Psychology – Page 36 – artdiamondblog.com

“The World Is Not Only Stranger than We Imagine, It Is Stranger than We Can Imagine”

(p. 238) The British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane once commented, “The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” This famous quote is often used to support the notion that the mysteries of the universe are beyond our understanding. Here is another way to interpret his insight: Because so much is out there that is beyond our imagination, it is likely that we will discover new truths only when we accidentally stumble upon them. Development can then proceed apace.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: I have corrected a typo in the Haldane quote. Meyers mistakenly has “that” for the second “than.”)

Edison Claimed an Inventor Needs “a Logical Mind that Sees Analogies”

(p. C3) Thomas Edison famously said that genius requires “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Edison’s third criterion for would-be innovators is less well-known but perhaps even more vital: “a logical mind that sees analogies.”
. . .
The art of analogy flows from creative re-categorization and the information that we extract from surprising sources. Take the invention of the moving assembly line. Credit for this breakthrough typically goes to Henry Ford, but it was actually the brainchild of a young Ford mechanic named Bill Klann. After watching butchers at a meatpacking plant disassemble carcasses moving past them along an overhead trolley, Klann thought that auto workers could assemble cars through a similar process by adding pieces to a chassis moving along rails.
Overcoming significant management skepticism, Klann and his cohorts built a moving assembly line. Within four months, Ford’s line had cut the time it took to build a Model T from 12 hours per vehicle to just 90 minutes. In short order, the moving assembly line revolutionized manufacturing and unlocked trillions of dollars in economic potential. And while in retrospect this innovation may seem like a simple, obvious step forward, it wasn’t; the underlying analogy between moving disassembly and moving assembly had eluded everyone until Klann grasped its potential.

For the full essay, see:
JOHN POLLACK. “Four Ways to Innovate through Analogies; Many of history’s most important breakthroughs were made by seeing analogies–for example, how a plane is like a bike.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Nov. 8, 2014): C3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the essay has the date Nov. 7, 2014, and has the title “Four Ways to Innovate through Analogies; Many of history’s most important breakthroughs were made by seeing analogies–for example, how a plane is like a bike.”)

The passages quoted above are related to Pollack’s book:
Pollack, John. Shortcut: How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas. New York, NY: Gotham Books, 2014.

We Feel Safer When We Have More Personal Control

(p. C3) So how should we approach risk? The numbers can help, especially if we simplify them. For acute risks, a good measure is the MicroMort, devised by Stanford’s Ronald A. Howard in the 1970s. One MicroMort (1 MM) is equal to a one-in-a-million chance of death.
. . .
In truth, “Don’t do that, it’s dangerous!” is about much more than the numbers. We must also reflect on the full basis for our preferences–such as, to take one small psychological characteristic among many, what we value in life, as well as what we fear.
. . .
In fact, the numbers tend to have the effect of highlighting the psychological factors. Take traveling. For 1 MM, you can drive 240 miles in the U.S., fly 7,500 miles in a commercial aircraft or fly just 12 miles in a light aircraft. We tend to feel safer if we feel more personal control, but we have no control whatsoever in a passenger jet, the safest of all (notwithstanding last week’s terrible tragedy). You could take that as evidence of human irrationality. We take it as evidence that human motives matter more than the pure odds allow.

For the full commentary, see:
MICHAEL BLASTLAND and DAVID SPIEGELHALTER. “Risk Is Never a Strict Numbers Game; We tell children to shun ecstasy but don’t fret about horseback riding–and other foibles of our view of danger.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 19, 2014): C3.
(Note: ellipses in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 18, 2014.)

