated and renegotiated. (See Boundaries and Beyond Boundaries.) So, I start with having periods of focus that are autotelic (self-rewarding). Because I’m so aware, and my periods of flow are already protected, I didn’t have to start from a deficit.

Second, I pay little attention to either the mainstream news media or social media. Part of that is disposition. Part of that is a conscious decision to see what bubbles up to be the most important. Chuck Underwood, who wrote America’s Generations, is focused on the news (or at least he was when we spoke). I’ve never really been that way. When I started researching what made people effective and how to handle the barrage of information we are subjected to, I realized that turning down the noise from the outside world was necessary. (See The Information Diet, The Age of Overwhelm, and The Organized Mind for more.)

In my conversation with Underwood, I recognized that I was much more concerned with fundamental truths than social fads. Much of what pulls people into the swirling pool of commentary (by professionals and professed experts) is distant and dull for me – and has been for a very long time.

Disconnected in Provincetown

Hari’s experience started with his own form of digital detoxification in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He arrived without internet access and a “dumb phone,” capable of making calls but not connecting to the internet. He describes his withdrawal symptoms as he gradually unwound the rules that had governed his life. Instead of being distracted by the latest like, he’d listen to the lapping of ocean waves.

He’d disconnect from reality in a way that most of us couldn’t. Not because we can’t survive without a connection to the internet –but because we can’t afford to leave behind our day-to-day for a month let alone the three that Hari took. He admits that his grandmother (who raised him) and his father couldn’t possibly do what he was doing. Their lives simply wouldn’t allow it – and to suggest it would be disrespectful.

Still, this detox was the first step to understanding what had been lost in the shuffle. It was a way to hear the inner voices that called to social media for a sense of instant gratification from the new follower, share, or like. It was a way to avoid the water that we’re all swimming in every day. It teams with distractions and currents trying to pull us towards others’ aims.

The Need for Speed

For over a century, we can track the increased pace of life. In my talks, I trace it back further. I attach it to the way that we receive, generate, and share information. If we look at content creation, we see the ever-increasing pace of our ability to create, copy, and distribute information.

If that weren’t enough, we expect that information isn’t just available but that’s available now – and that even pushed to us immediately (or nearly immediately).

Whether it’s mass media or personalized, individualized messages delivered to us, we live in a world that both generates more information and delivers it faster.

Moving beyond the technologies that enable our increased expectations, we can see that trends and fads move with ever-increasing speed. Topics simply come and go at a pace unimaginable to our grandparents. The problem is that this pace of change creates downstream effects that we didn’t anticipate.

We’ve seen the rise of misinformation and the difficulty in quelling it. There are still people who believe the MMR vaccine causes autism – a lot of people. The Data Detective reports that less than 50% of people believe that it doesn’t cause autism. This is despite the retraction of the original article and that Andrew Wakefield (the lead author of the study that purported to show the link) has had his medical license revoked. (See also Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology.) We know that people can – and often do – “flood the zone with shit,” because it works as a strategy. (See After the Ball for more strategies that can be used for good or evil.)

Secondarily, the onslaught of information has made it impossible to focus on any of it and to consider it deeply. There are better techniques for managing your time that can help, but they’re like trying to put out a house fire with a dixie cup. There are strategies for consuming faster – like speed reading – but they come at the cost of comprehension and understanding. Your eyes can scan the lines of text faster – but your brain can’t consider what you’re reading any faster than it already is. (Which is still about 3-4x the speed of the spoken word.)

We’re already shrinking the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth, and we’re at the limits of how we can shrink it. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow and Sources of Power for more.) We can, with time, develop more complex schemata (models) that allow us to more efficiently process the incoming information – but it’s context-sensitive and very time consuming. (See Efficiency in Learning and Learning in Adulthood.)

Fragmentation and Flow

Today, multitasking is all the rage. The ability to do multiple things at one time is seen as an essential skill for the high potential employee. The problem is that it’s fiction. Humans can’t multitask. Humans can task switch quickly, but each switch takes time and increases the probability of mistakes.

