Jonathan Drori:
About this talk
Starting with four basic questions (that you may be surprised to find you can't answer), Jonathan Drori looks at the gaps in our knowledge -- and specifically, what we don't about science that we might think we do.
About Jonathan Drori
Jonathan Drori commissioned the BBC's very first websites, one highlight in a long career devoted to online culture and educational media -- and understanding how we learn.
My Notes
Children get their ideas not from their teachers but from common sense
Be very very careful what you put into that head, because you will never ever get it out
We look for evidence to reinforce our existing models
Some are able to provide that evidence or to create other barriers to understanding
Children are not empty vessels, they have their own theories that we are trying to shift
Poor teaching does more harm than good
Below are significant talks at TED about poverty. For more, click here.
Paul Collier: 4 ways to improve the lives of the "bottom billion"
Isabel Allende: Tales of passion
Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight
About this talk
Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions -- motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one. An astonishing story.
About Jill Bolte Taylor
Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor studied her own stroke as it happened -- and has become a powerful voice for brain recovery.
My Notes
Wonderful story/demonstration of the dynamics of our brain and how it makes us "perceive"
For more information on this topic, you can refer to the HBR article below. This piece is the abstract. I have the rest you can try and find it online or contact me for it.
When to Trust Your Gut
How do business executives make crucial decisions? Often by relying on their keen intuitive skills, otherwise known as their “gut.” But what exactly is gut instinct and how does it work? Scientists have recently uncovered some provocative clues that may change the way you work.
The intuitive insight that would save Chrysler in the 1990s came to Bob Lutz, then the company’s president, during a weekend drive. On a warm day in 1988, Lutz took his Cobra roadster for a spin. As he raced along the roads in southeastern Michigan, he tried to relax, pushing aside what critics had been saying about Chrysler—that the company was brain-dead, technologically dated, and uninspired and that it lagged dangerously behind not only the Japanese auto-makers but also General Motors and Ford.
Ironically, Lutz found it difficult to enjoy himself precisely because he was finding the drive so pleasurable. “I felt guilty: there I was, the president of Chrysler, driving this great car that had such a strong Ford association, ”he says, referring to the original Cobra’s Ford V-8 engine. In fact, Lutz’s strong sense of corporate loyalty had earlier led him to remove the “Powered by Ford” plaques from his car. Still, the guilt needled him, and on this drive he began wondering about replacing the Cobra’s engine with one from Chrysler. Perhaps then he could enjoy his beloved sports car in peace. But he quickly realized that Chrysler did not have a V-8 engine that was up to snuff. If he made the switch, the car would lose considerable performance. “Chrysler was way, way, way behind,” he remembers admitting to himself.
Soon Lutz’s mind was racing. Didn’t Chrysler have a powerful ten-cylinder engine in development for its new pickup truck? Could that be the answer? And, wait, wasn’t Chrysler also building a five-speed, heavy-duty manual transmission for that truck? Why not co-opt those monster parts for a sexy, expensive, two-seat concept sports car that would be as revolutionary as the Cobra had been in the 1960s? Wouldn’t that silence everyone who had written off Chrysler?
That Monday, Lutz leapt into action, enlisting important allies at Chrysler to develop a muscular, outrageous sports car that would turn heads and stop traffic. After seeing a full-size clay model of the car—later to become the Dodge Viper—Lutz was all the more determined. But the naysayers were many. Chrysler’s bean counters were arguing that the $80 million investment would be better spent elsewhere, perhaps to pay down the company’s debt or refurbish plants. The sales force warned that no U.S. automaker had ever succeeded in selling a $50,000 car. At the time, Dodge cars were priced under $20,000, and customers were mainly blue-collar workers. But Lutz persevered, pushing the project forward with unwavering commitment. Amazingly, he had no market research to support him, just his gut instincts.
The Dodge Viper became a smashing success. It single-handedly changed the public’s perception of Chrysler, dramatically boosting company morale and providing the momentum that the company desperately lacked, ultimately spurring its dramatic turnaround in the 1990s. In hindsight, the Viper was exactly what Chrysler (now Daimler-Chrysler) needed; it was the right car at the right time. But how could Lutz have been so certain about that?
