“There are lies…”

Lies

“Tell an untruth; pretend with intent to deceive.” A popular television series, which I like to watch when I can, House, MD, has a lead character—Dr. Gregory House—who believes that everyone lies. Why do people lie to one another? Wikipedia, home to the collaborative intellectual knowledge of the masses, states that lies are told because people have the “intention to deceive, maintain a secret or reputation, or to avoid punishment.” As a whole, people want to be perceived in a certain way: Strong, powerful, helpful, kind, etc. They also want to keep portions of their life that they intentionally keep hidden from the world in that persistent state. Lastly, people generally seek pleasure and avoid pain. While punishment runs the gamut from the type of discipline that a parent gives to a child, it could also mean the shame given to a person from a societal perspective for doing things that are against the norm or outside other acceptable boundaries.

With the exception of psychopathic personality types, however, most people aren’t serial liars. Any poker player will tell you that each person has their “tells.” Any individual that is familiar with the operation of a lie detector understands the mechanics of the human body when they tell something that they know to be a mistruth. People who deal with other people enough has the experience to tell you what to look for in what a person says and does in regards to truths and lies.

Damned Lies

The thing to look out for here is the individual who doesn’t know that they are lying. While lying is mostly a matter of intent, it could also be considered a tool of the manipulative in order to gain control over the situation. In this respect, serial liars can take advantage situations by not being able to tell the difference between what a factual reality is and what things are fabricated. They will not have the “tells” of a person who feels guilty for their actions because they do not have the capacity to feel guilt for their transgressions.

Statistics

Believe it or not, everyone has an agenda. Some might be simple enough: Get through my day and get home so I can relax. Others might be more insidious: Take over the world. Most fall in between. At any rate anyone may use statistics to get their point across, draw someone to action, and control their environment towards the outcome which they desire. Take, for instance, this insurance scenario:

“Suppose that a zealous insurance CEO asks his statistician if drivers with two or more tickets in a three-year period were more likely to have an accident.[1] He would soon report back that drivers with two or more tickets have almost twice [2] the chance of having an accident.

Wow! Twice the accident rate! What fools! The CEO might think that by hitting these guys with higher premiums, he might make them think about their careless driving habits. Maybe it will teach them a lesson. The company can make quite a bit more profit, as other insurers are not going to try and steal the worst drivers away. Furthermore, the state motor vehicle departments start thinking about taking away these driver's licenses. Everybody thinks that these guys have to be gotten off the road before they kill themselves or someone else. Unfortunately, they aren't careless drivers. According to the assumptions, they are equally good at driving as everybody else. The statistics lied. The difference in mileage exposure alone is enough to produce a strong correlation between tickets and accidents.”

While tickets isn’t, in and of itself, a contributable factor inasmuch as it indicates the entire risk that any one client is going to be for an insurance company if this were something that were correlated to the distance that a person drives in any given year, it may then gain more credibility. All things being equal, consider the case between the younger man and the older woman. Maybe the younger man doesn’t want to put down that he drives twice the norm in a given year—30,000 miles—while the older lady decides that she doesn’t want to let the insurance company know that she only drives a couple thousand miles each year. Either way, these individuals are likely to let the insurance company know something different about their driving habits either through inflating or deflating their numbers, respectively.

And the Truth…

In the end it is a good idea to remember that the human instinct is correct a good majority of the time, at least for those things within our own purview. Experts may be able to pull out statistics and serial liars may be able to influence your actions with their finely-honed skills, and everyday people might baffle you will bull…but in the end just make sure to do your research and trust your own gut.

You 2.0

You 2.0 Article from Psychology Today.

Why be yourself today when you can be the you of tomorrow.

People Mechanics – Part 2

You might be asking yourself: “Which is better…episodic or procedural memory?” The simple answer: Procedural. I recall hearing an interview of a psychologist in which he took an Alzheimer’s patient to a golf course once. This patient was, once, a very avid golfer. Upon getting to the golf course and getting his hands on some golf clubs everything about golfing came back to the man. However, on the way back from the golf course the gentleman saw the golf course and the beautiful day and remarked how “beautiful the day was” and that they should go golfing.

I’ve long held to the belief that this is the reason that the military emphasizes battle drills. Just as you have probably seen soldiers, marines, sailors, or airmen march (although it is more likely to be one of the first two), you probably noticed that everyone performed a series of precise, discrete series’ of movements along with other members of their formation that can amount to some very spectacular sights to see. The same can be said for rifle drills: Everything in these drills and ceremonies is nothing more than a number of actions, one after the other. They can be repeated until perfect, able to be memorized to the point where someone can do it in their sleep.

The concept of drills does not stop at simply marching troops or inspecting their arms: Battle drills are used for many team maneuvers from building a bridge to constructing a mine-laying system. The more that drills are repeated and “drilled” into memory, the less a person needs to think about them when it comes to doing them. The concept of drilling removes the need to consciously thinking about performing a task when it matters, rather it is made a “second nature.”

Now, the talk about the emotional component earlier is not lost to the battle drill. The feeling of being a part of a team, that one has purpose, a sense of urgency: These are both satisfying emotions, adding to the effectiveness of the battle drill and why it can be remembered so well.

So, memories are often not simple bits of information stored in your brain. Rather, they are often embedded in a web of context. Data coupled with more data, random bits of different memories and types thereof comprising a larger set of data, eventually linking all thoughts in the brain together to form the sum of your experiences. Context is the key.

I’ve met people who have difficulty, for one reason or another, learning new data because of the lack of context it has in their everyday life. Of course, not everyone is going to find an essay on “Ode to a Grecian Urn” important, or even satisfying or pleasurable, to fit into their worldview. A person who has an affinity for history, art, literature, teaching, or to just broaden their perspective on the world at large is, however, going to take note of the Keats piece. People are often not compelled to expand their horizons with new sorts of information that don’t directly apply to their immediate world, though. How is one to combat this?

