Why Sisyphus is most likely not motivated

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What motivates us to work? In spite of many research finding, the belief that money does is still wide spread. Now think of Sisyphus, the king that, according to Greek mythology, has to roll a rock up a mountain for all eternity, and whenever he gets close to the top, the rock rolls all the way down again. If he had the choice and he got a lot of money for it, would he be motivated to keep on doing this?

Based on his TED Talk, behavioural economist Dan Ariely would most likely say no. He concludes from his experiment that it is meaning that motivated people. Moreover, people understand that meaning is important, but they don’t know how important it is. Acknowledging someone’s performance is a great motivator, whereas ignoring it is almost as bad as shredding it: it makes motivation plummet. And he confirmed the findings from his experiments in the “real world”.

For managers, team leaders and all those who are in charge of other employees, the consequence of these findings is pretty simple: when employees complete a task for you, acknowledge what they have done. Let them show or explain it to you. It might not always be possible to implement what they suggest. Furthermore, sometimes projects end before they have even begun, and whatever employees have completed until then is often of no further use. Moreover, what employees do is not always good, so it is not always possible to praise what they have produced. That’s just the way it is. But we should always acknowledge the effort they have put into it. When doing so, remember what we wrote about establishing high quality connections: always turn your full attention to the person. This does not require much effort. But the effects can be huge.

Thinking, fast and slow

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The 2011 book by Nobel Memorial Prize winner in Economics Daniel Kahneman outlines his research over the last few decades. Fast and slow refers to two systems we use when making decisions: System 1 is fast, instinctive and emotional, whereas System 2 is comparably slow, deliberative, and logical. He explains in which settings the systems work and where they have flaws. We came across a number of nice, short videos in which some of his ideas are explained.

 

The 2011 book by Nobel Memorial Prize winner in Economics Daniel Kahneman outlines his research over the last few decades. Fast and slow refers to two systems we use when making decisions: System 1 is fast, instinctive and emotional, whereas System 2 is comparably slow, deliberative, and logical. He explains in which settings the systems work and where they have flaws. We came across a number of nice, short videos in which some of his ideas are explained.

 

First, there is one that explains System 1 and System 2 and both the settings in which they work well and in which they are not quite as suitable.

 

 

We found two videos that explain in a bit more detail the biases our mind has. In the first one, it is outlined how our brain makes use of what you know and does not take into account what you might not know.

 

 

The second one explains anchoring, our tendency to rely too much on the first piece of information presented to us when making subsequent decisions.

 

 

In an interview with Jesse Singal on “The Daily Beast”, Daniel Kahneman explains what the practical implications of these biases are and why we better be aware of them. For example, when it comes to selection of leaders, he suggests we do not vote for the overconfident ones, but rather look at their achievements and make our choice based on that – which seems to be easier in organisations than in politics. When asked what he suggests in order to make sure that we make our decisions based on System 2, he gives quite a simple answer: “Slow down, sleep on it, and ask your most brutal and least empathetic close friends for their advice.”

 

Benefits of mindfulness at work

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Last week, we attended the EAWOP Congress, the 16th Congress of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology. During the congress, an Innovation Award was given to Ute Hülseger from Maastricht University for her work on the role of mindfulness for employee health and well-being. We attended her keynote speech.

Ute Hülseger and her colleagues Hugo J. E. M. Alberts, Alina Feinholdt, and Jonas W. B. Lang from Maastricht University in the Netherlands were interested in the effect mindfulness had on emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction.

Being mindful involves being aware of inner experiences without judging them and focusing on the present. Some people are more mindful than others by nature, but mindfulness can be trained by meditation practice.

One idea is that mindfulness reduces emotional exhaustion at work because it makes individuals perceive events in a receptive, non-judgmental and more objective way. As stress mainly stems from our judging the event and not so much from the event itself, mindfulness might thus reduce the levels of perceived stress. Another idea is that it enhances job satisfaction because it promotes self-determined behaviours by reducing habitual and automated functioning. Thus, it allows individuals to be in touch with their basic needs and values and realise them in their work.

