Psychology – Page 38 – artdiamondblog.com

Solitude May Allow “Making Novel Connections Between Far-Flung Ideas”

Source of book image: http://ffbsccn.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/focus.jpg

(p. 16) What appears to be most at risk is our ability to experience open awareness. Always a rare and elusive form of thinking, it seems to be getting rarer and more elusive. Our modern search-engine culture celebrates information gathering and problem solving — ways of thinking associated with orienting and selective focus — but has little patience for the mind’s reveries. Letting one’s thoughts wander seems frivolous, a waste of practical brainpower. Worse, our infatuation with social media is making it harder to hear the mind’s whispers. Solitude has fallen out of fashion. Even when we’re by ourselves, we’re rarely alone with our thoughts.

In the end, we may come to see the flights and fancies of open awareness as not only dispensable but pathological. Goleman points out that the brain systems associated with creative mind-wandering tend to be “unusually active” in people with attention-deficit disorder. When they appear to be “zoning out,” they may actually be making novel connections between far-flung ideas.

For the full review, see:
NICHOLAS CARR. “Attention Must Be Paid.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., November 3, 2013): 16.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 1, 2013.)

Book under review:
Goleman, Daniel. Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.

Artificial Intelligence Is a Complement to Human Intelligence, Not a Substitute for It

Source of book image: http://img2-1.timeinc.net/ew/i/2013/11/05/Smarter-Than-You-Think.jpg

(p. 11) Clive Thompson, a Brooklyn-based technology journalist, uses this tale to open “Smarter Than You Think,” his judicious and insightful book on human and machine intelligence. But he takes it to a more interesting level. The year after his defeat by Deep Blue, Kasparov set out to see what would happen if he paired a machine and a human chess player in a collaboration. Like a centaur, the hybrid would have the strength of each of its components: the processing power of a large logic circuit and the intuition of a human brain’s wetware. The result: human-machine teams, even when they didn’t include the best grandmasters or most powerful computers, consistently beat teams composed solely of human grandmasters or superfast machines.

Thompson’s point is that “artificial intelligence” — defined as machines that can think on their own just like or better than humans — is not yet (and may never be) as powerful as “intelligence amplification,” the symbiotic smarts that occur when human cognition is augmented by a close interaction with computers.

For the full review, see:
WALTER ISAACSON. “Brain Gain.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., November 3, 2013): 11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 1, 2013.)

Book under review:
Thompson, Clive. Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. New York: Penguin Press, 2013.

Do You Have to Be a Human to Have a Soul?

I cannot prove it to the skeptical, but after observing and interacting with our dachshund Willy almost every day for about 10 years, I strongly believe that he thinks and feels in ways that show he has a soul.
And I have no trouble believing that if a dachshund has a soul, then an elephant has one too.

(p. A21) Caitrin Nicol had an absorbing essay in The New Atlantis called “Do Elephants Have Souls?” Nicol quotes testimony from those who study elephant behavior. Here’s one elephant greeting a 51-year-old newcomer to her sanctuary:

“Everyone watched in joy and amazement as Tarra and Shirley intertwined trunks and made ‘purring’ noises at each other. Shirley very deliberately showed Tarra each injury she had sustained at the circus, and Tarra then gently moved her trunk over each injured part.”
Nicol not only asks whether this behavior suggests that elephants do have souls, she also illuminates what a soul is. The word is hard to define for many these days, but, Nicol notes, “when we talk about it, we all mean more or less the same thing: what it means for someone to bare it, for music to have it, for eyes to be the window to it, for it to be uplifted or depraved.”

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID BROOKS. “The Sidney Awards.” The New York Times (Fri., December 27, 2013): A18. [National Edition]
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 26, 2013, and has the title “The Sidney Awards, Part 1.”)

The article praised by Brooks is:
Nicol, Caitrin. “Do Elephants Have Souls?” New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society 38 (Winter/Spring 2013): 10-70.

Malcolm Gladwell, on Harvard, Rings True to Debbie Sterling

Debbie Sterling, GoldieBlox entrepreneur. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 2) Debbie Sterling is the founder and chief executive of GoldieBlox, a toy company dedicated to encouraging girls’ interest in engineering and construction.

READING I just started “David and Goliath,” by Malcolm Gladwell. He has some really interesting statistics about how at the top-tier universities like Stanford and Harvard, freshmen who go into engineering often fall out versus if those same students had gone to a second-tier school, they would have been in the top of their class and therefore would have stayed in. It really spoke to me because I was definitely one of those engineering students at Stanford who constantly felt like I was surrounded by geniuses. I was intimidated, but I stayed because I am just so stubborn.

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY, interviewer. “DOWNLOAD; Debbie Sterling.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., December 22, 2013): 2.
(Note: bold in original, indicating that what follows are the words of Debbie Sterling.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date December 21, 2013.)

