2022 University of Texas Human Dimensions of Organizations Undergraduate Commencement Speech

 

In May, 2022, I had the honor of being the keynote speaker at the University of Texas at Austin Human Dimensions of Organizations undergraduate commencement ceremony. Here are my remarks.

 

Good afternoon everyone!

Congratulations to the HDO graduates of the Class of 2022! We cannot celebrate your accomplishment enough. It is wonderful to see all the family and friends who have gathered here today. It is also great to share the stage with the HDO faculty and staff who did so much to support our graduates. I am so thankful that we are able to be here in-person this year.

Today, you are not just college graduates, you are Human Dimensions of Organizations graduates. You are bringing a unique human-centered perspective to bear on a world that desperately needs it. The front page of any newspaper or social-media feed is likely to highlight significant societal and political problems—and most of those will not be solved with money or technology. They will be solved through an understanding of people—as individuals, groups, and cultures. And you, graduates, will be in the best position to lead that charge.

Your education has prepared you to handle all the gray in the world around you. The gray reflects the nuance, context, goal conflicts, and boundary conditions that complicate relationships among people. One of the most important things you have learned is that the answer to every difficult question involving people is “it depends,” and you have skills to determine what effective solutions depend on. In particular, there are three things you will all bring to your future work.

First, you are able to see the normally invisible lines of force between people. Don’t worry. I don’t mean that literally…In your classes, you have drawn lessons from a variety of different disciplines to teach you about how to think about people

Whenever you learn something new, it changes the way you see the world. Years ago, I read an article in the Austin American-Statesman about the Austin Parkour Club. The members have all learned the art of clambering up walls, leaping to different surfaces, and acrobatically navigating urban spaces. One of the members talked about how he sees the world differently having learned this discipline.  Where other people see a brick wall, he sees the handholds and footholds that would enable him to scale it. The new physical skills he acquired literally changed what the world looked like for him.

Similarly, having learned about elements of the way people interact, you will see things in group dynamics that your colleagues will miss. You will recognize ways that different people’s goals, education, and life circumstances will change the way they view a particular situation. That will help you to understand the limits of potential solutions and courses of action you are considering.

Just as importantly, you have also gotten new words to talk about those concepts. When you use that vocabulary for talking about what you see, you will help everyone you interact with to develop the same powers of observation. On top of that, this vocabulary gives you a grounding to influence those interactions and create better teamwork and workplace relationships.

To do that you’ll need to draw on the second core skill—your ability to empathize with others. HDO has given you opportunities to engage with history and with works of fiction related to the workplace. One of the great values reading fiction and learning about other times and places is that it enables you to walk in the shoes of others. Great novels give you alternative perspectives on events. History provides a chance to consider a world very different from the one you’re living in now. Along the way, you grapple with the difference between the way you would react to a situation and the way that a character in a book or a figure from history has dealt with it. You also get insight into the thoughts and feelings of other people that you can contrast with your own. The engagement and analysis of literature and the study of history hones your skills to empathize not just with fictional and historical characters, but also with the people you encounter daily.  

Empathy has value because it helps you to understand the nuance in situations. To understand how this works, let me first introduce you to research on people who are bicultural. Bicultural individuals are those who have been raised simultaneously in two cultures and have adopted them both. This is common among immigrants to a country who have both the culture from the place where they grew up as well as the culture of their adopted country. Bicultural people have been shown to be more creative than those who grow up in a single culture because they are able to see every situation through two different lenses—one from each of their cultures.

That does not mean that people who are not bicultural are out of luck. Engaging with disciplines like history and literature allows you to immerse yourself in alternative perspectives on common situations. The empathy skills you developed through this engagement and understanding of people different from yourself will allow you to act more like a bicultural individual. You will be better able to take different perspectives on the events going on around you. And that will help you address the gray.

Finally, the ability to empathize and influence the world around you requires that you carry with you a strong sense of ethical behavior. Not long ago, the cognitive scientist Paul Bloom wrote a book called Against Empathy, in which he argued that empathy can lead people to do horrible things to others.  For example, soon after the United States declared war on Japan during World War II, President Roosevelt used empathy with victims of the Pearl Harbor bombings as well as the fear instilled by bombings of the west coast of the United States by Japan to justify and build support for the program of internment camps for Japanese Americans—which was not one of our nation’s finer moments.

Examples of empathy used badly are key demonstrations that empathy is a tool that is ethically neutral. It can be used for good and for ill. And—more generally—your UT education has given you many tools rooted in your understanding of motivation and human behavior that will enhance your effectiveness at influencing others. That power can be used in many different ways. Will you use that power to promote behaviors that have a long-term benefit on your organization and the people it serves? Will you use that power to develop trusted relationships? Will you use your influence to create more respect and understanding in your community?

In the 20^th century, business education was dominated by a perspective informed by theories in the field of economics. Economics helps us to track money and “utility.” It often drives people toward maximizing the benefits of actions in the short-term. As a result, this foundation for thinking about business glosses over a lot of the nuance about human relationships that drives success. I would argue that many of the factors that led to the “great resignation” and the “great reshuffling” that we are seeing now in the work world can be laid at the feet of this approach to doing business, because it does not account for the variety of goals that people pursue and the values they strive for through their work.