As mentioned above, I still am granted large periods of flow in my world, and it’s the opposite of the fragmentation that most people experience either because they’re trying to multitask or because they’re getting interrupted. We’ve known for decades that recovering from an interruption when you’re in flow takes ~20 minutes to recover. If you don’t believe me, check out Peopleware – which was originally published in 1987. It discusses the problem of recovering from an interruption to flow.

Fragmentation and flow are opposites. Flow is focus. Fragmentation is anti-focus.

Economic Growth Fueled on Sleep

Economists have long expected that our economic output will increase. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century explains that, for most of our time on the planet, our output increased by a paltry one-tenth percent per year. Since the industrial revolution, the rate has increased substantially. The estimated compounded per capita growth in output was 1.6% per year. The problem, according to Hari and his sources, is that this system ran out of gas, so we started feeding it sleep. We get less sleep, and we’ve become more sleep-deprived. To correct this issue would cause the assumptions of the economic growth engine to unravel with untold consequences on our societies across the planet.

The failures of attention, which are the subject of Stolen Focus, are just roadkill on the road to continued progress.

Life in 280 Character Chunks

It started with the short message service (SMS). It was a side effect of the telecommunications industry reaching level 7 of the signaling protocols. It created space for small amounts of bandwidth for short messages. It defined the limit as 160 characters. This was never intended to be a primary communication channel. When Twitter (now X) launched with 140-character message limits, it felt similar to the short messages that teens had “hacked” to provide longer messages by using a dizzying array of acronyms. It was the human equivalent of the compression tools that had been in use on computers for decades. Just like those compression tools needing to be present on both ends, the receiver of your message needed to decode the acronyms. Many older adults failed.

Twitter ultimately doubled the size of the message to 280 characters, and now we expect that we can express our lives in 280-character chunks. You can’t get deep in 280 characters – or even sets of 280 characters. The medium limits what can be done – and it doesn’t allow for depth.

Instagram and TikTok moved us to images and movies; though they consume substantially more data transmission resources, they are snippets of lives that still can’t convey depth. In fact, the evidence points to the idea that we’ve made people shallower. We’ve become obsessed with our appearance. Six pack abs and bikini lines refocus us on the surface and the temporary. We know everyone (who doesn’t die) will age and their body shape will change. Images are richer than 280 characters – but only in surface dimensions.

Attention Economy

While many still report that we live in an information economy, the truth is more sinister. We don’t live in an information economy. We live in an attention economy where the most valuable commodity is the attention that people can demand of us. Sure, we need the information to pull the attention, but the game isn’t the information itself.

It’s like magic. No, really. It’s like a magic trick. The goal is to control the attention so the audience doesn’t realize what is really going on. Controlling the attention is what can get the audience to react with a wow – or advertisers to write big checks.

Controlling attention is a series of distractions to draw you in the direction that they want you to go. Distractions are how they pull you to the things that they want from you. Who are “they”? It’s the social media companies – and anyone hoping to sell you a product or service.

Another unwanted side effect of the distractions – beyond the loss of focus – is the sense of mania it creates. There’s always another thing to check or alert to respond to. Click by click and tap by tap, we’re drawn into the web of mania so that we don’t even realize that we’re there. We believe that each notification is an indication that we’re recognized, special, and important. Having the notifications makes us feel important.

It’s Not Your Fault, but It Is Your Responsibility

It’s a bait and switch maneuver. When the problem becomes undeniable, you don’t accept responsibility for it, you transfer the responsibility to the consumer. Smoking isn’t about addictive chemicals, it’s about your lack of self-control. The obesity epidemic isn’t about portion sizes and calorie counts. It’s about your inability to control your desires – at least, that’s what they want you to believe. The truth is that the forces are aligned to make it hard for you to succeed. Some can do it – but only through unrealistic forces of willpower and determination.

While it’s not fair for someone to have to fight these forces, it is what is required. Just like an injury that isn’t your fault – like a broken bone – you must heal yourself. Who or what caused the problem doesn’t matter after it happens. It only matters when we want to help others not experience the same injury. That’s why even if the world is structured in ways that make it hard to focus, we must fight back for our individual lives – and band together to change the forces that make it hard for all of us to focus.