The passages quoted above were from a commentary adapted from the book:
Blastland, Michael, and David Spiegelhalter. The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger and Death. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Boring Jobs Cause Stress and Lower Productivity

(p. B4) A study published this year in the journal Experimental Brain Research found that measurements of people’s heart rates, hormonal levels and other factors while watching a boring movie — men hanging laundry — showed greater signs of stress than those watching a sad movie.
“We tend to think of boredom as someone lazy, as a couch potato,” said James Danckert, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and a co-author of the paper. “It’s actually when someone is motivated to engage with their environment and all attempts to do so fail. It’s aggressively dissatisfying.”
It’s not just the amount of work, Professor Spector said, also but the type. . . .
“You can be very busy and a have a lot to do and still be bored,” he said. The job — whether a white-collar managerial position or blue-collar assembly line role — also needs to be stimulating.
. . .
In a 2011 paper based on the doctoral dissertation of his student Kari Bruursema, Professor Spector and his co-authors found that the stress of boredom can lead to counterproductive work behavior, like calling in sick, taking long breaks, spending time on the Internet for nonwork-related reasons, gossiping about colleagues, playing practical jokes or even stealing. While most workers engage in some of these activities at times, the bored employee does it far more frequently, he said.

For the full story, see:
ALINA TUGEND. “Shortcuts; The Contrarians on Stress: It Can Be Good for You.” The New York Times (Sat., OCT. 4, 2014): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 3, 2014.)

The Experimental Brain Research study mentioned above, is:
Merrifield, Colleen, and James Danckert. “Characterizing the Psychophysiological Signature of Boredom.” Experimental Brain Research 232, no. 2 (Feb. 2014): 481-91.

The article mentioned above, that is co-authored by Spector, is:
Bruursema, Kari, Stacey R. Kessler, and Paul E. Spector. “Bored Employees Misbehaving: The Relationship between Boredom and Counterproductive Work Behaviour.” Work & Stress 25, no. 2 (April 2011): 93-107.

Less Time in Office Leaves Workers Happier, Less Stressed and Equally Productive

(p. 4) A recent study, published in The American Sociological Review, aimed to see whether the stress of work-life conflicts could be eased if employees had more control over their schedules, including being able to work from home. . . .
The study, financed by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, involved the information technology department of a large corporation. . . .
As part of the research, department managers received training to encourage them to show support for employees’ family and personal lives, said Erin Kelly, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota and one of the lead authors of the study. Then employees were given much more control over their schedules than before. They “were free to work where and when they preferred, as long as the work got done,” she said.
The results: The employees almost doubled the amount of time they worked at home, to an average of 19.6 hours from 10.2 hours. Total work hours remained roughly the same. Focusing on results rather than time spent at the office, and cutting down on “low value” meetings and other tasks, helped employees achieve more flexibility, Professor Kelly said.
Compared with another group that did not have the same flexibility, employees interviewed by the researchers said they felt happier and less stressed, had more energy and were using their time more effectively, Professor Kelly said. There was no sign that the quality of the work improved or declined with the changed schedules, she added.

For the full story, see:
PHYLLIS KORKKI. “Yes, Flexible Hours Ease Stress. But Is Everyone on Board?.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., AUG. 24, 2014): C4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 23, 2014.)

The study mentioned above is:
Kelly, Erin L., Phyllis Moen, and Eric Tranby. “Changing Workplaces to Reduce Work-Family Conflict: Schedule Control in a White-Collar Organization.” American Sociological Review 76, no. 2 (April 2011): 265-90.

“A Small Masterpiece of Animal Literature”

