Exam Flashcards
90% T-shirt
Company has problem with motivation, so the CEO gives employees a shirt saying “Why 90% doesn’t work”
This creates controversy, as even though some people think it is a good ideas as it motivates, ti is because because it can annoy the workers. But, it is concrete which is good.
Theme 1
Concreteness
Tangible, palpable, actual thing
Concrete and task-focused is better than abstract and self-focused feedback on performance
Illusion of transparency
We think that we communicate and think more clear than we actually do
Ex: Think can taste test soda better than you actually can
Theme #2
Divergence
Example with the zero defects t-shirt –> very aspirational goal (stretch goal) –> people would obscure their mistakes, are snowballed to be way worse than otherwise wouldn’t been since you brush your mistake under the rug because scared to admit you made a mistake given the organizational culture
Reported errors aren’t equal to actual errors. Safest could be the place with the most reported errors, as unafraid to report while other places won’t report
Tegmark - In Conversation Reading
–> The human mind not only is massively limited in its ability to comprehend the world at large; but, given how it evolved, it’s perfectly logical that it should be limited
- Darwin’s ideas show the ultimate nature of reality is weird and counterintuitive, as the brains that are advanced enough to understand new concepts is costly in evolution.
- -> We wouldn’t have evolved and spent a lot of energy increasing out metabolism if it didn’t help
- We can’t grasp stuff that we need to use technology to understand, it seems weird. When we study things that go faster, time slows down.
- WIth really large things, which were considered weird, took a long time until people accepted them. And when things are small, it is counterintuitive. Tough time accepting large and small things
- When you take a parameter out of the range of what our ancestors experienced, really weird things happen. Like when you have very high energies, for example, when two particles collide at CERN. Things nowadays are not intuitive, but this is how the world works
–> Verdict: whatever the nature of reality actually is, it seems really weird. If we dismiss physical theories just bc they seem counterintuitive, then we are almost certainly going to dismiss whatever the correct theory is once someone actually tells us about it
Just bc it seems counterintuitive doesn’t mean we should dismiss the idea
Pinker - Enlightenment Now Reading
–> Are we intuitive scientists or intuitive lawyers? Now, we are intuitive lawyers but before were scientists
- Evolution leaving us with a burden: our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one
- Evolution could not have adapted our brains to modern technology and institutions –> our cognitive faculties that worked in traditional societies are flawed
- People are illiterate/innumerate by nature
- -> Understand physical things through hidden essences instead of physics and biology; generalize from paltry samples, namely their own experience, and reason by stereotype; infer causation correlation; think holistically (black and white). Overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck
- Human moral sense can also harm our well-being, as we attack those with opposing views and look for scapegoats for our misfortunes and condemn rivals for immorality thru harm despite their own immoralities
People see violence as moral - wars have been fought to satisfy greed rather than seek justice
Kahneman- “Thinking Fast and Slow” Reading
What you see is all there is (WYSIATI)
“You never forget the Primat of the Is” –> phrase comes up when encountered with asymmetry between the ways our mind treats the info that is currently available vs info we don’t have
Info not retrieved from memory might as well not exist. System 1 excels at constructing best possible story that incorporates ideas currently activated, but it doesn’t and can’t allow for info it doesn’t have
System 1: what is there, readily available, success is the coherence of the story it manages to create and focusing on impressions and intuition
Jumping to conclusions based on limited evidence - WYSIATI
System 2 is generally too lazy to overturn system 1, resulting in it endorsing many intuitive beliefs. But, system 2 can have a more systematic and careful approach to evidence.
