Public commitment pledges are a surprisingly effective and free way to help you reach your goals. A public commitment pledge is simply writing what you will or won't do, perhaps something you know you find hard, signing it and displaying it publicly.

In her excellent book, How to Change, Katy Milkman describes how the simple intervention of a public commitment pledge in doctors' offices significantly reduced prescriptions of unnecessary antibiotics—just through a poster on the wall. Commitment pledges are a form of what Katy calls a soft commitment device (of Odysseus fame). This strategy helps us stick to our commitments even when tempted to go astray.

Pledges may work through our desire for consistency and create cognitive dissonance when considering going against the pledge. The benefits of what we desire to do, say "eat cookies," are pitted against the potential guilt or discomfort we'd feel by going against what we said we'd do, not "eat cookies." You don't want to let yourself down. The pledge gives us a greater chance of sticking to our actions and a defence against our present bias.

Is there something you wish you'd do more of or less of? A simple public commitment pledge could help you on your way.

Other free ways to help you achieve your goals: Temptation bundling, The Fresh Start Effect, commitment device, Nine-enders, Implementation intentions

Public commitment pledge

The fundamental attribution error is the attribution of the source of behaviour to the character and personality of a person above the consideration of context. It's sometimes described as over-attributing causes to disposition over situation.

In a classic example, if a driver swerves in front of you suddenly, it's easy to attribute the cause of the behaviour to the driver being a jerk, i.e. to their character. What we may not see is that the driver is late to pick up their kids, was distracted by a challenging conversation they just had at work, and they're worried they've gone the wrong way and are driving an unfamiliar car.

If a colleague is late to meet us, we might infer that the person is lazy or disrespectful when, in fact, they may have been held up by a traffic accident, been on the phone with a sick relative, and have had trouble sleeping lately. If we are late for a meeting, well, then it's probably for all sorts of good reasons outside our control.

Like confirmation bias, the fundamental attribution error is a big one that can easily colour our interactions with others without us being aware of it.

Remember that what we see is just a tiny fraction of any other person's life and that we don't see the complete picture.

Minimise judgment, particularly around character and personality.

Where appropriate, ask if anything is bothering others.

Build empathy for others as you would for yourself.

Reflect on the positive things others do.

Also see: self-serving bias, attribution bias

The Fundamental Attribution Error

The Barnum effect is our tendency to apply personal meaning to statements that could apply to many people.

For statements such as the results of a personality test, the effect is stronger if:

they are sufficiently vague — handy phrases include "at times," "a tendency to," "some of," etc.

they are mostly positive — we're more inclined to accept positive evaluations of ourselves than critical ones

You may recognise these tricks from a horoscope or your star sign, magicians, fortune-tellers, fortune cookies, con artists and, perhaps, marketing. There's a fascinating magician's technique you may have seen called cold reading that uses the Barnum effect with other tricks ("I see someone with heart pain in your family.") to make it seem like they know a lot of personal details about someone at a first meeting.

Originally from Bertram Forer, who called it "the fallacy of personal validation," it was later known as the Forer effect until Paul Meehl suggested it should be named the Barnum effect after P. T. Barnum (now of The Greatest Showman fame) for the way he could easily fool an audience with these techniques and to emphasize that we should all know and be on the lookout for being fooled. For that reason, I called it the same here.

Bertram Forer ran an experiment with his students (pdf), giving everyone the same results for their individual personality assessment. Generally, the students all thought the same description applied very well to themselves. He used these statements taken "largely from a newsstand astrology book":

You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.

You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.

You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.

While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.

Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.

Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.

At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.

You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.

You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof.

You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.

At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.

Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.

Security is one of your major goals in life.

I learned about it from a discussion of the Meyers-Briggs test (I'm an ENTP btw).