Business in the 21^st century must shift the foundation of business—and I believe that it will—by emphasizing the humans at the center of every organization. This approach will enable us give workplace relationships and trust the value they deserve in creating long-term prosperity and well-being. And you—HDO graduates of 2022—will be at the forefront of this revolution.

As you leave the University of Texas and take that first job, remember that you will be able to see things in the people around you that others will not. Share your perception. You will be skilled at understanding the goals and mindsets of your colleagues, customers, and clients. Share your empathy. And you will be positioned to help your organizations truly value the relationships they can create. Share your values.

And remember to let us know how you’re doing. You may only have spent a few years at UT getting your education, but you’re a Longhorn for the rest of your life. We are always here for you.

Congratulations and Hook ‘em.

Human Dimensions of Organizations Commencement Speech

 On December 10, 2021, I had the honor of giving a commencement speech to the graduates of the Human Dimensions of Organizations Program at the University of Texas. Here is the text of my speech.

Graduates, friends and family, my colleagues. It is an honor to have a chance to speak here on this wonderful occasion.

 

If you wrote a movie about a global pandemic prior to 2020, the heroes of the movie would be people in STEM fields. At the start of the outbreak, medical professionals would treat the sick. Scientists would sequence the genome of the novel virus. Bioengineers would develop a novel vaccine using cutting-edge technology. And the credits would roll as the first people got their shots—signaling the end of the threat.

 

One of the things that life experience teaches us is the limitations of our narratives. In the actual pandemic that began in 2020, the first vaccines were administered midway through Act I. As it turns out, the heroes we need aren’t just from the STEM fields. We need heroes who understand people in order to go beyond partisan divides to ensure that everyone gets vaccinated and takes other precautions. We need heroes to find ways to reduce barriers to getting the vaccine to people in every country in the world and not just the wealthiest nations. We need heroes to help people stay resilient in the face of what seems like a never-ending series of variants and other setbacks.

 

But, of course, all of you that we’re honoring today already knew that. By committing yourself to the last 15 months of study in the Human Dimensions of Organizations program, you recognized that understanding people is crucial for your future success. Today, you are graduates of the HDO Masters program. Congratulations on your hard work, your engagement with your classes, and completing the research on your capstone projects.  

 

While I have you all here as a captive audience, though, there are three more things I’d like to tell you. After all, you are about to take the knowledge and skills you have developed here to venture off to be the heroes we need.

 

First, let’s go way back to the very first week of the program in August of 2020. I spoke to several of you about your initial ideas for your final project and introduced you the concept that “The best capstone project is a completed capstone project.” I’m glad you took that advice to heart and did what you needed to do to finish.

 

But, that lesson is one you need to carry forward to everything you do. Human behavior is complicated, and you will never foresee everything that can go wrong with a plan that involves other people. Instead, you have to become adept at getting plans initiated and fixing them as they go along.

 

I have always found it strange that if you roll out a plan and then have to make changes people think you did something wrong—but nobody gets frustrated when a new piece of software needs an update a week after buying it. Remember—software is far less complicated than people. That means you have to set the norm that the plans you implement will change as you learn more. Your marker of success is where you end up, not where you start.

 

Second, your hard work has put you in a position to be better able to influence the lives the people around you. You have learned concepts that describe how people are motivated, so you can recognize what is driving their behavior. You have explored the qualities of leadership that create trust. You have worked on your ability to construct persuasive arguments.

 

All of these tools are ethically neutral. You can influence other people to do great things or terrible ones. You can persuade others to serve the broader community or just their own interests. You can build solid neighborhoods in which people lift each other up, or you can undermine people’s faith in each other.

 

Make the ethical use of influence a centerpiece of your work. As an example, I have initiated a practice in the teams I lead to make conversations about dilemmas a regular part of our work flow. As you may know, in the construction industry, they start meetings with a safety moment in recognition that lapses in safety can lead to fatal accidents. Analogously, I start team meetings with an ethics moment in which we watch a video or discuss a problem someone is facing. In this way, the team gets used to grappling with thorny problems before they become newspaper stories. It helps to send the message that ethics is as important in our workplace as safety is on a construction site.

 

Third, teach what you know to other people.  We live in a world in which far too few people understand the humans around them. We simply don’t teach much about individual behavior, group interactions, cultural influences, or leadership as part of our standard curriculum. That means you now know a lot more about these topics than most of the people you work with.

 

There are times when the knowledge and skills you have are more valuable when only you have them. This is not one of those times. The more that you can teach others about how to work together effectively, to solve problems among coworkers or with customers and clients, and to  resolve conflicts, the more open that your colleagues are going to be to your continued advice.

 

You will find that you teach in many different ways. You might actually give a class to a group of people you work with. But, you can also teach through day-to-day interactions with your colleagues. Use the concepts you have learned here explicitly in your discussions. Model the kind of behavior you want from others, but then call it out. Don’t expect that people will pick up on the things you’re doing without being told. It is ok to engage in a version of “see what I did there?” as part of your work.