Book that “spoke to” Sterling:
Gladwell, Malcolm. David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

Concentrating on One Task Results in Better Thinking

“Clifford Nass studied how new technology affected people.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

Nass focused on how interruptions from technology would reduce a person’s ability to think well. But doesn’t his research also imply that interruptions from other causes, including those from co-workers in open “collaborative” office designs, would likewise reduce a person’s ability to think well?

(p. 27) Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor whose pioneering research into how humans interact with technology found that the increasingly screen-saturated, multitasking modern world was not nurturing the ability to concentrate, analyze or feel empathy, died on Nov. 2 near Lake Tahoe. He was 55.
. . .
One of his most publicized research projects was a 2009 study on multitasking.
. . .
“We all bet high multitaskers were going to be stars at something,” he said in an interview with the PBS program “Frontline.” “We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.”
He added, “One would think that if people were bad at multitasking, they would stop. However, when we talk with the multitaskers, they seem to think they’re great at it and seem totally unfazed and totally able to do more and more and more.”
With children doing more multitasking and people asked to do more of it at work, he said, “We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.”
. . .
Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM YARDLEY. “Clifford Nass, Who Warned of a Data Deluge, Dies at 55.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., November 11, 2013): 27.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date November 6, 2013.)

The famous study on multitasking that Nass authored is:
Ophir, Eyal, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner. “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 106, no. 37 (September 15, 2009): 15583-87.

“Myth that Most C.E.O.’s Are Extroverts”

“”It’s a myth that most C.E.O.’s are extroverts,” says Dwight Merriman, chairman and co-founder of MongoDB, an open-source document database. He has overcome his own earlier shyness, he says, and relies on enthusiasm for his work.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT interview quoted and cited below.

(p. B2) Q. I take it you’re an introvert.

A. I am.
Q. You were C.E.O. of MongoDB for five years before becoming chairman, and a big part of that job no doubt required you to spend a lot of time with people and give a lot of talks. How did you handle that?
A. I think 95 percent of the time you can get past that with just sheer brute force. I remember public-speaking class in college. I really didn’t want to do it. But today, when I give talks to 1,000 people, I’m not nervous at all. I think you get used to it. You just have to force yourself out of your comfort zone.
And it’s a myth that most C.E.O.’s are extroverts. Many are, but probably no more than the general population. I do what works for me, which is being enthusiastic and passionate about what we’re doing. You’ve just got to find what works for you.

For the full interview, see:
ADAM BRYANT. “CORNER OFFICE: Dwight Merriman; Being an Effective Leader Without Being an Extrovert.” The New York Times (Fri., November 1, 2013): B2.
(Note: bold and italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date October 31, 2013, and has the title “CORNER OFFICE; Dwight Merriman of MongoDB on Leading by Enthusiasm.”)

Amazon’s User Reviews Increase Rationality of Consumer Choices

Source of book image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dNUZ_u-GWSk/UpqE0zmFQQI/AAAAAAAAAko/Z8uisfEjgRc/s1600/Absolute+Value+cover.png

(p. 3) You are no longer the sucker you used to be.

So suggests continuing research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business into the challenges marketers face in reaching consumers in the digital age. As you might suspect, the research shows that a wealth of online product information and user reviews is causing a fundamental shift in how consumers make decisions.
As consumers rely more on one another, the power of marketers is being undermined, said Itamar Simonson, a Stanford marketing professor and the lead researcher.
. . .
To get the full impact of the findings, you first have to know the conclusions of a similar experiment decades ago by Dr. Simonson, . . . . . . .
The researchers found that when study subjects had only two choices, most chose the less expensive camera with fewer features. But when given three choices, most chose the middle one. Dr. Simonson called it “the compromise effect” — the idea that consumers will gravitate to the middle of the options presented to them.
. . .
Flash forward to the new experiment. It was similar to the first, except that consumers could have a glimpse at Amazon. That made a huge difference. When given three camera options, consumers didn’t gravitate en masse to the midprice version. Rather, the least expensive one kept its share and the middle one lost more to the most expensive one.
“The compromise effect was gone,” said Dr. Simonson, or, rather, he nearly exclaimed the absence of the effect, underscoring his surprise at the findings. They are to be published next month in “Absolute Value,” a book by Dr. Simonson and Emanuel Rosen.
Today, products are being evaluated more on their “absolute value, their quality,” Dr. Simonson said. Brand names mean less.

For the full story, see:
MATT RICHTEL. “APPLIED SCIENCE; There’s Power in All Those User Reviews.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., December 8, 2013): 3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date December 7, 2013.)

The new research is reported in:
Simonson, Itamar, and Emanuel Rosen. Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information. New York: HarperBusiness, 2014.