Of course, there is the “Knowledge is power,” contrasted with “ignorance is bliss.” I always think that a mediocre individual came up with that last saying. The first statement, however, holds some interesting ramifications with it…if we look a bit deeper.

Human Mechanics: Awareness, Learning, and Context - Part 1

I have recently found myself picking apart the mechanics of fundamental human processes: Decision-making, learning, adapting, dealing with change, etc. To mention nothing of the psychology involved, it certainly has been a multi-disciplinary approach. Fields ranging from Information Theory to physics have found their way into my process and analysis of this academic study: One that I hope will have practical applicability.

Where to start?

General wisdom through the ages has passed on the adage that people have a tendency to do two things: Seek pleasure and avoid pain. Fueled by advancements in current technology this has been challenged. Dr. Gregory Berns of Emory University has dug more into the “what do humans want?” question. If pleasure is a sensational emotion that only happens occasionally then, it stands to reason, that something more substantive must exist along the way. Take from this that the ideal place to be is somewhere between pleasure and pain: Satisfaction. Let’s first examine this by looking at the definition of pleasure with a simple “define:” search in Google.

“· a fundamental feeling that is hard to define but that people desire to experience; "he was tingling with pleasure"

· joy: something or someone that provides pleasure; a source of happiness;”

Two definitions stand out, yes: The second pointing at joy, or a source of being happy. The first one points to the simple abstraction and how difficult it is to pin down the true meaning of pleasure. Of course, it’s a subjective term, but pleasure is always a positive thing—therefore finding a definition across a sampling of many individuals, many subjectivities, shouldn’t be impossible.

Next, satisfaction:

“· The human experience of being filled and enriched by their experience.”

And:

“ · act of fulfilling a desire or need or appetite”

Imagine moving up a hill: The hilltop represents the completion of the task, winning the prize for the effort that you’ve exerted. Although this supersedes satisfaction into pleasure, pleasure—especially in this context—is fleeting. There is also the downside that exposure to too much pleasure could desensitize its recipient to all but the most intense forms of it. Satisfaction, on the other hand, is achieved as a feeling of atonement for the accomplishment of component tasks of a larger pleasure-bringing project. In the long run, the seeking of satisfaction is better than the seeking of pleasure.

As with all behavioral mechanisms—satisfaction-seeking and pleasure-seeking, for instance, there is a “spectrum” to be observed. On one side of the spectrum of satisfaction there is complacency. Complacency is the maladaptive form of satisfaction. Destructive pleasure-seeking is the maladaptive form of pleasure. We’ll re-visit this topic later.

When we are trying to remember something one way of increase retention levels is to couple the proposed memory with something pleasurable. I’ve heard this recommended as coupling things you want to remember with thoughts of sex; while this might work (especially as a pleasurable form of memory utilization) , it fails to get to the heart of the matter and how memory really functions. Research into how people store memories show that the brain doesn’t store discrete pieces of data—such as the way a hard drive stores data as “1’s” and “0’s”. Instead the human memory is contextual in nature: When a topic was brought up by a person you were having a conversation with, did it make you remember something else? People have different types of memories. Among these are procedural and episodic. As you would imagine, episodic memory deals with the types of memories from your personal experiences and your past. Procedural memory, then, is what I often refer to as “drill memory,” or the type of memory that you utilize when you are doing something that is a set series of steps like brushing your teeth, combing your hair, arming a landmine, or formatting a report.

I read somewhere that people will remember about a third of what they read, half of what they see, and all of what they feel. Why does the “remember something alongside sex” trick work so well? Sex, generally, makes a person feel good: Thoughts that are coupled with satisfying or pleasurable feelings are well-retained. That is not to say, however, that data coupled with painful feelings doesn’t get remembered: It’s just that painful memories can be more easily forgotten and replaced with bad memories or otherwise repressed.

Economically-minded behaviors, Part 2

Smart Money magazine recently ran an article with the tagline “Emotions and poor judgment lead a lot of smart people to make dumb financial moves.” Given my interests in psychology and economics, I thought this a perfect opportunity to review a few insights about money and behavior through the scope of this article.

1. “Saving with the right hand, spending with the left.” Are you one of those people who fixate on the price of a new automobile, but don’t monitor your routine shopping habits, such as groceries and entertainment? Do you think that it is a rational—or even acceptable—decision to have a savings account with a 5 percent rate of return, while you still pay much more than that for your credit card interest rate? How about the IRS: Do you set your tax withholdings in a given year so that you receive a high return at the end of the year?

The article duly points out a few more logical methods for dealing with the above scenarios. For instance, the average credit card debt of an American is about $1800; an amount that most households have in savings to pay off. Paying it off increases the rate of return on the money remaining in savings by reducing the strain placed on it from other parts of your cash flows. How about the tax withholding situation? Why don’t you instead set it more accordingly—so the IRS does not get so much of your earnings—and you invest it in an account that earns you money throughout the year; instead of offering the government an interest-free loan, you can make that money work for you. Controlling your financial present and future is a lot about making every dollar “scream:” That is, the harder you make your money work for you, and the less you use it to consume now, the more you will have to consume later. Radio talk show host Dave Ramsey has a saying that he fondly recites on his radio program: “Today, live like no one else, so later, you can live like no one else.”