The researchers also wanted to look at another mechanism often seen at work: surface acting, i.e. expressing an emotion (usually a positive one) that is different from the emotion one feels (usually a negative one). Thus, employees often fake an emotional state. For example, salespersons have to stay friendly when faced with an angry customer who offends them. Surface acting is positively related to emotional exhaustion and negatively related to job satisfaction.

Ute Hülseger and her colleagues conducted two diary studies in which they had participants report their mindfulness, levels of surface acting, job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. The second study additionally comprised mindfulness training for study participants. The key findings were (1) that mindfulness at work increases job satisfaction and decreases emotional exhaustion and (2) that an increase in mindfulness leads to less surface acting, higher levels of job satisfaction and lower levels of emotional exhaustion.

The original article was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and there is an outline of the two studies on the Occupational Digest blog.

After the talk, there was time for questions from the audience. Someone pointed out that the effects of mindfulness seemed to be overly positive and asked whether there were also downsides of increased levels of mindfulness. Ute Hülseger replied that to her knowledge, there were none when looking at the results from an employee’s point of view. However, when taking the employer’s perspective, there are some potential downsides of mindfulness because with an increasing level of mindfulness, apparently some employees decide to quit their jobs!

However, the beneficial effects of mindfulness might overrule its negative side effects. We have written something on this before, for example in our posts “Track your happiness” or “How meditation can improve the quality of life”. And if you want to learn how to be mindful, there are more than enough programmes out there. For example, in January we reported on Andy Puddicombe’s website “Headspace” where you can find many little tools that can help you improve your mindfulness without requiring a lot of time or effort. Go ahead and try it out!

Creativity or: the world is a construction kit

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Last week, we learned that in order to make kids learn, we need to address their curiosity and creativity. How can we do this? Give kids – and not only them, but also adults – the opportunity to just play and create things that might look crazy and even useless at first glance.Today’s post is not so much about scientific research. It is more about a kind of field experiment Jay Silver conducted. His idea was that that sometimes your hands know and your intuition knows. But sometimes what you know gets in the way of what could be. Thus, he simply had people try out whatever came to their mind. And people, including himself, created objects like a brush that played sounds while working with it, a mushroom organ or game controllers made of play-dough. In a TED Talk, he presents a few of these inventions.

The interesting thing is that even though one might not have been able to find a purpose for the objects he and others had created, they managed to sell them. After a while, he saw videos of people doing really crazy things, apparently inspired by his inventions. And all of a sudden, some of the inventions turned into something useful. For example, disabled people used them as auxiliary devices which they normally would not be able to afford. Professional musicians used some of the inventions. And so on!

Thus, Jay Silver sees the world as our construction kit that gives you many ways of expressing yourself. His idea of a perfect world is one that is being created by seven billion pairs of hands, each of them following their passion. So go ahead and just take some time to try something out. Whatever comes to your mind. You think it’s crazy? Good!

Improving learning at schools

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Nowadays, everybody is talking about the information society and the importance of lifelong learning. But how can people keep learning throughout their entire lives when we are lacking the basis, when they have never had a proper school education? In many countries in the world, dropout rates at school are alarmingly high. What goes wrong here and what can we learn from it, even if we are not at school anymore?

In a very entertaining TED Talk, Ken Robinson, a professor of education, explains what education is supposed to focus on when setting up programmes: (1) children are diverse and different and should therefore be taught a broad curriculum. (2) Educators should try to spark the light of their natural curiosity, which will make them really want to learn. Good teachers are essential for this, and they should be teaching in a culture of learning and not so much of testing. (3) Awaken and develop the powers of creativity because humans are a creative species and create their whole lives.
Most of our readers are likely to be out of school already. Some might have kids. They might want to take Ken Robinson’s advice to heart: treat your kids individually, find out what their strengths and interests are and help them pursue them. Address their curiosity and let them be creative. And what can you take from this for yourself? Pretty much the same. Find out where your strengths and interests are and set your learning goals in these areas.

