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Media Psychology

~ Informing, Educating and Influencing

Media Psychology

Author Archives: Donna L. Roberts, PhD

Christmas Adverts: The Covid Class of 2020 | Redbrick TV

21 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on Christmas Adverts: The Covid Class of 2020 | Redbrick TV

TV Writer Heather Collier ranks four of this year’s biggest Christmas adverts, giving her verdict on which ones are naughty and which ones are nice

Source: Christmas Adverts: The Covid Class of 2020 | Redbrick TV

Written by Heather

Images by @JohnLewisandPartners on Facebook

How do we know it’s Christmas, you ask? Simple: When the annual barrage of Christmas TV adverts makes it positively unavoidable.

For me, Christmas came around the 13th of November, the release of the coveted crowning jewel of the festive season – the John Lewis Ad – and I’m sure, for you, it couldn’t have been much later.

It’s certainly an interesting time of year. For most, a time of family and coming together; but for big business, it’s a time of fierce competition, where various advertising departments try their wits to create the ultimate heart-warming narrative, condensing the meaning of Christmas to under a minute, in a way that will capture the hearts and minds of the country, and in doing so, raise both profile – and profit.

It is no surprise, that the market for Christmas advertising has grown exponentially over the past decade, with last year’s advertising blizzard coming in at an estimated 6.8 bn, John Lewis historically being the biggest spender, previously said to have “spent about £8m on its ad featuring Elton John playing his hit ‘Your Song’” according to the BBC.

“The best ads have altered their usual feel-good formulas to incorporate messages of community”

Such Hollywood spending remains largely all in response to the overwhelming emotional response of the nation – and the opportunity it presents to exploit it – with “half” of “1,000 Brits interviewed on behalf of the Advertising Association” in 2017, admitting that they had been “moved to tears” by Christmas ads; “One in six” having said they had even “changed plans to watch the premiere of their favourite Christmas ad”. As of this year, in conversation with Kantar, BBC reveals that consumers “spend about £30bn in the so-called “golden quarter” leading up to Christmas”. Furthermore, the picture of profit for businesses to make through the advertising period is looking pretty jolly indeed.

However, in the age of Corona, strategies have changed, and the best ads have altered their usual feel-good formulas to incorporate messages of community, family, and ‘giving’ – or at least the illusion of which – in line with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s appeal for a united front with talk of “get[ting] through this winter together”.

In light of this, behold a crop of this year’s Covid cohort; Those which succeed in effectively pulling on the heartstrings, to those that simply fail to bat an eyelid.

Sainsbury’s – ‘The Gravy Song’

Coming in at top spot, an advert which has recently received great media attention – although not for the reasons it deserves. Titled ‘The Gravy Song’, the ad has become a point of controversy, not because of any issue of its own, but because of the existing racism it has illuminated in a proportion of its viewers.

Such individuals took to Twitter to express their issues with the portrayal of a black family at Christmas time, “slamming the commercial for ‘not representing them’”, as The Metro reports. This all comes of course just a few months after the wave of UK Black Live Matters protests, undermining the popular “counter-narrative” of those who say, “Britain is not racist like America” (The Independent).

The ad in question shows a telephone conversation between father and daughter set against a montage of Christmas ‘home videos’ in which time elapses. The overwhelming warmth and sentimentality radiating off of this particular family unit are deceptive enough to appear genuine and non-commercial, drawing many people to Twitter in its defence: One viewer tweeted “Sainsbury’s advert reminded me of Xmas at ours! One day it will be like that again.”  While another said, “Best ad of 2020 in my opinion”. It is this reminder of family and tradition that is undeniably therapeutic for its viewers at a time of isolation and uncertainty. The ad is simple but effective.

Verdict: 10/10



Waitrose & John Lewis – ‘Give a Little Love’

This year’s long-anticipated John Lewis ad deserves mention for its lesson in artistry. It embarks on a journey through different animated aesthetic mediums as we follow the passage of a tender heart symbolism exchanged between loveably quirky characters. We can only hope to understand it as the passing on of ‘A little love’, the title of the accompanying song written and voiced by Celeste, a song best described as “delicately placed piano notes [which] tread delicately, as if over a fresh powder of snow” (The Independent)

The advert presents us with an imagined utopia where person and pigeon alike live harmoniously sharing and receiving “small acts of kindness”. Never has a John Lewis ad appeared more relevant to the here and now, addressing the possibility within a pandemic for selfishness, by reminding us of opportunity that Christmas time brings for spreading kindness and goodwill to all. It is one of the very few, aside from Amazon’s ‘The Show Must Go On’, that actually acknowledges the pandemic, and tailors it to explore the meaning of Christmas in the current political climate.

Unlike previous years, John Lewis – similar to Boots’ ‘Help Fight Hygiene Poverty’ campaign – has also swapped out its usual taglines for a final message of charitability, revealing a philanthropic campaign to raise money for charities including Home-Start and FareShare.

Although, to say the ad has come through with providing us that seasonal kick of painful joy, leaving us emotionally unavailable for 2-5 working days, would be more than charitable. Whilst John Lewis has indeed fulfilled their side of the bargain, providing us with an advert that does encapsulate the quintessential Christmas spirit, it lacks its iconic Lewisian heart-wrench ending, akin to 2013’s ‘The Bear & the Hare’ or 2014’s ‘Monty the Penguin’; a key component which ultimately, gives the John Lewis advert’s their name. Without it, it’s just an another well-made Christmas advert.

Verdict: 8/10



Aldi – ‘Kevin the Carrot’

Another advert which successfully jumps on the bandwagon of Christmas kindness is Aldi’s annual instalment of ‘Kevin the Carrot’, first appearing in 2016. This year’s ad shows the plight of Kevin to get home in time for Christmas after being stranded miles off in a flying accident. But following the help of Harry the hedgehog and Santa himself, Kevin is reunited with his family, as well as the spread of strategically placed Aldi products that await him.

Whilst Aldi have done well to establish an ongoing festive brand which its viewers can connect to and grow to adore, the ad does nothing itself in the grand scheme of advert history. The concept of ‘getting home for Christmas’ is in itself a very cliched storyline – just ask Coca-Cola. Therefore, if the objective is to create an averagely entertaining, yet easily forgettable Christmas advert, which can neither be overly disputed nor overly praised, and remains entirely identifiable as what it is – an Aldi Christmas advert – then perhaps Aldi has arguably succeeded. The average person, if asked, would to well to say “It’s alright”, but that’s all.

It’s…alright.

Verdict: 6/10



Tesco’s – ‘No Naughty List’

And finally, an ad that showcases what it means for an advertising team to get it fundamentally wrong.

Set to the tune of Britney Spears’ ‘Oops!… I Did It Again’, Tesco rejects classic Christmas tropes of old for a more contemporary comical ad, which figuratively “absolves us of our sins” (Creative Boom). It humours us with a string of silly confessions, from bulk buying to giving a bad lockdown haircut, before reassuring them (and us) that “After a year like this, we believe there is no naughty list.”

Packaged up as a harmless ploy to “treat” yourself after a hard year, what the ad actually does, however, is encourage overindulgence and disinhibition, far removed from the wholesome meaning of Christmas attempted by the others above. It directs us to the ugly, gaudy, commercialised side of Christmas that is all about material excess, appealing to the greed in human nature, opposing all sense of compassion and selflessness.

Given the current pandemic, where an array of cases of “breaking lockdown”, including illegal raves – which in September The Sun suggested “contributed to the 300 per cent spike” – the disobedience and selfishness of some has exacerbated the Covid scene for all. Ultimately, there is something to say about an ad which suggests we should be rewarding those who have been, as they phrase it, “naughty”.

Verdict: 1/10

Written by Heather

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20 Vintage Ads That Would Be Totally Illegal Now

14 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on 20 Vintage Ads That Would Be Totally Illegal Now

Source: 21 Vintage Ads That Would Be Totally Illegal Now

If you’ve ever seen Mad Men, then you know that the advertising business and the fine gentlemen who ran it were really sensitive to the needs and feelings of women. They would never use sexism and your own basic fears about yourself to try and get you to buy something.

So yeah, that was a good laugh!

Snap back to reality and we’ve got some really nutso vintage ads that wouldn’t be allowed in decent conversation these days.

1. You know what’s an asset? Not being sexist.

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

2. I don’t want to know what this man does out of a suit.

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

3. “Not Recommended For Children Under 6.” What was wrong with people!?!

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

4. For those frustrating days when your shampoo makes you want to shoot yourself in the face. We’ve all been there!

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

5. No joke, this stuff was actually used to treat malaria.

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

6. I’d prefer 23 ways to avoid a Cricketeer

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

7. Not always. 

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

8. I KNEW Santa smoked Camels!

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

9. Wait. Santa smokes Lucky Strikes too?!

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

10. If you think this is nuts, just wait until you see the commercial.

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

11. People sat in a room, reviewed this and said, “Yes! That’s it!”

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

12. There’s nothing cuter than a baby shaving!

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

13. Or you could get punched in the face. Either way, you’re a Tipalet man.

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

14. Yeah, doctors were selling smokes back then.

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

15. …leave him immediately!

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

16. “Drummond Sweaters. When You’re Sexist And Aren’t Afraid To Show It.”

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

17. You know what’s adorable? Childhood diabetes.

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

18. It’s true! Because this ad says so!

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

19. Naked on the floor staring at shoes?

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good

20. Isn’t this technically true about everybody?

Photo Credit: So Bad So Good


Awkward

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Why Is Writing Easier Than Speaking for Introverts? Here’s the Science

07 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on Why Is Writing Easier Than Speaking for Introverts? Here’s the Science

If introverts commonly experience a “word problem,” it might seem strange, then, that they’re also known as talented writers.

Source: Why Is Writing Easier Than Speaking for Introverts? Here’s the Science

by Jenn Granneman

Many introverts are naturally gifted writers — so why do they clam up or draw a blank when speaking?

“Oh, I love podcasts!” I told the interviewer, who was recording me, unedited, as a guest on his podcast. “I listen to at least one every day.”

“That’s great!” the interviewer replied. “Which one is your favorite?”

“It’s uhh… ummm…”  I listened to that podcast every flippin’ day! Why couldn’t I think of its name?!

“It’s something by NPR… uhhhhh… ” I couldn’t produce the name until I quickly googled it. By that time, the conversation had moved on and the point I was trying to make died a very awkward, very public death.

Story of my life as an introvert.