2. And 5…“Playing it too safe,” and “Throwing good money after bad.” People don’t like losing. As I’ve mentioned before, “people are more displeased by a loss than they are over a comparable gain: In America, at least, we typically need to offset an unexpected loss by a gain of 2.5 times that loss.” This loss aversion, obviously, extends to money. An example cited in the article is of the classic fuel-purchasing “penny pincher:” Driving miles out of their way to save as many cents per gallon when, in fact, the fuel consumption and the wear and tear on the person’s vehicle will cost about 6 times the amount that the person is saving. Individual investors, also, have the same attitude towards averting loss whereas they will be more apt to sell a winning stock than a losing one. The “sunk cost” bias tells us that we tend to feel that we’ve passed the “point of no return” and feel that cutting one’s losses would be a waste of resources—time, money, and otherwise. In fact, decisions about future investments should be made based on future possibilities and not biased by recent investments within the scope of the current scenario.

3. “Looking into a cloudy crystal ball.” While more than two thirds of Americans have life insurance, those in the 35 to 64 years old age bracket are six times more likely to be injured to such a degree that they would miss an extended amount of work—than they are to die. The upshot? Less than one third of us have disability coverage. People base their prediction of the frequency of an event or the proportion within a population based on how easily an example can be brought to mind—in other words, we tend to take “short cuts” to the conclusion that we want to draw with the information that is available to us, relying easily on images and experiences that come to mind more quickly than more logical alternatives. The article duly points out, via the words of University of Chicago researcher Cass Sunstein, a phenomenon known as “probability neglect:” “We tend to ask what’s the worst—or best—that could happen. Instead, we should be asking what’s likely to happen.”

4. “Living in the moment.” People like to procrastinate. Watching your favorite television program (or any television program at all, for that matter) instead of cleaning the garage or the attic is often more appealing and offers a more immediate reward than the alternatives. Instead of looking at the non-linear benefit or the delayed costs and rewards, people tend to look at the immediacy of them instead.

“Letting your ego get in the way.” Overconfident investors tend to have good experience and think they are skilled, while in reality luck may play a larger factor than skill. Because it is easiest to think about, focus, and analyze ourselves and our ability we will tend to take a shortcut back to ourselves and our own abilities and skills. Confidence is good; and a healthy dose of overconfidence (despite the definition and connotations otherwise) is good: Without it, we wouldn’t have a propensity to strive for what’s better, what’s next. An unhealthy amount of confidence when dealing with the stock market, it is pointed out in the article, trend towards high risk investments, overtrading, and under-diversification, and, ultimately, smaller rewards over the long term. Investing for all but the die-hard day trader, is like making a burger in that you get the fundamental essence of what you want and continue to play with it less, only moving it such that it doesn’t get burned, taking it off the grill when it’s ready to eat.

7. “Following the crowd.” Just because everyone else is doing it means that you should, too, right? The Bandwagon effect, or following the herd, is essentially the observation that people often do or believe things because many other people do or believe the same. Funny enough, a Yale study entitled “Dumb Money” by researchers Owen Lamont and Andrea Frazzini pointed out that poor sentiment was actually indicative of good future returns in both stocks and funds: Those who bought and held S&P 500 index after Black Monday have made eight times their investment; on the other side of the coin the more popular investments have been shown to underperform. The company that developed the ever-popular iPod and iPhone, Apple, has skyrocketed in the last year or so: Stock that I started monitoring at $117.98 is now worth 106.88 percent more than the price I began monitoring at. Some industry experts, however, have predicted that after the buzz of the iPhone wears off, the stock may finally start to deflate—if not plummet. Time will tell if these predictions are correct, however.

Economically-minded behaviors, Part 1

I’ve mentioned before that personal finance is more about a person’s behaviors than it is a function of their ability with crunching numbers. Taking this to its logical conclusion, a corollary would become that emotions and poor judgment lead a lot of people, exceptionally bright or not, to make, simply put, dumb financial moves. Historically, psychology has played an integral role in economics. For example, when Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments it included “the ethical, philosophical, psychological and methodological underpinnings to Smith's later works, including The Wealth of Nations (1776), A Treatise on Public Opulence (1764) (first published in 1937), Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795), and Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms (1763) (first published in 1896).”

Hersh Shefrin, in his 2002 work “Beyond Greed and Fear: Understanding Behavioral Finance and the Psychology of Investing,” listed three main themes for behavioral economics:

· Heuristics: Using “rules of thumb” that are, at best, approximated, instead of strict rational analyses, people tend to make bad decisions.

· Framing: The context of the problem or the way it is presented to the decision maker will often affect his or her action; which can result in a bad decision.

· Market inefficiencies: Examples such as mis-pricings, return anomalies, and non-rational decision-making can explained observed market outcomes that are contrary to otherwise rational expectations of market dynamics.

College macroeconomics courses teach a concept of “utility,” a fundamental concept in neoclassical economics which depicts perceived value in a good or service. Prospect theory, as part of behavioral economics, describes decision processes as consisting of two stages: Editing and evaluation. Editing consists of possible outcomes of the decision are ordered following some heuristic. Specifically, people decide which outcomes they see as basically identical, setting a reference point and consider lower outcomes as losses and larger as gains. In the evaluation phase, people behave as if they would compute a value, or utility, based on the potential outcomes and their respective probabilities, and then choose the alternative having a higher utility.

Keep in mind, however, while all this theory is good for a foundation of understanding the basis for the mistakes—and successes—we will inevitably have when it comes to our finances, note that these models can fail to predict outcomes in real world contexts for one reason or another. As in the science of profiling, establishing patterns and trends are keys in determining if a particular model will accurately predict a desired outcome. On the other side of the token, it is argued that while behavioral insights can be used to update economic and financial theories that we’ve come to rely upon, they also offer greater depth into these two disciplines: Not only reaching the same (correct) predictions as traditional models, but also correctly predicting outcomes where traditional models have failed in the past.

Self-Managed Behavior

"Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is."
- Isaac Asimov

Growth is a constant process; one for which we don’t often have someone directing us. Throughout most of our lives we are forced to take accountability for our behaviors and that growth. Techniques in self-managed growth, from a psychological perspective, can go far in helping us achieve our desired behaviors. Everything in our lives is about the choices that we make. Behaviors are simply the manifestation of those choices. Our behaviors comprise the makeup of our lives and, therefore, we live the life that our behaviors make for us.

