Category: Psychology

A.I. “Continues to Struggle in the Real World”

The passages quoted below are authored by an NYU professor of psychology and neural science.

(p. 6) Artificial Intelligence is colossally hyped these days, but the dirty little secret is that it still has a long, long way to go. Sure, A.I. systems have mastered an array of games, from chess and Go to “Jeopardy” and poker, but the technology continues to struggle in the real world. Robots fall over while opening doors, prototype driverless cars frequently need human intervention, and nobody has yet designed a machine that can read reliably at the level of a sixth grader, let alone a college student. Computers that can educate themselves — a mark of true intelligence — remain a dream.

Even the trendy technique of “deep learning,” which uses artificial neural networks to discern complex statistical correlations in huge amounts of data, often comes up short. Some of the best image-recognition systems, for example, can successfully distinguish dog breeds, yet remain capable of major blunders, like mistaking a simple pattern of yellow and black stripes for a school bus. Such systems can neither comprehend what is going on in complex visual scenes (“Who is chasing whom and why?”) nor follow simple instructions (“Read this story and summarize what it means”).
Although the field of A.I. is exploding with microdiscoveries, progress toward the robustness and flexibility of human cognition remains elusive. Not long ago, for example, while sitting with me in a cafe, my 3-year-old daughter spontaneously realized that she could climb out of her chair in a new way: backward, by sliding through the gap between the back and the seat of the chair. My daughter had never seen anyone else disembark in quite this way; she invented it on her own — and without the benefit of trial and error, or the need for terabytes of labeled data.
Presumably, my daughter relied on an implicit theory of how her body moves, along with an implicit theory of physics — how one complex object travels through the aperture of another. I challenge any robot to do the same. A.I. systems tend to be passive vessels, dredging through data in search of statistical correlations; humans are active engines for discovering how things work.

For the full commentary, see:
GARY MARCUS. “Gray Matter; A.I. Is Stuck. Let’s Unstick It.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JULY 30, 2017): 6.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 29, 2017, and has the title “Gray Matter; Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck. Here’s How to Move It Forward.”)

“Basic Fairness Is Probably Written into Our Genetic Code”

(p. C2) Basic fairness is probably written into our genetic code. Human societies depend on the expectation of reciprocity: We assume that a neighbor will collect our mail if we’ve mowed their lawn, or that drivers will take turns braking at stop signs.
Fundamental as this trait might seem, however, its evolutionary origins are hazy. Previous research has shown that chimpanzees–one of our closest relatives–are less motivated by fairness than by what they immediately stand to gain from a transaction.
A new study shows that chimps can go beyond such reflexive selfishness and cooperate, even if it costs them something. But they don’t just give up what’s theirs, even to their kin. They are particular about when they will share some of their food, according to research led by University of Vienna biologist Martin Schmelz and just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Like many of us, the team found, chimps keep score: They’re most likely to allot treats to a partner if that chimp helped them first.

For the full commentary, see:
SUSAN PINKER. “MIND AND MATTER: What Chimps Understand About Reciprocity.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 22, 2017): C2.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 21, 2017.)

The full academic article that is summarized above, is:
Schmelz, Martin, Sebastian Grueneisen, Alihan Kabalak, Jürgen Jost, and Michael Tomasello. “Chimpanzees Return Favors at a Personal Cost.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 28 (July 11, 2017): 7462-67.