It wasn’t the first time I’d drawn a blank under pressure. Job interviews and first dates are notoriously the worst. “Tell me about yourself” often results in me temporarily forgetting everything I’ve ever done with my life.

Even when the stakes are low, like in a casual conversation with a friend, I often need a few beats to think before speaking — and it’s not unusual for thoughts to swirl in my head that I simply don’t have the language to express.

Why are words so hard for introverts? Let’s take a look at the science.

Humans Mostly Think In Pictures, Not Words

To be clear, everyone forgets words or gets tongue-tied at times, even the most extroverted among us, for all kinds of reasons ranging from simple distraction to pregnancy brain. But one big, universal reason may come down to some ancient wiring: A recent Harvard study found that our species tends to prefer visual thinking to verbal thinking.

If you’ve ever heard someone describe themselves as a “visual thinker,” they mean they think in pictures, not words — which is actually very common. According to the Harvard scientists, this tendency appears to be ingrained in the most primitive parts of our brains, probably because language is overall a “recent” development for humans (you know, we started assigning different grunts to objects a mere 100,000 years ago).

Of course, those images we “see” in our minds need translation, if we’re going to get our message across to other hominid-like creatures. This takes focus and energy, and can be an inefficient process. To put it mildly, our brains are still playing evolutionary catch-up.

But that’s not the whole story when it comes to introverts.

Why Does It Seem Worse for Introverts?

If you’re an introvert like me, sometimes words seem, well, extra hard. Your “word problem” may even get you labeled as “quiet” or “shy,” when in reality, you have plenty to say. Sometimes it reflects negatively on us because we come across like we don’t know what we’re talking about, even though many introverts love learning and often become subject-matter experts in their chosen fields.

In a society that values fast and frequent talkers, it can be tough being an introvert.

As I explain in my book, The Secret Lives of Introverts, our “word problem” may be connected to long-term memory. Although it’s retained for long periods of time (as the name suggests), information stored in long-term memory is mostly outside our conscious awareness. Sometimes the information is fairly easy to access (like what you ate for breakfast this morning), while other memories are difficult to recall (like what you ate for breakfast on this day two years ago).

Contrast this with working memory (sometimes called short-term memory), which is limited and retains information for mere seconds. Working memory puts information on the tip of your tongue. It’s easy to access, but you don’t hold onto it for long, unless you move it to long-term storage.

Here’s the kicker: Introverts tend to favor long-term memory over working memory, while extroverts do the opposite, according to Dr. Marti Olsen Laney in her 2002 book, The Introvert Advantage — and this can make speech challenging for us “quiet ones.”

How Long-Term Memory Challenges Introverts

How does our reliance on long-term memory complicate things for introverts? Well, pulling information out of long-term memory can be slow and tricky. You need the right association or “key” to unlock the memory you’re trying to retrieve.

For example, let’s say you were trying to remember your first date with your now-spouse. Walking by an Italian restaurant, you catch a whiff of olive oil, and BAM, the smell reminds you of the dish you ordered that night. In turn, this memory “unlocks” more information about the date — what she was wearing, what she said, and how you dropped a meatball on the floor and tried to hide it.

Although complex information can be stored for long periods of time in long-term memory, reaching into it might complicate things for introverts when they speak.

Anxiety Sucks and Makes It Harder to Think

Another reason speaking can be difficult for introverts has to do with anxiety. Not every introvert experiences social anxiety, and not all anxious people are introverts — even some very outgoing extroverts feel it! Nevertheless, it’s not uncommon for introverts to experience some level of stress and discomfort in social situations, whether they have a diagnosed anxiety disorder or not. After all, our comfort zones are back home, alone, with a good book or show.

Anyone who’s ever suffered from anxiety knows it’s mentally and emotionally draining. That mental drain can make it harder to think, focus, and recall information. During times of anxiety, big or small, the stress hormone cortisol is released, which can interfere with memory and concentration, among other things — which in turn, makes it harder to speak.

If you’re feeling anxious and struggling to speak, take a deep breath and cut yourself some slack.

Writing Uses Different Brain Pathways

If introverts commonly experience a “word problem,” it might seem strange, then, that they’re also known as talented writers. In fact, plenty of bestselling authors are self-professed introverts, from John Green to J.K. Rowling. Even if you’re an introvert who doesn’t write for a living, you probably prefer texting and emailing over big in-person meetings or talking on the phone.

How can this be? Again according to Laney, writing and speaking use different pathways in the brain. These writing pathways simply seem to flow more fluently and easily for introverts.

If, like me on the podcast, you find your mind going blank, the best thing you can do is try to relax and let your mind wander. When your mind wanders, it may latch onto the right key to pull up the memory you need. Buy yourself some time by saying, “I need a few moments to think about that.” If all else fails, tell the person you’ll get back to them later — via text or email.

Written By

Jenn Granneman

Jenn Granneman is the founder of IntrovertDear.com and the author of The Secret Lives of Introverts: Inside Our Hidden World. Jenn is a contributor to Psychology Today, HuffPost, Susan Cain’s Quiet Revolution, Upworthy, The Mighty, The Muse, Motherly, and a number of other outlets. She has appeared on the BBC and in Buzzfeed and Glamour magazine. Jenn started Introvert, Dear because she wanted to write about what it was like being an introvert living in an extrovert’s world. Now she’s on a mission: to let introverts everywhere know it’s okay to be who they are.

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How the pandemic is preparing us to work from anywhere

30 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on How the pandemic is preparing us to work from anywhere

If we don’t always need offices to do our jobs, when do we need them? And how will the pandemic change the way we use them?

Jennifer Magnolfi Astill specializes in the strategic development of high-tech future work environments. Here’s how she believes the pandemic could shape where and how we work in the years ahead.

Source: How the pandemic is preparing us to work from anywhere

By Drew Pearce

After seven months away from the office, the way you used to work might feel like a distant memory. With the flexibility to start the day earlier, end the day later, and find uninterrupted hours of focus, you might be getting even more done at home than you did in the office.

For some, that’s less about unstructured time, and more about the comforts of home—especially when home feels like a calm oasis where it’s easy to get in a creative flow. In a new survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the majority of workers reported feeling more focused at home than at the office. 42% are spending more time on deep focused work, and just 22% are spending less.

For others, like working parents, WFH can be a hurricane of chaos with endless emails, Slack chats, and Zoom meetings interrupted by remote learning sessions and family chores.

Now we’re learning more about why the same work environment doesn’t work for everyone.

Architects and ergonomics experts spent years perfecting office workspaces with the goal of making us comfortable so we could be more productive. That led to the open office becoming the consensus design. But the new EIU survey also shows that the face-to-face interruptions common in open offices were the biggest source of distraction for most workers.

Now there’s the new question of whether open office environments will even be viable in the age of COVID-19. The pandemic not only made safety the new top priority, it expanded our idea of what a “workspace” can actually be. It revealed how we’d been stuck in an outdated paradigm.

The shift to distributed work has proven work can happen almost anywhere. And when we’re no longer forced to be isolated, companies will have more flexibility to choose between the “hybrid model” and Virtual First. The question is: If we don’t always need offices to do our jobs, when do we need them? How will the pandemic change the way we use them?

The pandemic not only made safety the new top priority, it expanded our idea of what a “workspace” can actually be.

Jennifer Magnolfi Astill is the founder of Programmable Habitats, a consultancy that specializes in the strategic development of high-tech future work environments. She’s advised companies such as Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Herman Miller, and BBC on headquarter workspace initiatives. With the future of offices still uncertain, we wanted to get her perspective on how the pandemic could shape where and how we work in the years ahead. The following is a conversation that took place over email.

How do you envision workspaces changing in the next 5-10 years? 

MAGNOLFI ASTILL: The innovations that catalyze structural shifts in the world of work, particularly in the field of technology workspaces, often become manifest in physical environments a few years after their adoption by end users.

For example, at a large scale, building infrastructure systems for new technologies might require upgrades planned across several business cycles. Or, closer to the end user, workers might default to tablets or wireless laptops as their primary work tool and might see their desks give way to unassigned seating well before workstations are upgraded to have USB instead of Ethernet ports.

It is safe to predict that changes in the workspace in the next 5-10 years will inevitably be influenced by our work experience during the Coronavirus pandemic. This will impact the entire ecosystem of stakeholders, from landlords to occupants.

In the near term, new considerations such as staggered days in the office, social distancing and new hygiene measures, modified design and circulation patterns, increased use of video and remote collaboration software and many other new factors will continue to inform our work experience.

The pandemic is akin to a spike in the work evolution curve. It has accelerated the widespread adoption of the prior shift—mobility—to areas of the workforce traditionally more reticent to it. It has also revealed a broader undercurrent, namely our reliance on machine assistance for complex decision making and analysis, which are increasingly more common scenarios across all areas of business.

It is reasonable to assume that the pandemic will inform both policy as well as design modifications in most work environments. In the absence of a reliable and widespread vaccine, however, organizations will be required to maximize their capacity for adaptation so this will take different forms depending on the organization. I don’t really see a one size fits all solution. Having said this, the generalizable factor that the pandemic revealed is the increasingly dominant role that machine intelligence has for business and competitiveness.

“The pandemic is akin to a spike in the work evolution curve. It has accelerated the widespread adoption of the prior shift—mobility—to areas of the workforce traditionally more reticent to it.”

An example that comes to mind in terms of recent use of ML/AI in relation to the workspace is IBM’s Watson Works, a system that uses AI to both support decision making at the level of workspace portfolio to facilitate re-entry into the office, as well as an employee app to connect the individual end-user with both policy decisions and information about a specific workspace. The system thus allows a centralized “hub” view of integrated workforce/workspace insights on one end, and it is an individual portal for the end-user for things like reserving a desk or meeting space, logging health status for accessing the workspace, reviewing new space plans and layouts, policies etc.

Effectively, the modeling allows for visibility into a range of activities in the workplace which would otherwise be very difficult to assess or manage remotely, particularly for large real estate/workspace portfolios—things like making decisions on re-entry into the workspace based on real-time data on employees’ health or location safety, visibility into the occupancy rates and utilization patterns or social distancing of different workspaces, and eventually facilitating contact tracing in case of need. This is an example of a curated system that helps interpret and derive insights from data provided by a workforce network to inform decisions about workspace strategy to support that same network.

In a recent interview, you noted that the people developing workspaces in 2008 weren’t thinking about creating innovation, they were responding to an unmet need. What are the unmet needs that have become clear during this crisis, particularly during the shift to work? 