Lutz, now CEO of Exide Technologies, the $3 billion manufacturer of car batteries, has trouble describing exactly how he made one of the most critical decisions of his career. “It was this Subconscious visceral feeling. And it just felt right,” he says. Lutz is not alone. In my interviews with top executives known for their shrewd business instincts, none could articulate precisely how they routinely made important decisions that defied any logical analysis. To describe that vague feeling of knowing something without knowing exactly how or why, they used words like “professional judgment,” “intuition,” “gut instinct,” “inner voice,” and “hunch,” but they couldn’t describe the process much beyond that.
Intrigued, I turned to leading scientists who have studied how people make decisions. Although the inner workings of the human mind are a mystery that may never be solved, I found that recent research has uncovered some striking clues suggesting that our emotions and feelings might not only be important in our intuitive ability to make good decisions but may actually be essential. Furthermore, I was told, the type of instinctive genius that enables a CEO to craft the perfect strategy for usurping competitors could require an uncanny ability to detect patterns, perhaps subconsciously, that other people either overlook or mistake for random noise.
So, then, what exactly is your gut and how does it work? When does it tend to be right—and wrong? An explanation of how your intuition works may surprise you; it might even change the way you make decisions. Before that, though, comes a more basic question: why is your gut important in the first place?
About this talk (Feb 2003)
Outside.in's Steven Johnson says the Web is like a city: built by many people, completely controlled by no one, intricately interconnected and yet functioning as many independent parts. While disaster strikes in one place, elsewhere, life goes on.
About Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson is the best-selling author of five thoughtful and surprising books linking science, technology and society. He's also a longtime innovator in the web world.
My Notes
who builds a neighbordood?
everybody and no single person, same as the web
google search is collective decision
urban density (living together) helps and kills the individuals, creates an organism
streets is alive despite these kills, system is working
google share
long tail intro
"conversation" is the savior
The hotel is (was before the new heartless hotel management forced everyone out) a legend and a sanctuary for numerous artists, musicians and writers: Thomas Wolfe, Charles Bukowski, Jean Paul Sartre, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, William S. Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Stanley Kubrick, Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Jane Fonda, The Grateful Dead, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Dee Dee Ramone of The Ramones, Henri Chopin, Édith Piaf, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Leonard Cohen, Pink Floyd, Frida Cahlo, Richard Bernstein, Diego Riviera, Andy Warhol, Henry Cartier Bresson...
Loss of control makes the mind misperceive
Based on the research of Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky
You see a chair that is not there. A rhythmic stomping of your feet, you are certain, determines the fate of your career. Office banter masks sinister conspiracies. You feel an urgent need to put everything precisely in its proper place. Might it be time to reserve an afternoon on the $100-an-hour leather of your psychiatrist’s couch? Unzip the straightjacket and breathe easily. You are not (necessarily) schizophrenic, obsessive compulsive, or any other chapter from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. You are just an ill-informed investor in a dicey market, or a fortunate survivor of a hellacious car crash, a first-semester freshman clueless on a college campus, or perhaps a primitive fisherman under the South Pacific sun. Adam Galinsky (Management and Organizations) and former Kellogg doctoral student Jennifer Whitson (University of Texas, Austin) report in the journal Science how even the most normal among us strive, intensely but unconsciously, to find and impose order in our unruly world. This quest for structure can sometimes be so all consuming that we trick ourselves into seeing and believing things that simply do not exist.
“We were interested in people who see the Virgin Mary in water stains, or believe conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination,” said Galinsky, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management, who is also a member of the Social Enterprise at Kellogg (SEEK) Program. “These look like different phenomena on the surface, but they share underlying aspects, all finding meaningful and coherent relations among unrelated stimuli. They’re all reducible to the same process.”
Mind, Magic, and Control
Magic, Science, and Religion, written in 1948 by Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, described life among primitive tribes of the Trobriand Islands off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea. Some tribes fished in deep, uncharted waters far offshore, where violent turns in the weather were a regular threat. Those tribes practiced extensive, fishing-related rituals. But tribes who fished in the shallower, safer waters closer to shore were far less ritualized. Those daring, deep water tribes, as Galinsky put it, perceived meaningful and coherent relations among religious rituals and sea churning tempests, relations that the tools of modern meteorology would be hard pressed to discern.
Said Galinsky, “While some misperceptions can be bad, can lead you astray, they’re extremely common, so they most likely satisfy a deep and enduring psychological need.”
