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Does Multitasking Ruin Your Ability to Multitask?

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Last week I went on a gorgeous scenic train ride through the Canadian Rockies. We were pretty much entranced by the scenery, which only got better with each mile.

A couple seated near us took it in differently. In their 30s, they each spent about 50% of their time reading a Kindle (latest model, her), or an iPhone kindle book or iPhone game (him).  Another 25% of their time was spent sleeping.  The remaining 25% was jumping up with their (very cool hi-powered) cameras and going to the open-air platform to snap a few pics, to then return to their digital or somnolent worlds.

I felt myself feeling judgmental, which of course is my problem, not theirs. At least I didn’t say anything. But in the end, it got me curious.

Who does that?
From the BBC comes a possible answer.
A study reported in the British Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and reported in the BBC News Blog suggests that three skills are critical for successful multi-tasking. They are:

·        Paying attention and screening out irrelevant information

·        Organizing working memory

·        Ability to switch tasks.

The study identified two groups of people: multitaskers, and non-multitaskers, and applied a classic psychological test of each skill to each group. In each case, the non-multitaskers out-performed the multitaskers. 

Say the study’s authors: 
"The shocking discovery of this research is that [high multitaskers] are lousy at everything that’s necessary for multitasking," Professor Nass said.
"The irony here is that when you ask the low multitaskers, they all think they’re much worse at multitasking and the high multitaskers think they’re gifted at it."
Several of the commenters on the blogpost insist either that they themselves are excellent multitaskers, or that the tests selected do not in fact test for multi-tasking. Me, I’m inclined to go with the authors.

The study authors themselves suggest that the remaining “pressing question” is whether multitasking degrades skills, or people with degraded skills are drawn to multitasking. Me, I figure it’s a classic predisposition-plus-opportunity thing, not unlike alcoholism or a bad sense of humor.

I hypothesize that playing an iPhone game while travelling through the Canadian Rockies on a sight-seeing train probably qualifies as multi-tasking. While I couldn’t judge how well they were doing in the digital world, I suggest they were doing badly at noticing the analog world, and their switching appeared pretty clumsy.  As to sleeping: hey, what do I know what their nights were like? Maybe they were massively jet-lagged.

But enough about others. I wrote the first paragraph of this blogpost watching a re-run of Two and a Half Men, one I’ve probably seen twice before. And I stopped in the middle to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Plus I like my coffee a lot, and like to claim it keeps me sharp, though I’m increasingly doubting that. So I’m not exactly pure snow here.

Plus, it’s not a value thing. There are a lot of things in this world that require being good at multi-tasking. More than in the past. The ability to focus and concentrate may still be critical to some things, but probably not as many, proportionately, as in the past.

But I do think focus and mindfulness and paying attention are critical to trust. Trust may be more rare, less frequently required, than in the past; but the nature of its requirements haven’t changed.

Maybe the big question is: can we switch gears between multi-task mode and single-minded focus mode? Is there a flip-switch move we can make, an exercise we can conduct, that will let us enter the other realm?

Judging from the couple next to us, it’s doubtful. Their social interaction, unlike most on the train, was pretty much nil, even with each other. And judging from my own experience, changing habits is awfully, awfully hard.

It takes a lot of focus to be able to multi-process, especially since multi-processing degrades the ability to focus. 

 

Why Did the Bear Cross the Road? What August Teaches Us About Interdependencies

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August is a big vacation month in North America and Europe. So it’s not surprising to find columnists writing about lessons learned from their summer travels. Nor is it surprising they’d learn lessons from what most of us do on vacation—getting outdoors and connecting to something less cerebral and urban than our daily routines.

Take Nicholas Kristoff, in “Food for the Soul.” His visit back home to the Willamette Valley in Oregon leads him to wax eloquent about the price we’ve paid for large-scale industrial efficiency in agriculture.

His co-columnist Thomas Friedman, on safari in Botswana, writes in “Connecting Nature’s Dots” about what we can learn by reading the "newspaper" of markings in a dirt road; the remarkable connectedness in nature.