(p. A13) In the annals of publishing, there may be a precedent or two for a venerable military historian setting aside his generals and artillery to evoke the love affair that consumed him as a younger man, but it’s probably safe to say that in none of these memoirs is the object of adoration feathered, 10 inches tall and given to maniacally attacking the historian’s shoelaces. Such is the case with Martin Windrow’s “The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar.” If the above description makes the book sound funny, touching and divertingly novel, so it is. But there’s more to it than that. In relaxed yet lapidary prose, Mr. Windrow–best known for “The Last Valley,” his 2004 account of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu–has produced an homage to both a creature and its species that is almost Leonardo-like in its precision and spirit of curiosity. The result is nothing less than a small masterpiece of animal literature.
. . .
Mumble became his mate-equivalent, and he hers. With the restraint typical of an educated Englishman of his generation, he does not dilate on what she meant to him, but we feel it the more keenly for his reticence.
A paradoxical pitfall of animal literature is that it achieves its effects too easily: Consider how quick we are to laugh when a writer so much as mentions a monkey. The good stuff, however, stands out for its refusal to push buttons or indulge in glib anthropomorphism. In this perfect book, Mr. Windrow may compare Mumble to a samurai and think of her as hurling at pigeons the owlish equivalent of a certain Anglo-Saxon expletive, but he never loses sight of what she is: Strix aluco, a beautiful alien.

For the full review, see:
BEN DOWNING. “BOOKSHELF; Full Feather Jacket; A military historian and an owl make a home together in a London high-rise. Visitors are issued vintage helmets for protection.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 2, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 1, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar’ by Martin Windrow; A military historian and an owl make a home together in a London high-rise. Visitors are issued vintage helmets for protection.”)

The book being reviewed is:
Windrow, Martin. The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Living with a Tawny Owl. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

HR Regulations and Fear of Lawsuits Keep Managers from Firing Workers Who Do Not Work

(p. 1B) The biggest problem in your workplace has a name. His name is Jeff. . . .
Jeff sits two cubicles down from us, or three, or four. His real name may be John, Juan or Joan. He gets to the widget factory late, he leaves early and always mucks up his part of any group project. He complains, loudly, about the smallest things, and when you bring doughnuts for your birthday he probably takes three and then talks with his mouth full, too.
. . .
(p. 2B) . . . , morale suffers greatly when most of a company’s employees perceive that their supervisor is failing to deal with their low-performing co-worker, month after month, year after year.
For this, Hoogeveen blames a corporate culture that is so concerned about HR regulations, and the often-imagined threat of litigation, that bosses often fail to take into account how the trouble employee affects the larger climate.
. . .
. . . if Jeff doesn’t improve, he needs to be fired. This is perhaps the worst part of a boss’s job, Hoogeveen thinks. His eyes mist as he recalls firing an employee whom he liked, but who was simply a bad fit at QLI.
It’s human nature to avoid this conflict, to maintain the status quo and let Jeff be, he says. That’s what can and does happen at most Omaha companies.
But it’s bad for the employees, and it’s bad for business.
“A lot of this stuff is incredibly easy to understand,” says Omaha’s workplace mechanic [Kim Hoogeveen]. “It’s incredibly difficult to live.”

For the full story, see:
Hansen, Matthew. “Workplace Guru: Don’t Let Problem Worker Slide.” Omaha World-Herald (Mon., July 21, 2014): 1B-2B.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the article had the title “Hansen: Don’t let Jeff — the problem worker — slide, workplace guru says.”)

“Ego Depletion” from Distractions Reduces Ability to Perform Cognitively Demanding Tasks

(p. B1) One study from Microsoft indicated that programmers who were interrupted by an incoming email lost 10 minutes every time they switched from their original task, on top of however long it took them to answer the email. Earlier studies suggest that workers lose (p. B2) as much as 40% of their productive time when they are regularly interrupted.
. . .
. . . , people underestimate the cost of . . . distractions, partly because we underestimate the effects of what psychologists call “ego depletion.” The idea is that we have only so much willpower. Some neuroscientists believe the brain literally runs out of its fuel, glucose, when we have to perform cognitively demanding tasks. But exercising the self control required to not answer that incoming email is also cognitively demanding.

For the full story, see:
CHRISTOPHER MIMS. “KEYWORDS; The Distraction-Industrial Complex.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 30, 2014): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 29, 2014, and has the title “KEYWORDS; Say No to the Distraction-Industrial Complex.”)