Here's Paul Meehl advocating for the Barnum effect:

"Many psychometric reports bear a disconcerting resemblance to what my colleague Donald G. Paterson calls “personality description after the manner of P. T. Barnum” ... I suggest—and I am quite serious—that we adopt the phrase Barnum effect to stigmatize those pseudo-successful clinical procedures in which personality descriptions from tests are made to fit the patient largely or wholly by virtue of their triviality; and in which any nontrivial, but perhaps erroneous, inferences are hidden in a context of assertions or denials which carry high confidence simply because of the population base rates, regardless of the test’s validity. I think this fallacy is at least as important and frequent as others for which we have familiar labels (halo effect, leniency error, contamination, etc.). One of the best ways to increase the general sensitivity to such fallacies is to give them a name. We ought to make our clinical students as acutely aware of the Barnum effect as they are of the dangers of countertransference or the standard error of r."

Meehl, P. E. (1956). Wanted—a good cook-book. American Psychologist, 11(6), 263–272. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0044164

The Barnum effect

A self-serving bias is one where we attribute our failures to external factors and our successes to our own admirable qualities and efforts.

So, a tennis player might internally credit their athleticism and skill for their victory, while the loser may blame the umpire's decisions, their racket or the court. You might have seen it in professional sports.

Self-serving bias may be rational and positive, maintaining our self-esteem and a positive view of ourselves. Conversely, it can hide reality (and give referees and umpires a more draining job) or cause us to reject negative but objective feedback.

Self-serving bias is a form of attribution bias where we misattribute behaviours or events to characteristics rather than circumstances or vice versa.

Self-serving bias is covered nicely (pdf) by Donelson R. Forsyth in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd Edition.

Self-serving bias

The Droste effect is an endless picture-in-picture—a part of the picture contains the whole picture, which contains the picture, which contains the picture, and on.

Most of us are likely familiar with it from the fun visual effect you often see when sharing your screen on a video call, which contains the video call where you're sharing your screen, on which is the video call where... Always entertaining. Google calls it an infinity mirror.

The name derives from a Dutch brand of cocoa powder, Droste, where the classic advert was a picture of a nurse carrying a tray with a box of the cocoa powder, with the picture of the woman on it carrying the tray with a box of the cocoa...

Articles about the Droste effect often mention the amazing M.C. Escher's Print gallery, a picture without beginning or end.

The Droste effect

Dark patterns are when people design interfaces intending to deceive or trick. Sadly we are all familiar with these. They're everywhere. 

It could be the free trial that unexpectedly led to a subscription or the subscription that was easy to sign up for but had to be canceled by mailing in a letter. Or it could be an outward attempt at giving control over privacy but with options so confusing as to do the opposite. Perhaps you tried to adjust cookie preferences on a news website but could only find a button to 'Accept all' after editing your preferences—grrrr! Tricking people like this into sharing more information than intended has come to be known as Privacy Zuckering.

Remember popups that could only be closed once you found a tiny 'x' that moved around the screen?

I recently wanted to pause a subscription only to be told it would invalidate all the accumulated unused credits I'd paid for (I'm still paying). The Pudding published a great analysis of unsubscribing from online services. At times this may be unintentional—there's naturally less incentive to work on great account closing and unsubscribe experiences than on signing up.

The example in the sketch was a real one I experienced (I wish I'd grabbed a screenshot) from an airline website where the designers buried the option not to buy insurance within the country select list.

And they're not just online. Sneaky casinos employ design in the physical world for their gain, such as removing references to time passing, such as clocks or windows, using mazelike navigation and the continual winning sounds of jingling coins. 

"Dark patterns" was coined by Harry Brignull and documented at the Deceptive patterns site and now a book.

Dark patterns

The isolation effect is our tendency to remember an item that stands out in some way from a set of otherwise similar items—you might easily guess, for example, which name we are more likely to remember from a list of Tom, Terry, Angelica, Theo and Tyler.

When presenting information, the isolation effect is practical if you wish to draw attention to specific items. By standardising the presentation of other items in a list, maybe by muting the colours, making them the same size, or removing features that stand out, you can draw people's attention and improve people's memory of your chosen items.

The isolation effect is standard in web design by using distinctiveness: red notification bubbles on a set of otherwise homogenous apps, a "most popular" plan more prominent than the other options, or a Call-To-Action (CTA) button in a contrasting colour.

The isolation effect is also known as the Von Restorff effect after the German psychiatrist Hedwig von Restorff. See, for example, Hunt, R.R. The subtlety of distinctiveness: What von Restorff really did. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2, 105–112 (1995) for a summary of Von Restorff's most cited paper on the effect.