Broadly speaking, I would group the unmet needs unveiled by the pandemic in three categories: digital space unmet needs, physical space unmet needs, and work culture unmet needs.

To start with, there has been a change in mindset when it comes to the mobility of work. From the organization’s perspective, most know they can be productive but few had prior experience in managing a distributed workforce as a community. Transforming a network of remote colleagues into a cohesive community of work is the domain of community managers, a function that was mostly absorbed by HR departments, but that emerged as a distinct job to be done during the pandemic.

Secondly, the pandemic clarified that certain functions are optimized by interaction in the real world—in proximity with each other and in real time. Decision making, course of action selection, and learning in teams are functions that are optimized in space, particularly when it comes to work contexts that require the integration or manipulation of data or the interaction with machine work—be it robotics or data analytics. The third has to do with culture and work anthropology, particularly in the context of socialization with colleagues as an important aspect of professional life and the on-boarding of new employees.

While the first can look to some established precedent for inspiration, and therefore a new function can emerge to meet that need, the other two will require innovation and new design, insofar as the basis for performance in both has traditionally been afforded by access to shared physical spaces.

What’s been the most surprising development you’ve observed in the past few months as workers and companies have made the shift to remote work? 

I’d say many things have surprised me, but one stands out. The chaos that many have experienced from merging their entire life with their work “space” has in many cases been liberating—causing what we might call an “extreme humanizing” of work relations.

Prior to the pandemic, even the most informal and friendly work cultures, such as tech or startups, drew a fine line between personal/family life and work/office life, particularly in more experienced, higher-ranking workers. In ordinary times, this mental and emotional separation is both appropriate and in many cases necessary.

In the midst of a pandemic, however, this line was softened by a shared experience of struggle and by the unavoidable conversations that many workers and leaders had to have with each other about the reality of their circumstances and the things and the people that mattered in their lives. In my observation, the renewed perspective of the human person at work might be one of the most valuable insights we have gained from the past few months.

Your research shows that remote teams benefit from physical interaction by coming together to solidify social bonds that improve teamwork—and you’ve advocated for designing a workspace that encourages people to interact more. What might that look like in virtual workspaces such as collaboration docs ? 

Both research and observations in the field suggest that shared experiences in real life—in the physical world together in real time—provide strong foundations for interpersonal relations, trust and improved communication among team members. These, in turn, support the team’s productivity and collaborative work patterns when they are distributed for an extended period of time.

What is important to note in this, however, is that these interactions, when successful, are seldom left to chance. They are either facilitated by the intentional design of the physical environment in which they take place or, in many cases, purposely curated with the intent to create a memorable experience. Often, both.

Digital collaboration spaces which allow for both management of workflow and communication in a team environment are not immune to this need for memorable (and purposeful) interactions, in as much as they, too, are social spaces for exchange. The governing principle often distinguishing successful and productive communities of work, whether in physical or digital space, is to forge connections that otherwise would not happen and guide those interactions towards a certain goal.

How do you foresee people interacting and collaborating when some are in the physical office building while others are in the digital/virtual space? 

This requires a delicate balance early on as new norms of work in our hybrid context are emerging. “Work from Anywhere” strategies being currently developed across organizations will be best served by taking this point into account.

“There has been a change in mindset when it comes to the mobility of work. From the organization’s perspective, most know they can be productive but few had prior experience in managing a distributed workforce as a community.”

Early on in my research, I found that engineering and programming teams would often define somewhat organically the things that needed to happen in digital space—like chat, for example, where a lot of iterative work would take place—and those that required a wall (often a whiteboard)—which was good to “fix in space” a moment in the evolution of a project.

My sense is that something similar is occurring in high-performing teams now. Cohesive teams, particularly knowledge and technology workers, will be adept at organizing their work, their assumptions and expectations of performance based on a mental model of working through the pandemic most of us now share.

In some cases, the choice between working in digital space or going to the office might be based less on arbitrary scheduling, and more on where it makes more sense to work at that point in time in the lifecycle of the project or to optimize overall team performance.

In terms of adopting new collaboration tools, you’ve noted how almost 10 years of workspace progress has happened in a few months, simply because more people were forced to adopt video conferencing and remote collaboration tools. Do you think these adoptions will “stick” and continue to be valued going forward? 

Some of the things that I think will stick, as you say, will constitute a new baseline for the future workspace, inevitably including new video collaboration tools. One of the main reasons for this is their effectiveness in underpinning most distributed work strategies.

Having said this, I think it’s still too early to determine which tools and what mix will stay and for how long, because we are still learning which parts of our psychology at work each of these tools is best suited for. We are all developing fluency and a personal or company work style with regards to, for example, when we feel it’s necessary to have a video vs. a call.

This experimentation will in some cases lead to new forms of “work culture”—i.e. this is how things are done in our organization now—that will then be formalized and integrated into work practices and policy. This will take time and much will depend on the evolution of the pandemic in the next year.

How much of the benefit of remote collaboration today would you say depends on pre-established trust between colleagues, which would need to be built up for new hires? 

The curation of digital work communities, and therefore the fostering of the values and norms that help those communities thrive, is an important and necessary job function, particularly at scale. Interaction design is a key factor in this.

Trust develops over time and is facilitated by shared experiences and by the development of knowledge about each other’s character and expertise. There are cognitive factors—like developing a shared mental model of work—and interpersonal factors—like psychological safety and dependability—at work in all high-performing teams.

We instinctively know when we are part of a great team. The translation of these factors to a remote workforce is necessary for developing trust among team members, particularly when a new one joins an established group, and will offer great opportunities for innovation in work practices and culture.

Dropbox recently announced that we’re now a Virtual First company, meaning remote work will be the day-to-day default for individual work. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this concept. What would you say are the advantages of being Virtual First? 

I think there is a notable point to be made, and it’s the cultural one—the (seemingly) intentional effort to level the field for all employees when it comes to the choice of how to work. I think this will likely show positive outcomes in addition to the logistical advantages implied by the new workspace policy.

 

The Author

Paul Boutin
Paul is a serial tech startup worker who has written about tech-fueled culture for Wired, The New York Times, and many others. A veteran Dropbox user, he explores remote collaboration as not just an interest, but a way of life.

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Do We Control Our Own Purchasing Habits?

27 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

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Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

Flaws in our decision-making ability are fuel for the market.

Source: Do We Control Our Own Purchasing Habits?

By Liraz Margalit Ph.D.

Persuading rational people to make rational decisions is easy. 

Unfortunately, as humans, we’re often stuck with irrational thinking, fueled by cognitive biases and emotions.

While we’d all love to think that our actions are based on reason and logic, the truth is that we’re often driven by cognitive biases that completely ignore reality. In his book, “Descartes’ Error,” Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, argues that emotion is a primary ingredient in nearly  every decision.

So, how do you persuade your customers when they are heavily influenced by subjective factors that you have seemingly little control over?

The first step toward answering that question is identifying what those subjective factors are for your audience.

Define Free Choice

Flaws in our decision-making ability are fuel for the market. In certain situations, illustrated below, we are especially susceptible to external influences. 

In those situations, our primitive needs and desires plague us. Our basic urges derive from the lower-level areas of the brain, such as the limbic system, which controls emotions and motivation. When it comes to consumers, perhaps the most important characteristic of emotions is that they push us toward action. As humans, we are often compelled to do something as a response to an emotion.

Imagine this scenario: You’re at the supermarket with your three children, who you’ve just picked up from school. 

After a tiring succession of aisles, punctuated by the begging, crying and screaming of your children asking for everything that catches their eyes, you’ve arrived undaunted at the checkout line. As you wait, a brave new world greets your little loved ones: a smorgasbord of tempting candies, each colorfully-wrapped treat at exactly the height where your children can reach them. 

By wondrous coincidence, soda and popsicles are also within reach. At this moment — while you’re under the stares of the other awaiting shoppers, when you’ve successfully reached the finish line after triumphing over the ceaseless struggles that met you in every aisle of the store — you finally surrender to the pleas of your kids. 

Into the cart you toss a Kit Kat bar, a Snickers bar and a packet of M&Ms. At that critical moment, with the barrier of resistance already breached, a chilled bottle of Diet Sprite beckoning from the cooler strikes you as just what you need. Your decision, apparently a choice freely made, is actually as far as it could be from a free choice. 

It turns out that when we are worn out, tired, hungry or under pressure (or all of the above), we make decisions that differ completely from those we make when we’re calm, cool and collected.

Overestimating Our Own Powers of Reason

In countless interviews and studies, consumers have revealed that they lack basic understanding of the forces that shape their purchasing behavior. 

When they decide to purchase a particular product, they believe that they are behaving rationally, making a choice in an effort to maximize their benefit. Yet this belief is nothing more than a cognitive deception.

Granted, today’s consumers are well aware of being targets of aggressive marketing. Yet in their hearts, they believe they are strong, independent thinkers, impervious to marketers’ manipulations. 

When asked how they decide whether to purchase a particular product, consumers speak about an intensive, rational process of thought. They describe how they investigate and consider the characteristics of the product, compare the available prices, and thus attain the best value for their money. 

The Illusion of Being in Charge

The problem with their self-conception is that it’s systematically biased. We overrate our resistance to external influences. This bias derives from our need to believe that at any given moment, we are in charge of our own decisions and actions. This delusion enables us to enjoy a feeling of independence and control over our lives. The locus of control bias is a basic, essential defense mechanism, and we couldn’t survive without it.

Our misconception of subjective experience gives us the illusion of control in our decisions. In order to preserve that sense of control that is so crucial in our lives, we create supporting narratives and tell ourselves stories about rational thought processes that underlie our decisions.

In reality, however, emotion and primitive urges play a very significant role part in our purchasing decisions. Much more so than we’d like to admit.

Which Force Decides: Rational or Emotional?

Inside our brains, decision-making is the product of two opposing forces — rational and emotional. The rational conscious force is governed by the brain’s command-and-control areas, located near the forehead. The emotional unconscious force is governed by the more primitive areas, such as the limbic system, which affect feelings and immediate urges, and which we share with our fellow animals.

The human brain has no access to the unconscious processes involved in decision-making. In fact, factors that have nothing to do with the actual decision greatly influence this process, such as environmental cues, context and our emotions.

