This beautiful book speaks about how the expectation of extracting rational behavior from our irrational selves is flawed. If we were completely rational, we would easily make choices which were in our long term interest and just as easily let go of short term pleasures and gains which did not serve us in the long run. But the fact that this is not how we are is illustrious of our irrational self. However, in spite of the seeming malignant nature of this dilemma there is a benign upside to this phenomenon, which is what this book is about.
The book also behooves readers to think of oneself as the subject of an experiment whose aim is to discover the truths about one's own self and behaviors. The author shares some fascinating experiments with revealing insights. There is much available for us to learn about ourselves should we so desire and go about it meticulously.
While we figure out what experiments we may want to conduct on ourselves, we may think through the following findings and lessons from the book and think of how they may apply to our day to day behavior, what could be learned from them, how could we grow as a person of greater self awareness and discipline:
Incentives and Performance Incentives up to a certain point motivate us to learn and to perform well. But beyond that point, motivational pressure can be so high that it actually distracts an individual from concentrating on and carrying out a task (an Inverse-U relationship between Incentives and performance - Yerke's and Dodson's experiment).
- This is why very high bonuses can actually adversely impact performance. This is especially true of knowledge based tasks. For mechanical efforts, high incentives may work.
- This is also where the teaching from Gita comes into play where it is taught that one should do one's duty with diligence, focusing on the effort, remaining unattached to any rewards.
- This result also points to the importance of effective relaxation and stress management techniques which allow one to take on more, focusing more on the effort and being less scared or anxious at the hands of the possible outcome. Here, meditation and spirituality have significant bearing on improving performance.
- The other very important implication of this outcome is the impact on creativity. Since creativity requires a mind free of fear and pressure, high incentives in knowledge field can get long hours from workers but not sufficient quality of creative output.
- Keeping bonuses frequent and/or low (or simply adequate salary amounts) can be a good way to reduce performance anxiety and foster creativity.
Work and MeaningAs a society we often see work as a means to an end, an unavoidable obstacle to life's pleasures and sense of freedom. Yet, work is not disjointed from happiness. For most of us work is a critical piece of our identity, without which we feel lost and misplaced. Why we work has serious implications for how we work or how our work environments either engage us or turn us off and away. If work is tied to meaning, which it is, then one should be able to connect the dots between what one does and what one holds meaningful in life . For someone who values being of immediate and tangible service, working in a back office, shuffling papers around without much human contact, would be quite meaningless even though it probably does serve some some people in an indirect but meaningful manner.
Even without such individual specific sense of meaning, we all have innate needs for appreciation and acknowledgement. These needs get thwarted , and consequently motivation, when our efforts go unacknowledged or feel wasted ("
Sisyphean's mythology story"). The greater the effort one puts in, the more the pride one takes in the quality and quantity of one's output, the more it may hurt and be demoralizing to see one's effort go unacknowledged. Here then lies a key for good management - understand individuals, align their efforts with their value system, acknowledge their efforts, and create clear, tangible, and meaningful goals and outcomes for individuals to achieve/deliver - if one is to create, foster, and preserve motivation and engagement that is. We tend to seek and to find meaning at the intersection of our efforts and resulting outcomes.
Another great insight into the matter is provided by the teachings of Frederick W Taylor and that of Karl Marx. Taylor was a proponent of the idea of division of labor to achieve local efficiencies (productivity gains), while Marx questioned the loss of meaning for the individual (the human cost) if the worker could not connect his efforts to the big picture due to such divisional breakdown. Any of us who work in large corporations can attest to the truth of Marx's sentiment.
Although the author touches upon the need for acknowledgement and sense of completion as necessary ingredients for creating meaning at work, I believe there are few additional critical factors involved, namely: a sense of growth/learning, a sense of belonging (co-worker/team dynamics or relationship quality), and a sense of one's ability to influence change (feeling of autonomy and empowerment).
A few important lessons:
- As long as we are doing something that is somewhat connected to our self-image, it can fuel our motivation and get us to work much harder.
- Even for an activity that one is passionate about, meaningless working conditions can very easily kill any internal joy one may derive form the activity.
- The translation of joy into willingness to work seems to depend to a large degree on how much meaning we can attribute to our own labor.