And Natalie Angier, in “Brain is a co-conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop,” suggests the antidote to a vicious circle of stress that hardwires even more stress into the brain. The antidote is August.

Having just returned from vacation myself, it struck me that my own reflections followed a similar pattern. I took a vista-on-steroids trip from Vancouver to Calgary, with stunning views of rivers, deserts and mountains from train, helicopter and roadside. Fabulous memories and photos—but from all of it, one image stands out.

It’s the view of several animal crossings being built across the trans-Canadian highway near Banff.

The crossings look pretty much like any other bridge built to carry a local road over a highway—except that they’re for animal roads. They carry not asphalt, but earth and vegetation. The road down their middle is buried below the edges, so animals can’t see the gas-powered people traffic beneath them as they cross on their own roads.

Built for deer, moose, porcupines, marmots, bears, bighorn sheep, ground squirrels and other inhabitants of the neighborhood, the bridges prevent cars from crashing into moose on the highway—something good for neither moose nor car.

But roadkill prevention alone could be handled just by fences. More broadly, the bridges keep the highways from dissecting ecologically integrated communities into fragmented pieces. Animals require certain geographic ranges of movement to sustain themselves as a population. In communities like Banff, the delicate balance between town garbage regulations, coyotes, wolves, bears, bobcats and dogs makes clear the lessons of interdependence between all creatures and their ecosystems.

Why should a Canadian living in Nova Scotia give a damn whether a deer crosses the highway in Alberta? Why should an Albertan care, for that matter? The only answer is, because they have evolved a society that grants social permission for the collective care and feeding of the interdependencies that underlie society.

Granted, those of us in urban US environments can also cite extraordinary examples of social interdependence. Cities don’t work without massive social recognition of the need to get along together.

But the animal bridges provide a counterpoint to, for example, the current health care debate in the US.

If the Canadians can recognize and act upon—at a Federal level—the value of protecting inter-species interdependence, why can’t their neighbors to the south figure out the value of providing universal basic health care coverage to their own species?

Evolved social structures—including trust—have to begin with the recognition that we’re all in this together. August is a good time to remember the interdependencies that make trust so valuable.

Selling Without Making Buyers Feel Sold (Part 1 of 2)

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(This post was originally published in RainToday.com).

One obvious purpose of selling is to persuade buyers to buy what you are selling. Most people have no trouble agreeing to that proposition.

Yet the harder you try to get people to do what you want them to do, the more likely they are to push back, resist, and generally behave contrarily.

Again, I think most people would agree.

Put those two statements together, and we can easily see selling as an ongoing struggle to get people to do what we want without making them feel that we are trying to get them to do what we want. Selling has at its heart a struggle to reconcile these two truths. You want to sell. They don’t want to be sold.

When two truths collide, one tends to lose, or they both tend to get watered down. But the way out is not to give up one goal (to sell) or the other (to not cause the feeling of being sold); it is to fully recognize both and transcend the apparent paradox.

It can be done. Here’s how.

The Tension Between Sellers and Customers

This paradox is hardly new. Sellers have palpably felt since time immemorial the tension to selling. Most sellers resolve the tension by one of three strategies:

  1. Defaulting to Truth One: hard selling 24-7 to anyone who comes within feeding range
  2. Defaulting to Truth Two: being nice and giving away money, relying on the hope that guilt will induce a sale
  3. Living With It: internalizing some form of denial, schizophrenia, or multiple personalities.

But there is another way.

The Other Way to Sell: Time, Gifts, and Trust

People resist being sold. But people love receiving gifts. In fact, receiving a gift induces a sense of obligation on the part of the recipient. Which suggests a strategy of "feels like" gift-giving might be the best form of selling.

For services businesses, there is an analogue to gifts—it’s what’s called sample selling in product businesses. Sample selling in the services might mean brainstorming, a small project, a "lunch and learn," a webinar, a series of articles, a series of conversations for which you don’t bill time, or sharing of some previous work.

