The secret to why you're being lied to a thousand times a week

The title of this blog was designed to be an experiment. It’s called ‘click bait’. Whether it worked is up to you being honest to yourself, did the fact the title was designed to slightly scare you make you want to click on it more?

What’s at work here is what Dan Gardner calls our ‘gut’ in his book ‘Risk’. He splits the brain into two parts: Head and Gut. Head is the rational one, who thinks about things objectively and without emotion, but he can be rather lazy (it’s an effort to use head). Gut is the part of our brain associated with emotional and that ‘gut’ feeling we get when something is just right or wrong. Gut is an easy part of the brain to use, and it’s the one active when we just want to ‘veg out’. Gut says, get me pizza, Facebook and a sofa…

Back to the click bait. The reason it is in the interest of the media, blogs like this one, news programmes, newspapers and corporations to use titles or themes like the one I’ve fictitiously used is because FEAR SELLS. Fear makes money. Fear is a fantastic marketing tool, seriously. That’s why we can’t turn on the TV or open a magazine without seeing it at work.

Fear sells because it acts on our ‘gut’ (the emotion part of our brain). When we see a story like ‘A story you can’t afford to miss!’ our gut goes crazy and tells us we need to read the story (or more increasingly, watch the video) because we could be in awful danger if we don’t. It might even be subtler though. We thirst for social acceptance as humans. If the title stipulates that we could be missing out on an opportunity for social gain, it also scares us in a more subconscious way.

What’s the problem with this? Sometimes the threat and dangers people write about are true: “there is a genuine chance of me being injured or affected by XYZ, I would rather know about it than not”. Absolutely, I agree. However, a great deal of what the media purports to be important or a threat can be quite shockingly fabricated. Try this example I’ve took from the book:

This is a typical example of the press taking advantage of our commonly accepted beliefs as a society (we tend to think the same as our peers), and intensifying them by fear mongering using very dubious sources. This is very troubling, because a lot of what we take as accepted knowledge comes from such sources.

Dan Gardner concludes by saying that a balanced perspective is vital. If you feel strongly something, try to use ‘head’ to research information about it, then make your judgements. I know I’m going to start doing so.

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.

Is your ego big enough?

You come down with something bad and you’re sent to bed for a few days with a warm drink and a painkiller or six. After some time you begin to feel better, and you thank your biological immune system for its service healing you, whilst also scolding it for not protecting you in the first place. You likely wish you had a stronger immune system to protect you from incoming viruses and flus.

It came as a surprise to me to find out that we actually have a psychological immune system too, and it serves us in a similar way to our biological immune system. Walter Mischel explains that this system allows us to ‘see ourselves as having more positive and fewer negative qualities than most of our peers’. It’s function is to protect us from chronic stress and dealing with terrible news, and it’s reasonable to extend this and say it helps us cope with our friends and peers when we receive negative and upsetting feedback. Our psychological immune system allows us to take in negative views, and the stronger our system is, overcome them. Think about the millions of people that despise Kanye West and vocalise this to him regularly. Were it not for his strong (ego) psychological immune system, he would probably have stopped making music a long time ago. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up for you to decide…

In a study of over 800,000 high school seniors, Myers found that ‘compared to our average peer, most of us fancy ourselves as more intelligent, better looking, less prejudiced, more ethical, healthier, and likely to live longer’! We’ve all got egos, some are bigger and some are smaller. Taylor demonstrated that ‘high self-enhancers (big egos) have lower biological stress levels’. In contrast: ‘the realists who perceive themselves more accurately experience lower self-esteem and more depression, and are generally less mentally and physically healthy’.

I conjecture that having a big (ish) ego is an essential tool for effectively dealing with criticism (‘haters’, if you’re a hip-hop artist?). This ability is a fundamental element of success.

“If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome”

- Michael Jordan

‘The Marshmallow Test’ (Walter Mischel): Why altering your conscience is good for you.

Here we go again. Get ready for the inevitable siege of the ‘new year, new me’ army. Empty promises to ones-self to get slim are so common at this time of year, that if I had a pound for each I’d have enough for… well, liposuction? 

