Strategy. Innovation. Brand.

Creativity

Social Animals and Systems 1 and 2

Your pupils are dilated!

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.

Playing Up Creativity

kids playingWant to be more creative? How do you get started? What are the best exercises to stimulate creativity? It all sounds very serious. As it turns out, it may not be so serious after all. The basis of creativity may simply be unstructured play.

That’s the argument that the International Play Association (IPA) makes. According to the IPA white paper Children’s Right to Play, when children play, they “…rearrange their worlds to make them either less scary or less boring.” They also learn how to negotiate, the importance of rules, and a general notion of fairness. It’s not so much rehearsal for adult life (as I had thought). Rather, it’s “about creating a world in which … children are in control and can seek out uncertainty in order to triumph over it — or, if not, no matter, it is only a game.”

The IPA notes that unstructured play can enhance a child’s “…adaptive capabilities and resilience” and “changes the architecture of the brain, particularly in systems to do with emotion, motivation, and reward.” For all these reasons (and more), the IPA concludes that “… play is no mere indulgence; it is essential to children’s health and well-being.” (By the way, the IPA was established in 1961 in —  where else? — Denmark. Those pesky Scandinavians again!)

Note that we’re talking unstructured play, which is different than, say, playing baseball or the piano. As Melinda Wenner points out in Scientific American, structured games “… have a priori rules — set up in advance and followed. Play, on the other hand, does not have a priori rules, so it affords more creative responses.” So, taking up all your kid’s time in sports leagues or music classes may actually impede rather than develop their creativity. It’s also important to let kids play with kids. Among other things, kids use more sophisticated language when they play with each other than when they play with adults.

That’s all well and good for kids but what about those of us who are well past our prime playing days? Wenner writes that “Adults who do not play may end up unhappy and exhausted without understanding exactly why.” How should adults play? Wenner makes three suggestions:

  • Body play — “participate in some form of active movement that has no time pressures or expected outcomes (if you are exercising just to burn fat, that’s not play!)”
  • Object play –  create something with your hands
  • Social play — “join other people in seemingly purposeless social activities, ‘from small talk to verbal jousting’…”

Wenner concludes that, “Ultimately, it’s not how you play but that you play.” So enough with this website. Let’s go out and play.

(By the way, IPA next triennial conference will be in Istanbul in 2014. Anyone want to go play?)

The Big Sort and The Big Short

Put two books in the blender. Then press "mash".

Put two books in the blender. Then press “mash”.

I used to be a book monogamist. I would start a book and read it — forsaking all others — until completion did us part. Then I would find another book and start the process over again. You could say that I was a serial monogamist.

Now I’m a book polygamist. Rather then reading an entire book from start to finish, I read randomly selected chapters in more-or-less randomly selected titles. I’ll read a chapter in Book A, followed by a chapter in Book B, followed by a chapter in Book X (ooh!), followed by Book D, and then back to Book A. I started doing this because I’ve read about the mashup theory of innovation, which suggests that innovations are frequently a mashup of two (or more) existing ideas. You mash up a Broadway play with a circus and get — voilá — Cirque de Soleil. Mash up a sports car and a sedan and you get – hier ist — a BMW.

Since most books really only have one idea (if that), I thought it would be useful to mash up ideas from multiple books at the same time. What do I have to show for my efforts? Well, I’m probably one of the few writers to mash up the Global Innovation Index with the World Happiness Report (click here). I’m about to mash up those two with measures of national cultural dimensions. I’ve also discovered that countries become more egalitarian (as measured by the power distance index) the farther north you go. I’d like to mash that up with another little-known fact — the incidence of multiple sclerosis increases the farther north you go. I’m not sure what egalitarianism has to do with MS but, at the very least, it’s an interesting question to ask.

At the moment, I’m reading The Big Sort and The Big Short more or less simultaneously. Given their titles, the two books seemed just perfect for mashing up. The Big Sort is subtitled, Why The Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. The basic idea is that we have sorted ourselves into homogeneous thought clusters. As the author points out, “The result is a country that has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred that people don’t know and can’t understand those who live a few miles away.” (For my previous article on The Big Sort, click here).