Ex: Experiment where see one-sided evidence, they are more confident in their judgements than those who saw both sides of evidence in the argument. One-side evidence makes you think that way
WYSIATI helps facilitate coherence and cognitive ease that makes us accept a statement as true->this is why we think fast and make sense of partial information in a complex world
WYSIATI helps explain other biases:
- Overconfidence: neither quality nor quantity of evidence counts for much in subjective confidence. Confidence in beliefs depends on quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. Our associative system tends to settle on a coherent pattern of activation, suppressing doubt and ambiguity
- Framing: different ways of presenting the same info can evoke different emotions (90% fat free vs 10% fat)
- Base-rate-neglect. Steve, meek and tidy, often believed to be librarian over a farmer, but many more male farmers than librarians
Haidt and Joseph- “The Moral Mind”
Five foundations of intuitive ethics, the five sets of concerns which are each linked to an adaptive challenge and to one or more moral emotions as the best candidates for the psychological foundations of human morality
- Harm/care. Adaptive challenge: Protect and care for young, vulnerable, or injured kin. When one is suffering, distress, or threat to one’s kin. Response: Compassion, caring, kindness. Opposite is cruelty
- -> Caring for vulnerable people - Fairness/reciprocity. Adaptive challenge: reap benefits of dyadic cooperation with non-kin. Proper domain: cheating, cooperation, deception. Actual domain: martial fidelity, broken vending machines. Anger, gratitude, guilt, fairness, justice, honesty, trustworthiness (opposite is dishonesty)
- -> Cooperating with those who cooperate with you - In-group/loyalty. Adaptive challenge: reap benefits of group cooperation. Proper domain: threat or challenge to group. Actual domain is sports teams one roots for. Characteristic emotions: group pride, belongings, rage at traitors
Loyalty, patriotism, self-sacrifice (opposite is treason, cowardice)
–> Being loyal to your group - Authority/respect. Adaptive challenge: negotiate hierarchy, defer selectively. Proper domain: bosses, respected professionals
Emotions are respect and fear. Obedience, deterrence (opposite is disobedience and uppityness)
–> Deferring to authority - Purity/sanctity. Adaptive challenge: avoid microbes and parasites. Proper domain is waste products, diseased people. Actual domain is taboo ideas (communism, racism)
Characteristic emotions: disgust
Relevant virtues: temperance, chastity, piety, cleanliness (opposite is lust, intemperance)
–> Being “pure”
If all of human existence were a minute long…
Then the first 59 minutes involved a world that looked nothing like our own
Tiny tribe where only see 70-150 people; need reliable senses to make cause-effect influences. Didn’t need to think abstractly or about large swaths of information. More challenging, but also simpler
Also needed to figure out how to cooperate as effective as possible with your clan by pegging some patterns (loyalty) good and others (dissent) bad
Darwinistic pressures to evolve in a way that favored this status quo are enormous.
How we think
In any situation, we have to ask ourselves 2 basic questions:
- What is?
a. Description
b. This informs how we make good decisions - What should be?
a. Prescription
b. This relates to whether we make the right decisions
WYSIATI
What you see is all there is
That’s all you had to know for the first 59 seconds of evolutionary minute
Kahneman: Our minds construct the best possible story that incorporates ideas currently activated in memory, but it does not (cannot) allow for information it doesn’t have
The bad with WYSIATI
Our mind has simplified version of things. For example, we think of the US as a rectangle.
4 biases in judgement result:
1. Anchoring
2. Availability bias (bc it is available in something like the media, you think it is more prevalent than it actually is)
3. Under-sampling negative experiences (things you don’t like, don’t go back to –> more accurate if you have a positive 1st experience with than if negative 1st experience)
4. (Mis) forecasting well-being (what’s in front of you looms large even if no bearing on your future)
The good with WYSIATI
Creative decision making.
Where you start profoundly shapes where you end up
Give a concrete thing and can think concretely
Ex: Exposed to a folder and shoe and a novel and practical idea results. For ex: think of a folder with pockets for resumes, business cards, and references
What Should Be?
What is moral intuition and the five things people think are morally good
What do people think is morally good? Haidt and Joseph: Moral intuition: across every culture, people are born with an innate sense that five things are morally good 1. Caring for vulnerable people 2. Cooperating with those who cooperate with you 3. Being loyal to your group 4. Deferring to authority 5. Being "pure"
Problems with Haidt and Joseph five morally good things
#3, "being loyal to your group" and #4, "deferring to authority" --> essential when we lived in primitive environments (the vast majority of human existence). Thus, we evolved a strong sense that these impulses are "right." But in this modern environment, they can get us into trouble by leading us to defer to the group, favor solidarity and cohesiveness over speaking up, and create conditions that stifle dissent Don't want to silence the people in your group, which this could do, so that's bad
Takeaways from Foundations lecture
We need to think and speak both concretely and abstractly when working collaboratively, but evolution often selects for the wrong one at the wrong time
We need convergence and divergence when working in groups, but evolution primarily selects for convergence
The evolutionary minute: our brains evolved to adapt to what kind of world (completely different, now know more people and relying on senses in different ways)
If what you see is all there is, then concrete detail will more strongly influence how we think and feel than abstract ideas. We often focus on the bad, but there is some good
Loyalty to unground and deterrence to authority could be bad - if we think they are morally virtuous then we are likely to overweigh solidarity and underweight divergence of thought when working in teams. We’ll be worried about throwing out unusual suggestions, and we’ll create conditions that promote cohesiveness, but stifle dissent
Heath Brothers: “Made to Stick” Big Picture
BE CONCRETE
Use buzzwords, concreteness avoids problems with abstractness, realistic concrete goal with the TNC of saving 50 landscapes over 10 years