The isolation effect

Attribution bias includes a set of more specific biases where we may attribute behaviour to fixed personality traits or characteristics of a person rather than specific circumstances or actions. For example, a child may be labelled a genius or gifted when they actually had a supportive environment and worked hard, or someone may be labelled a loser rather than recognising specific circumstances that led to some failures.

Criticism — one of the four horsemen of relationship apocalypse — can become toxic when it's attributed to someone's personality traits. For example, calling someone 'lazy' rather than sharing how it makes you feel when they don't keep the place tidy.

A form of attribution bias may be applied to whole societies via the Destiny Instinct.

Specific examples of attribution bias include the fundamental attribution error and self-serving bias.

Attribution bias

Optimism bias is a tendency to believe that things will turn out well in spite of past evidence or circumstances.

It can be extremely helpful. It allows us to attempt things that many may deem impossible. It probably helps drive entrepreneurs even when everyone is doubting them. Optimists are often healthier and happier.

But it can also undermine us. We might overestimate our chances of success because of what we want to happen rather than what's likely to happen. We may feel pressure from others to give a rosier outlook — like when you might underestimate a timeline when speaking with your boss. We might want others to succeed, or they may be paying us money and be hoping for good news. We probably think we'll get more done next week. We probably think we'll be more disciplined than we will be. We might think that this time it'll be different, or that everyone can't be wrong. Or we may be just discounting evidence without realising it.

Related: Hofstadter's Law, survivorship bias, Kitty Hawk moment

Optimism bias

You know that time when you couldn't concentrate at all because of someone having a phone conversation right next to you? It's the trouble with a halfalogue. Hearing only one side of a conversation, it turns out, can be more distracting than hearing the whole dialogue. This might stem from the unpredictability of the conversation — our brains working overtime to connect the dots and uncertain what's coming next.

Halfalogues were investigated in a paper by Lauren Emberson and coauthors: Overheard Cell-Phone Conversations: When Less Speech Is More Distracting. The distraction potential of halfalogues could have more serious impacts on a driver from a passenger's phone conversation in the back.

A halfalogue is a nice extension of the dialogue and monologue.

Emberson, Lauren & Lupyan, Gary & Goldstein, Michael & Spivey, Michael. (2010). Overheard Cell-Phone Conversations: When Less Speech Is More Distracting. Psychological science. 21. 1383-8. 10.1177/0956797610382126.

Halfalogue

Maslow's hierarchy of needs, or Maslow's pyramid of needs, was created as the basis for a theory of human motivation by the psychologist Abraham Maslow shared in a 1943 paper. He was interested in what gives our lives meaning and what makes people happy — particularly in the context of a world increasingly driven by consumerism.

He suggested there were our basic needs and our higher level needs — psychological, spiritual, and growth.

In the basic needs you have physiological needs such as not being hungry, thirsty, or cold. Then we have our safety needs such as being free from the threat of violence, or being healthy.

Then we have the higher-level needs of love and belonging including friendship, connection, family. Then esteem needs such as self-respect and self-esteem. And finally our need for self-actualization — reaching our potential, achieving mastery, or being the best we can be.

Maslow continued to refine his original framework. For all its flaws — it always provokes discussion and counter-arguments in my experience — it's remained a clarifying and remarkably enduring model.

If you're designing for needs I prefer Patnaik's hierarchy of needs.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Extrinsic motivation is the carrot or the stick — when the motivation for doing something is an IF/THEN reward or punishment. We use extrinsic motivation all the time like paying people to come into work, or issuing speeding fines to make people slow down. It can work well for simple problems, basic compliance, and short-term results.

However, when you need long-term behaviour change, when creativity is needed, or you're tackling complex problems, external rewards and the threat of punishments can even decrease performance and productivity. Rewards only go so far if you want to inspire a hit album, create the next Oscar-winning film, or create a breakthrough product. That is, for most of the important work we do in our lives, including I believe parenting, using extrinsic motivators of rewards or punishments is likely to be far less effective than tapping into intrinsic motivation — motivation that comes from inside ourselves.

I like Dan Pink's Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose framework for intrinsic motivation. His TED talk on the Puzzle of Motivation is also a fun and interesting watch.