And what else does it take to successfully keep learning and to achieve your learning goals? Grit. Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychologist from the University ofPennsylvania, looked at what predicts high school dropout vs. success, and she found that it was not IQ, family income or other factors, but that it was what she calls grit: the passion and perseverance to pursue a goal over a long time. We have reported on this before. Recently, she gave another TED Talk on her research.
She ends her talk with the words: we need to be gritty to get our kids grittier. We’ve come full circle: why not treat our children as individuals, address their creativity and let them be creative so that they develop a love of learning and the passion and perseverance to pursue their learning goals?

The switch in your brain

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Three weeks ago, we learned that our brain is more than a bag of chemicals. This means that different chemicals affect our brain functions in different ways, depending on where in the brain they are active. The conclusion was that if we want to understand the brain, we need to look at specific regions and circuits and the way they interact rather than at the brain as a whole. More evidence for this view comes from neurosurgery.

 

In a TED Talk, Andres Lozano, chair of neurosurgery at the University of Toronto, explains how very specific interventions in patients’ brains can lead to astonishing effects. When introducing the topic, he explains that different parts of the brain do different things and brain functions are localised within circuits. For example, there are parts of the brain that control movement, vision, appetite, body image, happiness/sadness, love/hate, avarice/generosity/empathy, judgement and empathy, or memory and cognition. When you are healthy and things work well, all these circuits work well. But every once in a while, neurons in these circuits are misfiring or are inactive and not working as they should. The way the dysfunction manifests itself depends on where in the circuits it is located. Thus, it could for example lead to motor or cognitive impairment. In order to bring these regions of the brain back to normal functioning, Andres Lozano and his colleagues use what he calls deep brain stimulation, meaning that they place electrodes in the brain exactly in the spots where the dysfunction is located. The electrode is linked to a pacemaker that can be controlled by a remote control so that the amount of electrical stimulation can be adjusted. In his talk, he shows absolutely incredible videos of people being treated with deep brain stimulation.

 

 

His conclusion is that as we know several brain circuits and the functions they control, we can access them and modulate their activity (motor, cognitive, or mood). He thinks that the method will have a lot more indications than the ones he presented and that in the future we will (hopefully) be able to help patients with many different diseases.

What can we learn from this? To me, it was just absolutely fascinating to see the effects of the deep brain stimulation. Impossible to describe with words only. These results show that we are beginning to understand some of the mechanisms of this incredible and fascinating organ, our brain. We will keep you updated with the latest research in this field!

Rapport från SIOP

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Världens största arbetspsykologiska konferens, SIOP gick av stapeln här om veckan i Houston. cut-e var på plats. Med sina 21 parallella sessioner under 3 dagar är det ett idealiskt tillfälle att sätta örat mot rälsen och träffa forskare och praktiker som driver utvecklingen inom fältet. Så, vad pratas det om?

Big data
Ingen kan ha undgått Big data som buzz-word de senaste åren. Fenomenet handlar om att göra förutsägelser och styra verksamheten genom analys av stora mängder lagrad digital information. Lätt att ta till sig tankegångarna för oss arbetspsykologer som är vana vid beslut baserade på statistisk analys av en stor mängd datapunkter. En ökad medvetenhet om kraften i big data i takt med att mängden lagrad information ökar exponentiellt i samhället är förstås oerhört intressant som ögonöppnare för vår bransch och ligger i linje med det uppsving de flesta större testleverantörer upplever just nu. Eller som rubriken i Harvard Business Review’s novembernummer upplyser oss om: ”Data Scientist – The Sexiest Job of the 21:st Century”. På Siop fanns förstås temat representerat av flera stora företag som styrt upp allsköns aspekter av verksamheten.  Allt från kalibrering av urvalsprocesser till hur Google mixtrat med lunchserveringen för att lura i sina computer geeks mer sallad.