Concreteness allows for stuff to happen, goals to be reached
Concrete helps teach people things, especially to novices. Look at math classrooms in Asia where they explain the abstract by emphasizing concrete things
Need concrete foundations to get abstract principles
Concrete survives generations, see this with Asad’s fables and stories passing down
Fridge test–> can list as many white things in your refrigerator as in your kitchen, even though fridge is in kitchen. This is because having a concrete focus helps you do a better job with brainstorming
Simplyfing things can help save costs and be better
Made to Stick details
Aesop illustrated universal human shortcoming in phrase “sour grapes” in “The Fox and the grapes”
Truths from story stuck- concrete images of grapes, fox, and the dismissive comment about sour grapes have allowed message to persist
We need more fables to address varying languages
Different professions have their own buzzwords: teachers, doctors, etc
While language is often abstract, life is not
Even the most abstract business strategy must eventually show up in tangible actions, and it’s easier to understand those tangible actions than to understand an abstract strategy->concreteness is key!
The Nature Conservancy
Helps to protect environmentally precious areas by buying land and making it off limits to environmentally damaging uses->”bucks and acres”
When CA had too many areas deemed to be in “critical danger” to purchase, TNC changed strategy to ensure that critical areas were protected against damage->organization would pay landowners not to develop their land
TNC could now protect more areas, but not focusing specifically on land deals were less concrete to donors and could have hurt employee morale
How to protect invaluable tangibility of “bucks and acres” strategy?
Could divide big, abstract goal into smaller, more concrete subgoals, but the numbers were just too big
Instead of discussing in terms of land area, TNC discussed in terms of “landscape,” or a contiguous plot of land with unique, environmentally precious features
Reframed areas and named based on particular location (oak savanna region became Mount Hamilton Wilderness- think SoHo or Lincoln Park, names that come to define an area and its traits)
This is a story about abstraction- avoided abstraction by converting abstract blobs into tangible landscapes
While context and solutions had grown more ambiguous, their messages could not
Understanding subtraction
Concreteness often boils down to specific people doing specific things, and concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts
Asian school teachers teaching math- explain abstract math concepts (addition) by emphasizing things that are concrete and familiar (buying school supplies and kickball)- concept known as Computing in Context
Abstract concept of subtraction by yanking tiles away from placed desks- Conceptual Knowledge
Abstraction demands some concrete foundation, helping us construct higher, more abstract insights on the building blocks of our existing knowledge and perceptions
Concrete is Memorable
Stories that have lasted generations, like the Iliad and Odyssey, are characterized by lots of concrete actions
Accounting class: work for two students starting business, and see role accounting plays in business life, motivating students to learn
Made high-level students more likely to major in accounting, and made average students better retain basic concepts and material
The Velcro Theory of Memory
We have different filing cabinets in our brains for different kinds of memories
Feels different to try to remember different kinds of things
Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes
To explain MLK assassination, Jane Elliott wanted to make prejudice a tangible lesson for students- separated students by eye color, and said that brown-eyed were superior and gave them special privileges
Class transformed quickly- friendships dissolved
Next day, she flipped who was superior, and students who were in inferior group noted the difference- affected emotions and academic performance
Students in the class became significantly less prejudiced over time->turned idea of abstract concept of prejudice into an experience
The Path to Abstraction: The Blueprint and the Machine
We slip from concreteness to abstraction because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly (jurors vs lawyers vs judges; bio students vs teachers)
Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details; experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through experience (as they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level)
Curse of Knowledge: to build complex machinery, the firm needed smooth communication between engineers to create designs and manufacturers to execute them
Whenever there was a problem, engineers would want to fix their drawings, making them more complex and more abstract- they knew more, and in turn lost the ability to imagine what the drawing looked like to non-experts
Easy to lose awareness that we’re talking like experts
Don’t “dumb things down”- simply find a “universal language” that others will understand
Concreteness Allows Coordination
Concreteness makes targets transparent: “pocketable radio,” “man on the moon within the decade”; helped Boeing design the 727 (must seat 131 passengers and fly nonstop from MIA to NYC
The Ferraris go to Disney World in the R&D Lab
HP sought partnership with Disney- instead of creating PowerPoint, team built 6K sq. ft. exhibit simulating experience that could happen only with HP as a partner
Appealed to different audiences (novices in Disney execs, experts in HP employees), taking abstract ideas from research labs into a family picture
Concrete Brings Knowledge to Bear: White Things
Write down as many white things as you can list; write down as many white things in your refrigerator as you can list
People write the same amount for both because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain
Kaplan and go computers
Idea for a portable PC that entrepreneur brought to VC firm- presentation was based on experience and theatrics->tossed leather portfolio with blank pad of paper inside, but its presence represented a symbol of the future of tech->he got funding
Portfolio shifted meeting from Q&A to brainstorming session because the boardroom participants saw it as a challenge and means to focus their thoughts and bring their existing knowledge to bear->attitude went from reactive and critical to active and creative
Concreteness creates a shared turf on which people can collaborate
Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) is a means to help save children from dehydration caused by diarrhea- how to get people invested in this idea?