How to Use Dyslexia and ADHD to Become a Better Leader

(p. R7) Leading a company without using email, reading memos or going to endless meetings sounds like a pipe dream. But it’s a reality for Selim Bassoul, chief executive and chairman of Middleby Corp., the Elgin, Ill., kitchen-supply maker with such popular brands as Viking and Aga Rangemaster.
Mr. Bassoul, 60, has dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conditions that weren’t diagnosed during his childhood in Lebanon, when he initially struggled in school. Years later, when he was a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, a professor suggested he get tested, he says.
. . .
WSJ: What are some ways that having dyslexia and ADHD affects your leadership style?
MR. BASSOUL: Dyslexia has forced me to be quite conceptual, because I’m not good with detail. I think in general rather than in specific [terms]. That allows me to step back and take in the big picture rather than get bogged down in details. Because of my weaknesses and handicaps, I’ve learned other ways to accomplish the same goal at faster speed.
As a dyslexic you have no choice but to rely on others for help with detail and tactical tasks. You become a great judge of character. You have to select the best team around you.
Then you have ADHD, which makes you restless but it can also be a huge motivator for action. It prompts you to go out of the office and into the field. You find yourself constantly on the front line. I don’t like to be confined to the office. I hate meetings. I am constantly visiting customers, our field offices, our manufacturing plants. I know the operations of my customers better than them, which helps create solutions for them prior to them knowing what they need.

For the full interview, see:
Rachel Emma Silverman, interviewer. “How a Chief Executive with Dyslexia and ADHD Runs His Company.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 17, 2017): R7.
(Note: ellipses added. Bold and italics, in original. The italics question is from the WSJ interviewer.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date May 16, 2017, and has the title “How a CEO With Dyslexia and ADHD Runs His Company.”)

“Inexorable” Trend Toward Remote Work

(p. B1) When Dell recently surveyed its 110,000 employees about their work habits, it discovered something surprising: While only 17% of Dell’s employees were formally authorized to work wherever they prefer, 58% were already working remotely at least one day a week. That’s good news, says Steve Price, chief human resources officer at Dell. In 2013, the company had said it wanted half its employees to work remotely for at least part of their week… by 2020.
. . .
. . . , data indicates that the remote-work trend in the U.S. labor force is inexorable, aided by ever-better tools for getting work done anywhere. Surveys done by Gallup indicate that in 2016, the proportion of Americans who did some or all of their work from home was 43%, up from 39% in 2012. Over the same period, the proportion who only work remotely went to 20% from 15%. Amazon.com , American Express , UnitedHealth Group , and Salesforce.com allow employees to work remotely at least some of the time.
. . .
(p. B4) . . . nearly every company that employs knowledge workers is still learning which jobs can best be done remotely, as the tools to accomplish remote work become increasingly powerful.
. . .
To understand the issues, it’s helpful to look at a company that has always been almost entirely remote. Automattic, maker of WordPress, the content-management system that powers 28% of all websites, has 558 employees spread across more than 50 countries, up from 302 in December 2014.
. . .
With teams that may be spread across a dozen time zones, Automattic relies on Slack for synchronous communication, Zoom for weekly video conferences and its own internal system of threaded conversations for documenting everyone’s work and for major decisions.

For the full commentary, see:
Christopher Mims. “More Workers Have Out-of-Office Experience.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 5, 2017): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis inside the first quoted paragraph, in original; other ellipses, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 4, 2017, and has the title “Why Remote Work Can’t Be Stopped.”)

We Are Happier When We Focus on the Future

(p. 1) What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation.
. . .
A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.
. . .
(p. 6) The central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications.
When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.
. . .
Most prospection occurs at the unconscious level as the brain sifts information to generate predictions. Our systems of vision and hearing, like those of animals, would be overwhelmed if we had to process every pixel in a scene or every sound around us. Perception is manageable because the brain generates its own scene, so that the world remains stable even though your eyes move three times a second. This frees the perceptual system to heed features it didn’t predict, which is why you’re not aware of a ticking clock unless it stops.
. . .
, , , there’s precious little evidence that people . . . spend much time outside the lab thinking about their deaths or managing their terror of mortality. It’s certainly not what psychologists found in the study tracking Chicagoans’ daily thoughts. Less than 1 percent of their thoughts involved death, and even those were typically about other people’s deaths.
Homo prospectus is too pragmatic to obsess on death for the same reason that he doesn’t dwell on the past: There’s nothing he can do about it. He became Homo sapiens by learning to see and shape his future, and he is wise enough to keep looking straight ahead.