 

The result of all this effort is that you will build a better market for your knowledge by giving as much of it away as you can.

 

So, that’s it. My last lesson. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Use your power wisely. And the best way to wield that power is to give it away. 

 

And before you head off to celebrate with your family and friends, remember that we’re always here for you. It has been a great joy for me to have graduates of the program come back and take seminars or just grab a cup of coffee and talk about what they’re working on. The HDO program has built an amazing community of alumni, and today you join their ranks. I look forward to hearing about all the ways in which you are the heroes that are needed in your communities.

 

Congratulations.

Is Perspective-Taking A Skill?

When we study psychology, there is a tendency to think about the tasks that we do as if there were built-in modules in the brain dedicated to those tasks.  So, we talk about memory and assume that there is a particular thing in the brain that helps us remember information.  We talk about attention, and figure there must be particular brain systems that help us to pay attention.

As the science of psychology has matured, it has become clear that there are many different systems that help us with a variety of tasks.  We now know, for example, that there are many different kinds of memory.  Some help us remember information over the long-term and some help us to hold on to information for a few seconds or minutes.  Other memory systems allow us to execute habits or to predict what is likely to happen next in a situation.

An interesting paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Rachel Ryskin, Aaron Benjamin, Jonathan Tullis, and Sarah Brown-Schmidt examined perspective-taking as a task.  Perspective-taking is the ability to take someone else’s viewpoint into account when thinking. 

For example, in a classic study, Robert Krauss and his colleagues found that when people were asked to give directions to a landmark in New York City, they changed the way they described how to get to the landmark depending on whether the person asking was from the city.  For other city-dwellers, people gave less specific instructions, because they assumed people would know basic aspects of navigating the city like how to get uptown versus downtown.

These researchers examined whether perspective taking was a single ability or a task that involves multiple different systems.  They examined this question in an interesting way by looking at individual differences in performance on different tasks that require perspective taking.  If perspective taking is a single ability, then people good at one task involving this ability should be good at other tasks involving it as well.

They selected three tasks for participants to perform across multiple sessions.  In one task, participants saw a series of 80 words and were asked to generate cues that would remind them of those words in two days.  This task requires people to take the perspective of themselves in a few days to figure out what would remind them of the words they saw. 

The second pair of tasks involved conversations between two people seated at different computer screens in separate rooms in which one person had to tell another which object on a 3 x 3 grid to click on.  On each grid, there was one square that was covered, so a particular participant could not see behind it.  Participants also knew which square was blocked for the other participant, though they could see behind it.  The image here shows examples of the materials from the paper.  One square is always covered.  The gray square is the one in which the participant can see what is there, but knows the other participant can’t see it.

With these grids, the person speaking is shown one of the objects and is told that the other participant should find that object on their grid.  The object they are supposed to talk about is circled.  In this case, it is a banana.  The key question is when do participants use an adjective along with the name of the object to help the other participant.  In the situation on the left, the participant has to use the adjective big to distinguish the big banana from the small one.  On the right, there is no need to use an adjective, because there is only one banana.  In the middle, though, there are two bananas, but only one is visible to their partner.  So from the speaker’s perspective, they should call it a big banana, but if they recognize that their partner can only see one banana, then they should not use an adjective. 

Finally, participants hearing the instructions have to search their grid to find the object.  Participants in this study were connected to an eye tracker so that it was possible to see what they were looking at as the task progressed.

Suppose the speaker says, “Find the big banana.”  At the adjective (big), the participant could look at any large object on the screen.  When the noun arrives (banana), participants could glance at any bananas in the grid.  The question is whether participants will look at objects that they know the speaker cannot see, because those objects are hidden from the speaker. 

In addition to these three tasks, participants did a number of other measures to help understand what factors lead to good performance in perspective-taking tasks.  They did the Stroop Task as a test of executive function.  In this task, participants have to name the color of the font that words naming colors are presented in.  This task is particularly difficult when the color of the font is a different color than the color named by the word.  For example, people are slow when the word green is written in a blue font.  They also did tests of working memory (the amount of information you can hold in mind at once when doing a task) and long-term memory skill (the number of words from a list people could remember). 

On average, participants were reasonably good at all tasks.  They remembered about half of the words from the list for which they generated cues two days later.  They tended to use adjectives when they were needed and omit them when they were not necessary.  They found the object that their partner was talking about, and looked less at objects that were hidden from their partner than at other objects.  However, there were also substantial differences on these tasks across participants.

Of interest, the correlations in performance across all three the tasks were low.  So, doing well in one perspective-taking did not predict how well people would do on another task.  The measure of executive function did not predict individual differences in performance on any of the tasks that well.  Individual differences in working memory predicted how well people would do in the memory task and also in the task in which they were the speaker.  In addition, overall memory performance also predicted how well people would do on the memory task in which people found cues for themselves.  None of the measures predicted how well people would do when finding objects that were labeled for them. 

What does all of this mean?

