The Leader's Voice

Why Research Matters

The following video is fun in and of itself - but the point it makes is definitely in line with my views. On this blog you will never see reference to research that I haven't personally researched sources for and evaluated. It is far too easy for people to say "research confirms.." without ever looking at the research and knowing if any research has even been conducted. Enjoy the video and the spoof that was perpetrated.

Emotions and Symbols

 

For a long time we thought emotions and reason (or logical processes) were separate entities and that the best thinkers (and therefore the best business leaders) would separate the two.

Neurological evidence aplenty demonstrates how wrong-headed this notion has been, even though for many it persists. Processing emotions, especially during decision-making that involves mixed feelings, or decision-making that is highly complex yields better decision-making. Shunting, ignoring, or otherwise trying to "put emotions aside" during decision-making generally yields lower quality decisions.

Facts and emotions work together. My research has argued that in a similar manner facts, emotions, and symbolic processes also work together and are as integrated as the emotional/logical processes. Researchers have long concluded that if someone uses a strong emotional word or image during a task it causes a "blink," or a temporary pause in the task as the mind attends just to the emotional word or image. 

A recent study using "attentional blink" theory and technique indicates that the presence of emotional language during a task will interrupt the task only if the word or image has to be processed semantically, meaning a part of the symbolic processing system has to be activated. One group of researchers following this study suggest that emotional words distract - but only when they mean something in the context of the work at hand.

This research is part of a growing body of evidence that shows how integrated our brain processes are in terms of communication and language. We used to study parts of the brain and made drastic conclusions about the entire process based upon the one part we could study. Those that studied the left brain or those that studied the limbic system (or even more refined would just study the amygdala or hippocampus portions of the limbic system) would make declarations of how the brain worked from their narrow view. It would be like HP or Apple technicians who make either keyboards or screens declaring they knew how the entire computer worked from their narrow field of expertise.

Newer techniques with finer levels of analysis are helping us see how integrated neurological processes are - which leads me to repeat the advice I give to those who attend my workshops - upgrade your knowledge. If you think that left brain/right brain theory is the most up-to-date model of the brain, then by comparison you think floppy disks are the way of the future for computers.

The image above is from Yang-Ming Huang's slide deck on one of the related studies he has conducted. Clicking on the link will download his entire presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint format.

Your Infinite Book

Russell Lynes was editor of Harper's Magazine for twenty years beginning in 1947. His quote, "Every journalist has a novel inside of him, which is an excellent place for it," may be the starting point for the more positive thought "that everyone has a book inside."

I certainly believe all of us have a book inside. Many of us die without it being written. Some of us write it and wonder if perhaps Lynes was correct. Regardless, it is there, waiting to be written.

Adding to this basic idea, three physicists, Sebastian Bernhardsson, Luis Enrique Correa da Rocha, and Petter Minnhagen just published a study in New Journal of Physics about how many different words authors use when writing and whether or not an analysis of the frequency of new words used by an author might reveal an author's "word signature."

The science behind the analysis is beyond the scope of this blog. So read the paper if you are into that. The idea these physicists were exploring was Zipf's law, a seventy-five year old theorem that states if you take a natural language the most frequently uttered word will appear twice as often as the next most frequently uttered word which will appear twice as frequently as the third most uttered word, and so on. 

But what about how frequently someone utters new words? These researchers examined the works of D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Herman Melville. And they examined not just their novels, but their shorter written works, including personal letters. What they found was that individual authors used unique (or new) words at a different rate from each other, basically giving each author a signature that appears just from analyzing word frequency. The authors hypothesis (which they found was true) was:

"The writing of a text can be described by a process where the author pulls a peice of text out a a large mother book (the meta book) and puts it down on paper. This meta book is an imaginary infinite book that gives a representation of the word-frequency characteristics of everything that a certain author would ever think of writing. This has nothing to do with semantics and the actual meaning of what is written, but rather concerns the extent of the vocabulary, the level and type of education, and the personal preferences of an author. The fact that people have such different backgrounds, together with the seemingly different behavior of the function N(M) for the different authors, opens up the speculation that everyone has a personal and unique meta book, in which case it can be seen as an author's fingerprint."

Mathematical evidence that the book inside you, regardless of how familiar the content, will contain your unique voice. 

Moderating the Effects of Status Loss

Richard Nisbitt and Dov Cohen described the American South as having a Culture of Honor. Historically, whether or not you plowed or herded depended upon the contours of where you lived - hilly and grassy contours invited herders. Flat and wet landscapes invited farmers. Those who herded, these authors argued, were more sensitive to things that might harm livestock and therefore developed a greater cultural willingness towards hostility or violence. 

These conclusions are contested by others, such as PJ Henry and Caroline Zink, each of whom in independent studies conclude that a person's status is the most important aspect of how conflict erupts. Nobel Laureate economist John Harsanyi agrees, "apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior."

Henry's most recent paper argues that violence erupts due to perceived differences in social status - there's nothing about herding or farming that inherently evokes more or less aggression. Zink's research affirms this view both behaviorally and neurologically (via brain scans). Both these scholars confirm Harsanyi's view that economics plays a huge role in determining social status.

The Great Recession is eroding the perceived social status of our world's talent. I know from personal conversation with some of these folks that such a sense of loss has occurred. It erodes faster when talent loses income and their colleagues escape the recession's scythe.

On a less recession oriented note, David Rock, CEO of an international coaching and consulting firm, finds, "many everyday conversations devolve into arguments driven by a status threat, a desire to not be perceived as less than another." In an interesting article he proposes a method to mediate these types of problems. 

Moral Principles - How Do You Rate?

I'm reading Justice by Michael J. Sandel, who teaches one of the most popular courses at Harvard (some classes have exceeded 1,000 students). The course concerns justice, how we develop our sense of it, and how we reveal our biases in practical everyday circumstances.

It's a terrific read and for those of you looking to recommend a book to managers who like to have their colleagues read a book and hold discussions, I would recommend this one. It pricks under your skin like a chigger bite. And it will make you think. What's also wonderful is that Sandel helped produce a series of videos in cooperation with WGBH on the subject.

Further ideas on the topic can also be found in Jonathan Haidt's work. A psychologist at the University of Virginia, he and his colleague Jesse Graham have surveyed over 110,000 individuals from many different countries. They have investigated the moral differences between liberal-minded and conservative-minded individuals. You can even take the test yourself and see how you rate.

Any leader aspiring toward self-improvement would benefit from either of these scholar's work.

And for those of you interested in generational differences, a new paper shows that individuals growing up during recessions tend to believe that success in life depends more on luck than effort, support more government redistribution, but are less confident in public institutions.