For the full commentary, see:
MARTIN E. P. SELIGMAN and JOHN TIERNEY. “We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., MAY 21, 2017): 1 & 6.
(Note: ellipses added. The word “central” in the first passage quoted from p. 6, appears in the online, but not the print, version of the article.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MAY 19, 2017.)

The Chicago studies mentioned above, are discussed in articles in a special issue on “The Science of Prospection” in the Review of General Psychology 20, no. 1 (March 2016).

The commentary quoted above, is based on the book:
Seligman, Martin E. P., Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada. Homo Prospectus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Walls and a Door Allow “a Quiet Place to Think”

(p. B6) The lofty building Jordan Hamad moved his tech-advisory firm into four years ago had the trappings of a startup idyll: open floor plan, polished concrete floors, custom-built communal tables.
Soon, the 33-year-old founder of Chairseven says he craved something else: walls and a door.
. . .
Now as he moves the company from Portland, Ore., to New York, Mr. Hamad has joined a cadre of bosses chucking the egalitarianism of working alongside their employees for the old-fashioned private office. Their open-office revolt, they say, is less about reclaiming the corner office than about needing a quiet place to think.
“People will say it’s so cool to have the CEO right next to you, but at the end of the day your team sometimes needs their space and you need yours,” says Mr. Hamad, who currently leases a private office for himself and co-working space for other staff. Other senior team members will soon get private office space, too, he says.
. . .
In a review of more than 100 studies of work environments, British researchers found that despite improving communication in some instances, open-office spaces hurt workers’ motivation and ability to focus.
. . .
“When you’re in a territory that’s clearly yours, you perform better,” says Sally Augustin, an environmental psychologist and principal at La Grange Park, Ill.-based consulting firm Design With Science.
. . .
Open offices are so popular among tech companies that when CircleCI’s founders moved the software-testing startup from an open space in San Francisco to one with 25 closed offices in 2014, it paid half the market rental rate, says co-founder Paul Biggar. In Silicon Valley, many people are “playing startup,” he says, emulating the open spaces of tech giants such as Google Inc.
In reality, he says, engineers need quiet places to concentrate–and so does he. “I love the private office,” he says.

For the full commentary, see:
Vanessa Fuhrmans. “Bosses Say they Want Their Offices Back.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 23, 2017): B6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 22, 2017, and has the title “CEOs Want Their Offices Back.” The following sentence, quoted above, appears in the online, but not the print, version of the article: “Other senior team members will soon get private office space, too, he says.”)

Dynamism Dying from Bad Attitudes or Bad Policies?

I agree with Tyler that the U.S. is less dynamic than it once was. But I mainly blame our bad government policies, while he mainly blames our own bad attitudes.

(p. A15) Is the “land of opportunity,” with dynamic labor markets and fresh sources of renewal, a thing of the past?

That’s the fear of Tyler Cowen, who argues in “The Complacent Class” that America is increasingly defined by an aversion to risk as well as to anything that is unfamiliar or different. He sees a broad swath of the American population losing “the capacity to imagine or embrace a world where things do change rapidly for most if not all people.” This mind-set, he says, has “sapped us of the pioneer spirit that made America the world’s most productive and innovative economy.”
. . .
To make his case, Mr. Cowen draws a contrast between the changes that Americans experienced in the first half of the 20th century and the changes of the past 50 years. The earlier period saw dramatic improvements in health and education as well as a proliferation of automobiles, airplanes and telephones. By comparison, the changes since 1965 have been modest. “A lot of our technological world seems to have stood pretty much still,” he writes, “albeit with a variety of quality improvements along the way.” He even notes that, while popular narcotics in the past were mind-altering (LSD) or activity-inciting (cocaine), today’s drugs of choice, such as heroin and opioids, “induce a dreamlike stupor and passivity.”
. . .
Given Mr. Cowen’s own innovative thinking, it’s disappointing that he does not focus more on potential remedies to the torpor he describes.