Sociala medier
Som överallt annars var sociala medier ett ämne som fyllde bänkraderna. Vid analys av organisationer som använder sociala medier för att attrahera kandidater framgår att det är långt ifrån självklart hur kommunikation via dessa kanaler fungerar. Information via sociala medier uppfattas tex i större utsträckning som åsikter medan information på hemsidor uppfattas som mer faktisk. Undersökningar pekar också på att kandidater i första hand föredrar hemsidor framför sociala medier i samband med jobbsökande. Råd som lades fram var att organisationer bör tänka igenom noga vilken målgrupp som rekryteras via vilken kanal.

Majoriteten av presenterade studier på området var av mer deskriptiv art, utan tydlig teoretiskt underbyggd hypotesprövande ansats.  Alltså typiskt för ett tidigt stadium i ett gryende forskningsområde. Definitivt ett område där tekniken har kommit längre än forskningen och där vi kommer få se mycket mer forskning kring de närmsta åren.

Beslutsfattande
Beslutsfattande är ett forskningsområde som äntligen börjar ta plats på SIOP. Trots massiv litteratur – och även nobelpris till Daniel Kahneman – har ämnet förvånadsvärt nog hållit låg profil inom arbetspsykologin. Denna gång representerades fältet bland annat av Reeshad Dalal, som pratade om overconfidence, dvs människors tendens att vara säkrare på sina beslut än de egentligen har grund för. Det är inte så lite det felar: Beslut som fattas med 90 % säkerhet är korrekta till ca 50 %! En smula problematiskt är dessutom att det inte hjälper att vara medveten om sin överkonfidens; effekten kvarstår ändå. Vad ska man då göra för att begå färre misstag? En metod är att be om input från andra, en djävulens advokat, eller någon annan person som är neutral i frågan. Fler hjärnor fattar i regel bättre beslut än en.

Teamwork
Salas summerade kortfattat vad vi vet om teamwork och konstaterade att effektivt teamwork spelar stor roll inom organisationer. Viktiga faktorer bakom effektivt teamwork kan sammanfattas med tumregeln ”7 C”  – Cooperation, Coordination, Communication, Cognition (gemensam förståelse), Coaching (genom ledarskap), Conflict (hantering) och Conditions (normer och support from organisationen). Lyckligtvis är ju detta saker vi vet att vi kan påverka.

Personlighetstest och fusk
Den sk faking-problematiken har diskuterats så länge som det har funnits personlighetstest. Och ja – diskussionen lever vidare. Att försköna sina svar på personlighetstest för att öka chansen att få jobbet, kallar vissa forskare för ”faking”.  Andra forskare föredrar att kalla det för ”response distorsion”, eftersom det finns såväl medvetna som omedvetna orsaker till att arbetssökande får ”bättre” resultat än icke-arbetssökande. Det är inte bara benämningen av effekten som skiljer mellan forskare, utan även synen på om det spelar någon roll. Och vad ska man i så fall göra åt det? Mycket forskning ägnas åt statistiska korrigeringar av resultat i efterhand, men olika modeller för korrigering leder till olika resultat, vilket ställer frågetecken kring hur korrigerade resultat ska tolkas. Niel Christiansen påpekade att han hellre ser att forskning fokuserar på utveckling av test som inte är lika känsliga för response distorsion; det är bättre att minska effekten redan från början än att korrigera för den i efterhand. Såväl Niel som Paul Sackett lyfte fram att forskning inom forced choice-baserade personlighetstest tycks vara lovande för att kunna minska effekterna.

Skrivet av: Mats Englund, Manager Research & Development på cut-e Nordic

Stressed out? Have some chocolate.

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“Many of us will recall occasions when we skipped breakfast, grabbed a croissant or a muffin mid-morning, ate lunch staring at our computer screens or had fast food for dinner. If we’re a 21st century office worker, it’s likely we’re all familiar with these experiences.” These are the introductory words for a survey that investigated the connections between stress at work and unhealthy eating habits.

