Mindframe

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...

If you've been hired for a job in the last thirty years, chances are you've heard of Myers-Briggs. It's a personality diagnostic tool used by everyone from self-searching college kids to Fortune 500 companies. It's understandable why employers embrace the Myers-Briggs Inventory. If there is a way to figure out ahead of time whether or not you're going to 'fit in,' it could save the company money in the long run, and you might avoid working for a company you don't like. If the test can prove you've got the right stuff, maybe you'll even skip a couple of rungs on your way up the management ladder. Perhaps someday you'll be the one ordering the personality testing of the young upstarts seeking to unseat you from your hard-fought throne. Obviously, when it comes to business, this is all a pretty big deal. If you're like me, you probably believed the Myers-Briggs was supported by some serious clinical evidence. After all, this is a ...

Your smartphone has more computing power than the computer that took Neil Armstrong and crew to the moon. And this is only one of the staggering technological advancements we've made in the last 50 years. Have you ever wondered why technological advancements, a byproduct of the analytical brain, have far outrun our ability to create any kind of significant improvements in our emotional governance? Wars, murder, and mayhem have gone unabated for thousands of years, and yet this week Apple announced the introduction of a new iPhone with fingerprint recognition. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, Mark Twain said something along the lines that any newspaper publisher, regardless of the era, could always bank on headlines like "Trouble in the Middle East" and "Revolution in South America". Twain was uncanny about the consistency of humanity's inability to live and let live. So why have our emotional brains hit a roadblock? Why haven't we wipe...

  When it comes to brain biases, one that gets an awful lot of play is the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It's a phenomenon demonstrated by many studies, but it all started with, you guessed it, Dunning and Kruger. 
The pair surveyed undergrad college students who had just taken a test, asking each student to predict his or her score. Then they compared each student's guess against the results. The students who did really well on the test had slightly downgraded predictions. The students who did poorly, on the other hand, had overestimated their scores by an average of 30%. In Daniel R. Hawes' article "When Ignorance Begets Confidence: The Dunning-Kruger Effect" ,  he shares the same general conclusion from another study: 
"Participants who took tests in their ability to think logically, to write grammatically, and to spot funny jokes tended to overestimate their percentile ranking relative to their peers by some 40 to 50 points, thinking they ...

As you can see from the above graph, global warming is pirate-based.  It's something I think we all suspected, but were hesitant to advance until the facts could be summarized in a handy graphic. There is something about information delivered via graph that instantly lends an air of unassailable authority. The person trapped in the cube next to you, or even the guy down at the gas station couldn’t possibly carry the credibility of a simple graph. It is an axiom of business that any presenter worth his or her salt is going to fill their PowerPoint with charts and graphs. The more the better, and the more oblique and difficult to read the best. Data delivered with a graph says "Here is the evidence, plain and simple. Let the ascending and descending lines tell you the story." The problem with the story, as with the graph above, is that we aren't just suckered into believing correlation implies causality. We start thinking correlation is causality. Governments...

Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. This simple truth is often ignored. Maybe it's not surprising. After all, it doesn't take much work for information to masquerade as knowledge. With a million statistics and soundbites at your fingertips, the internet can be an incredible tool for information-mining. But a fistful of data points doesn't necessary translate to truth. It's a concept perfectly embodied by Wikipedia, that convenient-but-at-times-questionable fount of facts, inconsistencies, and outright falsehoods. The idea behind Wikipedia is that once enough people read and edit a post, the best version will ultimately win out. In the abstract, this sounds good, a sort of Darwinian movement towards truth. But the world is full of examples where people individually and/or collectively fail to do the right thing. Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect theory would go one step further and say that people don’t even always act in their own self-inter...

Last week, I talked about whole brain strategy . This week, a look at what happens inside a workplace when a company or organization tries to implement a new policy without understanding how the human brain works. If you've ever witnessed a giant disconnect between the systems a company claims to use, and the way their employees actually operate (call it Ghost Ship Syndrome, if you will), unbalanced brain strategy may very well be to blame. So without further ado, I give you: The Top Six Errors in Unbalanced Brain Strategy 1.    Ignoring the importance of habit 53% of our day is composed of habits, or bits of neural code that dictate specific behaviors. For example, we tend to sit in the same chair every night for dinner, even when all the chairs are identical to each other. Habits are built through repetitive action, which gradually reinforces certain neural pathways by adding layers of an insulator called myelin. Habits take roughly 21 days to create and...