The complex task of perspective-taking seems to involve a number of different abilities.  You have to figure out what information someone else has access to (or what information you are likely to have in the future) and then use that information to inform what you do on the task.  It appears that this task recruits many different abilities depending on the specific nature of the task you are doing.  So, even though we have a single word for perspective-taking, psychologically it involves many different abilities.

One ability that does seem to be important for this task across at least a few situations is working memory.  That makes sense.  If you are going to take another person’s viewpoint into account, then you need to be able to keep in mind both what you are doing as well as what the other person knows.  The less information you can hold in mind at one time, the less able you are to keep track of what other people know.

Finally, this study further demonstrates how careful we have to be at figuring out the basic units of thinking.  There is a tendency to focus on the tasks people perform and assume the brain is organized in a way that respects these tasks.  Studies like this demonstrate that every task we perform involves a variety of different more basic abilities that are brought together as needed.

One reason why this matters is that when we do neuroimaging studies to look at brain activity when people are doing a task, we often start to identify brain regions with the particular task people were performing.  As this study demonstrates, though, a task like “perspective-taking” is not a single thing.  So, it would be dangerous to conclude that there are particular brain regions that are associated with perspective-taking, because that complex task involves lots of more specific abilities.

Knowledge and blame

Human beings love to give explanations for things.  If you have ever spent any time with a five-year-old, you know that a child that age just loves to ask, “Why?”  This desire to understand why things happen continues throughout our lives.  Understanding why things happen affects many aspects of our lives, including our ability to assign blame for an action. 

The way we go about assigning blame often involves our ability to come up with counterfactual statements.  A counterfactual is a statement that starts, “If only…” where the “If” part of the statement talks about something that didn’t really happen. 

Suppose, for example, two children are playing catch with a football in the living room of a house.  One of them throws the ball too hard, and it hits an expensive vase.  We might blame the child who threw the ball by staying, “If only he hadn’t thrown the ball too hard, the vase would not have broken.”  Or, we might blame both children by saying, “If only they had played catch outside, the vase would not have broken.” 

There are many factors that people take into account when they create these kinds of counterfactuals when trying to figure out who to blame.  Quite a bit of research by Jonathan Baron and his colleagues, for example, demonstrates that we often focus on actions people take rather than inactions when assigning blame.  So, if a man pushes someone over and she gets hurt, we blame the man for hurting the woman.  We reason that if he had not pushed her, she would not have gotten hurt.  But, suppose the man watches a woman about to walk into a bench that she does not see.  He does not tell her about the bench, and she trips over it, falls, and gets hurt.  The man might have prevented the accident by speaking out, but we don’t think he is (as much) to blame.  In part, his inaction is not seen as much of a cause of the woman getting hurt, because even if he had spoken up, it is possible she still would have fallen.

An interesting paper by Elizabeth Gilbert, Elizabeth Tenney, Christopher Holland, and Barbara Spellman in the May, 2015 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin explores another aspect of blame:  the knowledge of the individual performing the action. 

The idea behind these studies is that we often blame people more for actions when they have knowledge that they could have acted on.  So, if the children playing catch in the living room are 2-years-old, we might blame them less for the broken vase than if they are 10-years-old, because the 2-year-olds might know that throwing objects around the room can lead things to be broken, while the 10-year-olds know that and so they could have (and should have) acted differently.

In one study, participants read a scenario in which Sarah borrows a car from Josh.  It turns out that the car has brake problems.  Sarah drives a little recklessly and gets in an accident that hurts another person.  In this situation, people think Sarah and the brakes of the car are the cause of the accident.  However, if Josh knew that the brakes had a problem and did not tell Sarah, then people now think that Josh is actually more to blame for the accident than Sarah.  If he had told her, then she might have driven differently.  In a third condition, Josh knew that the brakes had a problem and did tell Sarah, but she drove recklessly anyhow.  Now, Sarah is once again seen as more blameworthy than Josh for the accident, because she had enough knowledge to act more responsibly.

Another study in this series looked at the counterfactuals people create.  The scenario in this study involved a woman who is cutting the grass at her house with a lawnmower that is defective.  The lawnmower spins out of control and cuts her prize tulips.  In one condition, the woman does not know the lawnmower is defective.  In the other, her mechanic has told her the mower is defective. 

Participants were asked to generate several “If only” statements and to rate whether this counterfactual statement could have occurred and whether the woman could have controlled whether that happened.   They also rated the woman’s blame for destroying the tulips.

Participants thought the woman was more to blame when she knew the lawnmower was defective than when she did not know.  The reason for this difference was that when the woman knew the lawnmower was defective, people were more likely to think that she could have done something (like buy a new lawnmower) that would have fixed the problem and spared the tulips.  So, there was a direct link between the counterfactuals people created and the blame they assigned the woman.

Ultimately, when we are trying to understand the causes of events in our world, we reason about the way the world could have been had people taken different actions.  When we think that people could have easily taken an action that would have led to a different outcome, we blame them for that outcome.  And, knowledge is one key factor that makes us believe that a person could have acted differently.

