Teamwork Might Not Make the Dream Work…

Teamwork is widely emphasised in business, education and in general, in hope to influence morale. What employers look for in prospective employees is to be able to cope in a team and cooperate in decision-making. Working in a team might lead to synergistic success; everyone has their own expertise, insight and opinions that they can share. But it’s not that smooth-sailing…

While in a group, full potential can be impeded by the cognitive bias of social loafing. And with this conquering the meeting room, even subconsciously, not everyone takes part, leaving a few to be bombarded with all the work and doing everything for the sake of the team.

But what exactly is social loafing? Is it really that bad? And if so, how can we prevent and overcome it?

Firstly, social loafing refers to people exerting less effort during group efforts compared to performing an activity alone. This is more present in group activities where it’s difficult to identify a single person’s contribution, since they all determine the group outcome.

The phenomenon was discovered by Ringelman, a professor of agricultural engineering, in 1913. He was already interested in how agricultural workers could maximise their productivity, compared to the efficiency of horses, oxen and machines. The experiment consisted of eight series, in which subjects had to pull a rope horizontally. Their force was measured with a recording dynamometer. Ringelman used 14 male participants for three trials; in one trial, each subject pulled alone. In the second, 7 out of the 14 males pulled the rope together as a group, while the remaining 7 subjects pulled as a second group for the third trial. These three series were repeated, but with a different set of 14 male participants.

As a result, group effort recorded was significantly less than all the 7 individuals’ efforts combined. For example, for the first 7 male subjects, they achieved 764kg in total when they exerted force alone, compared to 480kg when in a group together.

Ringelman thought the causes were coordination loss – “the lack of simultaneity of their efforts” – and motivation loss. The latter could explain social loafing, as each subject pulling the rope could’ve put all their trust onto the others for the desired effort, eliciting themselves to only follow the movement of the rope and exert less force.

The social compensation hypothesis sounds similar to this, positing that expectations of your peers’ performance also affects your own. People will work harder collectively when they expect their co-workers to perform poorly in the task. This is the reverse when you work alongside with competent peers, making you slack off and allow the others to do most of the work. The same researchers who proposed this hypothesis also found that a cohesive group – a group with a bond and high quality relationships – can reduce social loafing, whereas a noncohesive team only increases its likelihood, due to the lack of concern of letting them down.

Taking account of these causes, we can find ways to prevent this cognitive bias from hindering team performance. Reducing social loafing through cohesive groups leads on to establishing more personal and trusting relationships within your group. This then can encourage loyalty and involvement, making team members more productive.

Another idea is to establish individual accountability – that is, making someone feel that they’re being evaluated individually. This can lower social loafing, especially in Western cultures that emphasise individualism.

Clarifying the task and its importance can also be effective. Perhaps even assign separate responsibilities for each team member. When everyone knows what they’re doing and how much the team depends on them, this could reduce social loafing and possibly improve productivity.

Social loafing explains why there’s always that one person in a school project who take cares of everything, while everyone else does nothing. Though truth is, the loafers would feel dissatisfied and guilty afterwards, and even this puts a toll on the person who does all the work – frustration and resentment overcoming them. Not only does social loafing put the group in a disadvantage – mainly resulting in less productivity – but on each very individual in that group.

Therefore, effort really matters. The quantity of members in a team does not truly lead to higher quality performance. Every member in that group needs to put all their effort in, just like how they would perform when alone.

The Prinvie Bookshelf: Bad Science

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre 2008

Goldacre aims to reveal the absurdity of nutritionists, pill supplements, homeopathy, bogus statistics and pharmaceutical corporations. He shows that these things aren’t really based on true, scientific evidence and how people skew results towards their agenda. He exposes the fakeness of well-known nutritionists, who have no clue of basic science, as well as pseudoscientific Brain Gym, which is widely practiced in British schools as “brain boosting exercises”.

Goldacre goes on to talk about Dr Gillian McKeith, a clinical nutritionist and pill entrepeneur, appearing on mainstream media, having her own TV show and writing her own books. One such idea she advocates, as a nutritionist, is to eat spinach and darker leaves on plants because they contain more chlorophyll, “high in oxygen” to “really oxygenate your blood”. Goldacre highlights that this is ridiculous, and it’s bad science, because chlorophyll does not function this way, it only helps to make oxygen when there’s sunlight, it is not high in oxygen. And besides, McKeith’s point is void because there obviously will be no light in anyone’s bowels for photosynthesis to happen.