The full report by food psychologist Dr. Barbara Stewart-Knox of The Northern Ireland Centre for Food and Health (NICHE) at the University of Ulster and Herbalife is available online here.

4,980 office workers between 18 and 75 years of age in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy participated in the survey and reported their job roles, stress levels and eating habits. The good news was that eating habits amongst European office workers were healthier than for example those of American employees and overall okay. However, the survey also demonstrated that stress at work is related to high-energy food intake and unhealthy eating behaviours. Under stressful conditions, particularly women tend to overeat, and younger employees in middle- to senior-ranking jobs seem to be more prone to unhealthy snacking behaviours than older ones.

Why is this so? One explanation is that chronic stress is associated with reduced levels of insulin and leptin, the hormones responsible for storing energy. When less energy is stored, this means that also less energy is available when needed. Furthermore, lower levels of these two hormones seem lead to increased appetite, but decreased fat metabolism. Thus, when under chronic stress, we have less energy available and need to take more in, and we experience more appetite, while our fat metabolism does not work quite as well.

Interestingly, workers were found to eat healthier snacks when at work than when at home. One explanation provided in the report was that people want to present themselves as being on a good and healthy diet. But the other explanation is even more interesting: When returning from a stressful day at work, many people reward themselves by sweets or a glass of wine. Our internal reward system in the brain, ruled by the neurotransmitter dopamine, starts connecting “getting back home after a stressful day” to a pleasurable stimulus, i.e. sweets or wine. This often leads us to developing unhealthy eating habits. Furthermore, when we are tired (which we often are when we are under stress), we produce more of the hormone melatonin, which leads to a drop of the level of another hormone, leptin. This drop in the level of leptin seems to make us more prone to taking in sugary or fatty foods.

Furthermore, the study found that when workers feel stressed, it takes them longer to go to sleep than when not stressed. This again can be e vicious circle: workers are tired in the morning because they have not had enough sleep. As they are tired, they don’t work as efficiently and have to work longer. When they get back home late, they are even more stressed out, which makes it more difficult to go to sleep. And so on.

In the study, there are a few recommendations on how stress at work can be reduced. Enhancing physical activity at work is one of them. But also snacking habits should be changed. Of course, it is better to have fruit or yoghurt than chocolate or biscuits. But what is not too well-known is that also eating too much fruit can produce negative effects similar to the intake of too much chocolate. Fruit also raises the level of blood sugar, which is absorbed quickly by insulin. Thus, eating fruit leads to an energy pike that can drop again quickly and then may lead to the need for more sugar intake (which could be more fruit, but also sweets).

Furthermore, some people have learned in their childhood to associate fatty or sugary foods with relief from stress, boredom or unhappiness. Often, this association remains when they grow up, and thus, they use unhealthy snacks as means of relieving themselves from stress, boredom or unhappiness. Patterns like these need to be unraveled and overcome.

Finally, also perfectionism seems to play a role in unhealthy eating habits. Perfectionists often try to have a really perfect diet that contains only healthy foods. Once they cross the line and eat something unhealthy, they feel like having failed, and once this has happened, they end up in a downward spiral with respect to their previously healthy diet. For people like this, it can be pointed out that a single “outtake” in their diet is no drama and that they have not failed just because they ate one unhealthy item. Loosening their own standards a bit can prevent them from getting into the downward spiral.

Being conscious about patterns like ones mentioned above can help overcome them. But also employers can help their employees, for example by not selling unhealthy snacks or sweet drinks and offering healthy foods in the canteen (if there is one). But they can also make sure that there is a kitchen in which employees can prepare their own lunch (or simply warm up something they have brought from home), provide healthy drinks (such as water) or healthy snacks like fruit or yoghurt for free. They can encourage their employees to exercise. And, finally, they can keep an eye on their employees’ stress levels.

Do computers make knowledge obsolete?