When test subjects were asked to choose between receiving two Amazon coupons in a month’s time or receiving one coupon when the experiment finished, subjects who had shown high activity in the rational systems involved in long-term planning and in regulation of urges decided to wait a month to receive two Amazon coupons. Subjects who had shown higher activity in the emotional system that deals with immediate satisfaction of needs asked to receive one Amazon coupon on the spot.

The question is why the rational system takes charge in some cases, while in other cases our resistance is weakened and the emotional system takes control. 

Draining Our Discipline 

Until recently, the consensus was that self-restraint is an innate ability — that some people are born with abundant self-discipline and others with less. In order to test that conception, subjects were asked to forgo lunch and were presented with two bowls: one full of radishes and the other full of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

Half of the subjects were instructed to eat the cookies and ignore the radishes, while the other half was instructed conversely. Immediately after eating, the subjects were asked to perform a cognitive task, a persistence-testing puzzle, which was intentionally impossible to accomplish. 

The cookie-eaters, fully armed with self-discipline and motivation, tried repeatedly to complete the task. On average, they spent nineteen minutes more at their attempts than the radish-eaters did. For their part, the radish-eaters made far fewer attempts and devoted less than half the time solving the puzzle compared to the chocolate-eating participants. 

Those who had to resist the sweets and force themselves to eat pungent vegetables could no longer find the will to fully engage in another torturous task. They were already too tired and displayed frustration and irritation. They complained that the experiment was a complete waste of time. Some of them put their hands on the table and closed their eyes.

Manipulating People for a Profit

It appears that willpower is not a talent, but a matter of available energy. 

When our kids at the supermarket have drained us of our last drop of energy, our ability to stand fast and resist is significantly impaired. When we are under pressure to catch a plane, our resistance to tempting smells from the bakery stalls is particularly low. When we’ve said a painful farewell, our ability to opt for healthy food over junk food becomes dubious.

In online buying as well, it can be observed that impulse buying tends to occur in the evening, after the hard knocks of the day erode our powers of control. Impulse buying is the purchase, for emotional reasons, of products that we don’t actually need. We purchase these things because they provide us, at the time, with a moment of emotional relief. 

In contrast, an examination of purchasing in the daytime — when our cognitive resources are still at their fullest — shows consumers more involved in price comparisons and in careful examination of product characteristics.

We don’t stop to think how much effort and expertise is invested in understanding our moments of weakness and in developing strategies for exploiting them. With sufficient knowledge and understanding of people, someone will always find a way to sell an unnecessary product.

George Akerlof, a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, once said, “Taking advantage of weaknesses is an integral part of the free market. Manipulating people for profit is a natural aspect of the economic equilibrium. The free-market system exploits our weaknesses automatically.” 

Or in other words: if we have a weakness, the market will be sure to manipulate it.

Liraz Margalit, Ph.D., analyzes online consumer behavior, incorporating theory and academic research into a conceptual framework.Online:

ClickTale, Facebook, LinkedIn

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Does B613 Really Exist? — Life Imitating Art Imitating Life

01 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

 

B613?

Hollywood will always be Hollywood. There will always be ridiculous chase scenes, impossible rescues and implausible conspiracies, each accompanied by the proverbial warning, “Don’t try this at home.” But sometimes, when art seems to imitate life and aspects of the fantasy world on the page or screen seem to mirror our reality, we end up asking ourselves, “Is it possible? Is that really true?”

The highly successful political drama series, Scandal, was a perfect case in point. The main character, Olivia Pope, a Washington crisis manager (a.k.a. “fixer”), was based on the real-world crisis manager and former Bush administration press aide, Judy Smith. Smith & Company has managed very real crises for clients such as Monica Lewinsky, Wesley Snipes, Michael Vick and Sony Pictures Entertainment as well as provided strategic communication consolation to various Fortune 500 companies. Olivia Pope & Associates managed the reputations of the Washington wealthy and powerful by whatever means necessary, escalating from manipulating media coverage to crime scene clean up and beyond, all while Olivia deftly (and sometimes not so deftly) managed an affair with POTUS.

But there’s more . . . because . . . Hollywood.

Just under a quarter of the way through Season 2 (of 7 seasons), in episode 13, we encountered the cryptic moniker B613. And just like that, the world of fixing was forever altered. Just like that, Scandal’s faithful audience wondered incredulously, “Does B613 really exist?” And despite its secrecy and lies, ruthless totalitarianism, brutal tactics and fearsome power, we (ahem . . . . I mean, they, of course) almost want it to.

But why?

From The Count of Monte Cristo to Charles Bronson movies, to Dexter, The Sopranos and Scandal, the theme of vigilante justice meted out by an ethical-but-not-too-ethical hero persists in the stories we tell. It persists because somewhere, hidden deep in the shadowy crevices of most minds, there is a desire for a protector who is smart enough, and powerful enough, and tough enough, to dispense real justice when the system breaks down.

We like the juxtaposition of tough (really tough) and tender. We feel for Tony Soprano when he struggles with the human condition as he sits across from his therapist, all the while knowing that in a previous episode we saw him carrying a severed head in a bowling ball bag after some serious “wet work.” Likewise, we (mostly) root for Olivia in love and war, even though we are well aware of her unscrupulous, illegal and immoral actions. We feel tenderness when those lips start to quiver.

Several psychological principles seem at play here.

Humans seem to be hard-wired, if you will, to evaluate for aspects of fairness. Fair treatment elicits positive emotions, while conversely, unfair treatment elicits negative emotions. The definition of fairness, of course, it mitigated by individual experience and cultural norms, but regardless of that definition, when principles of fairness are violated, humans tend to seek punishment and/or retribution. Of course, given the circumstances, exacting such justice in the face of injustice is not always possible, practical or beneficial. Yet the desire is there. And because this causes cognitive dissonance, individuals may seek other, less direct measures of righting the wrong — e.g., retribution by proxy. Enter the Dexters, the Tony Sopranos and the B613’s of the world, real or fictional.

A close cousin of our need for fairness is the concept of revenge. Revenge is most often, or most purely, sought in the pursuit of fairness, or rather righting unfairness. However, that definition of fairness as a justification, can be twisted, and revenge can be pursued for less noble causes that fairness — e.g., pure spite or jealousy — think the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding drama. Again, much of what we might fantasize as appropriate revenge may well be immoral and/or illegal. Thus, we count on others — whether the sanctioned processes of our legal system, or some such entity that rises above the constrains of that system — to do our so-called “dirty work.”

And then, the question becomes, “At what price, revenge?” What do we really gain in the quest to seek justice and retaliation? What do we lose? How much power do we relinquish to any entity to whom we give the task of executing our personal justice? How vulnerable do we become to them?

So back to B613. Does a secret agency exist that operates on a virtually unlimited budget beyond the oversight of government in order to protect “the Republic” in any way its Command sees fit? Some believe the answer, to some degree, is yes. Some believe it so for the sheer thrill and mystique of imagining a secret agency. Others, however, argue that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), established in 2010 by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, bears some resemblance to Scandal’s fictional organization. The CFPB is hardly a secret. It has its own .gov site. But it does operate as an “independent agency” outside the authority of Congress. Much like B613, the CFPB is, some argue, under the control of one person — not referred to as Command, but rather a Director — though the agency does indicate a Deputy Director in its org chart.

Much like B613, CFPB has proven itself masterful in the extraction of information from American companies and consumers. The Bureau has been accused of amassing consumer data on 85–90% of American consumer credit cards with outstanding balances, a data collection program that dwarfs even the NSA’s surveillance program. And though the CFPB has yet to engage in the strong-arm tactics and “enhanced interrogation techniques” of B613 (solitary confinement, waterboarding, torture), it does pack a punch, so to speak, along the order of fines and legal action.

While the CFPB’s role is exclusively financial (again, unlike B613), it has been criticized for its overarching authority, lack of accountability, unchecked power and capacity for unilateral decisions, even, or perhaps especially among other government agencies.

United States House Financial Services Committee openly criticized CFPB for its “radical structure that is controlled by a single individual who cannot be fired for poor performance and who exercises sole control over the agency, its hiring and its budget” (Hensarling, 2013). The committee cited a lack of financial transparency and a lack of accountability to Congress or the President.

Thus far, legal action against the CFPB has been twarted. However, in October 2019, the Supreme Court announced it would review the constitutionality of the Bureau’s structure with proceedings set to begin in March 2020. But like B613, the CFPB has its staunch supporters as well, who argue that such unprecedented authority is necessary to fulfill its overarching mandate — consumer protection.

Beyond the CFPB, some argue that the real life role of B613 is played by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) clandestine units or a branch of the National Security Agency (NSA). Others insist that nothing remotely resembling the fictional agency does or could exist in the US, given the elaborate set of checks and balances in our government.

Still others argue that while there may not be one central organization, as depicted on Scandal, countless “off-the-books operations” function in an ad hoc manner — a.k.a. covert operations or “black ops.” Now we’re moving into some gray area. Depending on how one depicts these operations, they could be considered sinister conspiracies or the typical modus operandi of national security, which, by nature must hold its proverbial cards close to its chest, so to speak. Obviously, our government, or any government, for that matter, cannot make all things public. The question becomes, as it so often does with all things of a moral and ethical nature, where to draw the line. Where exactly is that murky gray area between for-your-own-good and harmful deception? And, of course, who gets to decide?

These are dilemmas humankind has struggled with since the ancient philosophers. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we get it very, very wrong. And sometimes we are left with more questions than answers.

Even B613.

Hensarling, J. (June 18, 2013). CFPB Lacks Oversight and Accountability. U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee. Archived from the original Press release https://web.archive.org/web/20170516101416/http:/financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=339512 .

 

 

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Can Hollywood Alter History? How Film Modifies Memory

03 Monday Feb 2020

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on Can Hollywood Alter History? How Film Modifies Memory

Movies can influence how we (mis)remember the past.

Source: Can Hollywood Alter History? How Film Modifies Memory

By Alan Castel Ph.D.

Currently, a lot of information is presented to us, to believe or not to believe. With so much talk about alternative truths and fake news, it is more important than ever to decipher what is real and what is imaginary.

Movies provide a rich and engaging form of entertainment and education, as story-telling can also make people more aware of current and past events. Research has shown that people learn very effectively from stories and narratives, engaging our brain in ways that are both pleasurable and incredibly complex [1, 2], so movies (and not just documentary form) are often ways for people to learn about the past. Our imagination is ready for action, and movies can provide a tantalizing twist, often portraying World Wars, the Depression, slavery, the Holocaust, or space exploration. Actors can become incorporated into people’s imagery of the past, such as in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) starring Jim Caviezel as Jesus, and Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln (2012).