Extrinsic motivation

Physics envy refers to the wish that a field of study would turn out to be as precise, as predictable, as repeatable, and as amenable to modeling and theory that replicates practice as physics is.

As it turns out, most fields that involve people — such as economics and the social sciences — are rarely so tidy and orderly and neatly mathematically modeled. They are instead usually messy, uncertain, and filled with context, nuance, history and confounding factors such that making sense of them in broadly applicable ways is rather difficult. And while we do our best to quantify and identify effects, or cleanly isolate our cognitive biases or our quirks of behavioural psychology, rarely are they able to live up to the purest standards of physics. It's enough to turn one green with envy.

It reminded me of the best laid plans of our Saturday sports coaches turning for their substitutes to execute their plans, only to find the players climbing trees in the adjacent field.

Physics Envy

The Rhyme As Reason Effect suggests that we're more likely to consider something as accurate or truthful when it rhymes. In a lovely study that asked people to consider the accuracy of both rhyming and non-rhyming aphorisms, "Woes unite foes," or "What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals," for example, were considered more accurate than "Woes unite enemies," or "What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks."

A classic example outside of old sayings is OJ Simpson's trial where the defense attorney memorably noted "If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit!"

You can read the study in the delightfully titled paper, Birds of a feather flock conjointly: Rhyme as Reason in Aphorisms (pdf), by Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh.

In a related note I was always curious how "Beer before wine, you'll feel fine," tallied up with what I heard in the US: "Beer before liquor, never been sicker," or even "Grape or grain but never the twain." It turns out from a neat 2019 study that, whichever way round you rhyme them, they have no effect on your hangover despite how persuasive the Rhyme As Reason effect may be — even after a few beers.

The Rhyme As Reason Effect

It's been called the expectation effect. Is it a B or a 13? It appears that how we see depends on the context and what we expect to see.

This neat example is from a 1955 experiment by Jerome Bruner and A. Leigh Minturn. One of the findings, other than people seamlessly identifying a B or 13 when surrounded appropriately by letters or numbers, was that when asked to draw what they saw "as is" participants were more inclined to draw a closed or partially closed B when it was surrounded by letters. What participants expected to see appeared to affect what they did see.

Context is king

Meh. Blah. Can't be bothered? Not excited about the future? Perhaps you're languishing.

Adam Grant's NYT article, There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing, resonated with so many people as the coronavirus pandemic drew on. While not having a mental illness or being clinically depressed, many of us associated with a general stagnation or apathy towards things — an absence of, or poor, mental health. Languishing is a counterpoint to how we might feel in prime mental health, full of wellbeing or Flourishing.

While languishing may not be necessarily dangerous in itself, if you're languishing you may be at higher risk of mental illness.

Naming our state can be a first step to doing something about it

Looking for small wins that show us progress

Asking how our friends and family are doing — having the opportunity to speak to someone about it

You also might consider working on the 5 Ways to Wellbeing, getting in some forest bathing, walking a labyrinth, aiming for some flow, noticing when you're happy, or seeing what might bring you hope.

The term languishing for that part of the mental health continuum is from Corey Keyes. See for example, Corey L. M. Keyes. “The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life.”Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 43, no. 2, 2002, pp. 207–222.

Armchair and inspiration, as usual, from Bill Watterson.

Languishing

Confirmation bias is the big one. The bias that leads us to live in a world of our own choosing, finding the information that already fits with our beliefs and ignoring or discounting what doesn't. It's the bias that makes two sides get further apart rather than closer together.

Edward De Bono in Water Logic suggested a metaphor for thought as channels of water. As water runs through the channels the channels get deeper, and as they get deeper it pulls more of the water into the main channels until there is only one way. Confirmation bias can act like that.

It's important to work to understand different opinions, not discount them upfront. To use our empathy to understand why others feel the way they do. And when we deliberately seek out information that challenges our point of view we will usually find a richer, more nuanced world that helps build bridges with others rather than drive us apart.

