Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
The Biology of Bad Behavior
Rock climbing, biking, or violent crime?
My resting heart rate is 56 beats per minute. I’ve always interpreted that as a sign of good health. It may also mean that I’m a natural born killer.
That’s one of the conclusions that Adrian Raine might like you to draw from his new book, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. Raine’s work is essentially a continuation of E.O. Wilson’s research on sociobiology. Wilson linked evolutionary and genetic influences to human behavior and, especially, to our reproductive habits, urges, and processes.
Raine takes sociobiology a step farther. If our genes can influence our reproductive behaviors, could they not also influence violent and criminal behavior? Are criminals different than non-criminals in some biological way? If so, can we use biology to predict who will commit crimes? Then what?
Let’s take low heart rate, for example. Raine reports evidence that a significant number (much higher than chance) of antisocial criminals have lower than average resting heart rates. Further, the condition points toward violent crime and not to other forms of behavior. It’s not only a predictor; it’s also a specific predictor.
Why would low heart rate point to violent crime? Raine offers three theories. First, there’s the fearlessness theory — “A low heart rate is thought to reflect a lack of fear.” Second is the low empathy theory – “Children with low heart rates are less empathic than children with high heart rates.” Third is the stimulation-seeking theory – low heart rate is associated with low arousal and “…those who display antisocial behavior seek stimulation to increase their arousal levels…”
I’m going with stimulation-seeking theory. Perhaps that’s why I took up rock climbing at the tender age of 18. I just needed some stimulation.
So, what might we have predicted about my behavior when I was, say, 15? It might have been this: “Travis has a low heart rate. Therefore, we can safely predict that he will either become a rock climber or a psychopathic serial killer.” Hmm… now what?
Let’s say I do commit a crime. Does my low heart rate absolve me of responsibility? Should a jury put me in jail or simply require that I take stimulants to boost my heart rate? Or should the government require me to take such stimulants before I commit a crime, just to be on the safe side?
It’s a debate we need to have and Raine begins to frame it up. Unfortunately, he’s rather sloppy. For instance, he seems to make a fundamental error in explaining correlation and variability.
Raine, with fellow researcher Laura Baker, studied whether violent behavior can be inherited. They used “sophisticated statistical techniques” (multivariate analysis) to estimate the heritability of such behavior. Raine writes that he and Baker found, “Heritabilities that ranged from .40 to .50. That means that 40 to 50 percent of the variability among us in antisocial behavior is explained by genetics.”
Multivariate analysis, however, sorts out correlations, not variability. The degree of variability is not the correlation itself but rather the square of the correlation. With a correlation of .40, for instance, the square is .16. If X and Y have a correlation of .40, then 16% of the variability in Y is explained by X. Thus, Raine and Baker can explain between 16% and 25% of the variability in antisocial behavior through inheritance. That’s an important finding but not nearly as strong as Raine claims. It’s a fundamental mistake and weakens the argument considerably.
Elsewhere, Raine writes that Ted Bundy killed approximately 35 women. A few pages later, Bundy’s victims total more than 100. Raine informs us that his wife, sister, and cousin are all nurses. Therefore, he picks a nurse, “Jolly” Jane Topppan, to illustrate the “breakdown in the moral brain”. I don’t understand why Jolly Jane illustrates such a breakdown better than, say, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber (who, by the way, has a resting heart beat of 54).
I find this irksome because I generally agree with Raine’s claims. Biology does influence our behavior. Through poor editing and sloppy statistics, however, he undermines his own argument. Raine’s book is a good start but I hope a stronger, more tightly reasoned book comes along soon. In the meantime, I need some stimulation. I think I’ll take up nude skydiving.
When Will We Have a Vision?
I’ve heard many executives try to answer questions about vision. The responses tend to be wordy. Perhaps the speaker meanders a bit. That’s unfortunate because a question about vision is often a plea for help.
Here are some questions you might hear:
- When will we have a vision?
- What’s the vision?
- When will you clarify the vision?
If the question comes from a junior employee, I’m inclined to take it at face value. The questioner just wants to know about the vision.
On the other hand, if the question comes from a more senior person – especially a person who manages other people – it may have a different meaning altogether. The question is not so much when we’ll have a vision but:
- When will we have a vision that I can (easily) explain to my employees?
The person may well understand the vision (in general terms) but doesn’t feel comfortable explaining and defending it. The question is actually a plea for help.
You could, of course, answer the question and explain the vision. But you would miss the opportunity to convert the person into an ambassador for your message.