The question is, to what degree can misinformation, or slight variations on what actually happened in the past, blend into people’s minds while watching movies? Does this sometimes less-than-accurate perspective then become embedded in memory, and with time, become a new version of the truth? This might be especially so for a younger generation, who do not personally remember the more remote past or did not live through the historical events in question.

As an example, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywoodprovides an engaging story and background for the 1969 events that led to the Sharon Tate Manson-clan murder spree. Living up to its story-book title (“Once Upon A Time…”) (spoiler alert) the movie provides a much different ending, as Sharon Tate never meets her demise in this tale. Most people over the age of 60 know about the Manson-family murders and Sharon Tate.

The movie provides a much less horrific ending for Tate and an alternative tale—complete with Tarantino-style violence (it involves a flame thrower) and using fantasy instead of historical facts. The Manson clan has the tables turned on them. However, in what is a deviation from the truth of what happened 50 years ago, it becomes possible that people (especially young adults) will now know a different version of reality—and may not question the movie’s twist on truth, and end up believing some of the fictitious events in the movie.

Research has shown that presenting people with misinformation—some information or event that is inconsistent with the truth of what happened earlier but is highly believable, can lead to not only some initial confusion, but it can then alter memory [3].  As a result of introducing misinformation in a psychology experiment on the exact topic, people will claim to have been lost in a mall as a child after being told this story had happened to them, or that as a child they met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland to refresh your memory, Bugs is a Warner Bros. character and thus couldn’t be seen at Disneyland) [4].

People are prone to believe stories and what makes sense often without questioning the events that are being suggested. Movies might provide just the right amount of entertaining and (sometimes subtle) misinformation that can lead to memories and history being altered in the process.

Movies provide us with entertainment and fodder for our imagination. They also reference history and make people think about what happened in the past, and what could happen in the future (such as the memorable Back to the Future trilogy). Presenting tales and alternative ending in the context of a real event can make people think what could have happened if only a few things were different—but these variations on the truth can also lead to some implanted memories for people who only have a vague understanding of the past.

In the context of persuasion and social psychology, the “sleeper” effect can lead people to believe something that they earlier didn’t believe or agree with, if they then experienced some reference to it and after some time they are even more likely to believe it [5].  Sleeper effects can make people believe things even if initially we are not likely to believe it.

Quentin Tarantino is not intentionally trying to dupe people into thinking things were different 50 years ago, instead he is allowing us to imagine how things could have been different if a few small or seemingly random events happened or different choices were made by certain characters. He took creative license to shed a brighter light (flame-thrower style) on a dark event.  Movies can allow the mind to imagine, and it is then up to us to differentiate what we imagine with what actually happened in the past, but sleeper effects can make us reimagine the past in ways that can have profound effects on our later memory, which can be modified each time we visit events from the past [6].  Students may also misremember historical events based on the movies that they were exposed to in classroom learning settings [7], suggesting that Hollywood can alter younger peoples’ perception of past historical events.

Ideally, movies that provide variations of the past will make people research what actually happened, to have a more complete understanding of the events, but it can also lead to some subtle changes in history from the younger viewers’ point of view.

 

References

1.    Zacks, J. M. (2015). Flicker: Your Brain on Movies. Oxford University Press, USA.

2.    Furman, O., Dorfman, N., Hasson, U., Davachi, L., & Dudai, Y. (2007). They saw a movie: Long-term memory for an extended audiovisual narrative. Learning & Memory, 14, 457-467.

3.    Loftus, E. F., & Hoffman, H. G. (1989). Misinformation and memory: The creation of new memories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118, 100-104.

4.    Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12, 361-366.

5.    Kumkale, G. T., & Albarracín, D. (2004). The sleeper effect in persuasion: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 143-172.

6.    Chan, J. C., & LaPaglia, J. A. (2013). Impairing existing declarative memory in humans by disrupting reconsolidation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110, 9309-9313.

7.     Butler, A. C., Zaromb, F. M., Lyle, K. B., & Roediger III, H. L. (2009). Using popular films to enhance classroom learning: The good, the bad, and the interesting. Psychological Science, 20, 1161-1168.

 

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7 Essential Psychological Truths About Ghosting

27 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on 7 Essential Psychological Truths About Ghosting

 

Why “ghosting” hurts so much, why people do it, and how you can get over it.

Source: 7 Essential Psychological Truths About Ghosting

By Loren Soeiro, Ph.D. ABPP

“Ghosting,” which has been in the common parlance for the past five or six years, was once known as the “slow fade.” It blew up in the popular press (including the New York Times) around mid-2015. For those who’ve never heard it before — and I can’t imagine there are many who haven’t — it means suddenly discontinuing all contact with another person to end a relationship. Ghosting can be failing to respond to a text exchange with someone you’ve never met, cutting off contact with someone you’ve dated a few times, or even refusing to return someone’s calls after a sexual involvement. If you’re dating, it can happen to you at any time, no matter how much investment you’ve placed in a potential partner.

A patient of mine, for instance, makes ghosting a regular practice, saying she just loses interest in the people she dates after they’ve had sex. To her, “ghosting” is a practical response to this problem. She has no other personal or professional overlap with the people she dates, and their friends don’t know hers, so when she stops responding to their texts, she knows there will be no consequences. Although my patient does feel guilty, she doesn’t see it as morally wrong, and she definitely doesn’t want the alternative — struggling through so many messy conversations! To my patient, ending communication suddenly is actually an elegant solution: The people she’s been dating can infer from her lack of contact that she’s no longer interested.

Her reasoning may strike many of today’s young adults as familiar. It’s altogether too easy to stop chatting with someone who can only contact you through your cell phone, which you can quickly set to ignore them. And it’s just as easy to meet someone new: There are hundreds of dating apps currently available — thousands, perhaps, if you count the small ones. With so many apps, each subscriber can find hundreds of people to date at any moment, so it might seem like a waste of time to treat each person with full politeness and courtesy. Online dating is fast-paced; if one option isn’t an immediate hit, you can move on to another immediately. Perhaps ghosters see the people they meet on the apps as if they’re walking profiles, something they can just swipe away if it’s not quite right. Of course, if you’re always looking around for someone just a little better than the person you’re chatting with on Hinge, it’s a good bet that that person is doing the same to you — which could further reduce your likelihood of making a real investment of time or energy.

It also takes courage to admit when we’re wrong, or when we’ve knowingly hurt someone. Ghosting is sometimes referred to as a form of cowardice: the refusal to acknowledge one’s own misconduct. And cognitive dissonance may play a role as well. Our brains naturally focus on information that confirms a preexisting belief about something, even when other evidence indicates that we might be wrong. Ghosters, like my patient, often go through elaborate cognitive gymnastics to convince themselves that what they do is totally fine. In addition, ghosting can also be the result of a particular set of beliefs about dating. Some people think of it as a way of finding the person they’re destined to spend their lives with and see their dating life as a targeted search for the ideal partner. These people don’t believe it’s possible for relationships to grow and change, or for attraction to deepen as time goes by; they do not have a growth mindset about romance. People who see dating this way are more likely to ghost when they decide that the person they’re dating is not 100 percent right for them. (According to the New York Times, the opposite is true as well: People who believe that attraction can grow and change in good ways, and who don’t hold their dates up to a hypothetical ideal, are less likely to abruptly disappear on their partners.)

When the person you like stops returning your texts, the emotional consequences can run from unpleasant to severe. There’s a profound lack of closure to the relationship, an ambiguity that makes it impossible to interpret what went wrong. The social cues present in a traditional breakup — reduction of time spent together, lack of eye contact, a change in the tone of interaction — are disorientingly absent. You may think your partner has begun dating someone else — or, worse, that they’ve finally recognized the things you hate about yourself. Ghosting causes you to question yourself, which can be devastating to your self-esteem. It deprives you of any chance to work through what went wrong in the relationship. In other words, it’s altogether too easy to draw troubling conclusions when you’ve been ghosted. Some even see it as similar to the silent treatment, which has been described as a form of emotional cruelty.

Ghosting is even more hurtful to people who have low self-esteem in the first place. If what one person believed was a substantial relationship ends suddenly — without even the effort it would take to have a traditional breakup — the results can even produce a traumatic reaction. In psychological studies, social rejection has even been found to activate the same neurological pathways as physical pain. People with low self-esteem also tend to release less internally generated opioids into the brain after rejection, as compared to those with higher self-esteem. In other words, low self-esteem means less ability to tolerate the pain of being forsaken or abandoned.

So ghosting is, by and large, not a great way to treat people you respect. It’s passive-aggressive, it’s self-protective at the expense of other people’s feelings, and it’s hard to stop: People who are ghosted become more likely to do the same to someone else. If you don’t like the experience, perhaps you should try to counter this trend and to work against a disposable, low-investment dating culture. There’s nothing easy about explaining to someone why you aren’t interested in them romantically, but even a brief explanation is much, much better than none at all. Closing a relationship openly is good for you, too: Disclosing your feelings can lower your blood pressure and reduce your subjective experience of stress. “I had a fun time,” you might say, “but I don’t think this is going to go in a romantic direction for me.” Or “I don’t think we’re really right for each other, although it’s been good to get to know you this week.” Even that much can help the other person close your chapter and move on. (Be careful about saying you’re sorry, unless you believe you have done something wrong; otherwise, “sorry” strikes a false note, or may even prolong someone’s emotional connection with you.)

And if you are hurting from having been ghosted? Remember that the message you’ve received is more about the other person than it is about you. Someone who ghosts you is declaring that they aren’t ready to treat you like an adult or to be honest about their feelings in anything approaching a delicate situation. It’s a clear sign that they are relying on primitive coping mechanisms — like avoidance and denial — and is not able to have a mature relationship with you at this time. Don’t bother reaching out to them again once you’ve gotten this message, either; if you believe the anecdotal evidence, asking people why they’ve ghosted you may even cause them to ghost you again. If your self-esteem has been damaged by the way someone else ended a relationship, don’t sacrifice any more of it by trying to communicate with someone who cannot do so in a mature way. You’ll do better to spend your time with courteous, kind people, and your ghoster has just identified himself, or herself, as someone who is neither.