Confirmation bias

There are both constructive and unproductive ways to argue. One classic unproductive style is what Philippa Perry, in The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, calls fact tennis. With fact tennis, the goal can seem more like scoring points over your opponent rather than actually finding a workable solution — facts are hit back and forth until one person wins when the other has no more reasons left to counter with. But of course the argument isn't resolved and the result is a hollow victory and a still frustrated loser.

For a more productive argument we can reframe from winning to understanding — we can seek to share how we feel about it, and to understand how the other person feels about the conflict and their point of view, and take that into consideration. When we have a greater understanding we can move forward together to find a workable solution. As Philippa explains "Finding out about differences and working through them is about understanding and compromise, not about winning."

Fact tennis

The essence of the bystander effect is that in a situation where someone needs help, if others are around who could help then it discourages us as individuals from stepping in.

While there may be many reasons for this, and it has been replicated in lots of different contexts, a recent study of CCTV footage paints a more optimistic picture. In the study they saw that although the likelihood of any individual intervening may be reduced with other bystanders present, the chances of someone coming to help increases the more people are around. In 9 out of 10 public conflicts they studied at least one person and often several came to help. So the lady in the sketch would probably be OK.

Given the bystander effect I remember being taught that if you are in a motor vehicle accident don't assume that someone has called for help already: it could help to choose someone directly and ask them to call for help to avoid everyone thinking everyone else will do it.

It reminds me of the story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody (also known as the responsibility poem):

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have.

The paper referenced is: Philpot, Richard & Liebst, Lasse & Levine, Mark & Bernasco, Wim & Lindegaard, Marie. (2019). Would I be helped? Cross-national CCTV footage shows that intervention is the norm in public conflicts. The American psychologist. 75. 10.1037/amp0000469. (pdf)

The Bystander Effect

Ever since I came across Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow it has stayed with me as a simple framework and beacon for finding joy, creativity, and total involvement with life.  

"What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us come to being happy."

When researching happiness Csikszentmihalyi found that be they climbers, ballet dancers, chess players, or gardeners, people gave surprisingly similar descriptions to how they felt at their peak experience while performing an activity.

When in flow people are wholly focused on the present moment, they experience a strong sense of control, they lose their self-consciousness and their ego, their experience of time changes so that time can fly by or a moment can seem to slow down, and the joy of performing the activity becomes an end in itself.

Flow has a fairly simple set of conditions which I find myself using as a little mental checklist:

When climbing, a prototypical flow activity, it's clear that you are trying to get to the top, you can immediately see if you are making progress and whether an action progressed you or not, and it's wise to pick a wall that is difficult but not impossible, for you to enjoy it. No wonder climbing can be so addictive.

By contrast, it was evident to me that none of these were present when studying for my PhD.

I also like flow because it reminds me that peak happiness is unlikely to be experienced by sitting around watching the TV.

The quote is from, Flow, the psychology of happiness, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who also taught me that any name can work to do great work.

Flow

Sometimes we’re smart enough to know that we’ll have trouble doing something we want to get done. That might be going to the gym, finishing that essay instead of goofing around, quitting smoking, doing your taxes, or, if you happen to be Odysseus, listening to the sirens’ song without going crazy and diving in the water or driving your boat to be crashed on to the rocks.

In these cases, you can try a commitment device: a voluntary restriction to help maintain our future self-control. In Odysseus’s case he instructed his men to fill their ears with wax and to bind him the mast and told them if he asked them to let him go then they were to bind him tighter. In this way, he managed to listen to the sirens’ song without ending up at the bottom of the sea.

Other commitment device’s may be more mundane, such as publicly announcing to your friends that you’re going to do something, paying a bunch of money to sign up for something upfront, or handing a $20 bill to a friend with instructions not to give it back until you’ve done what you’re supposed to.

Here are some nice examples of commitment devices.

Commitment device

In 2016 the British Government had plans to launch a new polar research vessel. To decide on a name for it, they put it out to a public vote. Despite a number of serious, meaningful or historic names suggested, like Shackleton and Endeavour, one name put forward, Boaty McBoatface, quickly overwhelmed all the other options put together.

It turns out this is not limited to the British sense of humour, and people will vote for a joke candidate because it’s fun and subversive, and people want to see what will happen if it wins. This NYT article by Katie Rogers has some other fun examples of competitions going ‘wrong’, such as an attempt to name a bridge 'Chuck Norris’ and selecting a school for the deaf as a concert location: What you get when you let the Internet decide.