If you answer the question literally, you’ll give information to one person. If you can create an ambassador, on the other hand, you can amplify your message and deliver it to hundreds of people. Moreover, your messengers will be trusted members of the local environment. That’s often much more powerful than hearing the same message from an executive who works thousands of miles away.
How do you create ambassadors? There are at least three steps:
First, make them feel like part of the team. Someone who feels they’re off the team, won’t convince others to join. How do you make
Oh, I see.
people feel like they’re on the team? Include them. Ask their opinion. Listen. Treat them with respect. Say “thank you”. It’s not so hard to do but it does take time and requires some thoughtfulness.
Second, simplify the message. You’re trying to put words in someone’s mouth – more or less literally. It’s easier to put a short message in someone’s mouth. Long messages tend to get filtered and edited in unpredictable ways. Short messages are more likely to survive intact as they pass from one person to another.
Third, repeat the message. And ask others to do it as well. Your target audience will need to hear the message at least half a dozen times before it sinks in. Even if you think it has sunk in, don’t stop delivering it. Take a hint from Coca Cola. We all know what Coke is but that doesn’t stop the soda giant from continuing to deliver the message.
Once you create ambassadors, be sure to treat them well. More people will hear your message from them than from you. That means you can use more of your time to do other things — as long as you can keep your ambassadors on message.
Social Animals and Systems 1 and 2
Your pupils are dilated!
I’ve been reading David Brooks’ book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. The basic idea is fairly simple: we are not alone. How we interact with each other strongly influences who we are and what we become.
Often, however, we don’t recognize just how strong those social forces are. Many of them operate at subconscious levels. Citing Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy Wilson, Brooks estimates that our minds can take in 11 million pieces of information at any given time. But we’re only aware of 40 of them, at most. Wilson writes that, “Some researchers … suggest that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work and that conscious will may be an illusion.”
Brooks compares the conscious mind to a “… general atop a platform, who sees the world from a distance…” while the unconscious mind is “…like a million little scouts.” The scouts “… maintain no distance from the environment around them, but are immersed in it.”
Brooks also cites Daniel Patrick Moynihan in writing that “… the central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most. The central humanistic truth is that the conscious mind can influence the unconscious.”
If you think that this sounds like System 1 and System 2 that Daniel Kahneman writes about (click here), well… you’re probably right. System 1 is always on, it’s automatic, and it makes quick decisions, often without your realizing it. System 1 is the default setting. Unless System 2 intervenes, System 1 will spin merrily along, running your life. While System 1 is right most of the time, it can make systematic mistakes.
While Brooks’ writing covers similar territory, he approaches from a different angle than Kahneman. He treats not only the influence of the two systems but also the influence of others. How we behave is remarkably influenced by other people.
I expect to write more about Brooks and Kahneman and how they compare. Today, however, I’ll just summarize some interesting tidbits that I’ve picked up from Brooks.
- You can’t consciously control the ends of your eyebrows. When you smile (genuinely) the ends of your eyebrows dip a bit. If you’re faking a smile, they don’t. It’s a clue that’s subconscious to both the sender and receiver – but is usually seen and correctly interpreted.
- You’re sexier when your pupils are dilated. It’s a subtle, subconscious sign of attraction that is usually correctly interpreted even if we aren’t aware of it. (Greek women seemed to understand this and used eye drops to dilate their pupils). As Kahneman points out, dilated pupils also indicate a high level of System 2 activity. So, if you want to look sexy, just do some complex math in your head. Your pupils will dilate and people will think you’re more attractive.
- In general, women are less visually aroused than men. Mena are looking for (visual) fertility clues. Women are looking for evidence of stability.
- Women, on average, are “… 60 to 70 percent more proficient than men at remembering details from a scene and the locations of objects placed in a room.” Simply put, women are more observant.
- People can make judgments about a person’s trustworthiness in a tenth of a second. “These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly accurate in predicting how people will feel about each other months later.”
- Height is important, at least for men. According to one study, “…each inch of height corresponds to $6,000 of annual salary in contemporary America…” Other people’s height influences our behavior.
I hope these tidbits capture your imagination. They certainly have captured mine and I’ll write a lot more about Brooks and Kahneman in the coming weeks.
More Time
Budget this!
Last week, in Time – The Infinite Resource, I wrote about the “time culture” in your organization. If your organization is like most, you keep close track of how employees spend money and no track of how they spend their time. Yet, management gurus like Peter Drucker, say that time is our most precious resource. If you can’t manage your time, you can’t manage anything.
In my post, I outlined three (of five) time management techniques that McKinsey recommends to make organizations more productive and less stressful. The basic trick is to treat time as a corporate resource rather than an individual resource. In other words, we should treat time essentially the same way as we treat money.