These kinds of nutritionists also might be barely qualified. McKeith has legal tussles relating to her qualifications, and as Goldacre contacted the previous institution she graduated from and the one she is currently studying in, they were very reluctant to give any information about her “pending diploma in herbal medicine” or PhD. Therefore, nutritionists like McKeith in the media are not credible or scientific, and could be just making these “facts” up for their career.

One other hoax that Goldacre exposed was fish oils, and how “science” proved that these could improve children’s IQs, school performance, behaviour and attention. The Durham trials involved 5000 students in their GCSE year (GCSE’s are those big exams that children in the UK have to do at the end of secondary/high school when they’re 15-16), who were given six fish-oil capsules a day, then comparing how they did in their exams with how the council had estimated they should do without the capsules. The problem with these trials was that there was no control group (students not taking any fish oil), thus the children fell victim to the placebo effect and the Hawthorne Effect – being attended to, focused on, and the simple fact you’re being observed in a trial will generally improve performance. Therefore, the fact that exam grades improved after the trials should not mean it is because of the fish oils, but rather the placebo and Hawthorne effect in practice. And besides, GCSE results usually get better every year.

These are some aspects of Goldacre’s book that I found intriguing. There is bad science everywhere, with fake scientists, nutritionists and researchers wanting to gain momentum and publicity, while their “evidence” for their beliefs are cherry-picked and tainted. We should not be fooled by pharmaceutical companies who want us to buy more pills or follow nutritionists’ advice in the media, not knowing their credentials. We need to look out for bad science, or otherwise we will only be satisfying and lifting up the conmen.

Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More

Do you ever have those moments where there’s too much choice? You would be browsing a streaming platform, looking for a movie to watch, but there’s too many to choose from, so you just end up disappointed and not watching anything? This certainly happens to me. This phenomenon has its own name – the paradox of choice – when there’s a surfeit of choice, in that it can decrease your satisfaction and quality of life.

A classic study has been done to show the paradox of choice with a selection of jam. This was what Iyengar and Lepper found in 2000, finding that it was better for shoppers to choose between a selection of 6 jams rather than 24. In the supermarket, 145 out of 242 (60%) who passed by actually stopped to look at the extensive-selection display of jam. 104 out of 260 customers (40%) who passed by the limited selection of 6 jams also stopped to take a look. You might think that surely the more the selection, the more you would want to sample everything. Yet, there was no significant difference in how many jams the customers sampled, whether in the extensive or limited jam booth. The most surprising result was that 30% (31) of the customers who stopped by the limited selection actually bought a jar of jam, but this was only 3% (4) with the shoppers who looked at the selection of 24 jams!

Surplus choice can be seen in every domain. A typical American supermarket carries more than 30,000 items, with more than 20,000 new products being placed on shelves every year. Telephone services grew its options for network providers and cellphone plans. The variety of pension plans for the retired have also grown, as well as different types of cosmetic surgeries (from liposuctions to eyelid surgery to tummy tucks to face lifts).

This much choice might seem empowering but it will only lead us to choice paralysis, making us not choose anything at all! Excessive choice also reduces our satisfaction, because costs grow with the higher number of options. Decision-making within a large selection requires more time and effort, thus leading to anxiety, regret, unrealistically high expectations and self-blame when we end up not as satisfied. All these feelings might’ve come from the heavy burden choosers have to distinguish between the good and bad decisions/flavours of jam/cellphone providers. And despite enjoying the choice-making process within an extensive selection, we feel more responsible for the choices we make, thus making the whole process simultaneously more difficult and frustrating too.