For the full review, see:

Matthew Rees. “BOOKSHELF; How American Workers Got Lazy.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Feb. 28, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 27, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Cowen, Tyler. The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Retiring Later Improves Health in Old Age

(p. 3) Despite what may seem like obvious benefits, scholars can’t make definitive statements about the health effects of working longer. The research is inherently difficult: Just as retirement can influence health, so can health influence retirement.
“I would say, in my experience, the research is mixed,” said Dr. Maestas of Harvard Medical School. “The studies I have seen tend to show that there are health benefits to working longer.”
As the economists Axel Börsch-Supan and Morten Schuth of the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging of the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy put it in an article for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Even disliked colleagues and a bad boss, we argue, are better than social isolation because they provide cognitive challenges that keep the mind active and healthy.”
Other studies have examined the impact of work and employment on the richness of social networks and social connectedness. The economists Eleonora Patacchini of Cornell University and Gary Engelhardt of Syracuse University tapped into a database of some 1,300 people from ages 57 to 85 that asked about their social networks in 2005 and 2010. After controlling for marital status, age, health and income, they concluded that people who continued to work enjoyed an increase in the size of their networks of family and friends of 25 percent. The social networks of retired people, on the other hand, shrank during the five-year period. In the study, the gains were found to be largely limited to women and older people with postsecondary education.

For the full commentary, see:
CHRISTOPHER FARRELL. “Retiring; Their Jobs Keep Them Healthy.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., MARCH 5, 2017): 3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MARCH 3, 2017, and has the title “Retiring; Working Longer May Benefit Your Health.”)

The article by Börsch-Supan and Schuth, is:
Börsch-Supan, Axel, and Morten Schuth. “Early Retirement, Mental Health, and Social Networks.” In Discoveries in the Economics of Aging, edited by David A. Wise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, pp. 225-50.

Open Offices Disrupt Analytical Thinking and Creativity

(p. A13) Visual noise, the activity or movement around the edges of an employee’s field of vision, can erode concentration and disrupt analytical thinking or creativity, research shows. While employers have long tried to quiet disruptive sounds in open workspaces, some are now combating visual noise too.
. . .
“I could barely ever focus,” says Ms. Spivak, marketing and communications director for San Francisco-based Segment.
Her company overhauled its layout when it moved to new offices in April. Its former space was like a warehouse, creating “these long lines of sight across the workspace, where you have people you know and recognize moving by and talking to each other. It was incredibly distracting,” CEO Peter Reinhardt says.
. . .
(p. A15) Being surrounded by teammates with similar work patterns can be comforting to employees. Unpredictable movements around the edges of a person’s field of vision compete for cognitive resources, however, says Sabine Kastner, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University who has studied how the brain pays attention for 20 years. People differ in their ability to filter out visual stimuli. For some, a teeming or cluttered office can make it nearly impossible to concentrate, she says.
. . .
In an experiment with Chinese factory workers published in 2012, Ethan Bernstein, an assistant professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, found teams were 10% to 15% more productive when they worked behind a curtain that shielded them from supervisors’ view. The employees felt freer to experiment with new ways to solve problems and improve efficiency when protected from their bosses’ critical gaze, Dr. Bernstein says.
A loss of visual privacy is the No. 2 complaint from employees in offices with low or no partitions between desks, after noise, according to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of 42,764 workers in 303 U.S. office buildings.

For the full commentary, see:
Sue Shellenbarger. “WORK & FAMILY; Why You Can’t Concentrate at Work.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 10, 2017): A13 & A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 9, 2017 and has the title “WORK & FAMILY; Why You Can’t Concentrate at Work.”)

The Bernstein paper, mentioned above, is:
Bernstein, Ethan S. “The Transparency Paradox.” Administrative Science Quarterly 57, no. 2 (June 2012): 181-216.