In Britain Right and Left Support “Libertarian Paternalism”

(p. 4) In 2010, Mr. Cameron set up the Behavioral Insights Team — or nudge unit, as it’s often called. Three years later, the team has doubled in size and is about to announce a joint venture with an external partner to expand the program.
The unit has been nudging people to pay taxes on time, insulate their attics, sign up for organ donation, stop smoking during pregnancy and give to charity — and has saved taxpayers tens of millions of pounds in the process, said David Halpern, its director.
. . .
Creating Commitment
One morning in late May 2008, 10 copies of a little red book arrived for Rohan Silva in Norman Shaw South, the Westminster wing where the leader of the political opposition — at the time, the Conservatives — is traditionally housed.
The book was “Nudge,” and Mr. Silva, then 27 and David Cameron’s youngest adviser, piled them up on his desk. He had read the book as soon as it came out, a few weeks before. In fact, he had read deeply on behavioral economics and social psychology and met many of the American academics who specialized in the field. He was eager to spread the message in his country. “We used to joke about Ro being on commission for Thaler and Sunstein,” said Steve Hilton, Mr. Cameron’s former director of strategy and now a visiting scholar at Stanford.
. . .
Libertarian Paternalism
. . .
. . . , the question in Britain no longer seems to be whether, but how, to nudge. In their book, Professor Thaler and Mr. Sunstein defined their approach as steering people toward decisions deemed superior by the government but leaving them free to choose. “Libertarian paternalism,” they called it, and while that term is not used much in Britain, there is broad agreement on the subject among the left and the right.
Mr. Halpern used to be policy chief for Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, and later wrote a report on behavioral policy-making commissioned by Mr. Blair’s Labour Party successor, Gordon Brown. In one small way, the 2010 election campaign was also a race to decide which party would carry out an idea that had been percolating in the intellectual ranks of both for some years.

Wider Horizons
One of Mr. Thaler’s favorite nudges is something that Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam adopted in public bathrooms: a small sticker of a fly in the center of a urinal has been shown to improve aim. It saves the airport cleaning costs.
During a recent visit to Downing Street, Mr. Thaler ran into Mr. Cameron in the men’s room. There were no fly stickers.
“What’s the deal?” he joked.

For the full story, see:
KATRIN BENNHOLD. “The Ministry of Nudges.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., December 8, 2013): 1 & 4.
(Note: ellipses added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date December 7, 2013, and has the title “Britain’s Ministry of Nudges.”)

The Nudge book is:
Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Revised & Expanded (pb) ed: Penguin Books, 2009.

Functional Stupidity Management

(p. 1194) In this paper we question the one-sided thesis that contemporary organizations rely on the mobilization of cognitive capacities. We suggest that severe restrictions on these capacities in the form of what we call functional stupidity are an equally important if under-recognized part of organizational life. Functional stupidity refers to an absence of reflexivity, a refusal to use intellectual capacities in other than myopic ways, and avoidance of justifications. We argue that functional stupidity is prevalent in contexts dominated by economy in persuasion which emphasizes image and symbolic manipulation. This gives rise to forms of stupidity management that repress or marginalize doubt and block communicative action. In turn, this structures individuals’ internal conversations in ways that emphasize positive and coherent narratives and marginalize more negative or ambiguous ones. This can have productive outcomes such as providing a degree of certainty for individuals and organizations. But it can have corrosive consequences such as creating a sense of dissonance among individuals and the organization as a whole. The positive consequences can give rise to self-reinforcing stupidity. The negative consequences can spark dialogue, which may undermine functional stupidity.

Source of paper abstract:
Alvesson, Mats, and André Spicer. “A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations.” Journal of Management Studies 49, no. 7 (Nov. 2012): 1194-220.

Interruptions and Distractions Disrupt Worker Productivity

Someday we will look back at open office plans as another way-overdone management fad. See also my earlier entry on the effects of workers switching tasks and my earlier entry on open offices.

(p. D2) Research led by Bing C. Lin, a doctoral candidate in industrial and organizational psychology at Portland State University in Oregon, found intrusions, or unexpected interruptions, increased exhaustion, physical strain and anxiety by one-third to three-fourths as much as the size of employees’ actual workloads. Bottling up frustration when someone barges into your cubicle worsens the strain, according to the study of 252 employees, published earlier this year in the International Journal of Stress Management.

For the full story, see:
SUE SHELLENBARGER. “WORK & FAMILY MAILBOX; Sue Shellenbarger Answers Readers’ Questions.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Nov. 13, 2013): D2.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 12, 2013, and has the title “WORK & FAMILY; The Toll of Office Disruptions; Latest Research on Distractions and Worker Efficiency.”)

The Lin study summarized above is:
Lin, Bing C., Jason M. Kain, and Charlotte Fritz. “Don’t Interrupt Me! An Examination of the Relationship between Intrusions at Work and Employee Strain.” International Journal of Stress Management 20, no. 2 (2013): 77-94.

Successful Entrepreneurs Focus Their Attention

(p. A31) Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. . . .
Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.
It leads to resilience, the ability to persevere with an idea even when all the influences in the world say it can’t be done. A common story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong.
It leads to creativity. Individuals who can focus attention have the ability to hold a subject or problem in their mind long enough to see it anew.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID BROOKS. “Lost in the Crowd.” The New York Times (Tues., December 16, 2008): A31.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 15, 2008.)