Barry Schwartz, who has particularly researched this paradox, was able to show how we can avoid this kind of dissatisfaction in a world full of choice – to satisfy rather than to maximise. We should choose what is “good enough”, not what is the very best out of the hundreds of alternatives. Maximisers have to deal with extra cognitive work to compare various options as well as the increased worry of making a “wrong” or suboptimal choice. Furthermore, it was found through self-reports that maximisers were more likely to have lower self-esteem, lower subjective well-being scores and be less optimistic than satisficers. Maximisers are also reported to be more sensitive to social comparison, being made less happy when outperformed by a peer, while satisficers were in a stable mood even when given social comparison information. So to really stop this dissatisfaction, we just have to pick what’s “good enough”. And despite the fact that satisficers don’t really reach their objective standards as well as maximisers, they subjectively feel better about the decisions they make.

After reading all this, you might come up with an example of a business who offer many variations of products, but are still well-loved and profitable. Like Starbucks – people have been customising their own drinks, telling the barista how many pumps of what syrup or ingredient they want in their own “secret menu” drink, thus ending up with over 80,000 combinations. It might be in fact that an array of similar options can heighten distinctions and make us more certain about our final choice. With too little options, we would still want to consider similar items first, so that after searching thoroughly, we are ready to buy. And besides, a meta-analysis of choice overload by Scheibehenne found that extensive choice had no adverse effect on choosers’ satisfaction. They also had conflicting results, in that more choice may actually facilitate decision-making and increase satisfaction.

Choice can be seen as a freedom, but we can either use this freedom to satisfy or maximise. So is it really less is more? Or more is more?

Fake it till You Make it

When you’re nervous for a presentation, your chest becomes heavy, your arms lightly shake, you just don’t want to look at anyone. Yet, we might be reminded of what our family, friends and peers have always, or at least at times, said to us, “Fake it until you make it!”. Although freaking out in the inside, we need to masquerade our nerves for our aims. And we can really do this through our free traits.

I first found the Free Trait Theory in Susan Cain’s Quiet, which she describes as being ‘born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits – introversion, for example – but we can and do act out of character in the service of “core personal projects” ’. So this basically means that if you’re an introvert, you’d freely act out of character to appear more extroverted and confident when presenting a speech, or meeting someone new from a mutual friend.

Dr Brian Little first proposed this theory; we advance our project aims by enacting free traits, irrespective of our fixed, biogenic dispositions. These core projects could range from daily chores, such as cleaning the house, to life commitments, like a great relationship with your partner. Therefore, one who is usually disagreeable might be a bit more agreeable when to please their boss. Acting out free traits for our core projects can have a direct effect on our wellbeing and quality of life, this particularly improving if we view our personal projects to be “meaningful, manageable, not unduly stressful and supported by others”.

One study, by Richard Lippa in the Journal of Behavior and Personality, shows the Free Trait Theory in action in introverts. He gathered subjects, assessing them on their extraversion and introversion, then videotaping them as they role-played as “extroverted” teachers. He measured each subject’s stride length, graphic expansiveness, percent of time talking, percent of forward eye-contact etc. Naive judges also rated how “extraverted” and “anxious” the subjects appeared. As a result, it was obvious that the extraverts were good at roleplaying as extravert teachers, yet some introverts were pretty convincing extraverts. Therefore, here, we can see that the pseudo-extraverts were using their free traits to be more confident, like they were actual extraverts.

These convincing introverts, who effectively used their free extravert traits, tended to score higher for self-monitoring. Self-monitoring refers to the trait that allows one to monitor, regulate and modify self-presentations and behaviours to the social demands of a situation. Thus, we can say that one who is a high self-monitor will be better at displaying free traits than low self-monitors, who are more likely to have trouble changing their behaviour to suit different situations and refuse changing their opinions for the situation.

Even with these free traits, there is a limit to how much and how long we can display them. Behaviour leakage occurs, in which our true selves are hinted through our unconscious body language. Using Lippa’s study, an introvert would carefully look away when an extrovert would still hold eye contact and would usually continue talking for longer. Therefore, we should not assume that free traits replace our fixed traits, because these can still subtly show, but rather they augment biogenic traits. However, we shouldn’t express free traits all the time.

If acting too much out of character from your biogenic, fixed traits, we can experience burnout, so then we need a restorative niche – a Free Trait Agreement. This is our acknowledgement that we will have to act out of character some of the time, in exchange for being ourselves the rest of the time. Brian Little gives us a personal example: after giving hour-long or two hour lectures in front of his classes, he restores his introverted side by taking a quick break in the washroom or getting some fresh air. This happens through a restorative niche – a physical or temporal place to go when you want to return to your true self (e.g. practicing meditation, going on quiet walks) to keep up with the Free Trait Agreement. Despite speaking in public so effectively, seemingly like an extrovert, Little is able to act out of his introverted character but also be himself. This is the Free Trait Agreement he has recognised for himself.