Play in Genes

There’s a fair amount of work that’s been done to try to determine what percentage of our traits and behaviors are genetically driven. This research is almost exclusively done with twin studies, a strategy that has limitations. In Judith Rich Harris’ works about how children turn out differently, No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption, she shares that the findings are tentative – and that the drivers are somewhere in the 40-50% range. Hari and his sources suggest that the results may be lower when additional factors are taken into account. SNP (Single Nucleotide polymorphism) heritability studies are finding that some of what we assumed were genetic traits are likely attributable to the increase in similarity in the way that identical siblings are treated rather than their genetic factors.

Genes, it turns out, may be less impactful than providing the right environment for growth to children when they need it. We know that there are regions of the brain that need stimulation at specific periods of time, and, if deprived of this input, they won’t develop correctly. We also know that animals play. They learn by the low-risk situations created by play. (See Play and also The Anxious Generation.) Despite both general and specific information about our needs as humans to learn through play, we’ve all but deprived our children of play via recess at school and free play.

We’ve become more fearful and protective of our children – even if the statistics show that we’re safer now than at almost any time since the 1950s. Both children and adults are safer since the violent crime peak in the early 1990s – but we don’t behave that way. (See The Anxious Generation for more on safety vs. perception.)

We’re being overprotective, but we don’t want to find our loved ones suffering – including from Stolen Focus.

Book Review-The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves

Robert Bogue November 21, 2024 No Comments

We like to believe that we’re rational creatures, but we’re not. In The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves, Dan Ariely explains what we know about managing our dishonesty in ways that allows us to still believe we’re good, honest people. This continues on the work in Predictably Irrational. It follows in the line of Daniel Kahneman’s work in Thinking, Fast and Slow and the work of Robert Cialdini in Pre-Suasion and Influence.

Economics and Criminal Justice

Economics isn’t the study of money. Likewise, criminal justice isn’t really the study of crime. Both are really about understanding human behavior. Economics is human behavior related to money and criminal justice is about human behavior related to crime.

The strict economic model fails to explain why, in the ultimatum game, people would elect to get nothing – as long as they can ensure the other participant gets nothing as well. (See The Evolution of Cooperation, The Selfish Gene, SuperCooperators, and Does Altruism Exist? for more on why this might develop and The Righteous Mind for how justice is a foundation of morality.) The ways that we’re willing to accept a cost to ourselves breaks that standard self-interest economic model.

There’s a similarly naive model called the Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC). It posits a cost-benefit analysis that includes the probability of getting caught and the degree of penalty placed against the backdrop of the value of the crime. The problem is that we know this doesn’t work. There isn’t a cost-benefit analysis in effect.

To understand why this isn’t true, consider the work of Gary Klein with firefighters and the realization that they don’t make decisions based on some sort of normal, numeric approach to the problem. Instead, they use recognition-primed decisions to simulate what’s happening and make a working solution. (See Sources of Power.) To believe that we make rational decisions based on the impact of getting caught ignores what we learned about D.A.R.E. (see Unsafe at Any Speed) and Scared Straight! (see Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology) being potentially harmful.

What Leads to Cheating

In The Ethics of Encouraging Dishonesty, I explained some of the things that we know about what causes more cheating. Ariely expands this to explain how decreasing the chances of getting caught – by eliminating the checks and disconnecting the cheating from direct financial reward – will increase cheating. However, he also reports curious responses to testing.

One would assume if the reward were higher, there would be more cheating. However, that’s not what Ariely found. He found that the degree of cheating went down when the reward went up. The proposed reason is that people need to feel like they’re honest, so their cheating has to be considered small – by them. The larger the reward, the harder it becomes to maintain this perspective.

Also, Ariely found that if someone were cheating to help someone else – i.e. they’re partners, and the cheating will help the other person as well – that cheating increased. Obviously, neither of these results make sense when we evaluate the cheating from a rational model – but they were the results of the testing.

The Cashless Society

Ariely expresses some concern that the move to a cashless society may increase cheating; in his research, when there was an intermediary to money, the cheating increased. If tokens were exchanged for money, they were seen as somehow not the same as cheating for the money directly. Certainly, the financial scandals that we’ve seen from organizations (see Moral Disengagement) and the home loan crisis (see The Halo Effect) support Ariely’s concerns.