References

Hosie, R. (2018, August).  I tracked down all the men who’ve ghosted me and this is what happened.  Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/ghosting-men-tracked-down-messaged-what-happened-dating-trends-uk-a8393866.html

Kim, J.  (2015, July).  The strange psychology of ghosting.  Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/valley-girl-brain/201507/the-strange-psychology-ghosting

Leary, M. R.,Haupt, A. L., Strausser, K. S., & Chokel, J. T. 1998. Calibrating the sociometer: The relationship between interpersonal appraisals and state self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, p.1290-1299.

Popescu, A. (2019, January).  Why people ghost and how to get over it.  Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/smarter-living/why-people-ghost-and-how-to-get-over-it.html

Priebe, H. (2019, February).  Why good people ghost: How our current dating culture necessitates dishonesty.  Retrieved from https://thoughtcatalog.com/heidi-priebe/2015/08/why-good-people-ghost-how-our-current-dating-culture-necessitates-dishonesty/

Samakow, J.  (2017, December).  Ghosting: The 21st-century dating problem everyone talks about, but no one knows how to deal with.  Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/30/ghosting-dating-_n_6028958.html

Vilhauer, J. (2015, November).  This is why ghosting hurts so much. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-forward/201511/is-why-ghosting-hurts-so-much

Williams, C., Richardson, D. Hammock, G., Janit, S. 2012. Perceptions of physical and psychological aggression in close relationships: A review. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 17, (6), p. 489–494.

 

Loren Soeiro, Ph.D., ABPP, is a psychologist in private practice in New York City, specializing in helping people find success, fulfillment, and peace in their relationships and their work.

Online:

www.lorensoeiro.net, LinkedIn

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Nir Eyal says distraction doesn’t start with technology—it starts with us

20 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on Nir Eyal says distraction doesn’t start with technology—it starts with us

Nir Eyal spent the best part of a decade working in the depths of the technology industry, watching as designers at tech giants subtly tweaked their products in order to manipulate the psychology of their users and modify their behavior.

Source: Nir Eyal says distraction doesn’t start with technology—it starts with us

By David Vallance

In 2011, Eyal released Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, a behavioral design manual. “My idea was to democratize the psychological techniques technology companies use so that all of us in business can help people form healthy habits,” says Eyal in an interview for Dropbox. Hooked was an instant success, spreading like wildfire across the technology industry and beyond.

But recently, Eyal’s focus has swung one-eighty. In his latest book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, Eyal focuses not on building habits, but breaking them. And his radical switch in focus started with a children’s activity book.

Eyal was playing with his young daughter. He had set aside an afternoon for them to work through a book of fun activities. “If you could have any superpower in the world,” Eyal asked his daughter, reading from the book, “what would you choose?”

As his daughter weighed the pros and cons of flight, invisibility, and super strength, Eyal’s phone buzzed in his pocket. Instinctively, he pulled it out. When his daughter had decided on an answer, Eyal was still glued to his device. “Just a second,” he said, his fingers tapping out an email. “I need to respond to one thing.”

We use these devices as psychological pacifiers as we are looking for an escape from uncomfortable sensations. And if we don’t deal with that fact, we will always find distraction somewhere.

By the time he had hit send and returned his focus to the activity book, Eyal’s daughter had wandered off. “I had just blown a special moment with my daughter because I had allowed something on my phone to distract me,” wrote Eyal on his blog Nir & Far. Eyal says this one isolated incident wasn’t a huge deal but the scene kept repeating itself in his head, and that worried him. He knew something was wrong. He started to investigate the problem of distraction. Several years later, that investigation would culminate in the publication of Indistractable.

We sat down with Nir to hear more about his findings.

Why is it important to examine distraction?

I wrote the book because I was Patient Zero and felt I was struggling with distraction. I found that I was distracted with my daughter, I found that I wasn’t able to complete the work I had planned, and I wasn’t taking care of my body.

I wasn’t doing what I said I would do and that was annoying — but it was also fascinating.

The fascination came from a question: Why did we do this? It’s an age old question. In fact, Socrates and Aristotle asked the same question 2,500 years ago. They called it akrasia, which is the tendency to do things against our better interests. And they also struggled to explain the mystery.

What I initially planned as a book about technology distraction quickly turned into a book about the psychology of all distraction.

When you identified the problem, your first reaction wasn’t to write a book. Instead, you investigated existing advice. What did you find?

I followed many self-help books to a tee. I went on a digital detox, I did a 30-day plan, and I excised technologies from my life — and two things happened. First, I realized I need these technologies. I need them to connect with my friends and I need them for my livelihood. Saying ‘Hey, stop using social media’ is easy but not every profession can do that.

Second, even when I did get rid of these things, it didn’t work. I got myself a flip phone and a word processor from the 1990s. I got rid of all my internet connections. I got rid of all the apps and social media. Then I thought, “Okay, now I’m going to be focused and not be distracted.” But it didn’t work.

I would find other distractions. I would organize my desk, I would say, “Oh, there’s that book I’ve been meaning to read,” or “Let me just take out the garbage real quick.” I kept getting distracted because — and here’s the truth we don’t like to admit to ourselves — distraction starts from within.

We can blame the proximal causes like technology all day long, but if we fail to realize we are doing things against our better interest because they are helping us escape from discomfort, we will always be distracted by one thing or another.

We use these devices as psychological pacifiers as we are looking for an escape from uncomfortable sensations. And if we don’t deal with that fact, we will always find distraction somewhere.

If technology is not the enemy, how do you advise fighting back against distraction?

Let’s start with the four part model that I talk about in Indistractable, which starts with a definition of distraction. What does that term mean? In order to understand distraction, we have to understand the opposite of distraction, which is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction.

Traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do. And the opposite of traction is distraction, which is anything you do that pulls you away from what you want to do.

This is really important for two reasons. Number one, it frees us from this silly moral hierarchy that lets people judge each other for how they spend their time. If you want to play Candy Crush or browse social media, there is nothing morally inferior to doing that versus watching football on TV. It’s a pastime and there’s nothing wrong with it as long as you do it with intent and it’s consistent with your values.

Number two, it makes us be honest with ourselves about what is traction. Many of us sit down at our desk at work and we say, “Okay, we’re going to do that big project that we’ve been delaying. We’re going to start working on it… right after we check email, right after we check our Slack channel.” And that’s just as much of a distraction as playing video games because it fools us. Distraction tricks us, it makes us think that what we’re doing is productive — but it’s not. It’s just as much of a distraction because it’s not what we intended to do.

What prompts us towards traction and distraction are only two things: external triggers and internal triggers. External triggers are kind of the usual suspects, the pings, dings and rings. They’re not inherently good or bad as it depends what they lead us to. If an external trigger says, “Hey, it’s time to wake up and go to the gym,” and that’s what you intended to do, that’s terrific. That trigger was serving its function. But if the external trigger is a notification while you’re in the middle of a meeting, it’s taking you off track and now it’s distraction.

In my research, what I found is that external triggers are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the number of distractions that we encounter every day. And most distractions don’t start from outside of us — they begin within us.

We have to go a layer deeper to answer the question: why do we get distracted? In fact, we actually have to go one layer deeper again and ask, why do we do anything? And it turns out that all behavior is prompted by the desire to escape discomfort.

It’s pain all the way down, which means that even the pursuit of pleasure is itself psychologically destabilizing. There’s a reason we say love hurts. All of these things are psychologically destabilizing and so we escape through action. And if all behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort, that means time management is pain management.

This is a fundamental truth we have to realize. We can blame the proximal causes like technology all day long, but if we fail to realize we are doing things against our better interest because they are helping us escape from discomfort, we will always be distracted by one thing or another.

Your work is built on fairly old research, but it will sound new and novel to most people. Why is that?

The irony is that professional media organizations are built on the same exact business model, and the technology companies, that they’re blaming. The publication that criticizes technology, calls them distractions, and say they’re hijacking your brain, use the same exact business model of selling your attention for money. They make their money on advertising.

When The New York Times or The Guardian writes a piece about how technology is melting your brain, they’re doing that because people love negativity. It’s called negativity bias and it’s an inborn tendency for us to be fearful of things. And so we want a big, bad monster, we want threats because looking inside of us and saying, “Wait a minute, we’ve met the enemy and it is us” is scary and requires us to do something.

You think the dominant ‘big, bad tech’ narrative has influenced the language we use to describe the problem. For example, you say we overuse the term addiction.

Everybody uses the term addiction, every article, every critic. It drives me crazy because an addiction is a pathology. You wouldn’t say, “I was reading a book and it was so good it made me OCD.” Obsessive compulsive disorder is a pathology, like addiction is a pathology. And when we use this term incorrectly, it’s not only incredibly disrespectful to the people who actually suffer from it but it also gives us an excuse to not do anything about the problem.

Watch what happens when I call technology addictiveversus when I say technology is something that some people overuse. If there’s no addiction, there’s no pusher, there’s nobody making me do anything, there’s nothing hijacking my brain. If it’s just overuse, it’s like any number of things that I overuse. Sometimes I drink a little too much or I eat a little too much — but that doesn’t mean I don’t have agency. It means that I need to have better control and find ways and systems to make sure that I don’t go overboard. I think the right term is overuse.

If there’s one motto I want people to remember it’s: the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. So in the moment, of course they’re going to get you. If you’re on a diet and a fork of chocolate cake is on its way to your mouth, it’s too late to do anything.

Likewise, if you’re complaining about how technology is hijacking your brain and you’re sleeping next to your cell phone, it’s too late. Of course it’s going to interrupt your sleep, of course it’s going to interfere with your sense of wellbeing. You have to take steps beforehand.

This is where I really disagree with critics who say, “Oh, it’s the algorithms and they’re hijacking your brain.” The fact is, with our current technology, there is nothing that you cannot easily overcome with forethought.

These simple steps that I talk about in my book — mastering the internal triggers, making time for traction, hacking back external triggers, and preventing distraction with pacts — are based on decades old research that I’m just applying in a new way. It’s not rocket science but it is harder than just saying, “Well, it’s big, bad tech doing it to me.” The problem is when we learn to be helpless, we are giving these companies exactly what they want.

So far we’ve talked about individuals but people spend huge chunks of their days in workplaces that are increasingly full of disruptions. How can we address that?

Half of the book is about things that we as individuals could do, and it’s important that we take those steps first. But I’ve helped start two tech companies and I’ve worked in big companies as well. I know that sometimes the solution is not quite as simple as changing your own behavior as we also operate in a larger context.