It’s good to act fake for our core projects. Although if someone acts fake all the time, trying to please everyone and everything, they won’t be able to restore and relax themselves, thus needing a restorative niche. Therefore, to truly have a good quality of life, we need a balance between different places and different people to express our free traits, while also revealing our fixed, authentic selves.

The Prinvie Bookshelf: Think Again

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant 2021

Grant elucidates the crucial skill of rethinking and re-evaluating your opinions. Readers discover the joy of being wrong and their values being challenged. It’s difficult at first, getting defensive and preachy, but Grant emphasises that we should be “scientists” – searching for the truth by testing hypotheses and discovering knowledge – not reverting to “preacher”, “prosecutor” or “politician” mode.

What’s engaging, for me, are the use of subheadings and diagrams, which I think helped me understand the book’s concepts and messages. It is also structured well, starting with a section on individual rethinking, then on interpersonal rethinking, then lastly collective rethinking. We see how reflecting on our views and opinions can be applied in the workplace, education, and even tacitly encouraging others to be vaccinated!

Grant presents the counselling approach of motivational interviewing. Accompanied with an anecdote – about neonatalogist and vaccine whisperer, Arnaud Gagneur, and a mother, Marie-Hélène, refusing to get her kids vaccinated – this was enjoyable to read. Arnaud used the technique of motivational interviewing to help the mother find her own motivation to change, through asking open-ended questions and reflectively listening to her. In this technique, you don’t tell people what to do, you expose them to finding new possibilities and breaking out of their overconfidence cycles. And this proved successful, resutling in Marie-Héléne inoculating her son, Tobie, and his older siblings. From this, we can see that we, ourselves, can influence and open up other peoples’ minds to contrary views and new knowledge.

There’s so much more, including the long conflict between Red Sox and Yankee fans, and how this intergroup prejudice can be alleviated. Grant also explains the unheard positives of impostor syndrome,the significance of task conflict between the Wright Brothers while also encouraging active-learning for schoolchildren to further question themselves and foster curiosity.

Think Again is an exceptional book on how we can refrain from being too dogmatic, but rather re-evaluate and adopt a scientist mindset on both an individual and community level.

Dunbar’s Number: How Much is Too Much?

We all want friends, maybe even a lot of friends. Humans are naturally social beings, so it’s vital that we have a group of friends who are always by our side – to talk to, to support us, to be there when we are down. Though is there a limit to how many friends you can have?

Well, to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, there is. We have a cognitive limit to how many relationships we can retain, as Dunbar has observed in primates. 5 people being your most intimate loved ones and support clique, 15 being your sympathy group (good friends), 50 being your close network (friends), 150 being your personal network while you only have 500 acquaintances and 1500 recognisable people. This limit is called Dunbar’s Number – named after its founder.

So how did Dunbar even get to this number? Published in the Journal of Human Evolution in 1982, he noted that the size of our neocortex constrains the group size in primate and human communities. A positive correlation was then found between these two co-variables, and going over the group size-neocortex limitation (Dunbar’s Number) would only cause us information overload. It was also found that large groups and terrestrial primates were characterised with large neocortices.

The pan genus of primates (chimpanzees and bonobos) was noted to have an average neocortex volume of 291,592mm³ and a mean group size of 53.5. So if the homo sapien neocortex volume is measured to be 1006,525mm³, then Dunbar’s Number (150 for a personal network) should be understandable.

So does this also apply online? With social media being so prevalent and inescapable, we could connect with new people – from those living in the same neighbourhood to those residing in the other side of the world! Are social platforms exempt from Dunbar’s Number, or are online relationships, like real-life relationships, still cognitively limited?

Digital, social activity also has to reach a point. A maximum of 150-200 stable contacts can be entertained, but once this goes over, the initial dedication to each connection can diminish. We have an internal queue to reply to messages, prioritising interactions with certain relationships that we value more. Though if this queue is overloaded, messages in excess of our cognitive limit can elicit us to discard them.