Pitch 1: Information based on credibility- lots of scientific language and exposition explaining the issue and how to potentially fix it
Risk: Making problem sound too complex
Pitch 2: Take out a packet of salt and sugar and say, “Do you know that this costs less than a cup of tea and can save hundreds of thousands of children’s lives?”
Means to get ideas to stick- brings out a concrete prop and starts with attention-grabbing unexpected contrast
While this sacrifices the statistics and scientific description that adds credibility to Pitch 1, a credible enough person could keep people from questioning facts and can instead focus on the motivational battle- after seeing the packet, you can’t help but start brainstorming the possibilities
Making Ideas Concrete
We might find our own decisions easier to make if they are guided by the needs of specific people: our readers, students, and customers
General Mills->Hamburger Helper: rather than looking at data, team created plans to send members into the homes of Hamburger Helper customers, known as “Fingertips”
Different experience to visit homes: if you know that convenience is important to mothers (main demographic)- difference between getting survey data and seeing mother with daughter on hip; also consolidated product line based on preference of predictability
Same idea: Saddleback Sam forces Church leaders to view decisions through a different lens- all ideas run through this idea of Saddleback Sam, who represents their ideal target demographic- they’re more effective in marketing and attracting new members
Finding our core message is tough, but being concrete is not, and doesn’t require a lot of effort
The barrier is simply forgetfulness- we forget that we’re slipping into abstract-speak
Switch Pages 76-81
Vision to bring breast cancer care under one roof and improve process for everyone
Laura Esserman is doing this
Destination postcard- a vivid picture from near-term future that shows what could be possible, specifically by setting a goal that can be tackled sooner rather than later
Breast cancer process is incredibly stressful for women- Laura Esserman had a vision for how to change it (destination postcard)
- Try to create a clinic where a woman could walk in at the beginning of day to get exams run on her lump and get results by EOD
- Main barrier was lack of coordination among medical departments
- Esserman was low on totem pole, so she coordinated with Mendelsohn, Chief Administrative Director, and simply used tenacity to sell a vision of what breast cancer care could be
-Over time, ran test trials, continued to persist, and practice and model was able to grow as people bought in
Interpersonal influence
Changing someone else’s behavior (ideally for the better)
Draws from research on
1. Change (altering, initiating, and maintaining action)
2. Motivation (directing, initiating, and maintaining behavior)
Ergo, the dominant frameworks on change and motivation have converged on three considerations
Consider change based framework with the rider, elephant, and the path
Rider, elephant, and the path
Change-based framework:
Person riding on an elephant along a path
The rider is the person riding the elephant, focused on directing your emotions and where you are going. It is the part of our mind which provides direction.
Elephant is like the emotions
And path is where you are going - the environment
We overthink the person’s role, not enough to the elephant or the path
Goals discrepancy between what we have and what we want, reduce it to achieve the goal
Motivation
Focusing on motivating the rider
Directing, initiating, and maintaining effort
We can key questions
1. How do we provide clear direction? (Problem: we don’t naturally think or communicate clearly about the future, we don’t think about distant future concretely - consider one day from now vs 5 yrs and how your plan of what you’re doing is much more concrete tomorrow, much more abstract in the distance)
How do we think about the distant future?
Not concretely!
Psychological distance: we have a difficult time conceptualizing the distance future in concrete terms
For example: individuals who were asked to think about reading a book right now: “following lines of print” vs indifiuvdals who were asked to think about reading a book in a year: “gaining knowledge”