1. Choose a target behavior. You must first know that which you desire to change.

2. Recording a baseline. With what frequency do you currently exhibit the behavior which you have or do you have undesired responses each day?

3. Set realistic goals. Set gradual, realistic goals to help you achieve your desired results. The best way to do this is to set daily and weekly goals.

4. Select reinforcing activities. Reward yourself for meeting you daily goals and reward yourself for meeting your weekly goals. Select something that you like and that will keep you motivated!

5. Record your progress. Keep accurate records of the behaviors that you are actually exhibiting and how that matches with your intended goals.

6. Reward successes. Follow through with your reward activities based on your following through with your goals.

7. Adjust your plan. As you learn more about yourself don’t be afraid to adjust your plan to better meet your needs or the needs of your environment.

Keep up the process and continually work at becoming the person that you want to become. Even though this will take some effort, over time your baseline behaviors will change and you will be able to achieve the success that you want!

Of Losses, Gains, and Winning

I’ve recently encountered a dilemma. In my apartment complex there are rules regarding what sorts of things can be out on the public areas of the tenets’ balconies. The property manager asked me to remove my grill from this balcony for reasons extending from the terms in my lease agreement. Being the law- and rules-abiding person that I am I promptly removed the grill from the balcony and placed it inside my apartment. In the days following I began to notice that others still had their grills outside their apartments in the same fashion that mine was. Furthermore one of my neighbors had their bicycles in a precarious position that has always been in the way of me, especially when I would be bringing something like grocery bags or a large package up the stairs. To my dismay I perceived this as a loss for myself and a gain for others.

This phenomenon has, in fact, been quantified by psychologists. One person’s loss must be made up by a gain of 2.5 times that loss in order to get over the loss, perceived or real. In other words, people are more displeased by a loss than they are over a comparable gain: In America, at least, we typically need to offset an unexpected loss by a gain of 2.5 times that loss. In my example above I was particularly observant of the plight of those around me after my loss was realized looking to see if the loss was a shared one. I fully expect the enforcement of laws to be fair and equitable in their enforcement. Not seeing this, my perception was that the loss was unbalanced and unfair. Of course, life isn’t fair, but this doesn’t preclude the quantifiable perception of loss.

Take politics, for example. In American politics there are a finite number of ideologies: Conservative, liberal, libertarian, independent, so on and so forth. When their affiliated parties do not enact the laws and policies which they think will improve society frustration is often had. Take the polarizing issues of our day: The War on Terrorism, immigration, abortion—they polarize the American public largely because the politicians are not enacting laws that are congruent with their belief structure and, in their frustration, can allow irrational actions to attack others in differing political affiliations or otherwise do things which tarnish the name and image of their party.

However, every change comes at a price. Improving something for someone will often cause a loss for someone else. Hybrid cars are a big thing right now, allowing for tax credits for those individuals willing and wishing to come up with the tens of thousands of dollars for them. These tax credits, however, come at a price. This “credit” actually becomes a redistribution of taxes in that it needs to be financed through other people being taxed for you to have that credit.

Economists call these “zero-sum games” in which the total net benefit to all of the interacting individuals in the situation adds to zero; each individual only benefits at the expense of others. This is the very nature of tax and economic legislation and, as it turns out, a common theme in our lives, thus the adage “life is not fair,” other people’s gains often come at the expense of our own.

How do we get past this paradigm and make the world a better place? Crafting classic “win-win” scenarios in our interactions with others will shatter this classic paradigm and make things better for everyone else. Win-win games often start with the self-talk phrase “I want to win and I want you to win too.” The easiest and often most effective means of doing this are for you to look at the underlying needs of the situation. By addressing each party’s underlying needs allows you the opportunity to craft solutions acknowledging and valuing those needs rather than denying them. Even when the result isn’t necessarily what everyone would have ideally wanted the process that goes into achieving the result will make each party feel differently about the outcome: Typical results are achieved through simple quantitative processes, such as the zero-sum game; qualitative improvements are made with qualitative improvements in the very process which produces the result.

The changing of this process requires the redirection of your energy. Instead of asking yourself “which is the best solution for me?” replace it with “which is the best solution for you?” Instead of asking yourself “what is my real need here?” ask “what is your real need here?” Instead of making a self-directed value judgment or envisioning a result that you want focus on the value judgment of the other or the envisioning the result of the other person’s desired results.

If you do not know the answers to these questions…perhaps you need to get to know the person better.

A Model for Interpersonal Interactions, Part 2

Everyone (well, most everyone) interacts with other people on a daily basis. When we interact with people the new information allows us the opportunity to deal with the many differences that might exist between how we perceive the world and how the world really is. As individuals that belong to social groups, communities, and other such groups of individuals, we tend to develop shared worldviews based on individuals in the group placing and communicating value on similar objects. These shared views of the world create the environmental construct in which our individual constructs evolve. Things such as the laws we observe, virtues we share with others, and the morals of our communities are the manifestations of groups of worldviews. Because we share, respect, and value the worldviews of the social groups which we reference, we live our lives, in a manner of speaking, in accordance to the social reference group whose collective worldview is most aligned with our own.

Conflicts arise, however, when we add personal meanings to the collective worldview. Because 10 different people will interpret the world through their personality filters in 10 different ways people will be apt to create different construct meanings as part of the greater morality construct. In this sense, worldview meanings will not always translate—and often do not always perfectly translate—into the worldview meaning of the social reference group. In this environment where the fusion of individual and group beliefs is non-existent conflict becomes highly probable: We’ll start seeing conflicts not only between individuals in specific groups, but also between different groups. These groups of interactions are, in the more common vernacular, as relationships.

