Transference Bias: A Tale of Bloody Wars, Baby Kings, and Bad Bosses


There was a time, and it was not so long ago, that conventional wisdom said if you were born into nobility, you possessed a set of superior traits that automatically qualified you for governance. Got royal parents? Congratulations, you've won the leadership lottery.

There was just one problem: the system often produced people uniquely unqualified to rule.

Consider Charles II of Spain. He came from a line of the Spanish Hapsburgs so intermarried that one ancestor appears on his family tree in 14 separate places. Charles took the throne in 1665 despite a host of physical and mental disabilities—he couldn't chew, drooled frequently, was never really educated, and at one point it's rumored he ordered his deceased family members dug up so he could look at them.

Consider King George IV of England, famous for his extravagant spending, love of leisure—and utterly selfish, irresponsible behavior.

Consider the many kings and queens who were handed the reigns to their country before they were old enough to put their own pants on.

Now consider: many of these people held the fate of nations in their hands.

A history pockmarked with unnecessary wars, massive public debts, and plain incompetence proves it out: leadership is not an inherited trait. Wisdom and judgement are gained through experience, not via bloodline.

These days, most surviving monarchs are more figurehead than supreme ruler. After all, the industrial revolution has ushered in modern times and modern thinking. Or has it?

Anyone working in business might guess where this is headed. Transference bias at its core presupposes that knowledge is not a requirement for climbing the ranks of leadership. ("If Jones displayed a hardworking can-do attitude over in sales, by golly he can certainly run the finance department!")

Today, "character, positivity, and fortitude" are the new blue blood in business.

Not that these traits aren't good things for a leader to have. Most certainly they are. But when it comes time to make hard choices, the sunniest attitude in the world is no substitute for expertise. It's the same way that Count Chocula’s noble birth doesn’t guarantee him wisdom in the deployment of his infantry.

Unfortunately, transference bias never died, merely dressed itself in new clothes. And like the old kingdoms at war, there is much collateral damage.

So the next time your new boss shows up green behind the ears, fresh from some other unrelated department, remember it could be worse. Your cubicle could be a castle wall, facing a catapult attack of dead rotting cows. And if there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that nothing is worse than dead rotting cows. Except for maybe the new minty-fresh boss you’re about to train…

Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more