That psychological need, as revealed by decades of research, is for control. Our survival depends on the ability to minimize uncertainty and predict and execute beneficial courses of action. The more control we exercise and the less uncertainty we face, the more likely our choices will lead to safe and rewarding outcomes. But we sometimes fall victim to our finely-tuned circuitry—evolved over millennia—to seek and exploit patterns and stability by perceiving relationships and regularity that do not actually exist. Seeking to command situations over which we actually have little control can lead us to believe that mysterious, unseen mechanisms are secretly at work. For example, work in the mid-1990s showed that young adults, overwhelmed by the novel, complex social experience that was their first year as an MBA student, were more likely than their second-year elders to harbor beliefs in conspiracies. Other research showed that when confronted with an unpredicted, unpleasant outcome, we often place blame on some earlier, unassociated event, as anyone who has ever tasted failure because they could not find their lucky socks can attest.
Everything In Its Right Place
“Feelings of control are so important to people that lack of control is inherently threatening. So we looked for examples that hit on lack of control,” said Galinsky, introducing his series of experiments. He and Whitson asked people to look at pairs of simple symbols, like the letter “T” inside a circle, and choose which one fit into a group of similar symbols. Some people received no feedback about the correctness of their choices. But in order to instill feelings of powerlessness and a lack of control, other subjects received feedback that was random. Half of their choices were reported to be incorrect, regardless of the choice that was actually made.
The people were then asked how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I enjoy being spontaneous,” and “I like to have a place for everything and everything in its place,” all of which reflected the need for structure in one’s life. The people who received random feedback on the symbol-selection task, who presumably felt very little control over the task, subsequently reported a greater need for structure in their lives.
After performing the symbol-selection task in a second experiment, individuals were asked to look at “snowy” pictures. Half of the pictures were just grainy patterns of random dots. The other half also contained images, such as a chair, a boat, or the ringed planet Saturn, that were faintly visible against the grainy background. While all people correctly identified about 95 percent of the hidden images, the people who received random feedback on the symbol-selection task, whose feelings of control had been eroded, also “saw” images in 43 percent of the pictures that were actually just random scatterings of dots. This illusion occurred significantly more often than it did among the subjects whose feelings of control were left intact during the symbol-selection task.
“People clearly see false patterns in all types of data,” said Galinsky. Motivated by this finding, he described plans for future research, wondering, “Might they also see patterns that are actually there that other people miss?”
Lack of control instilled a need for order and led to an occasional visual hiccup. But could it explain lucky socks? To better understand superstitions, Galinsky and Whitson had a group of people write about situations they had experienced. Half of them recalled situations in which they had control, while the other half detailed paralyzing instances in which they had no control. They recounted car accidents caused by others, illnesses to friends and family, even a time when they had “taken some drugs and felt that the ceiling fan was angry at them,” recalled Galinsky. They all then read short stories in which significant outcomes, such as getting one’s idea approved at a business meeting, were preceded by unrelated behaviors, such as stomping one’s feet three times before entering the meeting. People who had initially written about situations in which they had no control expressed greater belief in a superstitious connection between the stories’ simple behaviors and the outcomes that followed. Those people were also more afraid of what might happen if the superstitious behavior was not properly repeated in the future.
Galinsky was quick to point out that, “If the belief makes them feel better, more confident, then it serves a purpose, it’s not irrational. For example, there’s data showing that religious people tend to heal more quickly. So whether or not God exists, believing might help you live five years longer.” Pondering possible biological features of this phenomenon, and pointing to future research, Galinsky asked, “If someone is given an opportunity to see a pattern, does that lower physiological stress?”
Foot stomping, lucky socks, and other superstitions are quirky but usually harmless—life’s cotton candy. But what of the oft-destructive tendency to believe in elaborate, sinister conspiracies? When asked to read and describe simple stories, the people whose feelings of control had been diminished were more likely to perceive conspiracies lurking just beneath the surface of innocuous situations. For example, when reading about an employee who was passed over for promotion, the powerless people tended to believe that private conversations between co-workers and the boss were to blame.