Sample selling works even better in intangible services than in businesses that have "hard" products. The best way for a client to learn how to work with you is to let the client work with you. Create a sample experience.

But that’s only half the problem. The other half: if you set out to give a gift with the express intent of inducing guilt-based buying, you’ll get the reverse—outraged backlash at what is perceived as bait and switch, duplicity, two-facedness.

A gift has two features: it is open-ended, and it implies an ongoing relationship. (Think of Don Corleone in the movie The Godfather: "Perhaps, sometime in the future, and that time may never come, I will call upon you for a favor.") It is non-specific. It is not legally or logically binding, but it carries huge emotional obligation.

When we try to use the language of the market: "If you give me this, I will give you that" or "If you do this for me, I will do that for you," things change. That is the language of a contract, of money, of transactions.
The trick is for the seller to give up attachment to the specific short-term outcome of a particular gift to a particular buyer in a particular timeframe. The seller needs to give a sample as a gift, a generally social-obligating offer, not as a hard-obligating transaction.

Applied to selling, this means a strategy of loosely controlled sample selling is far more powerful than a tightly controlled strategy of transactions.

In simple terms, if you’re generous as a policy to a sensible group of people in the short term, many of them will buy in the long term.

Part 2, tomorrow: Why this kind of selling is so hard; how to do it; the paradox of great selling.

Does Your School Trust Its Students? Do You?

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Companies work hard articulating their values. For example, take a look at a short excerpt from Johnson & Johnson’s Credo.

  • Everyone must be considered as an individual.
  • We must respect their dignity and recognize their merit.

Thinking about and articulating values aren’t limited to big companies. A couple of years ago, one of my kids attended a school where the 8th grade students collaborated to create rules for their own behavior – values in action. The class worked hard together, and then voted on the rules the students would follow.

The rules the students created bear a passing resemblance to those quoted from J&J’s Credo – a document developed in an exercise that I would imagine took J&J many committee meetings and people hours to formulate. Here are the rules from the students as I recall them from parents’ night: ·

  • Be inclusive, share and work together
  • Talk things out
  • Don’t pull other people into your fights
  • Don’t get stressed out if an assignment is too hard
  • Always encourage fellow classmates
  • Include everyone all the time
  • Respect everything and everyone: classmates, teachers, and their belongings
  • Work hard to do your best.

I have to hand it to the school administrators. They believed in their students. They trusted that their students would create great rules for themselves. They also trusted that their students would both follow those rules, and impress upon each other the value of obeying or living by the rules.

And it worked! Designing rules collaboratively enabled both buy-in and self-enforcement. When these kids finished eighth grade they had a great start collaborating on, creating, and living values. I look forward to seeing how they bring their collaborative skills and values into the working world in a few years.

The Thin Line Between Trusting and Self-Delusion

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Chris Brogan is, if not a new media god, then assuredly a prince-in-waiting. Unpretentious and wildly prolific, there may be higher quality bloggers out there—but they put out one-tenth of what he does, and his quality:volume ratio is good enough that I nearly always read him.

So what if a popular blogger like Chris puts out a spoof—an April Fool’s day blog—and no one picks up on it?

That’s what happened, twice in a row. First, he posted “Get More Twitter Followers—Today!” an infomercial-type get rich quick genre spoof. In case anyone didn’t get it, he followed up with 10-no-4 Days to Become a Social Media Expert!

And—you guessed it—apparently these two posts were huge hits. Chris is partly bemused and partly seriously wondering why. (Now, Chris is no dummy—of course he knows why. He’d just like to see fellow-bloggers like me spell it out in various ways. OK Chris, here’s my take).

Are People Deceived? Or Are They Delusional?

On the face of it, there are two theories why people would over-react to these blog titles.

Theory 1. People trust Chris Brogan and, holy cow, if he says so, it must be true!
Theory 2. People trust anyone who’ll promise them get-rich-quick schemes—they are sadly self-deluding.

The truth is, as usual, all the above, and a few more. You can chalk it up to naievete, or the triumph of hope over experience, or the enduring ego-centric belief that god is uniquely talking to us and us alone in providing these windows to opportunity—I’m not sure the reason matters.