The Big Short, subtitled Inside The Doomsday Machine, tells the story of how a few people made bazillions of dollars by recognizing the mortgage bubble and betting against it. Of course, the mortgage bubble also triggered the biggest financial crisis since the Depression. Both books tell fascinating stories about modern America. By reading them together, I’m trying to mash them up. Could it be that thought clusters led to the doomsday machine? By separating ourselves into “ideologically inbred” clusters, did we help establish the conditions that produced a massive bubble?  I’m still trying to tease the two together but, if nothing else, it’s another interesting question to ask.

I once took a course called Comparative Literature. Among other things, we compared the epic Spanish poem The Cid with Albert Camus’ The Stranger. We found surprising parallels in plot, structure, and description. What I’m doing now is really not that different. It’s a surprisingly good (and easy) way to come up with interesting insights. So, what do you think? What books would you like to see mashed up?

 

 

Does Happiness Cause Innovation? Or Vice-Versa?

I'm happy being innovative.

I’m happy being innovative.

Does happiness cause innovation? Or is it the other way round: does innovation cause happiness? Or is there a third variable that causes both happiness and innovation to vary together?

In the past, I’ve written about measures of national happiness (here and here) and measures of innovation (here, here, and here). I’ve been wondering: are happiness and innovation correlated? It seems like a reasonable thought but I haven’t had any evidence to make an inference. Until now.

I’ve just been reviewing the Global Innovation Index of 2012 (the GII) as published by INSEAD (the business school) in conjunction with the World Intellectual Property Organization (part of the UN). One of the goals of the GII is to develop effective measures of innovation that can be applied at the national level. INSEAD has published the report annually since 2007. Each year, it evolves and adds new variables. In theory, each year it becomes a better reflection of the true state of innovation around the world. In the 2012 edition, the report incorporates about 80 different variables.

What struck me immediately was the relationship between the GII and the World Happiness Report that I’ve written about before. While researching this article, I also stumbled across the Legatum Institute‘s ranking of national happiness. Though Legatum uses a different method, the results closely match the World Happiness Report. Indeed, the top ten countries in each report are the same — though in different order.

So, how does happiness relate to innovation? Look at the table below, which compares the top ten countries in the World Happiness Report (WHR), Legatum, and the Global Innovation Index (GII). Half of the top ten most innovative countries (with *) are also among the world’s happiest countries. The correlation seems to grow stronger if you look past the top ten. For instance, the USA is 11th on the WHR and ninth on the GII. Similarly, Canada, New Zealand, and Norway are 11th, 12th, and 13th on the GII and all three are in the top ten of both WHR and Legatum.

Why should happiness be related to innovation? I’m not at all sure. Part of the reason I’m publishing this is to ask my readers: what do you think? Let’s gather the best ideas and see if we can test them logically. Over to you.

WHR Legatum GII
1 Denmark Norway Switzerland *
2 Finland Denmark Sweden *
3 Norway Sweden Singapore
4 Netherlands Australia UK
5 Canada New Zealand Netherlands *
6 Switzerland Canada Denmark *
7 Sweden Finland Hong Kong
8 New Zealand Netherlands Ireland *
9 Australia Switzerland USA
10 Ireland Ireland Luxembourg

Sunday Shorts – 10

Of course I can talk.

Of course I can talk.

Interesting things I’ve found this week — even if they happened long, long ago.

Want to improve medicine and reduce costs at the same time? Just add robots.

If there’s a gorilla hiding in your chest x-ray, shouldn’t a radiologist find it? Maybe not. After all, they’re intent on finding other things, like abnormalities. But isn’t a gorilla an abnormality? Why would 83% miss it?

Can dogs talk? You bethca. In fact, Bella just finished telling about her trip to the nail salon. She liked the service but wasn’t happy with the color.

Is Iran Botching the Bomb? According to Jacques Hymans in Foreign Affairs, it’s hard to build a bomb without good management systems and that’s “why so few authoritarian regimes have succeeded: they don’t have the right culture or institutions. When it comes to Iran’s program, then, the United States and its allies should get out of the way and let Iran’s worst enemies — its own leaders — gum up the process on their own”.

Need more caffeine? I certainly do. How about buying soap with caffeine in it and absorbing it through your skin? Why not?

What are the 50 companies that are most likely to disrupt the market place in 2013? Yikes! And the accompanying editorial.

Will solar energy cost less than fossil fuels in the next decade? It’s possible if this new technology proves out.

Have a malformed ear? Print a new one using a 3-D printer. Vincent Van Gogh should be so lucky.

You’ve heard about 3-D printers. How about a 3-D pen — write in the air!

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