Misperceiving Markets
To study how loss of control and subsequent distortions of perception might impact decision making in a business environment, Galinsky and Whitson had a group of people read descriptions of a very stable stock market. “Smooth Sailing Ahead for Investors,” read one headline. Another group read “Rough Seas Ahead for Investors,” and other descriptions of a volatile, unpredictable market. All people were then asked to read comments about two anonymous companies, A and B. Twice as many comments were about company A than about B (24 comments versus 12). But an identical percentage of comments about each company was positive, both companies receiving glowing reviews two thirds of the time. For example, “Company B continues to boost shareholder value.” The remaining third of comments about each company was negative. For example, “Higher costs should continue to crimp company A’s margins.”
When asked to recall how often bad things were written about company B, those in the stable market were nearly 100 percent accurate. Those in the volatile market, however, reported 25 percent more bad news than they actually read. Consistent with several earlier studies, market uncertainties set the stage for unconscious associations between the type of information that was presented less frequently (i.e., negative) and the company that was described less frequently (i.e., B). This mental distortion influenced the group’s subsequent investment decisions. While company B attracted investments from 58 percent of those in the stable market, only 25 percent of those in the volatile market put their money on B. Even though the information about companies A and B was equally positive in equal ratios, the jittery minds of nervous investors deemed company B a riskier bet than it was.
Having shown that diminished personal control can influence perception and behavior in a number of different ways, Galinsky and Whitson wanted to learn whether powerless people could have their feelings of control restored, their perceptions brought back into alignment. Earlier research had shown that having people focus on and express their cherished personal values instilled in them enhanced feelings of self empowerment. So they first examined people’s beliefs by asking them to rate how strongly they believed in certain values. For example, people rated how much they considered themselves to be social people with an interest in caring for others, and how much they valued scientific theory and research. The people were then asked to write about situations in which they were helpless, thus compromising their sense of self control. Then, in an effort to restore feelings of self-empowerment, some of the people were asked to elaborate upon the values that they had earlier rated as very important. For example, a person who rated political power and influence most highly was asked questions like “Which type of organization would you rather found, an orchestra or a debating society?” Other people, however, were asked to elaborate on the value that they held in lowest esteem. A person who expressed little value for religion, for example, was asked questions that focused on religion, such as, “Would it be more important for your child to receive training in religion or athletics?”
The results were clear. People who focused on values that they did not hold in high regard and who did not have an opportunity to regain their feelings of self empowerment were more likely to perceive visual images that did not actually exist and to perceive conspiracies in innocent situations. The people who regained feelings of self control by focusing on important personal values were no different from people who never lost their feelings of self control in the first place, who never had to recall experiences of helplessness. Galinsky and Whitson broke people’s self control, then helped put it back together again, fixing perception and behavior in the process.
“The less control people have over their lives, the more likely they are to try and regain control through mental gymnastics,” said Galinsky, summarizing their numerous discoveries. “Aaron Kay at the University of Waterloo has a similar idea—that people believe in a controlling, interventionist God as a form of compensatory control. That makes me confident in our theory and captures the beauty of science, with two groups coming to very similar conclusions from two unique approaches.
Source: Kellogg Insight
Philip Zimbardo
(Remember the prison experiment? or Das Experiment?):
How ordinary people become monsters ... or heroes
Notes:
Great evil start with a minor evil.
Power of institutions + Power of unanimiouty = Dehumanization
New & Unfamiliar creates the ground for evil.
"Public disorders" can be created or prevented.
September is over, in many ways. The heyday of capitalism is over with it, the breathtaking summer of 2008 is over with it. Now it's time to think, besides playing. Now it's time to discover new continents because it will soon be too cold on this one. Now it's time to buy an island, initiate Dharma on it, then move the island to Thailand, and then to Fiji, finally back to Hawai... Yes, my dears, now that winter is approaching, it's time for Lost...
Not surprisingly, I have big projects cooking up. Now that my constant immigration and traveling is over, I figured I could make use of a brief settlement. I have my own deviant definition of organization which is of little use, so I decided I would use some help along the way from people who'll stay with me for a while. My first move for this autumn is about TED. Now that my one-person-a-day project is over, I'll have something more domestic and insightful to do daily: one-TED-video-a-day, comment on them, and master the issues at hand. How I love watching TED videos: people who are beyond passionate about what they do... I'll be attending TED one day, which will only be possible after I do something useful and biggg to change the world. Got to think about that...
Now I'll have my last summer night with a 270° view to my sea you can see above, and ride into wet clouds by morning.