The point is: it’s a thin line from trust to self-delusion.

Is the Decline of Trust Vastly Over-reported?

Hearing of an obituary having been published about him, Mark Twain famously wrote that “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” I wonder if the same may not be true of trust?

We’re all familiar with the headlines of declines in trust among professions, government, business and other institutions. I don’t disbelieve them; but at the same time:

  • Are you using your credit card more online these days to purchase goods? Someone is. Has their level of trust in online commerce gone up?
  • Are states gaining more revenue from lotteries than they were four years ago? (I can’t find data more recent than 2007—someone else?). If so, does that mean we trust state government more these days?
  • If Chris Brogan’s blog stats go up when he promises instant karma, does that mean we’re now in a post-Madoff economy and more easily trust online promises of fame and fortune?

I guess what I’m getting at in juxtaposing these data is that first, measuring trust is a bit like weighing fog. You know there’s something there, but by the time you get your hands around it, much of it has burned off in the sunlight or condensed on the measurement instrument. Measuring longitudinal trust on the same question with the same audience seems to work; beyond that, I find it hard to draw many conclusions from comparative studies except at the grossest levels.

Secondly, the human capacity to BS ourselves is quite remarkable. We’re all quick to decry others’ obsession with get rich quick schemes. But there are an awful lot of “others” out there, and some of them look a lot like us.

And it’s hard to tell the difference between sensible trusting and insensible self-delusion.

Me, I clicked on Chris’s first link. There, I said it. And I’m still not clear why I did it. Do I trust Chris Brogan? Or am I a self-deluding fool?

Don’t forget about answer "d. all the above."

The Dance of Trust

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Much has been written recently about trust.  Not so much, however, about just exactly how it gets created. Think of it as a dance—the dance of trust.

Trust is the end result of a dance between two people. Like ballroom dancing, the roles are not the same. In ballroom, one person leads, the other follows. If each plays his her role, it’s a beautiful thing. If, however, both people try to lead, you get feet stepped on and general ill will.

Trust also has two differing roles. One is the role of trustor—the one who does the trusting. The other is the role of the trustee—the one who is (more or less) trusted. And just like in ballroom, if the roles aren’t played cleanly, you get something of a mess. (And if both follow, well, you get nothing.  No risk, no gain).

The Dance of Trust Starts with the Trustor

The dance of trust is initiated by the trustor—the one who does the trusting. It is (s)he who takes the first step—and the one who takes the biggest risk.

By contrast, the trustee role (being trustworthy) is low-risk, but requires more work. It’s also more passive; being trustworthy is a strategy of attraction, not action.

An example: Let’s say BioPharm wants to hire an accounting firm to do some systems work. BioPharm interviews several candidate firms, and ends up deciding to choose Jones&Jones. BioPharm can justify the decision, but also says that “it was basically because we trusted these people to know us and to be straight with us.”

BioPharm is the trustor, initiating the dance and taking the larger risk–the risk of time, money and commitment spent on a new relationship.  Jones&Jones is the trustee, having been (successfully, in this case) trustworthy enough that it got asked to dance.

At this point, we have to lose the pure ballroom dance metaphor, because in trust, the roles have to change.  In ballroom, one person generally leads.  Not so in trust: you have to swap roles constantly.   So if not during the sales process, then shortly thereafter, Jones&Jones is going to have to take some risks and trust BioPharm.

If Jones&Jones doesn’t go out on a limb with some ideas, share its technology, offer a point of view, prepare to collaborate and be transparent, then BioPharm will pretty quickly be unsatisfied. Because once the initial trustor action is taken, it is up to the trustee to reciprocate, and offer to take some risks as well.

The Dance of Trust Requires Shifting Roles Between Trustor and Trustee

This frequent change of roles—back and forth—is what distinguishes the dance of trust. If Jones&Jones never takes a risk or trusts BioPharm, it will wear out its welcome quickly. And if Jones&Jones does take risks but BioPharm never reciprocates, it may be a mildly successful engagement, but it’s not likely to generate repeat business.