As we can see, Dunbar’s Number can be both present in real-life and in the virtual world. But are the said numbers actually reliable and representative enough? There’s been criticism that humans actually pass this group size. One research paper even claimed that we have an average network size of 290.

There’s no fixed limit to our relationships, as humans have exceeded it “culturally, bureaucratically, and technologically”. One problem with Dunbar’s Number is the way we define a “relationship”. This number would surely increase if we consider negative relationships, ancestors, animals and those relationships that are purely transactional. You could say that Dunbar was mainly focusing on relationships which have a grooming and gossip bond instead. Furthermore, communication online can help surpass this limit. Social networking platforms have features, like story/status updates and birthday reminders, though not face-to-face, that can assist in future contact with that person.

So do we become sceptical of Dunbar’s Number? Or do you find it relatable to your own life? It’s obvious that you don’t actually know all your social media followers. However, it’s also evident that technology could still surpass Dunbar’s Number. Is there even a limit to how many relationships we can have and maintain? This is one thing that Dunbar and the majority of his critics could agree on.

The Prinvie Bookshelf: You Are Not So Smart

You Are Not So Smart by David Mcraney 2012

Mcraney demonstrates how 48 cognitive biases, heuristics and logical fallacies are deluding us, leading to bad judgement and incorrect conclusions which may even defy pure logic and reasoning. It’s filled with many interesting cited experiments, exhibiting how these fallacious tendencies take place both in a lab setting and real-life.

What I like especially is Mcraney’s easygoing, witty writing style, so anyone new to psychology or behavioural economics can easily read this. The wide list of cognitive biases was also complementary. As someone who’s already read about the many types of cognitive biases, there was still something new that I learnt, such as Dunbar’s Number, learned helplessness and extinction burst.

There are limits to our self-awareness and reasoning, as Mcraney has discussed. Yet, there is a hint of positive light, as all our irrationalities are present in everyone else, and these are what make us human and sane. Though we should not embrace them, rather understand them and be aware of them. And this is what Mcraney expounds to us – we are not so smart.

The Art of Persuasion

We frequently find ourselves in a position in which we need others to comply. So the most plausible way is to persuade them. At first, it might be difficult, the other person always responding with a sad “no”. But, to facilitate this, persuasion techniques can come in handy.

Persuasion is a skill. But at its extreme, persuasion can heighten to manipulation. Manipulation then eliciting resentment – bad resentment – on the person. And we all know that resentment can create vengeance.

So it’s important to be able to influence others, whereas, not in a position where you’re constantly convincing and persuading people, edging yourself towards manipulation. Listed below are two popular techniques.

Foot-in-the-Door Technique

Compliance enhances when we give a smaller, initial request. When this is completed, the more substantial target request is presented; compliance to this request also increases because the person would’ve agreed to the previous, more minor one. Thus, it’s better to order it this way, rather than displaying your big, target request in one go.

To demonstrate the impact of the foor-in-the-door (FITD) technique, in 1966, Freedman and Fraser conducted experiments with housewife subjects. A telephone call was made to a selection of the subjects in the morning, asking for a small favour – to answer some questions about the household products they used. Then after this call, another one was made to them, but this time, a much larger request was asked – if 5 or 6 men would be allowed to come into the subject’s house and inspect, enumerate and classify all their household products for 2 hours, all of this information potentially being used in a report. Quite a demanding request, if you ask me.

Even if the larger favour was more strenuous, 52.8% of the participants who precedingly encountered the initial, smaller request also accepted the more serious, bigger request. However, subjects who only faced the large request, a meagre 22.2% complied. So a person that has been induced to comply to a small favour is more likely to then comply to a larger demand. The same effect was still significantly evident even when there was a different person asking for the larger request.

This might happen because of a sense of involvement. Once agreeing to an action, a person feels more involved than they were before. Thus, it’s possible that their attitude may change. They now perceive themselves as someone who wants to be involved in taking action for their beliefs, and in cooperating with good causes. This attitude change inches towards “activity or compliance in general”.