Workers in Open Offices Are Less Able to Focus and Take More Sick Days

(p. R7) Noisy, open-floor plans have become a staple of office life. But after years of employee complaints, companies are trying to quiet the backlash.
Many studies show how open-plan office spaces can have negative effects on employees and productivity. As a result, companies are adding soundproof rooms, creating quiet zones and rearranging floor plans to appeal to employees eager to escape disruptions at their desk.
Companies are “not providing sufficient variety in spaces,” says David Lehrer, a researcher at the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Lehrer studies the impact of office designs on employees, and lack of “speech privacy” is currently a significant problem, he says. Employees in open-plan offices are less likely to be satisfied with their offices than employees in a traditional office layout, Mr. Lehrer adds.
. . .
Companies with open offices, . . . , soon encountered the downsides. For one thing, workers took increased sick days–a 2014 Swedish study of more than 1,800 workers found open-plan workers were twice as likely to take sick days as workers in traditional offices. The reason, the researchers hypothesized: the spread of germs and increased environmental stress of working in an open space. Workers also complained of an inability to focus and were generally less content with their work environment, the study said.
Now, companies are again “realizing people actually have to be productive,” says Ned Fennie, partner at San Francisco-based architecture firm Fennie + Mehl.

For the full story, see:
ALINA DIZIK. “Open Offices Lose Some of Their Openness; Companies look for ways to add privacy and quiet areas without reverting to the traditional design.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Oct. 3, 2016): R7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 2, 2016, and has the title “Open Offices Are Losing Some of Their Openness; Companies look for ways to add privacy and quiet areas without reverting to the traditional office design.”)

The 2014 Swedish study mentioned above, is:
Bodin Danielsson, Christina, Holendro Singh Chungkham, Cornelia Wulff, and Hugo Westerlund. “Office Design’s Impact on Sick Leave Rates.” Ergonomics 57, no. 2 (Feb. 2014): 139-47.

We Want Meaningful Work

(p. 1) HOW satisfied are we with our jobs?
Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.
Why? One possibility is that it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view of Adam Smith, the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay. “It is the interest of every man,” he wrote in 1776 in “The Wealth of Nations,” “to live as much at his ease as he can.”
This idea has been enormously influential. About a century later, it helped shape the scientific management movement, which created systems of manufacture that minimized the need for skill and close attention — things that lazy, pay-driven workers could not be expected to have.
Today, in factories, offices and other workplaces, the details may be different but the overall situation is the same: Work is structured on the assumption that we do it only because we have to. The call center employee is monitored to ensure that he ends each call quickly. The office worker’s keystrokes are overseen to guarantee productivity.
. . .
(p. 4) To start with, I don’t think most people recognize themselves in Adam Smith’s description of wage-driven idlers. Of course, we care about our wages, and we wouldn’t work without them. But we care about more than money. We want work that is challenging and engaging, that enables us to exercise some discretion and control over what we do, and that provides us opportunities to learn and grow. We want to work with colleagues we respect and with supervisors who respect us. Most of all, we want work that is meaningful — that makes a difference to other people and thus ennobles us in at least some small way.
. . .
You enter an occupation with a variety of aspirations aside from receiving your pay. But then you discover that your work is structured so that most of those aspirations will be unmet. Maybe you’re a call center employee who wants to help customers solve their problems — but you find out that all that matters is how quickly you terminate each call. Or you’re a teacher who wants to educate kids — but you discover that only their test scores matter. Or you’re a corporate lawyer who wants to serve his client with care and professionalism — but you learn that racking up billable hours is all that really counts.
Pretty soon, you lose your lofty aspirations. And over time, later generations don’t even develop the lofty aspirations in the first place. Compensation becomes the measure of all that is possible from work. When employees negotiate, they negotiate for improved compensation, since nothing else is on the table. And when this goes on long enough, we become just the kind of creatures that Adam Smith thought we always were.

For the full commentary, see:

BARRY SCHWARTZ. “Rethinking Work.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., AUG. 30, 2015): 1 & 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date AUG. 28, 2015,)

The commentary is related to Schwartz’s book:
Schwartz, Barry. Why We Work, Ted Books. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.