Spinning Activities to Avoid What We Fear

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When we’re scared, we might spin up a frantic list of activities to avoid confronting our fear. The more afraid we are, the more we retreat from what spooks us by believing we’re too busy to tackle it.

Instead, block 15 minutes on your calendar to shut down all messaging and busy work. Name the perceived nemesis you’re avoiding. Write down three columns: the worst-case scenario, the current situation, and the best possible outcome.

Writing specifics under each column, you might discover that your worst case is much more likely if you stick to your current choices than if you were to mobilize your team in another direction.

Sabina Nawaz writing for Harvard Business Review

Brain damaged decision-making

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We humans make all the same mistakes, over and over again. It's how we are wired. To neurophysiologists, who research cognitive functions, the emotionally driven appear to suffer from cognitive deficits that mimic certain types of brain injuries. Not just partisan political junkies, but ardent sports fans, the devout, even hobbyists. Anyone with an intense emotional interest in a subject loses the ability to observe it objectively: You selectively perceive events. You ignore data and facts that disagree with your main philosophy. Even your memory works to fool you, as you selectively retain what you believe in, and subtly mask any memories that might conflict.

Barry Ritholtz writing in the Washington Post

Making Better Decisions

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For many of us, the main concern over decision-making is practical — how can we make better decisions? Neuroscientist Paul Glimcher said that his research has helped him develop specific strategies. “Rather than pick what I hope is the best, instead I now always start by eliminating the worst element from a choice set,” he said, reducing the number of options to something manageable, like three. “I find that this really works, and it derives from our study of the math. Sometimes you learn something simple from the most complex stuff, and it really can improve your decision-making.”   

Emily Singer writing in Quanta Magazine

Motivated reasoning

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Motivated reasoning is thinking through a topic with the aim, conscious or unconscious, of reaching a particular kind of conclusion. In a football game, we see the fouls committed by the other team but overlook the sins of our own side. We are more likely to notice what we want to notice. Experts are not immune to motivated reasoning. Under some circumstances their expertise can even become a disadvantage. 

People with deeper expertise are better equipped to spot deception, but if they fall into the trap of motivated reasoning, they are able to muster more reasons to believe whatever they really wish to believe.

Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up

Increase your confidence and determination by self-distancing 

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Adopting an alter ego is an extreme form of ‘self-distancing’, which involves taking a step back from our immediate feelings to allow us to view a situation more dispassionately.

“Self-distancing gives us a little bit of extra space to think rationally about the situation,” says Rachel White, assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College in New York State. It allows us to rein in undesirable feelings like anxiety, increases our perseverance on challenging tasks, and boosts our self-control.

In one study, participants were asked to think about a challenging event in the future, such as an important exam, in one of two different ways. The group in the “immersed” condition were told to picture it from the inside, as if they were in the middle of the situation, whereas those in the “distanced” condition were asked to picture it from afar – as if they were a fly on the wall. The differences were striking, with those taking the distanced viewpoint feeling much less anxious about the event, compared to the immersed group. The self-distancing also encouraged greater feelings of self-efficacy – the sense that they could pro-actively cope with the situation and achieve their goal. 

Self-distancing seems to enable people to reap these positive effects by leading them to focus on the bigger picture – it’s possible to see events as part of a broader plan rather than getting bogged down in immediate feelings. 

David Robson writing for the BBC

 

Sunk Cost Fallacy

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We all have seen the sunk cost fallacy in action at some point, whether it be sitting through that bad movie because we have already paid for it or finishing that awful book because we were already halfway through. Everyone has been in a situation where they ended up wasting more time because they were trying to salvage the time they had already invested. A sunk cost, also known as a retrospective cost, is one that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered by any additional action. The sunk cost fallacy refers to the tendency of human beings to make decisions based on how much of an investment they have already made, which leads to even more investment but no returns whatsoever. Sometimes, hard as it is, the best thing to do is to let go.