Explanations and Our Place in Society

There is a funny paradox in politics. Many people who are successful or wealthy recognize the combination of talent and circumstances and plain luck that landed them where they are.  Those who are unsuccessful or poor can recognize how things might have gone differently if their circumstances had been different. 

Yet, the recognition that success and wealth do not happen purely on the basis of effort and merit does not change people’s attitudes toward social policy.  While we recognize that there is substantial income inequality in the United States, few people endorse specific policies that would redistribute income and opportunity.

Why is that?

This question was explored in an interesting paper by Larisa Ussak and Andrei Cimpian in the November, 2015 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

They suggest that from an early age, people tend to explain the behavior of groups in terms of characteristics that those people have rather than in terms of the social forces that act on them.  This focus on inherent characteristics rather than extrinsic forces leads people to accept that groups deserve to be in the social position they are in.

The first few studies in this paper looked at 8-year-olds and adults.  They were given descriptions of groups of people from an alien planet.  They were told that the groups had some kind of inequality (for example, one group might have a lot more money than the other).  Then, they were given two explanations for that difference.  One explanation focused on inherent characteristics (one group is smarter than the other).  The second explanation focused on extrinsic factors (one group found a lot of gold).  Participants rated how plausible they thought these explanations were.  (Pilot studies showed that thought each explanation was equally plausible as a description of why one group might be wealthier than another.)  They also rated whether they thought the situation on the planet was fair. 

Both adults and 8-year-olds gave higher ratings to explanations based on inherent characteristics than to those based on external factors.  Of interest, the more strongly that a person preferred the inherent explanation to the external one, the more that they thought the situation on the planet was fair.

Other studies in this series found a similar result with children as young as 5.  In addition, studies found that children given the scenarios and asked to generate an explanation for the difference on their own tended to give explanations referring to inherent properties than to give explanations based on extrinsic factors. 

Interestingly, these differences in explanations are observed when children think about groups, but not about individuals.  When they are told about individuals from a planet who come from different groups and differ on some characteristic (like income), they are equally likely to give explanations based on inherent and extrinsic factors.  So, the effect I have described seems to apply just to beliefs about groups.

One final study manipulated the type of explanation and looked at fairness.  In this study, children were given either an inherent or an extrinsic explanation for a difference between groups on a planet.  Children given an inherent explanation thought the difference between groups on the planet was more fair than children given an extrinsic explanation.

Putting all of this together, when children and adults look at groups of people, they often assume that group differences result from characteristics of group members rather than situational factors.  As a result, they tend to think those group differences are fair.  This suggests that one reason why people often fail to endorse public policies that might help to repair differences between groups is that they think that the differences between groups actually reflect aspects of those groups that are causing the inequality rather than situational factors that public policy might be able to fix.

Your Memories Are Not Fixed in Stone

One of the scariest parts of the legal system is its reliance on eyewitness testimony.  A witness identifies who a defendant as the perpetrator of a crime can sway a jury in the absence of any physical evidence that that the defendant was actually the one who committed the crime.

For several decades, of course, we have known that eyewitness memory is faulty.  In the 1970s, classic studies by Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues demonstrated that people would mix together information they saw and things they heard in later questions when thinking back to an event.  In a 1974 paper written with John Palmer, participants watched a film of a car accident.  Later, participants were asked to judge how fast the cars were going.  Some people were asked how fast they were going when they hit each other, while others were how fast they were going when they smashed into each other.  A week later, participants were asked whether the saw broken glass in the accident.  Those who were asked about the cars smashing into each other were much more likely to say they saw broken glass than those who were asked about the cards hitting each other.

On the basis of results like this, there are two possibilities.  One is that when we remember things, we recreate our memory based on fragments of actual memories from the past.  This view of memory suggests that we may make mistakes when we do this reconstruction, but somehow the truth is still buried in our memories somewhere. 

A second possibility, though, is that when we are reminded of the initial situation, our initial memory is actually opened up again in ways that allow it to be altered. That is, over time the initial memory may be gone completely and replaced with a revised version.

For a long time, the first of these possibilities was the one that was generally assumed by the field.  More recently, though, studies suggest that our initial memories themselves may be changed in the future through a process called reconsolidation.  In reconsolidation, a memory is made active again, and while it is active, it is subject to change.

One example of reconsolidation in people comes from a 2007 study by Almut Hupbach, Rebecca Gomez, Oliver Hardt, and Lynn Nadel published in Learning & Memory.  They had participants two lists of words over a three-day period. 

On the first day, participants learned a list of 20 words that named common objects.  They practiced the items until they could recall at least 17 of the 20 items on the list.  On Day 2, some participants were reminded that they had learned a list on the previous day.  Others were not given a reminder.  These two groups then learned a second list of words naming a different set of common objects.  A control group did not learn the second list.  On the third day, participants returned and were asked to remember as many of the words from the first list as possible.

The control group recalled about half of the words on the list.  The group that was not reminded of the list that they learned on the first day recalled 45% of the words, and occasionally also recalled one of the words from the second list (about 5%).  The group that was reminded of what they did on the previous day recalled only about 36% of the words from the first list.  Interestingly, they also recalled about a quarter of the words from the second list they learned.