Relationships allow us to seek awareness in our patterns of thinking: The comparison of our closely held beliefs through emotions and concepts with the events that are transpiring in our interactions, our relationships. Which beliefs, concepts, and values are reflected in our behaviors? Each of these behaviors that reflect our beliefs, concepts, and values are partly caused by our interactions with our environment and partly the manifestation of our genetics.

Throughout our past we learn and evolve an understanding of how to be from the framework which we are working in at that time: This is why awareness is a key leadership trait at all levels—from self-awareness to awareness of one’s environment—if one’s perceptions are broad and understanding of circumstances deep, an individual can seize this epiphany of conditioning and make the most of one’s evolution. We go through this constant process, being most apt and searching for it in our youth, to fulfill the need to search for meaning in oneself and the world around them. If the past has had a dominant “punishment model,” the search for meaning created mechanisms for defense within the construct; in a nurturing atmosphere, self-expression becomes dominant. At any rate, the experiences of your past manifest themselves as the patterns of your today. The earlier that these experiences shape your construct, the stronger the tendencies and patterns become…the more inertia they have…and the more energy is require to overcome them.

The patterns that we use throughout our daily lives embody the truths in our world: We interpret, process, and mold the world to meet our specifications, our worldview. Conflicts in relationships are simply two worldviews that lack congruence with one another. In his book “Ways of Worldmaking” Nelson Goodman says: “Not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a version and a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous.” In other words, the truths of each individual differ, but the reconciliation of our truth from someone else’s is infamously indistinct.

The logical conclusion for all of this is that we should strive for three things: Heightened self-awareness, a deeper understanding of our relationships, and a thoughtful understanding the individuals in our relationships.

Personality and Intelligence: A Brief Contrast and Comparison

Personality: The complex of all the attributes--behavioral, temperamental, emotional and mental--that characterize a unique individual; "their different reactions reflected their very different personalities"; "it is his nature to help others"

Intelligence: The ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience.

Many people have been conditioned to think that one of the above can be changed while the other is concrete for life. The ability to comprehend and apply lessons to one’s experiences to their benefit and the benefit of others is something that is not constant: This is a reason why intelligence quotient tests can be used as a metric of change in intelligence. Given a specific demographic the knowledge, skills, and the ability to apply them to a series of problems is charted across peers in that demographic. As we grow older we may learn more or we may learn less, but at any rate maturity tends to bring with it increased judiciousness and a changing attitude towards risk.

By contrast, personality is the underlying construct to intelligence: Just like an operating system controls the functions of a computer or the framework of a house determines how large the house can be or where walls, rooms, and doors can go, personality instructs how we learn and how our intellect interacts with the rest of the world. Just as new information can change our intelligence if we are receptive to it—just as it is that a house can have an addition added or rooms taken away—what is to say that personality, the underlying construct of who we are, cannot be just as malleable?

Research by developmental psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck at Stanford University suggests that this is, in fact, the case. An article recently published in Newsweek overviews the old way of thinking and the empirical data that suggests otherwise:

“The old thinking was that our personality—the sum total of our human qualities—was an inherited legacy, fixed at birth and unchanging through life. So we had adventurous people and timid people; competitive Type As and laid-back Type Bs; conscientious, truthful types and—well, scoundrels and liars.”

Instead:

“The new thinking is that these traits are not fixed but in flux, and there are many ideas about why personality might change. Dweck's theory is that our beliefs about ourselves and the world—our "self theories," in the jargon—are a powerful influence on who we become in life. In other words, our own lay theories about personality and aptitude actually shape our character.”

Years ago when I was in a special leadership development course we were taught that “People see the world how they want to see it.” This correlates strongly with the adage that “someone convinced against their will is of the same opinion still.” My friend Rick once counseled me with the following advice: Whenever we have problems with someone it behooves us to look inside. It stands to reason, then, that the best way to change our world and how we interact with it is to look inside and change our worldview.

In Dr. Dweck’s research hundreds of pre-teens were given a standard IQ test. Most of them scored “OK” on the test but different groups were praised differently on the test: Some were praised for their natural talent (“What a great score! You're so smart!”), while others were praised for their hard work (“What a great score! You must have worked very hard!”). The first message was crafted to convey people’s abilities as a fixed personal asset and the second message meant to convey a person’s abilities as something that can be changed.

As they say, “the proof is in the pudding:” Where results are the things that matter, the children who were told that they were smart were less apt to expose themselves to more circumstances that would possibly offer evidence to themselves that would take away this worldview, this perception, that they had. The pre-teens that were told that they had worked hard, however, were more apt to expose themselves to new challenges more because it allowed them the opportunity for growth.

To prove the point, the pre-teens were subsequently given very difficult problems to solve. When they failed, the children that were told that they were “so smart” saw it as a blow to their self-worth. Those that were told that they had worked “very hard” just “dug in more.”

The story gets better.

After all the testing Dr. Dweck gave the kids the opportunity write down their thoughts about the test, leaving a space to record their grade on the test under the auspices that it would be for those that took the test in the future. Those that scored badly inflated their test scores in order to improve their own self-perception of their own self-worth. In other words they justified their actions by lying to themselves in order to make themselves feel better instead of expending the effort to actually do better.

In the end the research has proven that undesirable personality traits need not be permanent or be allowed to affect our lives for the worse: As long as we don’t allow our self-perceptions to be negative and look at problems as opportunities, exerting enough good old-fashioned effort, each of us should be able to overcome anything in our path.

If a Tree Falls in a Forest…

…Does it make a sound?

I was first confronted with a new way to answer this question when emailing a “pen pal” Lutheran pastor when I was in school, in the years before the Internet had graphics and bulletin board systems ruled the bandwidth. We were discussing the wonderful world of quantum physics where the laws of the physics of Newton and Galileo break down and take a different shape; where the ultimate rules that govern the universe underneath it all are manifested.