In the ‘The Marshmallow Test’, Walter Mischel proposes that we can deliberately and effectively cognitively reappraise events by using the prefrontal cortex to critically adjust the way we interpret temptation. I want to try and explain this in colloquial English (for my own benefit if nothing else). In essence, using the part of our brain that is responsible for emotions and problem solving, we can adjust the way we think about temptation, which can allow us to gain a deep mastery of self-control. The word ‘temptation’ probably springs to mind a fat chocolate cake, so I figured I’d throw in a picture of one, however, it’s used in a much wider context here. Think of temptation as anything that involves immediate gratification (drinking alcohol and partying etc.). 

Self-control is crucial for the pursuit of long-term goals; it means we can pursue activities that require deferred gratification like studying, starting a business, dieting, or the plethora of things that will improve us. In the book, Mischel states: “[self control] is the master aptitude underlying emotional intelligence, essential for constructing a fulfilling life. It can help people avoid becoming entrapped early in life, dropping out of school, becoming impervious to consequences, or getting stuck in jobs [we] hate”. 

So this year instead of picking a diet plan, why not start mastering self-control. If you want to lose 20 pounds, spend 20 pounds on this book.

How? Here’s three ways the book suggests we can alter our cognition to improve our self-control: 

i) Imagine someone else making the choice. ‘One way to momentarily escape the brains desire for gratification is to imagine how someone else would behave. It’s easier to use our rational mind when making choices for others rather than ourselves’. Ask yourself: “What would an intelligent person do”, then try to apply your decision about their life to yours.

ii) De-stress. Yale neuroscientists concluded that “mild acute uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities”. Hence, if you’re stressed, your ability to handle situations with self-control is rapidly diminished and negated.

iii) Think of the shapes. This one is more about food. In a study of preschool children, it was shown that those who thought about a treat in front of them as a picture and not as a tangible object of desire, were much more able to delay gratification and not eat the treat. This is because; as one child humorously described it “you can’t eat a picture”! Thinking about food as an image that we are seeing helps negate our strong emotion for wanting to eat it.

... Happy new year!

You are two-faced. Here's why.

We hate it. A person acts a certain way in one place and acts different in another. It’s demonised and we will quickly turn away from people who are two-faced. But I’m telling you, you are two-faced. It’s because of a glitch in your brain. In ‘The Tipping Point’ Malcolm Gladwell discusses the power of context and it’s influence on how we view people’s personalities. The book's focal point is on what makes epidemics spread, but I thought this was a gloriously controversial point to write about. 

Let me put this to you. I would like you to describe your closest friend in a short sentence.

Chances are, you’ve come up with an explanation along the lines of ‘Beth is a wonderfully kind person’

As humans, we love singularities and absolutes. It is a coping mechanism that helps us make sense of the world around us, using human personalities as a tool for cognition. However, Zimbardo (one of the psychologists behind the famous Stanford Prisoner experiment) suggests that we are deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behaviour when we forget the crucial role of situations, or context. Beth can probably be very mean with people she despises, for example.

Quick example: A group of seminarians were asked to prepare a talk for a bible group on ‘the Good Samaritan’, then walk over to a nearby building and present it. Along the way, the psychologists made sure the seminarians would run into a slumped man, clearly sick in need of help. Would the seminarians stop? Our mind, using absolutes, would say yes, most of these people would stop; they are the most selfless people imaginable.

But the psychologists introduced a variable, where they would either say “oh you’re late”, or “you’re a bit early, but may as well head over now” before the seminarians left for the talk. This had a profound effect. “It is hard to think of a context in which norms concerning helping those in distress are more salient than for a person thinking about the Good Samaritan, and yet it did not increase helping behaviour” concluded Darley and Batson. Only 10% of the rushed group stopped, versus 63% of the other group. The only thing that really mattered was whether the student was in a rush.

This is classic. The reason this shocks us is because we want to look for a dispositional explanation to why the seminarian didn’t stop (i.e. wow what a two-faced person), as opposed to looking objectively and using a contextual explanation (i.e. they were simply late).

Gladwell summarises: ‘Character then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in our brains’ which psychologists call FAE (Fundamental Attribution Error).

Next time you brand someone two-faced, think carefully about the situation they were put in, it had a much bigger effect than you might think.