This technique can be explained by Bem’s self perception theory. In Dariusz Doliński’s book, Techniques of Social Influence, he demonstrates how this can be applied to the FITD technique. If someone has accepted a request, and couldn’t find a suitable external explanation on why they did, they conclude that they “possess attitudes and convictions that are consistent with that decision”. Then in accord with the self perception theory, the person now has a different, psychological image of themselves, so the proceeding, bigger request would be in line and compatible with their new self perception. Thus, more likely to accept the next request.

As the saying goes, “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile”.

Door-in-the-Face Technique

This is where you present an extreme request at first, but then this is followed up by a moderate target request. Even if your first request is rejected, people are more likely to accept your next request – which should be your target.

Cialdini et al. in 1975 published studies on the door-in-the-face (DITF) technique. Volunteers in the experiment would approach random university students and introduce themselves as a member of the “County Youth Counselling Program”. A number of the students were asked a large, extreme favour at first, which was to work as a counselor at the Juvenile Detention Center, having to commit two hours per week for at least two years. Of course, no one wanted to do this request. Then the volunteer would follow on with the smaller, target favour: to chaperone a group of boys/girls from the Juvenile Detention Centre on a trip to the zoo for about two hours.

As a result, 50% of the subjects complied with the second request when they firstly refused the previous, more serious one. Though, when confronted with only the small request, 16.7% of the participants accepted. Therefore, there’s more agreement with the second favour when there was a larger rejected request.

We can see a norm of reciprocity, proposed by Gouldner in 1960. This dictates that we should help those who have helped us as well as not injuring those who have helped us. The failure to reciprocate is looked down upon and there could be distasteful consequences and negative reactions to this person. So how does this relate to the DITF technique?

As well as the norm of reciprocity being applied to the exchange of goods and services, this can also be used for concessions. So “you should make concessions to those who make concessions to you”. When moving from an extreme favour to a lighter one, the person would feel an urge to reciprocate by matching our concession with their own. The two valid answers to a favour would be “yes” or “no”, so the only way to reciprocate this would have to be moving to compliance by accepting the smaller request – an “illusory retreat” from the more serious request.

Another theory, contrast effect, is involved. Being exposed to a larger favour elicits the subjects to think about a smaller request, which is perceived to be less demanding.

In the journal, Communication Research, in 2002, Millar reported that guilt also plays a crucial part during the DITF process. Declining the initial request produces high levels of guilt. And this is the where the person has the greatest amount of compliance – right after rejecting. So when accepting a second, less serious favour, people would anticipate their guilt to subside.

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The FITD and DITF techniques seem to be the complete opposite of one another. Yet, they both appear to achieve satisfactory compliance from others. Behind persuasion, it has a deeper psychological aspect that explains why people actually and eventually comply. And with these techniques, the process can sound simpler, even funner!

The Prinvie Bookshelf: Seeing What Others Don’t

Seeing What Others Don’t by Gary Klein 2014, 2017

Klein presents a new perspective on how to view decision-making. Insight. To Klein, insight is “an unexpected shift in the way we understand things”. He notes that organisations and companies stress the reduction of thinking errors and cognitive biases unproportionately more compared to gaining insights, which is just as important to improve performance. He discusses ways on how to gain insight, help others and ourselves to foster insight and what interferes with insight. In only 250 or so pages, Klein presents intriguing stories and case studies which convey his points well. A pioneer in naturalistic decision-making, he demonstrates how insight works in real settings.

There are five different strategies to gain insight, in which Klein has identified through compiling 120 cases: connections, coincidences, curiosities, contradictions and creative destruction.

Insights can be gained from contradiction. The expression of disbelief in reaction to the inconsistencies of our current story elicit a “Tilt! reflex” which urges us to find a new, better story that makes more sense. Klein has used the example of John Snow and how the miasma theory was a contradiction to how cholera was actually transmitted in the 19th century. It was believed by the medical community then that cholera spread through foul air. Although, Snow knew this didn’t make sense when he had read a story about a sailor’s death in a lodging house. A few days later after that sailor’s death, another person checked into the room and contracted the disease. To Snow, why didn’t other people in the lodging house get sick? In accord to miasma theory, surely the disease should spread in currents and infect most people in the vicinity. Then Snow had a Tilt! reflex, observing that people with cholera had problems in their digestive systems, rather than their lungs, indicating that it would’ve been contracted through ingesting something. Now, this was also a connection, one of the other five insight strategies. So Snow investigated the Broad Street pump incident, finding out that it was actually dirty water that spread cholera. Earlier on, this has been rejected by many scientists at the time but was accepted eventually with the convincing connections and evidence.