I think the workplace, despite our best intentions, can make us distracted. It can perpetuate a culture that creates more internal triggers. We know through the work of Stansfield and Candy that the confluence of high expectations and low control leads to anxiety and depression in the workplace. And when people are feeling anxious and depressed, how do they escape? They send more emails, they call more meetings, and they are on Slack channels all day long. They’re doing this in a desperate attempt for more agency and control when they don’t have enough.

We need to realize that technology overuse in the workplace is not caused by the technology itself. It is, in fact, a symptom of a dysfunctional workplace culture. And when you add technology that has the ability to keep us constantly connected to a sick workplace environment, you get up an unholy mix. It looks like technology is the source but it is just a proximal cause, not the root cause. The root cause is a dysfunctional workplace culture.

You’ve said that the world is bifurcating into two groups: those who allow their attention to be manipulated and those who have become indistractable. Do you think society is trending towards either group?

I think there is much more interest in the problem. When I wrote Hooked, the opposite was true. I had to convince people that companies were using psychology to change your behavior. Back then people thought, “Oh, Zuckerberg just got lucky.” But I came in and said, “No, no, no. They understand these techniques and they use them to change our behavior.” And, of course, today I have to convince no one of that.

But now, the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. I need to convince people to ease up a little bit. These techniques are good, but they’re not that good. We are not puppets on a string. You can’t make people do something they don’t want to do for very long.

 

David Vallance
David is a former craft beer journalist turned writer and digital strategist. He now helps ambitious technology brands tell narrative-driven stories.

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Cal Newport on finding focus in the age of distraction

20 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by Donna L. Roberts, PhD in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on Cal Newport on finding focus in the age of distraction

Source: Cal Newport on finding focus in the age of distraction

By Michael Thomas

Before he turned 30 years old, Cal Newport completed his PhD, authored three books and released dozens of peer-reviewed papers. However, as his thirties loomed and Newport neared his transition to professorship, he worried that his new demanding schedule would leave little time to explore high-value work like original research and writing.

In order to prepare for his transition, Newport spent his final two years at MIT honing and improving a unique productivity philosophy called deep work. He carefully blocked out his day, and created space for long, uninterrupted hours to write papers and do research. He also experimented with tactics like travelling on foot to give himself more time in isolation and actively sought out isolated spaces to work without interruption. Quickly he began to see positive results.

After taking a job as a computer science professor at Georgetown University, Newport’s professional obligations did drastically increase, but he continued to produce original research. “Not only did I preserve my research productivity, it actually improved. My previous rate of two good papers a year… leapt to four good papers a year, on average, once i became a much more encumbered professor,” he wrote in his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. He attributes this success to the unique philosophy he described in his book.

While deep work sounds simple, Newport believes most people have trained themselves out of this way of working through addictions to disruptive social media and technology. Every notification you check and feed you aimlessly scroll through makes it harder to work without distraction for an extended period of time.

Throughout the late-2000s and early-2010s, Cal Newport wrote countless articles on the dangers of these distractions and social media more broadly. Each time, as soon as he clicked publish, the comments section would swell with detractors voicing the same handful of objections time and time again.

But then something changed.

On June 3rd 2016, Newport gave a talk at TEDxTysons titled, “Quit Social Media.” Newport’s message was largely the same as the articles he had written over the past decade but the response couldn’t have been more different. The video’s view count soared into the millions and the comment section buzzed with supporting voices. “Guys, wish me luck. I’m quitting Facebook today and hope I’ll never use it again,” wrote one viewer. “I quit social media on my birthday, what a gift it was to my soul,” wrote another.

That same year his book Deep Work quickly climbed the Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list. In Silicon Valley—home to many of the tech giants he criticized in his TED Talk—CEOs gave copies to their entire company to inspire better productivity and peace of mind.

Earlier this month Newport released his latest book, Digital Minimalism, in which he expands on the once controversial, but increasing popular idea that people should be more intentional about the technology they use and abandon apps that don’t improve their mental well-being.

Dropbox caught up with Newport to ask for tips on creating the space for more deep work, what he learned running an experiment on people who quit social media for 30 days, and how managers can find deep work despite the communication demands of their team.

In knowledge work, we don’t quite have the right management structures in place so there’s an implicit reward for the shallow because it’s visible.

When I was reading Deep Work, I was struck at how stark the comparison was between shallow work and deep work. It seemed to me a little bit confusing that when people were presented with both options, that they would choose shallow work over working on something significant and important. Why do you think this is?

I think there’s a couple things going on. One, deep work is hard and it’s something that also requires practice. Let’s say you’re an accomplished fiction writer, you’re actually like an Olympic caliber, Deep Work thinker at this point. Let’s say that’s what you do is you write literary fiction, which is incredibly cognitively demanding. To you, it would seem like you want to do the deep work. It feels very comfortable, it feels very fulfilling. But if you’re young, and you’ve grown up in an age of smartphones and you’ve never had to spend more than 15 minutes focusing on one thing at a time without some distraction, Deep Work is very difficult. In fact, if you try it, not much is gonna happen. It actually takes a lot of practice, which is why in Deep Work I really get in a lot of detail about how you train this skill. I think that’s one aspect of it.

The second aspect is in knowledge work, in particular, we don’t really quite have the right management structures in place so there’s an implicit reward for the shallow because it’s visible. Let’s say I work at this company, I sit in this cubicle, my title is confusing, I don’t produce this one thing, I’m just involved in a lot of meetings and sending emails back and forth. I seem to do a lot PowerPoint. It becomes ambiguous what it is exactly that I do. If you’re visibly busy then you can make the argument that at least I’m not slacking off. I’m doing something. Look, I’m answering all these emails, I’m jumping on calls, I’m having coffee. There’s something comforting in that. Managers feel like they know this person isn’t taking advantage of me.

There’s also these structural biases in favor of publicly visible busyness that we haven’t yet figured out. This is actually a new book I’m working on now. We haven’t yet figured out how do we restructure the modern knowledge work organization to actually be focused on optimizing cognitive output. As opposed to what we’re doing now, which I think is a lot more tentative, arbitrary, and ad hoc than we would like to admit.

In roles like project management or account management, where interruptions are almost a core part of what you do, does deep work make sense?

Well, there’s two relevant points. One is that it’s certainly true. I talk about it in the book that different roles require different amounts of deep work, with some roles requiring none and some roles where basically if all you did was deep work it would probably be the optimal configuration. There’s a whole scale, but I’ve also noticed that people, especially in management positions, tend to, I think, misestimate where they fall on the scale. They tend to push themselves more toward the fundamentally can’t do deep work side of the scale than they need to be.

Project managers are an example that I would get a lot of pushback from. They say, “No, I have to constantly be communicating because I can unlock a log jam that’s stopping three other people from getting work done. That’s my highest bit of contribution.”

But some of this is actually just locked into the actual work flow with which you’re doing project managing, which is what I call hyperactive, highline workflow. It just takes the paleolithic model of working it out on the fly—just the three of us trying to hunt the mastodon—scaled up into knowledge work. We use email and Slack as opposed to talking to people in person. It’s the same idea, let’s just keep the conversation going. If you need something let me know. It’s this flexible, unstructured way of communicating.

As long as that’s your underlying workflow, if you’re a project manager, you have to tend that ongoing conversation because if someone needs something, and you’re not there, there’s problems. But the deeper response to it is, well is that the right actual structural workflow for the projects you’re running? We’ve seen a lot of disruption on this, especially in software because software is really producing a product that actually has a lot of overlaps with the industrial sector where they figured this stuff out about a century ago. Process development. You have to think about processes and what works better than others. They’re much more innovative in industry, than we are in knowledge work.

In software, where you have all this overlap, what you’re starting to see is alternative workflows. Alternatives to just the hyperactive, highline, let’s just keep talking. There you see things like agile methodologies, or scrum, where who is working on what is transparent, and everyone can see it, and everyone knows what they’re working on. They have these synchronized meetings twice a day, standing up, so they don’t last too long. Okay, who’s working on what, who needs what from whom? So everyone knows what everyone is working on, and who they owe what to who. There’s no actual need to have an ongoing conversation in between. By making tasks and obligations transparent and structured, it’s a completely different experience if you are running a scrum as opposed to being a software knowledge worker that just uses email.

It’s a long answer to a short question, but in a big sense yes. Different jobs do different amounts of deep work. But in a small sense, there’s a lot of these positions where the reason they require little deep work right now is because the underlying workflow I think is way suboptimal. You could restructure the whole way this type of work happened in such a way that it still is very effective, but people get a lot more concentration. And by doing so, actually a lot more value is produced.

Once people started looking at [social media] critically, it was like the floodgates opened.

Is there a way we could shift some or all of the shallow work to AI and simply not have that as a human task anymore?

AI is going to eventually eat most of it. That’s my prediction. It’s gonna take a while, but there’s a lot of money being invested in this right now. This is potentially bad news for people who are in creative fields. On the face of it, it seems like this is gonna be great because in the future of AI handling shallow work-type scenario, it’s gonna be like you have your own presidential Chief of Staff. This is the vision that I get from the industry when I research this. Everyone has their own agent and the agents talk to each other. So when you come in, it can say, “This is what you should be working on today. I’ve gathered the information you need. I already booked your tickets for this thing you’re doing next week. Don’t worry about it. I’m talking to other people’s AI on your behalf. There’s no email you have to answer, there’s not phone calls you have to go on. You’re working on your article today. I’ll set up interviews for you of these people who you want to talk to. Great, I’ll go take care of that for you.” You’ll be able to get substantially more value out of your brain per hour spent working.

That seems like it’s great, except for the problem is it’s gonna reduce the number of people we need in the creative field. I’m actually potentially worried for the creative fields because we’ve been so inefficient because of the shallow work and the impact it has on our cognitive performance. We have been so inefficient that if we actually remove that inefficiency from the system, it’s gonna require drastically fewer people to get the same amount of work done. So it’s possible that, even if you’re in a job that is never gonna itself never gonna be automated by AI, you still might be having to worry about losing this job because when the AI comes, one of you is gonna be able to do what it used to take three. There’s potentially even a concern here for the very high and creative class because of how inefficient we’ve been. That’s been our implicit Achilles heal from a technological perspective.

So AI won’t wipe out skilled work but it will condense it?

If your AI chief of staff took care of everything else, here it all is, come in, spend three hours, write, take a break, come back in, here you go. You have a 10 minute back and forth interaction with your agent each day and that’s it, you would probably be producing at a two or three X faster rate.