Grandmother Mortality

Mike Adams is concerned for your grandma while you’re going to college. He collected data over the years and ultimately demonstrated that grandmothers are ten times more likely to die before a midterm and nineteen times more likely to die before a final exam. The odds are even worse if the college goer is not doing well. Students who are failing a class are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother when compared to non-failing students.

His work is intended to highlight the lying that goes on – and how, while under pressure, students are more likely to make the grandmother death claim. The obvious sampling error is that Adams data was sourced from student communications – which almost always came with a request for an accommodation. If grandma dies at a time when the student doesn’t need an accommodation, he wouldn’t get the note.

Still, it might be worth some added protection for grandma if she has a grandchild that’s struggling in their college coursework.

Self-Signaling

The way that we signal ourselves matters. If you think that you’re wearing genuine designer clothing and accessories, you’ll behave differently than if you believe you’re wearing a knockoff. It’s not uncommon to find people selling knockoffs of designer clothing and accessories in large cities across the world. I’ve personally seen them in New York and San Francisco.

The argument for those who buy the knockoffs is that they’re not harming anyone because they can’t afford – and therefore would never buy – the real thing. This ignores the fact that part of the reason for the high price is exclusivity – something the knockoffs deteriorate. However, the real problem isn’t the knockoff itself even when considering the brand effects. The real problem is that it makes you more likely to cheat overall.

Rationalization

In Jonathan Haidt’s view, our consciousness is like a press secretary explaining our behaviors post-hoc. (See The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis.) That’s make sense when you consider that Richard Nisbett and Tim Wilson laid out four identical stockings and then asked people which ones they liked better. People made up lots of reasons why they liked one pair over the other – despite the fact they were identical.

In a set of experiments, Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose corpus callosum was severed. He found they’d make up stories when shown images in their left eye (processed in the right side of their brain). The left side of the brain initiated the story creation process and fabricated a post-hoc reason for behaviors triggered by the right side of the brain. (See The Blank Slate, Noise, and Incognito.)

Gangs

Ariely states, “The act of inviting our friends to join in can help us justify our own questionable behavior.” This squares with the research of Albert Cohen in Delinquent Boys and Cas Sunstein in Going to Extremes. The presence of others tends to reinforce and amplify our behavior choices.

Essay Mills and Generative AI

At the time of Ariely’s writing, academia was concerned about the introduction of essay mills. For a few hundred dollars, one could ask for a paper to be written about basically any topic. Ariely tested this process by asking for a 12-page paper on the topic of dishonesty. Ariely’s team paid a few places between $150 and $216 and the results weren’t impressive – such that they decided they weren’t a concern for academia at the time.

Today’s concern is the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in the form of large language models. I fed a slightly modified prompt from Ariely’s original instructions (as recorded in the book) to Bing’s Chat function (based on GPT-4) and received a response that it couldn’t help – but it proceeded to provide a quite useful outline. I then provided the same prompt to Microsoft Word’s Copilot function. The result was a 10-page paper – with a few problems.

On the first attempt, it failed to generate, ironically after displaying a reference to The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. The second attempt, which generated the 10-page paper, also failed to get the references right. It didn’t make them Word references, and it didn’t supply a complete reference for Leon Festinger’s 1957 title, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. It also generated a reference to Albert Bandura’s work on moral disengagement – but the specific reference wasn’t relevant to the topic. (However, Bandura’s Moral Disengagement might have been.)

That being said, academic institutions have a valid reason to be concerned about the degree to which they can measure a student’s understanding based on papers. GenAI solutions can take a lot of the burden off and leave it to the student to do a bit of cleanup instead of a lot of writing.

Congo Is Watching

In the 1995 movie, Congo, the viewer is exposed to the idea that gorillas were watching as other gorillas were mining diamonds. The idea that someone is watching matters for more than diamond mining. It matters for honor boxes. That’s what Ariely and colleagues found as they alternated pictures above an honor box setup between flowers and eyes. When the pictures of eyes were up, the honor box contained three times more money.

We don’t have to have real people watching us – we just need to be reminded that we could be watched to trigger our honest behavior. Maybe if you believe you’re being watched, you’ll find The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.

Public Speaking