- Sucking the meaning out of work is very easy - simply destroy a person's work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be little more subtle, just ignore them and their efforts.
- Two critical components for meaningful work - giving employees a sense of completion and an active and timely acknowledgement for a job well done.
- Division of labor is one of the dangers of modern work-based technology, which allows projects to be broken into very small tasks and assign to each person only one of the many parts. Doing so, risks taking away an employee's sense of big picture, purpose, and completion. In the absence of meaning employees may have little desire to put their heart and soul into their labor.
The IKEA EffectWe all take pride in things we create whether as parents, inventors, or as employees. Our investment of effort increases our affinity and attachment toward the output of that effort, provided the challenge keeps pace with our effort (if the challenge is too great it is unlikely to result in affinity for lack of progress). This attachment causes us to overvalue our creation as well as leads us to (mistakenly) believe that others would value our creation just as much. The author refers to this as the IKEA effect, for obvious reasons. However, to enjoy IKEA effect, it is necessary for our efforts to result in success, even if that success simply means that the project was finished. If effort does not lead to completion (or is unfruitful), affection for one's work plummets. This could be one of the reasons why "finish what you start" is a sage advice. That which we leave incomplete, makes us feel bad about ourselves. Since we do not like to feel bad about ourselves we start believing that it is the task or the subject at hand that is the problem and hence we develop an aversion to the subject, thereby losing our affinity toward it and closing the door on it in our life. This can stymie our progress in many ways and on many fronts. Nikola Tesla was adamant about finishing what he started. He once started a 20 volume book series on a particular subject. Halfway through the first book he lost his interest but so great was his discipline of "finish what you start" that he did not give up and finished all volumes. Bill Gates too is known for not giving up until he has finished what he started.
Another important aspect of this effect is that since (the right amount of) effort creates affinity toward what it is expended on, in our laziness or shortsightedness, when we forego effort and seek claim only to the results, we lose a depth of enjoyment, which would otherwise have been our to enjoy since it is often the effort that creates the long term satisfaction.
This also ties into the Not-Invented-Here (NIH) syndrome, as per which we do not give much worth to what we did not create. Consequently, in order to build a sense of ownership, put effort into it (IKEA effect); to get another's buy-in, help them believe it is their idea. For essentially, IKEA effect is people love what they put an effort into, while NIH is people reject what they did not create.
The author complied the following four take aways:
1.
The effort that we put into something does not just change the object. It changes us and the way we evaluate that object.
2. Greater labor leads to great love (or hate/frustration if left incomplete?)
3. Our overvaluation of the things we make runs so deep that we assume that others share our biased perspective.
4.
When we cannot complete something into which we have put great effort, we don't feel so attached to it.
Hedonic Adaptation (Happiness Effect) This is the emotional leveling out when positive and negative perceptions fade. One important aspect that hedonic adaptation has toward effective decision making is that we can be influenced by the initial appeal of an outcome and forget that we will eventually adapt - in general we are not good at predicting our own happiness. The thing to remember is that even if we feel strongly about something in the beginning, in the long run things will even out and will not be as ecstatic or miserable as you expect.
Some keys to changing the adaptation process by interrupting them:
- People will suffer less when they do not disrupt annoying experiences, and enjoy pleasurable experiences more when they break them up. Any interruption would keep people from adapting to the experience.
- To increase the duration of the happiness experience slow down pleasure and not indulge in everything all at once (don't do all your pleasure shopping in one instance!). Similarly we can maximize overall satisfaction in life by shifting our investments away from products/services that give a constant stream of experiences toward those that are more temporary and fleeting (purchase experience, not product).
- Purposefully add randomness to your daily routine/day to disrupt adaptation.
- Our happiness is influenced by how we compare to those around us. Choosing an environment where we feel good about ourselves (because we have more, are more etc) can make us much happier.
Empathy & Emotion"One man's death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic." - Stalin
"If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at one, I will." - Mother Teresa
"Whoever saves one life
Our decision to jump in an help someone spontaneously in driven by three psychological factors:
1. Our proximity to the victim - either physical or a sense of kinship.
2. Vividness of description or perception
3. Drop-in-the-bucket effect - your faith in your ability to single-handedly and completely help the victims of a tragedy (one can counteract this effect by reframing the magnitude in one's mind - instead of thinking about the problem of massive poverty, think about feeding five people).
