Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Egotism and Awe
I’m in awe of my ego.
Are egotism and awe inversely related? As one goes up, does the other go down? Could egotism and awe be two ends of the same spectrum?
Let’s start with egotism. Is it going up or down? Are our kids more egotistic than we were at the same age? Are we more self-centered than our parents were?
There’s growing evidence that egotism is on the rise. William Chopik and his colleagues, for instance, researched long-term trends in egotism by analyzing every State of the Union address from 1790 to 2012. They counted the words and analyzed the number that showed self-interest (“me’, “mine” “I”, “our”) compared to the number that showed interest in others (“you”, “your”, “his”, “theirs”). The ratio between the two became the “egocentricity index”.
Up until 1900, other-focused words dominated, outnumbering self-focused words every year. In 1920, however, the trend reversed and self-focused words have outnumbered other-focused words ever since. Though the trend is inexorably upward, there are peaks and valleys. For instance, the index spikes after economic booms and slides during recessions. (The research article is here. A less academic summary is here.)
Why would we grow more egocentric over time? Perhaps the economy accentuates the trend. From 1960 to the present, American GNP per capita has roughly tripled. The egocentricity index hasn’t grown quite so quickly but it has accelerated compared to pre-1960 levels – just as the economy has.
Emily Bianchi’s research lends credence to this thought. Bianchi measured the narcissism of over 32,000 people aged 18 to 83. She found that those who had come of age (aged 18 to 25) during recessions were less likely to be narcissistic later in life compared to those who came of age in boom times. (The research article is here. A less academic summary is here).
A number of other articles (for instance here, here, and here) suggest that egocentrism has increased significantly over the past 40 years or so.
And while egotism has been on the rise, what’s been happening to awe? According to Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, it’s on the decline. And we should be worried about it.
Piff and Keltner argue that awe is a collective emotion “that motivates people to do things that enhance the greater good.” The authors have done a number of studies (here and here, for instance) that induce awe in research subjects and measure the effects. Those who experienced more awe were also more likely to help strangers, lend a hand after an accident, and share more resources.
Writing in the New York Times, Piff and Keltner suggest that our culture is “awe-deprived”. People spend less time staring at the stars, watching the Northern lights, camping out, or even just visiting art museums. Indeed, when was the last time you got awe-induced goose bumps?
The authors suggest that the overall reduction in awe is linked to a “broad societal shift” over the last 50 years. “People have become more individualistic, more self-focused, more materialistic and less connected to others.”
Did the rise in egocentrism cause the decline in awe? If so, could we reduce egocentrism by increasing awe in our culture? It’s hard to say but it’s certainly worth a try. Let’s head for the hills.
Intuition — Wicked and Kind
My intuition is good here.
When I was climbing mountains regularly, I thought I had pretty good intuition. Even if I didn’t know quite why I was making a decision, I generally made pretty good decisions. I usually made conservative as opposed to risky decisions. Intuitively, I could reasonably judge whether a decision was too conservative, too risky, or just right.
When I was an executive, on the other hand, my intuition for business decisions was not especially good. I didn’t have a “feel” for the situation. In the mountains, I could “fly by the seat of my pants.” In the executive suite I needed reams and reams of analysis. I couldn’t even tell whether a decision was conservative or risky – it depended on how you defined the terms. As a businessman, I often longed for the certainty and confidence I felt in the mountains.
What’s the difference between the two environments? The mountains were kind; the executive suite was wicked.
The concepts of “kind” and “wicked” come from Robin Hogarth’s book, Educating Intuition. Hogarth’s central idea is that we can teach ourselves to become more intuitive and more insightful. We have some control over the process, but the environment – whether kind or wicked — also plays a critical role.
Where does intuition come from? I wasn’t born with the ability to make good decisions in the mountains. I must have learned it from my experiences and from my teachers. I never set a goal to become more intuitive. My goal was simply to enjoy myself safely in wilderness environments. Creating an intuitive sense of the wilderness was merely a byproduct.
But why would I be better at wilderness intuition than at business intuition? According to Hogarth, it has to do with the nature, quality, and speed of the feedback.
In the mountains, I often got immediate feedback on my decisions. I could tell within a few minutes whether I had made a good decision or not. At most, I had to wait for a day or two. The feedback was also unambiguous. I knew whether I had gotten it right or not.
In a certain way, however, mountain decisions were difficult to evaluate. The act of making a decision meant that I couldn’t make comparisons. Let’s say I chose Trail A as opposed to Trail B. Let’s also assume that Trail A led directly to the summit with minimal obstacles. I might conclude that I had made a good decision. But did I? Trail B might have been even better.
So, in Hogarth’s terminology, mountain decision-making was kind in that it was clear, quick, and unambiguous. It was less kind in that making one decision eliminated the possibility of making useful comparisons. Compare this, for instance, to predicting that it will rain tomorrow. Making the prediction doesn’t, in any way, reduce the quality of the feedback.
Now compare the mountain environment to the business environment. The business world is truly wicked. I might not get feedback for months or years. In the meantime, I may have made many other decisions that might influence the outcome.
The feedback is ambiguous as well. Let’s say that we achieve good results. Was that because of the decision I made or because of some extraneous, or even random factors? And, like Trail A versus Trail B, choosing one course of action eliminates the possibility of making meaningful comparison.
It’s no wonder that I had better intuition in the mountains than in the executive suite. With the exception of the Trail A/Trail B issue, the mountains are a kind environment. The business world, on the other hand, offers thoroughly wicked feedback.