Here another metaphor applies: personal relationships. No good relationship lasts long (or stays healthy) if one side always gives and takes the risks; any good relationship needs the healthy back and forth provided by reciprocity.

Trust is, after all, a mutual relationship. But it is one generated by constantly shifting roles. The dance of trusting and being trusted is what generates the state of trust we hear so much about.

 

When Arrogance Feigns Humility

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At my seminars, one of the actions I suggest to increase perceived trustworthiness is to speak truthfully.

Sounds great in principle, until you get into just which truths you discuss.

Speaking conventional, obvious truths (“how ‘bout them Bulls”)  doesn’t do much to create either distinction or deeper trust. Hence the usefulness of talking about things that don’t get said by others (“Joe, I’m sensing some hesitation here—is that right?”).

At this point, attendees often raise the issue of propriety, as in, “Some things should best be left unsaid—you don’t want to embarrass people or make them uncomfortable.  And if people feel uncomfortable or embarrassed, they’re not likely to trust you anyway.”

I tell them my experience is that most businesspeople don’t suffer from telling too much truth, but from telling too little. And so on. We generally have good discussions about the issue.

But occasionally that discussion goes to a higher plane. So it was recently, when an attendee and I talked at a break:

“I buy what you’re saying about our general hesitation to take personal risks in the workplace,” she said, “and you’re right—we’re making the client take the hit for our own insecurities.”

“But what about those cases where it’s actually true? Where to hear something really would be upsetting to the client, even if it’s true, and potentially important for them. Maybe it’s an issue I’m not totally sure of.  Maybe it’s a situation where I can get by with just saying most of the truth; or maybe the risk of embarrassment to me truly does exceed the benefit of truth-telling to the client. Aren’t you really helping the client by taking into account what you know of their reactions and ability to hear tough truths, and packaging them accordingly?”

I thought to myself, “Those are good questions: and we do have an obligation to our clients to say important things in ways they can hear them. But we have another obligation, to figure out how to say those tough truths, rather than deep-six them.”

Yet, how to say that to this thoughtful and insightful person?

I suddenly remembered a wonderful quote from Martha Graham: 

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open."

I said to the participant, “I’m sure you don’t think of it this way, but is it conceivable that your genuinely good intentions and insights are nonetheless making you behave arrogantly? In the sense that you are depriving your client of the right to make this decision for him- or herself? And if you don’t trust your client to handle the truth–doesn’t that ultimately degrade their trust in you as well?”

I didn’t need to elaborate.  She reacted immediately with shock at the suggestion that she, a most pleasant person, could conceivably be thought arrogant; but in half a second I saw quickly saw in her eyes that she ‘got’ it, and understood the meaning, and the truth, of the question.

Then, I think, she smiled a bit. Which, I suspect, Martha Graham would have appreciated.
 

Trust and the TransAm

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My husband Mark doesn’t come to trust easily in the everyday world, but in some special realms he can build surprising bridges of trust with total strangers. Take the selling of one of his treasured Trans Ams to someone 2000 miles away, whom he never met.

Mark had his last two in a long line of muscle cars – all Trans Ams – in the garage, a ’71 and a ’78. He concluded one day that they deserved better homes because he wasn’t driving either of them more than a few hundred miles a year. The ’78 he sold immediately to a neighbor; we can still see it in their garage by looking from our front porch. The second one he held onto while he debated about keeping or selling.

In October, in the course of his “sell” research, Mark found a ’72 Trans Am for sale on e-Bay and contacted the seller to talk about how he, The Seller Guy, had set the price. (All the sellers and buyers in our e-Bay world are “The Guy”, as in “The Guy selling the Trans Am.”) As it turned out, The Guy was only selling a Trans Am for a friend, and was himself interested in buying Mark’s ’71. They continued their dialog offline.

