Below are a set of numbers. Give a friend five seconds to estimate the answer, without resorting to a calculator.

Set-A  8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1

Here’s another set of numbers. Find a second friend and give them the same instructions.

Set-B  1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8

You will find that the second person gives a smaller estimate than the first, and both will be way off the correct answer (which, rather startlingly, is 40,320).

Maybe you’re not surprised that people find it difficult to quickly multiply eight digits, but why the smaller estimate for Set-B? The answer is provided by the only psychologist to win a Nobel prize, Daniel Kahneman. Check out his ground-breaking 1974 article, written with Amos Tversky, in Science magazine.

A little clue: It’s all to do with ‘anchoring’ - a psychological effect that has a profound effect on our decision-making ability, and which in real life trips us up when we try to buy expensive things like houses or cars!

Photo credit: Scottchan/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As I try to manage a four-way video-conference on my Dongleberry I suddenly realise how much technology is getting in the way of genuine human interaction. So let’s just think about what can happen in a traditional face-to-face meeting that cannot occur if we all choose to sit in different rooms gazing at little cameras. Here’s a short list:

• Authentic human contact. Whichever way you cut it, the only way to really connect with another person is when you meet them in the flesh.
• Informal promises. This is the stuff that happens on the side, in the form of favours, promises and bits of negotiation. It’s all part of developing a relationship that’s both personal and informal, and best done when you are with another person.
• Non-verbal understanding. Most technology is not up to the job of capturing all the subtleties of gestures, voice, facial expression and so on; let alone giving you the opportunity to study the expressions of all the other people present at a virtual meeting!
• Real-time information. Don’t you just love it when it all freezes up, or is just a little bit out of synch…
• Social identity. It’s much easier to know where you stand in a group (or an organisation) when you can interact properly with other people. Status is harder to understand if you try to construct it  from the fragments of a cyber conversation.
• Discovering norms. No virtual conversation is ever going to help you appreciate the unwritten rules and norms that drive an organisation; or for that matter any strange or idiosyncratic aspects of its culture.
• Bonding & commitment. You need to share something meaningful to bond – it really is all about being there in person.
• Emotional support. The virtual world might be fine for transmitting information, but it’s not a good place for providing meaningful emotional support – and you might well need this from your colleagues if the going gets tough.
• Honesty & trust. It’s very difficult to know if someone is being honest, or to trust them, without experiencing the full weight of their communication and interpersonal skills.
• Tapping into the lighter side. Come on, it can all be a bit stiff and formal. In ‘real life’ humour is frequently needed to get things going, and this can be harder to use when you can’t easily check the reactions of others; and of course the very act of organising something like a tele or video-conference tends to give the proceedings a gravitas that’s not necessarily helpful.

None of this should be any surprise. Humans are social animals and we need to get information through all our senses in order to make proper sense of the world, even the digital world.

Photo credit: Daniel St Pierre/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Stop…

1. Responding like a trained monkey.
2. Mindless traditions.
3. Reading annoying things.
4. Work that’s not worth it.
5. Making things more complicated than they should be.

I’m particularly attracted to her first point. She’s talking about emails and the way in which we get continually sidetracked by waves of incoming nonsense. What are we doing? I spent many a happy hour at university messing about with different sorts of ‘reinforcement’ schedules and fooling various rats (and the occasional pigeon) into behaving like a complete turkey! Yep, variable reinforcement schedules (read: emails of varying degrees of urgency plopping into your inbox at unpredictable intervals) make us all behave like Pavlov’s pet dog.

So let’s get a grip and stop it. If you must, check your email every 90 minutes or so. Strangely things will proceed as normal: the sun will rise, the Earth will rotate, politicians will continue to irritate you etc. There, I feel better already. Happy Christmas and a less monkey (rat, pigeon and dog-like) New Year!

Photo credit: Michael Elliott/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

http://www.hoganassessments.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/resources/research-articles/journal-articles/Indefense.pdf

Information cascades are important in economic psychology as they are used to explain the behaviour of financial markets. That’s because they feed the process of speculation, including frantic buying or selling: bubbles v crashes. Now of course all this starts at a vaguely rational level (remember the restaurant example) but rapidly moves into irrational herd-like behaviour. Thus maybe it’s no accident that we talk about confident or ‘bull’ markets! Although perhaps in reality it’s more cow-like: put your head down, eat the grass and stick with the herd.

The bigger point is that information cascades affect all manner of decision-making. And the movement of the ‘herd’ (group, team, board) can be very difficult to resist, even if you, the individual, recognise it as being irrational. People en masse are easily convinced they are moving in the right direction, and frequently do not stop to ask the obvious question: why are we doing this?

At work this is made worse by the fact that many managers do not know how to probe the thinking of their colleagues. They simply base their understanding on what they assume is going on, and assumptions, as we all know, are often vague and unpredictable beasts. The real trick is to return to the beginning and pose clearly framed questions about the logic of projects and plans, and also to ask questions about the organisation. Not just, ‘why are we doing this?’ but ‘why are we doing it this way?’ So maybe the competency lists that are so beloved of HR professionals should always include the ‘ability to ask good ‘why’ questions’ behaviour…

Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Try it here: Analyse Words.

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