Here are the other two time techniques from the McKinsey article.
Refine the master calendar — to identify things that you can stop doing, you first need to identify (to yourself and others) that you are doing them. This often means a master calendar for key individuals and meetings. In fact, meetings are some of the biggest time wasters. (See the Travis Rule). Make them do double duty. If executives travel to a meeting, ask them to schedule other activities at the same time. Perhaps they can visit customers or schedule personnel evaluations on the same trip. McKinsey also suggests categorizing your meetings. Are they for: 1) reporting; 2) collaboration and coordination; 3) managing performance through course corrections; 4) making decisions? (Not approving decisions, but actually making them). McKinsey reports that, in top performing organizations, executive spend some 50% of their meeting time in decision-making meetings and only 10% in reporting meetings. Less efficient organizations often over-schedule reporting meetings and under-schedule decision-making meetings. By wasting time that also increases stress.
Provide high-quality administrative support – how often have I seen companies lay off relatively inexpensive clerical workers and then ask expensive executives to pick up the task? Far too often. That reduces the time efficiency of your most costly employees and adds to their stress. In McKinsey’s study, 85% of executives who manage their time effectively also report that they have excellent administrative support. Only 7% of the poor time manager report that they have excellent support.
It’s also interesting to note how effective time managers spend their time. According to McKinsey, the best managers are alone 24% of the time. That doesn’t mean they’re not communicating — they could be on the phone or e-mail — but it does mean that they’re not in meetings. They also spend 17% of their time in meetings with customers or prospects and another 10% in meetings with external stakeholders. Taking the three activities together, they spend 51% of their time not in internal management meetings. If you’re trying to organize your time more effectively, that seems like a good number to shoot for.
When effective time managers communicate with others, their preferred method is face-to-face meetings. Indeed, such meetings account for 38% of their communication time. This was a revelation to me. I’ve always believed that meeting face-to-face is the most effective way to communicate. But I never thought of them as time savers. Perhaps because face-to-face meetings do provide richer, more nuanced communications, they also save time in the long run. With richer communications, you make fewer errors — and correcting errors is a huge time sink.
Pour Me a House. Print Me a Cookie.
Print this!
When Elliot was in architecture school, he designed a chair in 3D software. Then he printed it. Then he sat in it. It held up pretty well.
As a designer, Elliot was an early adopter of 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing. Elliot designs an object in 3D virtual space within a computer. (He’s an expert at this). The object exists as a set of mathematics, describing lines, arcs, curves, shapes, and so on.
Elliot then exports the mathematical description of the object to a 3D printer. The printer converts the math into hundreds of very thin layers – essentially 2D slices. The printer head zips back and forth, laying down a slice with each pass to build the product physically. It’s called “additive manufacturing” because the printer adds a new layer with each pass.
The earliest such printers might have been called “subtractive manufacturing.” You started with a big block of wax in the “printer”. You then loaded the mathematical description and the printer carved away the unnecessary wax using very precise cutting blades. The result was the object modeled in wax. You used the model to build a mold for manufacturing.
Elliot used a printer equipped with a laser and some very special powder. Based on the mathematical description of the slices, the laser moved back and forth, firing at appropriate points to build each layer. On each pass, the laser converted the powder into a very strong, very hard resin that adhered to the previous layer. At the end, Elliot had the finished product, not just a mold.
Elliot’s chair looked and felt like it was made of plastic. Several companies are now experimenting with metal oxides that use a similar process to print metal objects. A British company, Metalysys, is working with a titanium oxide that should allow you to print titanium objects. One benefit: it should dramatically reduce the cost of titanium parts and products.
Newer 3D printers can use a nozzle to extrude material onto each slice. What can you extrude? Well, cement, for instance. Construction companies in Europe are already using robotic arms and cement extruders to build complex walls and structures. It won’t be long before Elliot can design an entire house in virtual space and then have it poured on site. Elliot will be able to create much more imaginative designs (like the one above) and print them at a lower cost than traditional building techniques. What a great time to be an architect!
Not interested in cement? How about extruding some cookie dough instead? In fact, let’s imagine that you have some special dietary needs and restrictions. You submit your dietary data to the printer, which selects a mix of ingredients that meets your needs, and prints you a cookie. You can select ingredients based on your tastes as well as your dietary needs. What a great time to be a chef!
What’s next? GE recently announced that it would use additive manufacturing to create jet engine parts. Before long, we may be able to print new body parts. (I’m waiting for a new brain). And, 3D printing is coming to your home. Click here to find out how you can make anything. What a great time to be a nerd!
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