But what inhibits us from having these insightful revelations? Klein notes that in the workplace, insights are obstructed because of organisations solely focusing on reducing errors and uncertainty. They do this by imposing tighter standards, increasing controls and stressing the precision of schedules. As we can see, this can lead us to have a passive stance and concrete reasoning – two of the four reasons on why we miss insight. The other two are being gripped by false beliefs and a lack of experience.

Although you might’ve never thought about what insight is before, Klein helps the reader understand the process more and accentuates the importance of it, in decision-making and everyday life. To him, “having an insight is an act of creation” and “a story we can tell ourselves and to others”.

Priming Effect: Humans as Associative Machines

You might think that decision-making requires thoughtful deliberation and reasoning, going over the available course of action, weighing up the pros and cons. Though, our unconscious might have a lot to do with it more than you think. We aren’t even aware about its doing, we even deny that it has anything to do with our decisions. Certain ideas, words and events act as a stimulus to how we respond to a subsequent stimulus. Humans are associative machines, making continuous connections and links. And this phenomenon is what psychologists call the priming effect.

A simple idea activates many other ideas associated with it. It can even change your behaviour; for instance, when exposed to the word eat, you would identify and respond quicker to its associative words (food-related) in a list, like fork, vegetables, hungry. It can even change our feelings, body language and movements. We might feel temporary disgust and twist our face when we see an unpleasant word like vomit, then eliciting the idea of a hangover, nausea and stench. And it has been studied that when exposed to words associated with the elderly, we actually walk slower without even knowing! Such a phenomenon where we make motions unconsciously is named the ideomotor effect.

Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1996, Bargh et al. had subjects unscramble sentences that contained words associated with old age, like bald, wrinkle, bingo and Florida. After this task, the participants had to walk down the corridor to the elevator. The time it took for them to walk to the elevator was measured by the researchers. They found that subjects primed to old age walked slower by an average of a second (8.28s) than the control group (7.30s). We can infer that when exposed to a particular stereotype, it influences our behaviour and movements to be consistent with it – the activated stereotype. And all of this was done without any awareness! The participants were questioned after and none of them noticed that the words had a common theme.

Though, in Bargh’s third experiment, it showcased the effect of stereotypes and how it primes hostility. Caucasian participants had to go through a tedious computerised visual task. Immediately before each trial, an image of a young male African American face or a young male Caucasian face would flash on the screen for 13 milliseconds, faster than the subjects could consciously process. On the 130th trial, the computer showed an error message, indicating that the participants have to start all over again. The ones exposed to an African American face were recorded to be more hostile and frustrated. Every participant then had to complete the Racial Ambivalence Scale and Modern Racism Scale, to which the researchers found out that there was no significant correlation to racism and the hostility recorded. So even if you think you’re tolerant and accepting, you might react in a hostile manner unconsciously. This really displays the potency of priming and how seemingly trivial things can unconsciously change our emotions, behaviour and attitudes – for the better and even for the worse!

A study conducted by Bateson et al. in 2006 showed that priming cues can affect how altruistic we can be. An honesty box was placed in a university coffee room, which was where people have to pay for their drinks. Each week, the banner above the honesty box would change between a picture of flowers or a picture of eyes. It was found that people paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed rather than the flowers.

As we can see, the image of eyes significantly increased their contributions to the honesty box. This is because it primes the perception of being watched, so they would give more due to the “reputational consequences of behaviour”, changing their behaviour to be more cooperative and generous.

Priming can be seen everywhere in everyday life. It controls your decisions and actions without you even being consciously aware of it, so it’s difficult to overcome it. It can even be said to be a cognitive bias, due to it acting as a mental shortcut during decision-making. But it has its pros – like with the previous experiment, influencing others to be more generous. And research has found that when primed right, individuals can become more healthy and active. Even if priming can be harmful to the people around us due to stereotypes, steps can be taken to do more good, without even having to be explicit with people.