Use your unconscious mind to add 10% to your grade

What if I said that it was possible to prime people’s behaviour around you that would directly affect how that person deals with the world around them subsequently? This is something that I have recently discovered in a book called ‘Blink’, and it’s ever so slightly unsettling.

A psychologist named John Bargh conducted a priming experiment where he told people to come to his office and take a sentence-arranging test, and then he looked at how they behaved after the test. As an example: one jumbled sentence could be ‘shoes give replace old the’. There were around 10 of these sentences to un-jumble.

The sentence puzzles themselves are easy to solve. However, the real impact of the study comes after you leave the office. After you had left the office, you would have walked down the corridor more slowly than you had previously walked in. The test affected the way you behaved, because it was primed with words such as “worried”, “Florida”, “old”, “lonely” and so on. This happens because your ‘adaptive unconscious’ brain is picking up on the subtle cues that come from words we associate with being old, and reacting to them by literally adjusting the way you deal with your environment. In this case, it slowed your walking speed down because it had been slightly primed to think you were old.

Lets not go 0-100 here. Gladwell is quick to reassure that priming is not the same as brainwashing, it’s not like you could subtly use words associated with my childhood such as “mum”, “sleep” or “dummy” and I would reveal my deepest kept secrets about how I sucked my thumb for so long......

On the other hand, the effects of priming aren’t trivial. In the book, Gladwell introduces the story of two Dutch researchers who did a study in which they had groups of students answer forty-two fairly demanding questions from a board game called Trivial Pursuit. Half of the students were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6%. The other half were asked to sit down and think about soccer hooligans. They got 42.6% right. That gap is enormous. The students had matching aptitudes for the test, but their unconscious brain was primed differently. To university students, even being able to add 2% to your overall score could be the difference between a 1^st and a 2:1.

This is a small demonstration of the power of your unconscious mind. It whirrs away while we go about our day, and most of the time is an exceptionally useful tool. However, be aware that when primed in a certain way, it can have a profound effect on how you deal with reality. 

Does academic intelligence = intelligence for Entrepreneurs?

Higher education is seen as the end of our childhood. Something that acts as a ‘funnel’ to our hopeful career success. Ostensibly it is the essential step that must be taken in order to have a truly successful working life. But in a time of rapid industrial change, is it time we inspect the value that education can drive for entrepreneurs more critically? After all, these are going to be the people directing the companies of tomorrow, which every consumer will trust to run companies ethically and efficiently.

There is a paradigm within education that has puzzled me since I started my first year at University. I study Management and Entrepreneurship, and I pay around £9,000 per year to be there. That is cheap compared to the high proportion of international students that our University attracts with some paying much more than this sum. These are incredible amounts to pay to be at an institution to sit exams and study a specific subject, which is what a lot of students are exclusively paying for. The problem this creates is that we have students with degrees who have been entirely reclusive in their study of their subject, who by default outcompete people without degrees in the job market or even people with lower class degrees who have filled their time at university with extra curriculum activities. But I find myself wondering, which student would be more competent when faced with a real task in a company? Someone with ‘practical intelligence’ or someone with academic intelligence?

I would concede that this is not relevant to all subjects. Certainly, more vocational degrees such as engineering require a level of knowledge that is best learned through study and practical education. But for aspiring entrepreneurs, education beyond the fundamentals such as finance and accounting seems superfluous. No amount of PowerPoint presentations will form someone with empathy, interpersonal proficiency or the ability to deal with a situation where an angry client needs to be reassured. Short of a profound shift in the way we teach entrepreneurship, these skills come from dealing with real world situations head on.

So, can we change our perception of intelligence?

Ultimately, I think the issue lies in our employment system, which filters our judgment about how to assess a person’s skills. Some companies will disregard applications from anyone who doesn’t have a degree and rapidly this is becoming anyone who doesn’t have a Masters qualification, an increasing trend as we enter into a perpetuating spiral of ‘survival of the fittest’ (if everyone has a degree, no one does). Having met people who study incredibly difficult subjects (academically speaking) such as mathematics or science, I find it hard to support the view that intelligence is centered on academic performance, and how this somehow acts to define our competence in a potential job.

Sir Ken Robinson speaks about how in school we are benignly led away from ‘softer’ skills such as art, theatre or music, in place of what we view to be more academic, or even ‘useful’ skills. Contrast this with the fact that we no longer live in a society demanding managers and leaders to have the same skills that they needed in the post-industrial period, and where an understanding of art and culture is incredibly important to our society. Jim Davies writes in his book ‘Riveted’ that ‘the creation and consumption of art compromises a major portion of our lives. Young Americans spend about seven and a half hours every day consuming artistic media’. So overlook the ‘softer’ subjects and the skills that come with them at your own peril.

In my opinion the movement to a more holistic way of judging candidates such as test centers and personality reviews is a great thing. I can completely understand the constraints on companies’ cost, meaning ultimately candidates have to be axed by some objective measure, but I believe the real solution lies in finding cost-effective subjective judgment techniques, where we are able to include personal experience at the first assessment hurdle, instead of simply axing anyone without a degree.

In the current climate, it’s key that we continue to strive to do the best we can in university as we are ultimately forced to live in the paradigm that was created all those centuries ago. However, for entrepreneurs and managers (and I imagine for a lot of other future roles), we have to look further and think how we can generate real world experience that will truly improve our competence and intelligence.