I learned about the Boaty McBoatface effect from Dr Roger Miles on the Human Risk podcast. Also see Conduct Risk Management: A behavioural approach by Dr Roger Miles.

The Boaty McBoatface effect

Astronauts returning from space have repeatedly shared experiences like this:

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty.”— Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut

“When we look down at the earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet. It looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile … Anybody else who’s ever gone to space says the same thing because it really is striking and it’s really sobering to see this paper-thin layer and to realize that that little paper-thin layer is all that protects every living thing on Earth from death, basically. From the harshness of space.”— Shuttle/ISS astronaut Ron Garan

The overview effect, coined by Frank White, is kind of the mother of seeing the forest for the trees. It’s the realisation that we live on a fragile planet, we are all connected, and this is all we’ve got.

The sketch is based on the image of earth from the moon taken on the Apollo 11 mission.

The overview effect

There’s something about being out in Nature for 3 days or more that resets us and improves our mood, our wellbeing, and how well our brain is working. Observed by river rafting guide Ken Sanders who used to see a marked change in the groups he led on the 3rd day of being out on the river, it’s known as the 3-day effect. Since then, David Strayer and his group at the University of Utah have conducted studies that measured a real change in our calmness and even our creative problem solving after 3 or more days in Nature.

“I think it takes the first two days and nights to wash away whatever veneer of civilization you have brought with you. The new reality begins on that third day.”

More about the 3 day effect at National Geograhic: This is your brain on Nature and REI: The Nature Fix.

No doubt similar things at work to the magic of forest bathing.

The 3-day effect

We have a natural tendency to think that big events must have big causes. For instance, in one study, participants who were told that a plane had crashed and everyone died were more likely to believe it was a terrorist incident than one in which they were told a plane had crashed but people survived. It might also help explain why, when we want to roll that big lucky number to win, we might find ourselves giving the dice an extra shake before rolling, as if the extra effort might lead to the better outcome.

Normally, proportionality bias makes a lot of sense, but sometimes it leads us astray. Working with software, for example, might help train this out of us as a mere misplaced comma can bring entire systems grinding to a halt. And small changes to ecosystems, or, say, a small temperature rise on a planet, can lead to massive consequences.

Proportionality bias is considered one of the drivers of conspiracy theories. For example, we might be inclined to think that someone like Lady Diana couldn’t possibly have just died in a driving accident — there must be more to it. Or JFK couldn’t have been killed just by a lone gunman — there must be a larger plot at work.

Proportionality bias

The paradox of how groups of people are able to take actions that no one in the group actually thinks is a good idea. Though individually, we each may think that an idea is a bad one, we may go along with the group decision thinking that it’s just us that disagree when, in fact, no one thinks it’s a good idea.

It was coined by Jerry Harvey, a management professor, who illustrated the phenomenon with a fictional story of a family who ended up on a rubbish day out to Abilene that no one wanted to do.

On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch until the father-in-law suggests that they take a trip to Abilene (53 miles north) for dinner. The wife says, “Sounds like a great idea.” The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, “Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go.” The mother-in-law then says, “Of course I want to go. I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.”

The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.

One of them dishonestly says, “It was a great trip, wasn’t it?” The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, “I wasn’t delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of you.” The wife says, “I just went along to keep you happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that.” The father-in-law then says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

The group sits back, perplexed that they decided to take a trip that none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.

More paradoxes: The coastline paradox, Jevon’s paradox, the liar paradox, the transparency paradox, the paradox of choice

Also see: groupthink, the bandwagon effect

Harvey, J. B. (1974). “The Abilene paradox: the management of agreement”. Organizational Dynamics. 3: 63–80. Excerpt as quoted from Wikipedia :) 

This is not to diss Abilene. I’m sure it’s a neat place.

The Abilene paradox

Ever had that feeling when people were saying well done or thank you for what you did, that you didn’t deserve it? It’s called imposter syndrome.

It’s a pernicious and pervasive feeling of doubting accomplishments and fear of being exposed as a fraud — any moment, everyone will wake up and realise you aren’t so great after all.