The Guy then sent a hundred dollars or so – earnest money – as they negotiated. The Guy wanted to see more pictures; Mark posted 172 shots of the inside, outside, underside and every inch under the hood on his FTP site. The Guy sent another $3000 as they concluded the deal and tried to make arrangements for shipping the car and a considerable assortment of parts from New Jersey to Montana.

I don’t know how many cars you’ve shipped, but it seems that shippers take either parts or cars, but not both.

Months ticked by, and nine months later, in July, Mark got an email that The Guy had found a friend delivering a car to PA who was going to stop and pick up the ’71 in NJ to haul it back to Montana. The Guy wired the rest of the money. In August The Pick-up Guy showed up and the car and parts were lovingly handed over to the care of another stranger.

If you asked Mark (I did) what made him trust The Guy he’d never met, hold onto the car for months, and then load the car onto the truck of another stranger, he’d say it was that he didn’t do anything until he had money in hand. The Guy had to do all the trusting (and Mark was of course trustworthy.)

I think it goes deeper: they were members of the same tribe, who spoke the same language, and could be trusted because they established that each was what he said he was – part of the Trans Am tribe.
 

Sotomayor Was Right the First Time: A Wise Latina Does Know More

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Supreme court nominee Sonia Sotomayor now-famously said, in 2001, that she would hope a “wise Latina would make better decisions because of her life experiences than a white male.” 

As she noted, those have become her most-quoted words, overwhelmed by a firestorm of opinion characterizing her as racist or worse.  Before long, she was forced to eat her own words (as in a Boston Globe headline, “Sotomayor Repudiates ‘Wise Latina’ Comment.")

She was right the first time.  A Wise Latina woman does know more. 

Notice your own reaction in this instant, after reading this blogpost title and that last sentence.

Most of you had a quick emotional reaction—negative for most, positive for some.  You interpret it as a political statement, and you probably made an inference about my own political views.

Let me try to find the rarified air wherein that statement has nothing to do with racism or politics, and should not provoke any emotions at all.  It is simply a statement about the dynamics of human beings when they are cast in roles of minority and majority.  It should provoke no more adrenaline than an observation about the feeding habits of penguins.

The Dance of Majority and Minority

People observe and believe very different things based on whether they are members of a minority, or of a majority.  One group, I suggest, notices more, and knows more, than the other.

This isn’t about race per se: it’s about a mixture of numbers and power.  Suppose Group A constitutes 70% of a culture’s population, and 85% of its economic and political wealth.  Groups B and C each represent 10% of the population, and 5% of its economic and political wealth.

All groups—A,B and C—will view Group A as the dominant culture.  The habits, opinions, styles, language, likes and dislikes, family patterns and ideologies of Group A will dominate in institutions, advertising, government, etc.

If you’re a young A person, you conclude that your culture is the norm.  Mathematically, you are absolutely right.  Emotionally, you conclude that you are also “right,” and that other cultures, being in the minority, are odd, unusual, out of the ordinary.

If you’re a young B or C person, you see the same facts.  You also know that A people are the norm–you can do the math too.  Unfortunately, you likely also internalize the majority view that B-ness or C-ness is somehow odd, unusual, out of the ordinary.

It is but the tiniest of steps from the above for an A person to judge a B or C person as “weird,” wrong, or inferior–and to simply not notice many differences. More insidiously, it’s also a tiny step for Bs and Cs to think the same of themselves.  (Being a minority is a helluva psychic challenge).

Each group understands the As.  But the As impute mainstream characteristics—which happen to be their own–to everyone.  Hence they literally do not notice many characteristics of Bs and Cs, assuming them to be identical to mainstream (and their own) ways of life.  The most “normal” Bs and Cs, to an A, are those who most resemble As.  (“But you don’t look Jewish…”)

An example: look at the photo on the top right of this page (go to the URL if you’re getting this by text).  In this picture, those are the feet of a white person.

Of all the feet on all the dashboards of all the cars in the US, what percentage of the time are those feet likely to be the feet of a black person?

a.    0%
b.    5%
c.    10%
d.    25%

If you’re a white person, you’re likely to guess a number in line with the black percentage of the US population.