This finding suggests that just reminding people of the experience of learning the first list led people to combine their memory of the first list with that of the second.  Two control conditions refined this finding a bit.  In one study, participants recalled the first list immediately after learning the second list.  In this study, participants did not recall any of the items from the second list when remembering the first list.  This finding suggests that it takes time for the memory of the second list to be combined with the memory of the first list.

Another control condition looked at memory for the second list.  This study found that when people recalled the second list, they rarely also added words from the first list to it, even when they had been reminded that they had learned the first list in the previous session.  This study suggests that it is only the initial memory that is being affected by a later experience.

Putting all of this research together suggests that it is possible to rewrite aspects of our old memories with new information that was acquired after the initial memory was created.  These findings are particularly frightening when it comes to things like eyewitness memory, because it suggests that even if people were able to recall things correctly at some point in the past, that “truth” may no longer exist anywhere in memory.

This is just one more reason why the legal system needs to treat eyewitness testimony carefully.  After all, if old memories have been altered by new information, then the witness will believe deeply in their testimony, because it reflects their actual memory.  Unfortunately, that actual memory is not an accurate reflection of the past it represents. 

Bring Your Brain to Work is coming!

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Social Comparisons Can Make You Give Up

Competition can often be motivating.  The history of discovery and innovation is filled with stories of people who were spurred on by the prospect that someone else would beat them to the goal.  Watson, Crick, and Franklin were concerned that other groups were also closing in on the chemical structure of genes. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray were rivals in the development of the telephone (and indeed, Bell’s patent application preceded Gray’s by a matter of hours). 

Yet, in ordinary life, social comparisons can also be de-motivating.  To understand why, it is important to start with the core principle that people’s engagement with a task depends on two factors:  whether the goal is important for them to achieve and whether they believe they can achieve it. 

If you compare yourself to someone else who is just a little better than you are, you may be energized to improve and catch up with them.  In this case, competition increases your sense that the goal can be achieved, and provides some incentive to increase the importance of the goal.  But, if you compare yourself to someone who is significantly better than you are, you may feel like no matter how hard you work you will never measure up to their example.  Now, the gap between you and your goal seems impossible to bridge.

A paper in the March, 2016 issue of Psychological Science by Todd Rogers and Avi Feller provided evidence for the downside of competition.

In one study, they examined over 5,000 participants who were students in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).  Many MOOCs have the students give peer evaluations to each others’ papers in order to make the workload manageable for the instructors.  In this MOOC, students wrote a paper about mid-semester and then gave evaluations to at least three papers written by their peers.

The measure of interest was whether students finished the course and ultimately received credit for it.  The quality of essays a student evaluated affected whether they finished the course.  About 68% of students who evaluated essays of average quality finished the course.  But, only 45% of the students who evaluated excellent essays finished the class.  That is, when students read excellent examples of other student performance (and thus had a chance to compare themselves to other students who were performing well), they were less motivated to finish the class than if they read average examples of other students’ essays.

As a way of understanding the size of this effect, the researchers also looked at the effect of the grade students got on their essay.  Overall, 93% of students who got a perfect store on their essay went on to finish the class, while 75% of students who got an average score finished the class.  That means that seeing examples of excellent work (as opposed to average work) was about as demotivating to students as getting an average score on their own essay (as opposed to an excellent score).  It also means that the worse you did on your own essay, the more that you could be made to feel like you could not possibly succeed in the class.

The researchers also did a second study in which they manipulated the essays people evaluated experimentally and got similar results.

These findings demonstrate that comparing yourself to excellent performers can sap your motivation.  You have probably experienced something like this before.  When learning to play a musical instrument, hearing a real virtuoso may lead you to think you will never be any good at all.  Similarly, starting at a new gym can be an exercise in despair when you see toned gym rats go through their workout. 

That doesn’t mean that you have to fall prey to the perils of social comparison. Ask yourself why you are working toward this goal in the first place? It is rare that your goal is to be the best in the world at something, and so there is no need to be threatened by the excellent performance of another person.  If you go to the gym to get in shape, the only person you need to be better than is the person you were before you started working out.

Also, it is important to remember that anyone who is good at something has put in a lot of effort to get to that point.  When you compare yourself to others , it is easy to discount the work that it took for them to reach their current level of performance. If you do compare yourself to people who are better than you, try to imagine how good they were at the same point in their own practice.

I started playing the saxophone about 17 years ago when I was in my mid-30s.  Living in Austin, Texas, I am surrounded by great musicians. At first, I was intimidated by their ability, and hearing the number of amazing players in town made me doubt my commitment to take up the instrument.  Eventually, though, I realized that my goal was not to quit my job and play the sax, but to have an artistic outlet.  Eventually, I focused on the goal that if I played for 10 years, I wouldn’t be horrible.  Now, I enjoy hearing my peers who are more skilled than I am, because it gives me a sense of new things I might eventually learn to do.  And I did reach my goal—I now play in bands in town.