So, does it make a sound?

Not if anyone is there to hear it, to see it, to perceive it. If no one is there to perceive the tree, it doesn’t exist. If no one is there to perceive the forest, it doesn’t exist.

I’ve found over the years that this can be used as an analogy for human interaction. People are usually very apt to “talk the talk,” but without a perception of that talk manifesting itself into actions…it doesn’t exist. “Talk the talk, but not able to walk the walk.” Anything internal to you has no effect on anything or anyone but you unless you express it externally. In other words: Thoughts and feelings that are not perceived by the world mean nothing to it.

How to effectively express these thoughts and feelings to the rest of the world? This often requires insight, thoughtfulness, and creativity. “Fortune favors the bold,” I often find myself saying to myself when interacting with people, “and I hope that you do, too.” In 1936 a well-known motivator of a man known to the world as Dale Carnegie wrote his magnificent piece of work How to Win Friends and Influence People in which he described a list of tenets in dealing with other people. A select few of these I list below:

1. Arouse in the other person an eager want.

One of my degrees is in marketing. To this end, I fully understand the importance of self-marketing. Every action in which you partake, every word which you utter, each non-verbal communication which escapes you helps to paint a picture of the world’s perception of you. Some people are more observant than others, but that aside: People interpret everything you communicate in one form or another based on their biases, prejudices, and worldview. To arouse an eager want in an individual it is critical that you know the person: Their wants, needs, and desires, implementing bold actions that make an impression in line with their worldview. This is the third technique that Carnegie offers in successfully dealing with people.

2. Make the other person feel important—doing so sincerely.

This is the last of six suggestions that Carnegie asserts to the end of influencing people to like you. Making someone feel important is always creative, always different, always renewed and fresh and alive. I have always believed—always—that personal achievement, on a secure foundation of integrity and honesty, is a paramount trait: Especially to the end to making the world a better place. I have realized that a person does these things to the end of feeling important. People want to feel important, feel like they belong. “Sometimes someone comes into our lives and touches us in a very special way,” I once read: Sincerely seeing to this in another person is the quickest route in which have the other person feel that you are important to them.

In the Search of Change: Are People Static or Dynamic?

A question that tends to repeat itself every so often is the debate between people that think that people change and the ones that think that, fundamentally, people do not change.

Who is right, who is wrong?

Once upon a professional lifetime I worked as a Resolutions Support Consultant, or quasi-supervisor/analyst, with a major wireless firm. The team that I belonged to was an elite group of former floor representatives in the receivables management department: When you want to pay a bill, particularly when it is past due, these are the agents to whom a person speaks. Resolutions, on the other hand, was the team that these agents turn to for technical, protocol, and procedural guidance as well as to pass on escalated callers. I have several an earlier blog post about this period in my life. Despite all this fun in handling escalated callers in suspenseful situations, we were also subject matter experts in the field of wireless phone customer service and receivables management policies and procedures and all that jazz.

There were rules in “Res:” Written rules that dictated how we could behave on escalated calls, how far we could bend, how systems worked, etc. There were also, unwritten rules: The ones that you are bound to out of a sense of honor and respect for the position. Those of us serving on the team didn’t always agree with one another. The culture that predominated was one that emphasized “go ahead and prove me wrong, because that gives us both an opportunity for growth.” Substantiating and disproving matters became part of the everyday marching orders. By virtue of our position we were just right. In reality, we weren’t necessarily always right…but as a team we were.

Say, for instance, I am speaking with a customer who has asked the floor representative to speak to a supervisor regarding a misunderstanding (which, generally, is what most conflicts are about). While speaking to the customer I validate their concerns and listen to their particular situation. I proceed to advise the customer that, despite their special circumstances, policy prohibits me from offering an exception. The customer interprets this as me taking a hard line and requests another supervisor. This first tier escalation turns into a second tier escalation. I continue by asking the customer to hold while I contact another supervisor, dial back into the Resolutions queue and get the next available Resolutions Consultant. I inform them about the basics of the caller and then warm transfer the call. What could happen from here is that the second tier escalation turns into an opportunity for the customer to be offered an exception. Likely, what happened, is that new information surfaced that changed the situation enough to warrant a different behavior be expressed.

In life the same sort of situation happens: We change our behaviors based on new information made available to us. We take in new information, process it and (perhaps) do a risk-reward assessment. Based on our interpretation of the new information we will change our behavior or personality, thus changing how we interact with our environment.

Again: New information changes our behaviors. It can, therefore, affect our personality. Our behaviors also shape our environment. Information that changes, however, isn’t always something that is welcome to the recipient. Often, information that conflicts with that which we believe in any degree is resisted. Information that reinforces is more easily accepted. In order to get the most benefit from new information one must be receptive of it and not outright resist it based on our prejudices and biases.

Thermodynamics and the Degradation of Society, Part 1

“A lost horizon in an ocean of flames.”
—Def Leppard, “Desert Song”

Remember back to when you were younger, playing with your friends. When you were in constant contact or communication with them your bonds strengthened and you grew closer. In a sense, you became second nature to each other. The same could, perhaps, be applied to your first girlfriend or boyfriend or such. On the other hand, when you were out of contact for enough time things had a tendency to decay: You were not so much as in-sync as you were before; what was second nature now becomes a glimmer of a sense of what once was. You grow out of touch, what synergies existed because of what you had now lack the true functionality of what could be.

Physics is the study of the relationship between matter and energy. Thermodynamics is the study of energetic interactions or the lack thereof. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that, over time, a system will gradually grow more into disarray. When a system is being formed if there are any chaotic elements involved, those chaotic elements will only grow more prevalent throughout the life of that system. The only way to avoid complete systemic entropy is for the addition of energy to take place.