But if you’re a black person, you know the answer is a, or just about 0%.  In the black community, putting one’s bare feet up on a car’s dashboard, or a table, is considered just plain rude. 

The reason white people don’t know this is that black people know what happens if they try to explain it.  Picture yourself as an African American, trying to explain to a white senator  that his kids are rude because they see nothing wrong with putting their feet on the dashboard.  Will the Senator hear it as anthropological information?  Or as insulting racist talk?  Take a wild guess. 

So we have:

1. Minority people (black, in this case) know what to expect from everyone on the foot test. 

2. Majority people (white in this case) do not know what to expect from everyone on the foot test. 

3. QED: minority people know more than majority people.  Sotomayor was dead right.

Then why did she repudiate herself?  Because majorities tend to hear statements of minority knowledge as insults to the majority.

And, since majorities can’t see what minorities can, it’s a losing battle to protest.  Easier to repudiate yourself.

If you’re white, and think that blacks overstate racism, then ask yourself: how emotionally disturbed was I by this headline?  If the answer was, ‘a lot,’ but you also see the point of this blog, then that tells you how deeply embedded majoritism (racism, sexism, etc.) is in this society.  Your gut instinct was to hear the truth as an insult.  Just like a Senator who heard "a double minority person knows more then a white male."

Very sad, perhaps.  Yet also, simply very true.
 

Markets, Relationships and Trust

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Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational is one of several in the “Malcolm Gladwell” category of books.  Such books point out the counter-intuitive, and debunk the rational, linear, deductive explanations that we so often assign to social phenomena.

It’s an antidote to any professional (economists come to mind) who believe man is a rational, transacting, self-interest-maximizing calculator.

One of his most compelling points happens at the intersection of relationships and markets.  In his example, imagine a great Thanksgiving dinner at your mother in-law’s—all the fixin’s.  And then you offer to pay her, say $150, for the experience.  To your surprise, she feels insulted!

You are now persona non grata at your in-laws’.  As Ariely explains, you reacted to a social situation with a market response. 

What happens when social norms collide with market norms?  As Ariely says: “the social norm then goes away for a long time.”

Ariely channels Alfie Kohn, who 15 years ago in Punished by Rewards  pointed out the de-motivating effect of monetary rewards.  The intrinsic pleasure children took in games was destroyed when researchers paid the kids to play the same games. 

Extrinsic incentives work, said Kohn: they work to incent more extrinsic incentives.  But at the cost of destroying intrinsic motivation.

Ariely cites a day care center where parents occasionally came late to pick up their kids.  To reduce tardy pickups, a penalty was assessed.  Whereupon tardiness increased.  Parents were grateful for the “permission” to pay a fine rather than incur social guilt.

On the face of it, then, companies ought to use more social incentivizing.  Or should they? Companies built around devotion to shareholder value and metrics that devolve to financials are asking for trouble when they try to play an honest game of relationships. Then the social norms are gone, for a long time.

Markets do two great things: they tend to make things less costly or more efficient.  And, they require more transparency.

Take my blogpost of two days ago, A Case Study in Low Trust, about untrustworthy behavior in the financial planning sector.  The problem with industry associations like NAPFA is that, despite failing the public, they insist on concocting arguments to transparency.  Here’s a case where markets—in the sense of freely available information, and a reduction in personal relationships—is precisely what’s required.

Too many policy debates these days take place on the ideologically rigid dimensions. 

-in finance, “markets” vs. “relationship” is a useless debate; it depends
-in health care, it isn’t “markets” vs. “socialism;" it depends
-“government should be run like a business” vs. “government should be run for the people” is a red herring; it depends.

Where corruption exists we need markets and transparency.  Where children are educated, as Ariely suggests (and Gladwell and Kohn tend to agree), we need focus on relationships and intrinsic motivation. 

Trust is not automatically the province of either one–again, it depends.  Market-driven transparency  can increase our trust in financial planners.  More relationships can increase our trust of suppliers.  It depends.

How about your issue?  Is it better served by markets, or by relationships?