My thoughts: Hang in there, keep trying your best, stay humble, and don’t take things too seriously.

Imposter syndrome

What makes you trust someone in a professional context? I liked this simple equation by Charles Green which makes it a combination of how credible, reliable, and how intimate — or how safe you feel with that person — divided by the self-orientation of the person — are they focused on their interests, or simply paying more attention to themselves vs being genuinely interested in you and your success. Depending on how you scored this abstract model I guess that would mean that trust is either undermined by someone focusing on their own interests, or strengthened the more they are focused on yours.

The trust equation

A deceptively simple, almost too simple to notice, heuristic —  a mental shortcut to solve a common problem — where we consider the likelihood of events by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind. In simple terms, things that we can easily recall or where we can think of examples, we generally consider as more important or more common than other things.

If we were asked to consider the divorce rate in the community, we might evaluate that by considering how many of your acquaintances are divorced. If none of your friends are divorced you’re naturally less likely to think the divorce rate locally will be high.

In many situations it makes good sense to give some credence to what you remember easily. However, in situations involving probabilities in particular the heuristic will lead us predictably astray such that more often I think of it as an availability bias — a predictable pattern of thought and behaviour leading to incorrect conclusions. 

So, the vividness of shark attacks causes us to overrate how likely they are to actually occur. Or we’re more likely to worry about lions than hippos, even though hippos kill more people each year than lions. Or the risk of being struck by lightning vs stuck by a car crossing a road. Or, the prevalence of violent crime on the news compared to the likelihood of you being a victim. Or the fact that it’s cold outside and yet the planet is gradually warming.

Here’s a 1973 Kahneman and Tversky paper: Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability

The availability heuristic (and bias)

The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar identified that an average person’s social network appeared to follow simple scaling laws from the closest friends — who you would seek personal advice or help from in times of severe emotional and financial distress — through your superfamily (or close friends), to your acquaintances (or clan), whom you might invite to a party, to your most casual friends (or tribe). At each level, the number of people typically increases by about a factor of 3. So you might have 5 close friends, 15 in your super family, about 50 in your clan and about 150 in your tribe.

The 150, with some variance, seems to be around the limit for the number of people we can keep track of and reasonably call part of our social network and maintain as a cohesive group. Partly perhaps due to limits of our memories and also to the effort it takes to maintain the relationships.

There are many instances of the ~150 in action, for example, in challenges of transitioning companies as you exceed 150 employees while maintaining cohesiveness, the size of Neolithic farming communities and the basic unit size of Roman armies.

The number is actually 148, but 150 is catchier and seems fine between friends.

Dunbar’s number: 150

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is an amazingly simple way to uncover if and how strong your implicit biases may be. For example, you could test if you have a bias on gender roles (as in the sketch), race, religion or in fact any attitudes you may have. You could forget about reading this and simply go take the Implicit Association Test online now and you’ll get the idea and perhaps surprise yourself.

In the example I gave in the sketch, you could see how strong your biases are for traditional gender roles by measuring the difference in time it takes to sort first career words towards men and home and family words towards women, and then sorting the other way around.

It’s fascinating, and a little uncomfortable, to see your implicit attitudes so clearly come to light. Don’t forget to try taking a test.

The Implicit Association Test

In Dan Pink’s book Drive, he looks at scientific studies showing that the all too common approach to motivating people involving rewards and punishments, or the carrot and stick approach, ultimately doesn’t help motivate people for the tasks and work we have to do today.

Instead, we do our best work when driven by intrinsic motivation — motivation from inside us rather than imposed externally like rewards or punishments. And the 3 facets he highlights that help intrinsic motivation are:

Autonomy: being in control and able to guide both what we do and how we do it

Mastery: our desire to continually be improving and learning and bettering ourselves

Purpose: working towards something we think is worthwhile. Having a North Star to aim for and a reason it’s worth doing what we’re doing.

I find it a useful framework to think through whenever I’m not feeling motivated or when I want to help make sure the people I’m working with are motivated.

Also see: flow at work, Goldilocks tasks, the zone of proximal development, on parenting

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Sketchplanations tagged with psychology