A way to save yourself from this cognitive bias is by focusing on future benefits and costs rather than the already lost past costs. You have to develop the habit, hard as it is, of ignoring the previous cost information.   

Rahul Agarwal writing in Built in

BrainShift

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Under the right circumstances, a subconscious neurobiological sequence in our brains causes us to perceive the world around us in ways that contradict objective reality, distorting what we see and hear. This powerful shift in perception is unrelated to our intelligence, morals, or past behaviors. In fact, we don’t even know it’s happening, nor can we control it. 

(We) found that it happens in two distinct situations: those involving high anxiety and those associated with major reward. 

Under these conditions, all of us would do something just as regrettable as the headline-grabbing stories above, contrary to what we tell ourselves. Phrased differently, we don’t consciously decide to act a fool. Rather, once our perception is distorted, we act in ways that seem reasonable to us but foolish to observers.

Robert Pearl writing in Vox

Each Step

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The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision, the more our heart softens - or better perhaps, comes alive.  

Each step in life which increases my self-confidence, my integrity, my courage, my conviction also increases my capacity to choose the desirable alternative, until eventually it becomes more difficult for me to choose the undesirable rather than the desirable action.       

On the other hand, each act of surrender and cowardice weakens me, opens the path for more acts of surrender, and eventually freedom is lost. With each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for people to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept the fact that they have wasted energy and time.     

Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil    

The Indecision Cycle

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No-brainer decisions, like jumping in a pool to rescue a drowning child, are driven by a very fast-thinking part of the brain (known as the prefrontal cortex). When you jump in to save a theoretical child in need, you’re driven by that emotional part of your brain — and you don’t spend time analyzing how deep the water is, how to best approach the rescue, etc.

Most tasks, however, utilize rational parts of our brain. Unfortunately, these are the same parts of our minds that helped us avoid danger in primitive times. As a result, we approach an Excel spreadsheet the same way we foraged for food as cavemen — by looking at all the possible dangers behind it, and constantly analyzing the best approach. It’s a slow and inefficient process that causes procrastination, and stress only makes it worse.

The key here is to end the indecision cycle by to activating the proper parts of your brain.

While you cannot immediately flush out procrastination out of your system, you can start by conditioning your mind into focusing on what is important and knowing that you can do it (or at least take a crack at it) during the 5-second window.

Elle Kaplan writing in Medium  

The green fig tree

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I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Testosterone makes men less likely to realize when they're wrong

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Higher levels of testosterone increase the tendency in men to rely on their intuitive judgments and reduce cognitive reflection -- a decision-making process by which a person stops to consider whether their gut reaction to something makes sense. 

Researchers found that men given doses of testosterone performed more poorly on a test designed to measure cognitive reflection than a group given a placebo. The testosterone group also "gave incorrect answers more quickly, and correct answers more slowly than the placebo group," the authors write.

Caltech's Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics and T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience Leadership Chair (says) "The testosterone is either inhibiting the process of mentally checking your work or increasing the intuitive feeling that 'I'm definitely right.'"

The research will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Read the full story in Science Daily

Attributes of a high-performing Leader

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A decade long study published in Harvard Business Review set out to identify the specific attributes that differentiate high-performing CEOs: 

Our findings challenged many widely held assumptions. For example, our analysis revealed that while boards often gravitate toward charismatic extroverts, introverts are slightly more likely to surpass the expectations of their boards and investors.

We were also surprised to learn that virtually all CEO candidates had made material mistakes in the past, and 45% of them had had at least one major career blowup that ended a job or was extremely costly to the business. Yet more than 78% of that subgroup of candidates ultimately won the top job.

We discovered that high-performing CEOs do not necessarily stand out for making great decisions all the time; rather, they stand out for being more decisive. They make decisions earlier, faster, and with greater conviction. They do so consistently—even amid ambiguity, with incomplete information, and in unfamiliar domains. In our data, people who were described as “decisive” were 12 times more likely to be high-performing CEOs.

Read more about the CEO Genome Project in the Harvard Business Review