When fractions are better than decimals

In order to graduate from high school, people usually spend  about13 years (K-12) learning about math concepts.  One of the things that math does is to give us a universal way to think about quantities.  The beauty of the number 2, for example, is that it refers to a pair of items regardless of whether those items are bowling balls, butterflies, or beer barrels.

Even though math is about abstract concepts, the human mind is often focused on specific situations in the world.  As a result, the mathematical notations we learn may not always make it easy for us to reason about the world.  Psychologists have begun to explore the relationship between the way people naturally want to reason and ways that we can represent situations using numbers.

An interesting paper in the February, 2015 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Melissa DeWolf, Miriam Bassok, and Keith Holyoak explored differences in the way that fractions and decimals affect thinking. 

A fraction takes two integers and places them in a ratio (like 3/4 or 10/15).  A decimal can express the same numerical quantity, but it does so with a single number (like 0.75 or 0.66).  So, the fraction makes the relationship among numbers clear in the way it is written, while the decimal does not.

In one study, the researchers showed college students displays in which a fraction or decimal could be used as a description.  In the continuous displays, there was a rectangle and some of it was shaded red, while the rest was shaded green.  In the discrete displays, there were several objects, some of which were red, and some of which were green.  Finally, in the discretized displays, there was a rectangle (like in the continuous display), but it was divided into regions of equal size.  Some of those regions were red, and some were green.

With displays like this, there are two kinds of comparisons people can make.  There are part-to-whole comparisons. For example, if there are three red squares and five green squares, then the part-to-whole relationship of red squares is 3/8.  There are also part-to-part comparisons.  In this same display, the relationship between red squares and green squares is 3/5. 

In one study, participants were shown a continuous, discrete, or discretized display and were asked whether they would prefer to describe either a part-to-whole or part-to-part relationship for that display with a fraction or a decimal.  They weren’t asked which fraction or decimal they would use for the displays, just whether a fraction or a decimal would feel more appropriate.  For both kinds of relationships, participants preferred to use decimals for continuous displays, and to use fractions for discrete and discretized displays.  A second study asked people to identify the specific relationship shown in a display and found that people were equally good at using fractions and decimals for continuous displays, but much better at using fractions than decimals for discrete and discretized displays.

So far, these results are pretty straightforward.  The rest of the studies explored the ability to perform mathematical analogies.  In these studies, participants saw a display and either a fraction or a decimal that described the part-to-part or part-to-whole relationship in that display.  For example, if they saw 3 red squares and 5 green ones, and the fraction 3/5, that was describing the part-to-part relationship.

Next, they saw a second display of the same type, and two descriptions of the relationship.  For example, this time they might see 5 red stars and 7 green stars.  They would see one mathematical description of the part-to-part (5/7) relationship and one description of the part-to-whole relationship (5/12), and they had to pick the response that referred to the same relationship that was shown in the first display.  In this case, they would have to pick the part-to-part display.

They found that people had a hard time with this task for both fractions and decimals when the displays were continuous.  They were much better at the discrete and discretized analogies with fractions than with decimals.  This was true, even when the fractions referred to the same ratio, but did not map directly onto the number of items in the display.  For example, if the part-to-part relationship in the display with 3 red squares and five green squares was described with the fraction 6/10, that would be equivalent to 3/5, but the numbers would not map directly to the display. 

This work fits with a lot of previous research suggesting that people like to reason about frequencies of things in the world rather than proportions.  We experience the world in terms of the numbers of objects we see and the numbers of events we experience.  Math allows us to create other representations like decimals that are great for calculations, but they can make it harder to reason about what has happened in the world. 

This work also suggests that if you are staring at a numerical description of a situation and that description does not make sense to you, consider trying another way to think about it.  You are often asked to make decisions based on information that involves numbers.  Often, those numbers are decimals or proportions.  Consider turning those numbers into frequencies or fractions when reasoning about them.

Peer Pressure Affects Your Actions More Than Your Recommendations

As a parent, I am often confronted with the hypocrisy of advice-giving.  There are plenty of things I have recommended to my kids that are courses of action that I have not taken myself.  Some of that is that I want my kids to avoid some of the mistakes I have made.  But, some of it is also that the way you give advice differs from the way you decide what to do yourself.

An interesting paper in the February, 2015 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Sarah Helfinstein, Jeanette Mumford, and Russ Poldrack examined an important factor that leads people’s recommendations for others to differ from what they themselves would do. 

Participants were asked about a variety of risky behaviors across a number of domains including social risks (like moving away from family), recreational risks (like bungee jumping), financial risks (like betting a day’s wages at poker), safety risks (like driving without a seatbelt) and ethical risks (like not returning a wallet with a lot money in it).  These were taken from a normed inventory called the DOSPERT.

Participants all rated the potential benefit, potential cost, and likelihood that they would incur the cost for each of these risky behaviors.  They also rated how likely it was that other people engaged in these behaviors.  Finally, participants either rated their willingness to engage in that behavior themselves or their willingness to recommend the behavior to someone else.