It is almost impossible to think of number/calculations and feel emotions at the same time. Hence, once one starts computing the cost of helping, the compassion level goes down. This might also indicate to an effective way to deal with surge of high emotions - start counting or calculating in your head. The only effective way to get people to respond to suffering is through an emotional appeal, rather through an objective read of massive need. Once we attach an individual face to suffering, we are much more willing to help, and we go far beyond what economists would expect from rational, selfish, maximizing agents.
Long term effects of short term emotionsIt is important that we do not act on our negative feelings since all emotions seem to disappear without a trace! We take our past actions (driven by a certain emotion) as indication of what we should do next, even when that original emotion no longer exists. If we see ourselves having once made a certain decision, we immediately assume that it must have been a reasonable one (Self-Herding). That way, the effects of the initial emotion end up influencing a long string of your decisions.
Your DECISION (one driven by emotional component) has set a precedent for your future behavior since self-herding kind of animal and look to our past decisions as a guide. It hence becomes critical to be very mindful of our decisions and actions we take driven by the emotional states. We have a very poor memory of our emotional states but we
do remember the actions we took. In essence, once we choose to act on our emotions, we make short-term DECISIONS that can change our long term ones:
The emotional cascade:
decisions --> emotions --> DECISIONS (short term) --> DECISIONS (long term)
This means that when we face new situations and are about to make decisions that can later be used for self-herding, we should be very careful to make the best possible choices. Our immediate decisions don't just affect what's happening at the moment; they can also affect a long sequence of related decisions far into our future.
Practical lessons:
- If we do nothing while we are feeling a emotion, there is no short- or long-term harm that can come to us. We must give ourselves time to cool off before we DECIDE to take act action under the emotion's influence. If we don't our DECISION might just crash into our future.
- However, if we react to the emotion by making a DECISION, we may not only regret the immediate outcome, but we may also create a long-lasting pattern of DECISIONS that will continue to misguide us for a long time.
- Finally, our tendency for self-herding kicks into gear not only when we make the same kinds of DECISIONS but also when we make "neighboring" ones (we not only remember our past decision but we also interpret it more broadly instead of automatically repeating what we did before; it becomes a general indication of our character and preferences and our actions follow suit - "I gave money to a beggar, so I must be a caring guy; I should start volunteering at the soup kitchen" - In this type of self-herding we look at our past actions to inform ourselves of who we are more generally, and then we act in compatible ways).
Miscellaneous LessonsThe book also covers other important themes such as:
- Our innate desire for vengeance and the healing effect of an apology
- Our ability to adapt to almost anything with time, and the role that hope and our ability to assign meaning to that pain play in alleviating or at least in reducing suffering
- How we adapt more easily to gain (pay increase) but it is much harder for us to put up with a loss of same amount (pay cut)
- While our level of attractiveness does not change our aesthetics tastes, it does have a large effect on our priorities (less attractive people view non-physical attributes as more important);
Following are some of the irrational influences that one needs to be mindful of:
- Endowment Effect: We tend to overvalue what we have.
- Loss Aversion: The misery produced by losing something we feel is ours outweighs the happiness of gaining the same amount. Loss aversion makes it difficult for us to give up something even when doing so may make sense.
- Status Quo bias: Generally we tend to want to keep things as they are.
- Irreversibility of decision bias: Making choices is hard enough, but making irreversible decisions is especially hard.
- Sunk cost fallacy: Looking back at all our efforts, we are very reluctant to write them off and change our decision.
- People are fantastic rationalizing machines.
In summary, then we all have biases; we must learn to doubt, question and test our underlying assumptions by running experiments and reviewing the results and applying the lessons learned.
Other Pointers- "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair.
- Glossophobia: Fear of public speaking.
- Contrafreeloading: Aterm coined by animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely available food.
- Not-Invented-Here (NIH) Bias: If I(we) didn't invent it, then its not worth much.
- Hedonic Adaptation: The emotional leveling out when positive and negative perceptions fade.
- Hedonic Treadmill: We look forward to the things that will make us happy, but we don't realize how short-lived this happiness will be, and when adaptation hits we look for the next new thing.
- "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." - Sherlock Holmes