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Computers are becoming smarter and smarter. They can help us find our way in a city we have never been before (navigation system). They know facts we can’t remember (e.g. Wikipedia). In fact, they are so smart that they can not only beat world class chess players in a game of chess, but even the best Jeopardy players in the quiz. As a consequence, if their knowledge outdoes ours, why should we still bother to learn facts like other countries’ capitals, former presidents’ names or historical dates?

In a TED Talk, Ken Jennings, who holds the record for most consecutive wins on the classic American trivia game show, Jeopardy, remembers what it was like when super computer Watson beat him in the game. He reasons on the consequences of the recent developments. When jobs that require thinking, like for example finding law cases relevant for a certain trial or writing a newspaper article about a football game, can be done extremely well by a computer, why should we still bother to acquire knowledge?

In his talk, he explains that the downside of this development is that our brains are not challenged any more. As a result, they shrink and we become dumber. In his opinion, this is a problem because our world is increasingly complex. There is so much information that we need to be familiar with in order to make good judgment and decisions and thus master the complexity. When we don’t have the information available, will we bother looking it up? Or will we just make a (most likely not very sound) decision based on what we know? And what happens if we simply do not have the time to look something up, but need to respond to a certain situation instantly? From the examples he gives in his talk, it becomes quite evident why having knowledge in different fields available is important to survive in this world – literally!

Skrivet av: http://cut-e-science.blogspot.se/

Our brain is more than a bag of chemicals

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In the Western world, there are an increasing number of people who suffer from mental diseases. Some statistics say that about one in three people fall mentally ill once throughout their lifetime. Many of them take psychotropic drugs. However, often this medication does not help or has severe side effects. Why are mental diseases so different from diseases of the body?
In a TED Talk, biologist David Anderson from California Institute of Technology explains why. He says that we have an oversimplified image of psychiatric disorders: we consider them to be caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. The drugs we take changes the chemistry in the brain. They may improve the patient’s symptoms, but they have many side effects as they act in a very unspecific way. A more recent view of psychiatric diseases is that they are disorders of emotion circuit function. Certain areas of the brain are affected, but not all of them. Therefore, chemicals are important for brain functioning, but they have different effects, depending on the region of the brain. Thus, in order to study them, it is not sufficient to only look at the chemical only, but one also has to consider where the chemical is acting.

The researchers studied animals (fruit flies and mice) and their emotions in the laboratory. For doing so, they turned specific neurons in these animals on and off in order to find cause-effect-relationships: which neural circuits in combination with which neurotransmitters are responsible for which outcome?

First, they conducted an experiment to find out whether fruit flies could really experience something like emotions. They found that this was the case by exposing the fruit flies to puffs of air and observing their reactions. Second, the researchers induced a state of arousal and excitement in fruit flies that had certain genes turned on or off and found that one group needed more time to calm down from the excitement than the other. Dopamine and its receptors were involved in this process, the neurotransmitter that is linked to attention, arousal, and reward, but also to drug abuse, Parkinson Disease and ADHD. In a follow up study, they looked at two aspects of ADHD, hyperactivity and learning disability, and found that both of these aspects were located in different areas of the flies’ brains. They came to the conclusion that the same receptor controls different functions in different areas of the brain.

Thus, Professor Anderson reasons, when treating psychiatric disorders, we need to treat specific regions of the brain rather than the brain as a whole.
What does this mean? First of all, further research is needed. The researchers are working with animal models at the moment. It is likely that their findings can be applied to humans, but so far, there is no evidence for this. Maybe one day, there will be medication for mental diseases that is specific enough to treat more or less only the symptoms of the illness without having too many side effects. In the meantime, we should be aware of the fact that drugs for mental diseases have many side effects and that we should abstain from taking them when they just a “quick fix”, while there is another (maybe more effortful) way of dealing with the disease that does not involve drugs. But above and before all, we should take good care of our mental health so that we don’t become mentally ill and need psychotropic drugs. What can we do for our mental health? We have a few findings here on the scienceblog, feel free to browse the posts. We also some exercises you can do, for example the Three Blessings or meditation.