Energy, to the physicist, is anything ranging the continuum from heat to electricity; from the grand force of gravity to the strong nuclear force that holds the stuff that comprises us together. Energy, to you and I can be anything from effort to affection. Remarks that build confidence to those that seek malice. There are multiple types and factors involved with these kinds of energies that we use to interact with the world in everyday life. We could do something evolutionary: A task performed with a degree of competence, confidence, etc. We could, on the other hand, do something revolutionary: Not something that is a simple degree of effort and task-oriented, but seeks to be transformational to the end being sought. Additionally, this can be positive or negative. Things that are positive in nature will add positive energy to the system at hand; while negative things done will add to the chaos of the system in the same way that entropy seeks the complete disruption of it.

This Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems: A sense of the Galilean approach to physics shining through—simplification for the sake of simplification. The lives we live are rarely in a closed system unto themselves, rather they are open to the context of the environment surrounding it. Energy can be exchanged or events and situations otherwise influenced by the goings-on of the systems surrounding it. In other words, our lives are often directly influenced by our environment and indirectly influenced by those situations and environments around us. This is why context is always very important in, well, anything.

Now, for the bigger picture: Laziness and apathy are things that breed chaos. Have you ever wondered why Patton was such a great general? His famous adage that “something done now is better than something perfect tomorrow” goes to this end. By doing nothing in this moment and waiting for another for your plan or execution to be perfect you risk the system growing more entropic than you could handle or that could fit into your plan’s parameters.

Consider this a multi-part entry. More to follow.

Self-Efficacy

“Play the game—You know you can't quit until it's won,
Soldier on—Only you can do what must be done”
—John Parr, “St. Elmo’s Fire”

When you are confronted with a task, what is your paradigm: Do you view a potentially difficult task as something to avoid or something to be overcome? How you have learned and continue to learn new tasks is not solely done through the effects of your own actions: Instead, humans being the social creatures that they are, we learn through coding information that we see modeled in our everyday lives. New information has greatly become democratized in the world of today: Much more so than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago. Our ability to take in this information and apply it towards our success has not increased along with the availability of the information, however.

Social learning has pre-requisites: Many of them being tied closely to the communication model of sender-message-receiver with their associated barriers. While many environmental factors can cause a person to be less apt to take in new information en route to success, there is—as is nearly always the case—at least one thing able to overcome any barrier to success.

Mental states are a vital part of the learning process: Intrinsic factors such as self-motivation, self-discipline, and a sense of—you guessed it—self efficacy all contribute to a person being in the proper paradigm to take away ample return from their learning activities.

Adults, for the most part, are experiential learners: We learn with a kinesthetic approach as opposed to visual or auditory. In most adults this not only contributes to the usefulness of a skill set, it also helps with retention and continued motivation: When you are successful at something, your proclivity at being successful increases: Success begets success.

Success is all about the behaviors that we have and how they converge with our environment. The relationship between individual, behavior, and environment are all intertwined in an interdependent yet causal interaction with one another: Each can have a bearing on any of the others in the triad. The individual can affect the behavior can affect the environment can affect the individual or the environment can affect the behavior or any other combination therein, for example.

The trick is to take charge and make the individual have more bearing on all else instead of allowing the individual to be controlled by all else.

So, the next time you see that task that you’ve been dreading think of it in terms of personal growth and having a high amount of internal drive with the end in sight.

Relationships

“He said look behind your own soul And the person that you’ll see
Just might remind you of me”

—Collin Raye, “Not That Different”

Sometimes the bonds that tie people together and simultaneously separate them aren’t that much at all. While logic dictates the metrics of our relationships, emotions will offer an additional valuation or devaluation to the mix; said another way: We may size a person up…but our hearts determine the risk we’re willing to take.

Look back over the years at interpersonal relationships you’ve had with others: Friends, acquaintances, loved ones, so on and so forth. What has made them tick? Which things made stronger the bonds of friendship and love or otherwise weakened the ties that bind us together?

I travel much for my work. This allows me to listen to many podcasts and music, and to do much thinking. Often a particular song or notion will bring to forefront a thought of the past: A person, a feeling, an episodic extent of my past which lingers much like the pain of a broken heart. Lately my thoughts have been in many places ranging from my previous successes and failures to the relationships that I have had with people. By contrast, those that I have today are much fewer than I’ve had in the past, for one reason or another. They’ve said that a tree that moves much lacks deep roots: Perhaps my roots in my current community haven’t grown too deep. I made new acquaintances rarely, friends even less these days. This is more an issue with lack of opportunity, less lack of ability.

Psychologists have a chapter in text books about the struggles that one will face in different decades, different stages, of their life. In the twenties the grand struggle seems to be between acceptance and aversion. How does this fit in with the risk that a person will take?

Risk is a function weighed by metrics but decided by the heart…certainly this is some sort of oddity. Risk management is a science of numbers, not feelings. Feelings, also, can lead to irrational decisions: Impulsive and maladaptive. Impulsive decisions can rely on faulty intelligence received or bad assumptions made.

One of my current areas of study is decision-making theory: What is the “just the right” amount of intelligence and/or assumptions that need to be made in order to make a decision that is the right one? Diminishing returns are quickly realized when trying to receive perfect information to make the perfect decision, and the practical making of decisions “in the field” requires less time than is allowable for perceptually sufficient intelligence in order to make a sufficient decision. I feel that, in the end, conditioning will need to be done to the individual wanting to learn the method for expedient decision making because the most efficient way for it to work will be in an instinctual basis.

On another note, perhaps the person that doesn’t perceive risk properly, it could be said, likes to feel the pain of poor decisions or maladaptive practices in decision making. All other explanations escape me at this time.