It’s possible the other response to that is that’s just gonna free up a lot of highly creative, cognitive surplus, and the economy might adapt. We might just find many more places in which we can now insert high and creative thinking. Where, once we have a surplus, maybe the economy will adapt and find other places that this type of thinking is useful. That’s the optimistic way of looking at it. But I think it’s an interesting point that people think, I’m completely fine if I’m in the high and creative field, and I don’t think that’s at all assured.

I’ve listened to a couple of your interviews where you talk about how we’re a fulcrum in our use of technology; is there something that happened over the last two or three years that made you think that way?

I noticed a shift starting a little bit less than two years ago. As best I can tell, it’s connected to 2016 Presidential Election. My running theory is that the 2016 Election gave everyone in the country, regardless for example their political stance, something to be upset about regarding social media. The impact of this is that it changed the place that social media occupied in most people’s minds.

Before they tended to see it as Bill Maher joked—a gift handed down from the nerd gods. You have to use it, it’s weird to criticize it. But once they shifted its location to something that had some pros and cons, I think it completely changed the cultural zeitgeist on social media. Once people started looking at it critically, it was like the floodgates opened.

So for me I used to get a lot of pushback and confused shrugs when I would talk about social media being problematic. But starting about 18 months ago, I began to get much more engaged head nods and requests to tell me more, so I think there’s been a shift. I think the shift is pretty recent.

You’ve been talking and writing about digital minimalism for quite a few years now. Was it the changing in culture attitudes that prompted you to write this book, or is this something that you’ve been wanting to write for a while?

It was definitely the changes. Earlier in 2016, I had published Deep Work and I began starting to get feedback from those readers who said, “Okay, I buy your argument about technology in the workplace, but you’re also missing out on this bigger picture, which is technology in our personal lives.” There’s something here. I kept hearing that message. Then I noticed that shift in the fall of 2016. It was the week after the election I had this op-ed in the New York Times that was saying something critical about social media. I got a lot of negative pushback, like I usually do. But about a month or two later, I noticed that talk I had given on quitting social media had jumped up to millions of views. So sometime in that fall, there was some sort of transition. So it’s not coincidental that in late 2016, I began to experiment publicly with some of these ideas about digital minimalism.

Reading your new book, you had quite a lot of people in your self-selecting experimental group who weren’t able to complete the process of quitting social media and distracting tech for 30 days and then adding back in only what they deemed valuable. Do you see society, out of its own volition changing its relationship with technology?

I think there needs to be some sort of philosophical framework. The example that I look to is health and fitness. We figured out in the 20th Century that processed food and junk food make people sick. It makes you obese, it gives you diabetes, it gives you heart disease. But simple advice—eat less, eat healthier—wasn’t getting it done. [The pull of processed food] was so powerful that it wasn’t making a significant dent in people’s health and fitness.

Everyone has read the same article about turning off notifications. Everyone has read the same article about doing a digital Shabbat once a week and it doesn’t seem to be working.

Whereas, if you think of the healthiest person you know, it’s almost certainly someone who has a named philosophy of health and fitness. They’re Paleo or Vegan or they’re a Crossfitter. They have some sort of philosophy that’s based on values they can believe in and it gives them a consistent way of dealing with these issues in their life. It’s ground into their values and doesn’t require them to make a lot of decisions on the fly.

I’ve noticed that the same thing is happening digitally. So everyone has read the same article about turning off notifications. Everyone has read the same article about doing a digital Shabbat once a week and it doesn’t seem to be working. So I became convinced that we basically need the digital equivalent of Veganism or Paleo or crossfit. Something that’s an actual philosophy of technology use. Something that you can say I am a digital minimalist, and this is what it means because it typically requires something like that to overcome strong cultural and biological forces. At least that’s what we’ve observed in a lot of different areas in human life.

You have previously defined digital minimalism in a number of ways. Is it an idea that’s evolved over time? And do you see it evolving into the future?

Yeah, I think so. In some sense, there’s two things going on here. The first contribution is more fundamental, which is just let’s start thinking in terms of philosophies. In that sense, I’m completely happy if another philosophy comes along for tech users. If a dozen philosophies come along for tech use, I would still be completely happy. What I would define as success is that we get to a place where when you ask people about how they use tech in their personal life, they have some philosophy. The idea is that you don’t just do this in an ad hoc fashion. I think if we get there, we’re gonna be in a much better place.

Now, is digital minimalism the right philosophy? Well, probably not for everyone. It seems to be working pretty well. I think it’s a good one. I came up with the term, but there were a lot of people who were doing this and just didn’t have a name for it. The people [who] take this on seem to be having a lot of success. So as a first philosophy, I think it’s a good one. But more important to me is the idea that most people have some philosophy when it comes to this part of their life.

There are a lot of people who try and frame you and digital minimalism as anti-technology, which is obviously not true. Are there any services or tools that you use that you think facilitate concentration, and deep work, and your work life?

As a computer scientist it would be self-defeating if I was anti-technology. That’d be a self-hating career case that I’d made. What I’m pro is critical engagement with technology.

In a period where we get away from that, like industrialization, or like we did during the Dot Com exuberance, we tend to get into trouble. Then when we come back and say, “Let’s be a little bit more critically engaged and figure out what are we trying to do and how can we make tech tools.” I think that’s the pendulum were on.

In terms of my own engagement with technology, especially in the personal sphere, I’ve never had a social media account. I do really like blogging though, I’m a huge booster of blogging. I think the social internet, which has been around since the early ‘90s, is a great way to express yourself, connect with people, and find interesting ideas. When I’m against social media, for example, I’m not against a social internet. I’m against the idea that we need to have one or two companies build their own private internet, behind a wall, guarded, in which they watch everything we do. I’m an old fashioned net nerd. I mean, learn some HTML! I have my own server with my own WordPress instance running on it. No one’s tracking any data on it and it’s all mine. That’s the type of thing that us old tech geeks get a lot of interest out of.

I have a smartphone, an old generation iPhone, but it doesn’t really have much on it. It’s my wife’s old phone. I’m on a laptop right now. I don’t web surf for the most part so I don’t have a cycle of sites I go through. I also don’t believe in bookmarks because my idea is it’s a perfect filtering tool. You can only remember so many websites so the ones you like the best will be the ones you remember. Whichever ones I happen to remember, those are probably the ones worth checking out anyways.

I have a tech footprint that is pretty similar to someone in the year 2001. I don’t look at my phone a lot. I don’t entertain myself with my computer that much but I have tools. I connect, I do things on the Internet, and so I’m like a circa 2001 tech denizen at this point.

In the past one or two years, we’ve seen a handful of tech companies going against the grain, taking a step away from what Facebook and Instagram are doing with attention economies. They’re maybe trying to build products and tools that make people happy rather than hold their attention. Is that something that you’ve seen as well?

These ideas are definitely out there. Essentially what happens is when you get away from social internet companies that are based off attention and support a 500 billion dollar valuation and say, “We don’t necessarily have to support ourselves off of attention. We don’t necessarily have to be one of the five biggest companies in the world” then a lot more breathing room is opened up.

I think that it’s good for the internet. The more that we have smaller, more agile companies, and products, and people are piecing together more heterogeneous collection of tools. I think it is for the better.

There’s not a clear winner in this space yet, but there’s a lot of interesting movement going on. One thing I’ve been tracking has been this broader IndieWeb movement, which is trying to push people back towards this idea that you should have your own domain. You should have your own server. You should have your own WordPress instance. There could be tools to make this easier, but you own your own stuff, you’re posting your own stuff. Then there could be other services that come along that can help aggregate this.

Now, with the IndieWeb movement, there might be some sort of portal that you log into to help arrange content from a lot of people’s privately owned servers into a way that maybe it looks like a social media feed but they don’t own any of the information. That’s all on your server and you push your information to ten other services if you want to as well. I’m interested in this IndieWeb movement, of getting back to individuals owning their own data, expressing themselves not through the auspices of another company. It’s the original vision before the social media guys came along. I think that’s kind of interesting.

Also, I think different models, more niche social media where you pay. I think there’s a lot of interest in that. Where they don’t make money off trying to get you compulsively use it so now they can focus on things you actually care about.

The final thing I’ve written about recently is this network effect argument that the large social media platforms use to justify themselves, I think is largely built on hot air. This idea says that you have to have everyone on a service like Facebook before it’s useful, therefore no one else can compete because no one else will ever get a billion users. This is largely untrue because everyone always has access to the infrastructure that allows you to connect with people, communicate with people. It’s the internet and the associated protocols.

I think there’s a lot more room out there for niche and interesting behavior because we have this underlying universal framework already. We have email and HTML, and all these protocols that already exist and are free and completely decentralised. They already exist, so you don’t actually have to have a new private internet in order for people to find each other and communicate. I think there’s a lot more room for smaller and niche plays than the larger companies would want you to believe.

You’re talking about decentralization of power, which hasn’t been the way things work, historically. Do you see the tech space, and internet in particular, do you see that as being different?

Well, I think the social internet is largely decentralized and actually works really well. I came up in the age of the blogosphere, which actually worked out to be an incredibly effective decentralized publishing platform. People owned their own servers, people posted their own stuff, they connected to other people with hyperlinks. And reputation and visibility within this world grew as more links came to you, and those links came from people that themselves were more linked to. It’s the same logic that Sergey Brin and Larry Page used to come up with the original Page Rank algorithm that runs Google’s search engine. It worked really well, and it was a decentralized trust hierarchy, and it was pretty good at finding voices that were interesting and letting new voices in.

There was no centralized editorial overview or censorship. And yet, it did a really good job of implicitly censoring out the crazy stuff and giving emphasis to the good stuff because it was all humans making decisions. I want a link to this, this person that has a lot of links to them, which gives them social capital. Now they’re linking to this person, which gives them the social capital. It worked really well. That was essentially the original vision of the internet. Humans linking to other humans, information linking to information, itself creates this web. That’s where we got the original name, The World Wide Web. It’s really effective for expression and spreading information.

Maybe it’s because I used to work a floor above Tim Berners-Lee when I was at MIT but I think his vision is actually a powerful one. And stands in strong contrast to the alternative, which is that we need a company to build its own version of the internet. We all have to use this internet version two. But the difference between internet one and internet two is that also the company who built internet two watches every single thing you do.

 

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Michael Thomas
Michael Thomas writes for magazines like The Atlantic, FastCompany and Quartz. He is the founder and CEO of Campfire Labs. You can follow him on Twitter @curious_founder

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