Overall, people were not really more or less willing to engage in risky behaviors themselves than to recommend them to others.  In some domains (like social and safety risks, people were more willing to perform the actions themselves than they were to recommend them to others.  In other domains (like recreational and financial risks) people were less wiling to perform the actions themselves than to recommend them to others.

It is the determinants of these recommendations that are most interesting.  People were more likely to perform an action and to recommend it when there was perceived benefit for doing it and less likely to perform or recommend it when there was a significant cost and when that cost was seen as being likely to happen. 

The big place where willingness to perform an action differed from the recommendations people made was in the influence of the likelihood that other people perform the action.  When recommending an action to others, the likelihood that other people perform the action did not matter much.  But, engagement of other people increased people’s willingness to perform the action themselves.  That is, people succumb to peer pressure.  When we perceive that other people are performing an action, it makes us more likely to perform it ourselves. 

This tendency is true for decisions that do not involve risk as well.  For example, studies of consumer products demonstrate that the leading brands in different product categories has remained relatively stable for a long time.  Gillette has been the leading brand of razors and Tide has been the leading brand of detergent for over 50 years.  Part of what helps brands like these to maintain their dominance is their perceived popularity.  Even without knowing it explicitly, we buy what we think other people are buying. 

When you are contemplating a decision, then, it is worth asking yourself both what you are thinking of doing as well as what you might recommend to someone else.  If you think that there is a difference between what you would do yourself and what you would recommend, then stop and think about whether you might be better off doing what you would recommend to someone else. 

Can Liars Be Caught By Aviation Security?

If you travel frequently, then you have probably endured more than one security screening interview at an airport.  At passport control, for example, border agents ask a few questions, stare at your passport, check you on electronic databases, and then send you on your way.

The purpose of these interviews, of course, is to catch people who are being deceptive.  This is a remarkably difficult job.  Thousands of people are streaming through airports every day, and only a very small fraction of them are actually being deceptive in any significant way. 

Can those few liars be caught effectively?

This question was explored in a field study by Thomas Ormerod and Coral Dando published in the February, 2015 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 

They trained two samples of security agents on different methods of screening for deception. 

One method focused on finding suspicious signs that are supposed to distinguish lairs from truth-tellers.  This technique, which is typical of what is taught to security screeners, involves a scripted set of questions.  As passengers answer these questions, agents look for signs of deception like nervousness or a passenger dressed inappropriately for the trip they are going on.

The other method focused on the security interview itself.  This technique uses a lot of open-ended questions designed to get the passengers to talk about themselves.  The agent asks questions of general knowledge that someone with that background should know.  For example, a passenger who claims to be a student at the University of Texas should know where the Student Union is or how to get to the airport from campus.  The technique is designed to give the passenger very little control over the direction of the interview.  Deceptive individuals like to control the conversation, so that they can focus on the details that they want to discuss.

After this training, about 200 deceptive passengers were sent through security over an 8-month period.  Notice, this means that most passengers that any agent saw were genuine passengers.  The deceptive passengers were recruited to participate in the study.  They were given payment to be in the study and a significant amount of additional money if they passed through security without being called aside for further screening.  So, the deceptive passengers had some incentive to get through security.  The ability to detect whether this group was deceptive was compared to the screeners’ likelihood of sending genuine passengers for extra screening whose demographic characteristics matched those of the experimental sample. 

A few weeks before participating in the study, the deceptive passengers were given a cover story to learn that was tailored to their age and appearance.  The example given in the paper was a male police officer who was told to imagine that he was working as an engineer near his hometown and was traveling to Chicago to take part in a fencing competition.  The deceptive passengers were told to do research to add information to their backstory.  A subset of the deceptive passengers were also given several opportunities to be deceptive at different times, to see if they could improve in their ability to fool the screeners.

The results were striking.  Screeners trained with the interview technique caught about 70% of the deceptive passengers, while those trained with the traditional method of looking for cues detected about 5% of the passengers.

You might thing this reflected that the screeners trained with the interview technique just sent more people for additional questioning than those trained in the traditional way.  That was not the case.  The agents who learned the interview technique were no more likely to send other passengers for additional screening than those who were trained in the traditional way. 

You might also think that the interview technique takes longer.  It does not.  Agents trained with each technique spent about 3 minutes with each passenger.  The big difference was that those trained with the interview technique asked more open-ended questions and gave the passengers more time to speak than those trained in the traditional way.

Finally, those passengers who were given several opportunities to get through screening were caught at about the same rate for each try.  This finding suggests that it was not straightforward for passengers to learn to beat the system. 

The reason why the system is hard to beat is straightforward.  If you claim to be someone very different from who you are, there is a wealth of life experience that you simply don’t have.  All of the specific details of life from where you shop to how you drive home to what buildings you pass on your way home are second-nature when you are telling the truth and are absent when you are involved in a large-scale deception.  These security interviews allow agents to capitalize on the absence of this knowledge when interviewing passengers.

Finally, this research is a great demonstration of the way that psychological research can be used to solve a practical problem.  First, the interview technique itself is drawn from extensive research on deception.  Second, the test itself is quite well-constructed, and the researchers do a good job of ruling out a number of alternative explanations for the results.