People Mechanics, Part 1

Human Mechanics: Awareness, Learning, and Context

I have recently found myself picking apart the mechanics of fundamental human processes: Decision-making, learning, adapting, dealing with change, etc. To mention nothing of the psychology involved, it certainly has been a multi-disciplinary approach. Fields ranging from Information Theory to physics have found their way into my process and analysis of this academic study: One that I hope will have practical applicability.

Where to start?

General wisdom through the ages has passed on the adage that people have a tendency to do two things: Seek pleasure and avoid pain. Fueled by advancements in current technology this has been challenged. Dr. Gregory Berns of Emory University has dug more into the “what do humans want?” question. If pleasure is a sensational emotion that only happens occasionally then, it stands to reason, that something more substantive must exist along the way. Take from this that the ideal place to be is somewhere between pleasure and pain: Satisfaction. Let’s first examine this by looking at the definition of pleasure with a simple “define:” search in Google.

“· a fundamental feeling that is hard to define but that people desire to experience; "he was tingling with pleasure"

· joy: something or someone that provides pleasure; a source of happiness;”

Two definitions stand out, yes: The second pointing at joy, or a source of being happy. The first one points to the simple abstraction and how difficult it is to pin down the true meaning of pleasure. Of course, it’s a subjective term, but pleasure is always a positive thing—therefore finding a definition across a sampling of many individuals, many subjectivities, shouldn’t be impossible.

Next, satisfaction:

“· The human experience of being filled and enriched by their experience.”

And:

“ · act of fulfilling a desire or need or appetite”

Imagine moving up a hill: The hilltop represents the completion of the task, winning the prize for the effort that you’ve exerted. Although this supersedes satisfaction into pleasure, pleasure—especially in this context—is fleeting. There is also the downside that exposure to too much pleasure could desensitize its recipient to all but the most intense forms of it. Satisfaction, on the other hand, is achieved as a feeling of atonement for the accomplishment of component tasks of a larger pleasure-bringing project. In the long run, the seeking of satisfaction is better than the seeking of pleasure.

As with all behavioral mechanisms—satisfaction-seeking and pleasure-seeking, for instance, there is a “spectrum” to be observed. On one side of the spectrum of satisfaction there is complacency. Complacency is the maladaptive form of satisfaction. Destructive pleasure-seeking is the maladaptive form of pleasure. We’ll re-visit this topic later.

When we are trying to remember something one way of increase retention levels is to couple the proposed memory with something pleasurable. I’ve heard this recommended as coupling things you want to remember with thoughts of sex; while this might work (especially as a pleasurable form of memory utilization) , it fails to get to the heart of the matter and how memory really functions. Research into how people store memories show that the brain doesn’t store discrete pieces of data—such as the way a hard drive stores data as “1’s” and “0’s”. Instead the human memory is contextual in nature: When a topic was brought up by a person you were having a conversation with, did it make you remember something else? People have different types of memories. Among these are procedural and episodic. As you would imagine, episodic memory deals with the types of memories from your personal experiences and your past. Procedural memory, then, is what I often refer to as “drill memory,” or the type of memory that you utilize when you are doing something that is a set series of steps like brushing your teeth, combing your hair, arming a landmine, or formatting a report.

I read somewhere that people will remember about a third of what they read, half of what they see, and all of what they feel. Why does the “remember something alongside sex” trick work so well? Sex, generally, makes a person feel good: Thoughts that are coupled with satisfying or pleasurable feelings are well-retained. That is not to say, however, that data coupled with painful feelings doesn’t get remembered: It’s just that painful memories can be more easily forgotten and replaced with bad memories or otherwise repressed.

You might be asking yourself: “Which is better…episodic or procedural memory?” The simple answer: Procedural. I recall hearing an interview of a psychologist in which he took an Alzheimer’s patient to a golf course once. This patient was, once, a very avid golfer. Upon getting to the golf course and getting his hands on some golf clubs everything about golfing came back to the man. However, on the way back from the golf course the gentleman saw the golf course and the beautiful day and remarked how “beautiful the day was” and that they should go golfing.

I’ve long held to the belief that this is the reason that the military emphasizes battle drills. Just as you have probably seen soldiers, marines, sailors, or airmen march (although it is more likely to be one of the first two), you probably noticed that everyone performed a series of precise, discrete series’ of movements along with other members of their formation that can amount to some very spectacular sights to see. The same can be said for rifle drills: Everything in these drills and ceremonies is nothing more than a number of actions, one after the other. They can be repeated until perfect, able to be memorized to the point where someone can do it in their sleep.

The concept of drills does not stop at simply marching troops or inspecting their arms: Battle drills are used for many team maneuvers from building a bridge to constructing a mine-laying system. The more that drills are repeated and “drilled” into memory, the less a person needs to think about them when it comes to doing them. The concept of drilling removes the need to consciously thinking about performing a task when it matters, rather it is made a “second nature.”

Now, the talk about the emotional component earlier is not lost to the battle drill. The feeling of being a part of a team, that one has purpose, a sense of urgency: These are both satisfying emotions, adding to the effectiveness of the battle drill and why it can be remembered so well.

So, memories are often not simple bits of information stored in your brain. Rather, they are often embedded in a web of context. Data coupled with more data, random bits of different memories and types thereof comprising a larger set of data, eventually linking all thoughts in the brain together to form the sum of your experiences. Context is the key.

I’ve met people who have difficulty, for one reason or another, learning new data because of the lack of context it has in their everyday life. Of course, not everyone is going to find an essay on “Ode to a Grecian Urn” important, or even satisfying or pleasurable, to fit into their worldview. A person who has an affinity for history, art, literature, teaching, or to just broaden their perspective on the world at large is, however, going to take note of the Keats piece. People are often not compelled to expand their horizons with new sorts of information that don’t directly apply to their immediate world, though. How is one to combat this?

Log in tomorrow for Part 2!