One of the early articles in the substantial literature on ego depletion, is:
Baumeister, Roy F., Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne M. Tice. “Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 5 (May 1998): 1252-65.

“Long, Lonely Odyssey “from Heresy to Orthodoxy””

Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. D5) As the Nobel committee put it in the 1997 citation for Dr. Prusiner’s prize in physiology or medicine, he had established “a novel principle of infection” — one so controversial that a few experts in the field still continue to search for that elusive virus. But as far as Dr. Prusiner is concerned, the Nobel confirmed that his long, lonely odyssey “from heresy to orthodoxy” was over.

The journey he details was full of hurdles. Some were of the kind likely to befall any researcher: insufficient laboratory space, poor correlation between needs and resources. (At one point, Dr. Prusiner calculated that for a single year’s worth of experiments he would have to house and feed 72,000 mice, an impossible multimillion-dollar proposition.) He submitted a grant application that was not just rejected for funding but actually “disapproved,” often the kiss of death for a train of scientific thought.
Some of his problems were a little darker but still universal — graduate students captured by competing labs, data appropriated and misrepresented by erstwhile colleagues, bitter authorship battles.
Some of Dr. Prusiner’s shoals, however, seem more particular to his personal operating style. As a teenager he was blessed with what he describes as indefatigable self-confidence, and this trait apparently endures, to the considerable irritation of others.

For the full review, see:
ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. “Books; A Victory Lap for a Heretical Neurologist.” The New York Times (Sat., May 20, 2014): D5.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 19, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Prusiner, Stanley B. Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions–a New Biological Principle of Disease. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

Rickenbacker Wasn’t the Best Pilot or the Best Shot “but He Could Put More Holes in a Target that Was Shooting Back”

Source of book image: http://jacketupload.macmillanusa.com/jackets/high_res/jpgs/9781250033772.jpg

(p. C6) With his unpolished manners, Rickenbacker encountered a good deal of arrogance from the privileged sons of Harvard and Yale, but after he had downed his first five enemies, criticism ceased. About Rickenbacker’s killer instinct his colleague Reed McKinley Chambers had this to say: “Eddie wasn’t the best pilot in the world. He could not put as many holes in a target that was being towed as I could, but he could put more holes in a target that was shooting back at him than I could.”

For the full review, see:
HENRIK BERING. “Daring Done Deliberately.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 31, 2014): C6.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 30, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘Enduring Courage’ by John F. Ross.”)

The book under review is:
Ross, John F. Enduring Courage: Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2014.

Psychological Theorizing Based on False Facts

Source of book image:
http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/k/kitty-genovese/9780393239287_custom-113f9b45a7b76ac664f82c62c6604fd07d7ad5f9-s6-c30.jpg

(p. C7) The Kitty Genovese myth has turned out to be as enduring an urban legend as the tale of alligators prowling the New York sewers. In March 1964 the young Queens bar manager was stabbed to death at three in the morning outside her Kew Gardens apartment while 38 neighbors watched from their windows and did nothing to save her–or so the tale has gone for the past half-century.

In fact, hardly anything about the Genovese story is what it first appeared to be, although it has calcified into a metaphor of urban alienation and prompted research into a psychological phenomenon that has come to be known as the “Genovese syndrome.” As Kevin Cook writes in his heavily padded but provocative new book, “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America,” the tale is as much about the alchemy of journalism as urban pathology.
. . .
. . . , as it turns out, only a few neighbors understood the attack for what it was and failed to respond.
. . .
Journalism is a blunt instrument, and allowances must be made. Even so, it’s plain that the original story was more hype than first draft of history.

For the full review, see:
EDWARD KOSNER. “BOOKS; What the Neighbors Didn’t See; A woman was stabbed and raped steps from her door. Did no one call the police?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 1, 2014): C7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 28, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Kitty Genovese’ by Kevin Cook; A woman was stabbed and raped steps from her door. Did no one call the police?”)

The book under review is:
Cook, Kevin. Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014.