Could I ever develop solid intuition in the wicked world of business? Maybe. I’ll write more on how to train your intuition in the near future.
How To Kill The Lottery
Great idea!
I’ve reached the conclusion that Americans actually enjoy paying taxes. While that may seem counter-intuitive, I see it happen every time I gas up my car. In the gas station, I usually see at least two or three people (often many more) lined up to pay their taxes. They don’t seem grumpy like they do at the DMV. Rather, they seem eager to plunk down their money to help support the American way of life.
It’s the lottery, of course. Or rather, the lotteries. I’ve just read (in The Atlantic) that Americans spent $70.1 billion on state and regional lotteries in fiscal year 2014. By comparison, we spent roughly $30 billion on the federal gasoline tax, $17.8 billion on sports tickets, $14.6 billion on books, and $13.1 billion on video games. (I was pleasantly surprised to learn that we spent more on books than video games).
On a per capita basis, we spent $280 per person on lotteries in 2014. If we exclude children from that number, the figure rises to about $300 per person.
Who is spending that money? Poor people account for a disproportionate share. According to a study by Elizabeth McAuliffe, the poorest third of Americans buy more than half of all lottery tickets. The Washington Post ran the numbers and estimates that “…households making less than $28,000 a year are dishing out $450 a year on lotteries.” In other words, poor people are paying about 50% more than average people.
Lotteries have essentially addicted state and local politicians. People willingly play them, no well-organized lobby opposes them, and they raise oodles of cash with minimal bureaucracy. So, can we ever change this system?
Actually, there may be hope in the form of prize-linked savings accounts (PLSAs). Some smart people asked the question, “Why don’t poor people save more money?” An important part of the answer seems to be that people believe that they’ll never get ahead by putting their money in small savings accounts. By comparison, a lottery offers some hope of getting ahead – not much but more than a small savings account. In other words, it’s a rational choice.
So, why not add lottery-like features to saving accounts? Presto! It’s the PLSA. Like any other savings account, a PLSA offers interest. In a PLSA, however, a good chunk of that interest is swept into a lottery and awarded as prizes. If you win the prize, then bully for you – it’s like winning a lottery. If you don’t win the prize, then you still have the money in your account plus (usually) a small amount of interest. It’s a lottery with virtually no downside.
Does it work? According to Wikipedia, various forms of PLSAs are now available in at least 17 countries. In the United States, Michigan’s Save To Win program enrolled 36 credit unions and gave away prizes based on random drawings. By saving more, participants could increase their chance of winning. A study found that 56% of the participants had been non-savers prior to the program, 39% were considered asset-poor, and 44% had low-to-moderate household incomes. By 2010, participants had opened 16,833 accounts with an average balance of $1,673 or a total of $28.1 million. The program has now spread to Nebraska, North Carolina, and Washington.
Why don’t we have more PLSAs? In some states, it’s against the law – only the state can offer a lottery. In other cases, it’s probably just lack of awareness. If you think it’s a good idea, it’s time to talk it up.
(Though this idea is new to me, it’s not such a new idea. You can find out more about current Save To Win programs here. The Save to Win website is here. Peter Tufano, formerly of Harvard Business School, and now the Dean of the business school at Oxford, has written about it here. Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame has written about it here.)
How Long Does It Take (To Have A Good Idea)?
Developing a slow hunch.
Friends often ask me how long it takes to write one of my web articles. I can frame the question narrowly or broadly. In the narrow frame, the answer might be 90 minutes or so. In the broad frame, it might be 30 years or so. Talk about a slow hunch.
I’ll illustrate with my most recent article: Hate, Happiness, Imagination. As with many things – especially innovations – the article is a mashup of several different sources and concepts. Let’s track them in chronological order.
The first idea came to me through Graham Greene’s brilliant novel, The Power and the Glory. The novel includes a lovely quote: “Hate is the failure of imagination”. Greene wrote the novel in 1940, so the idea is now at least 75 years old (or perhaps older since Greene seems to echo previous authors).
I read the novel when Suellen and I lived in Guanajuato, Mexico in 1980. The quote about hate and imagination struck me and has stuck with me ever since. So, I’ve been gestating the idea for 35 years. I would occasionally mention it to friends but, otherwise, I didn’t do much with it.
In 2005, David Foster Wallace gave his famous commencement speech at Kenyon College. He stressed that, all too often, we fail to imagine what life is like for other people. If we did use our imagination more fully, we would empathize more, and our lives would be richer and fuller. First, we have to recognize that we can make a choice — that we don’t have to operate on our egocentric default setting. Second, we actually have to make the choice.
I didn’t know about Wallace’s speech until I started teaching critical thinking. As I looked for sources, I came across a video of the (abridged) speech and used it several times in my class. I first stumbled across it in 2012.
I didn’t do much with the Kenyon College speech until a few weeks ago. Frankly, I had forgotten about it. Then one of my students discovered it and asked me to show it to the class. That led to a very healthy discussion during which I connected what Wallace said to what Greene wrote.
Bingo! I made the connection between the two ideas. Why did it take me so long? Probably because I was just thinking about it. Thinking is fine but I don’t think that merely thinking creates many new ideas. The give-and-take of the class discussion stimulated me to make new connections. The diversity of opinions helped me open up new connections rather than merely deepening old connections.
Still, I didn’t have a complete thought. Then Suellen read me a paragraph from a review of the new biography of Saul Bellow. The review mentioned Bellow’s belief that imagination is “eternal naïveté”. When I realized what he meant by that, it dawned on me that it completed the thought. Greene connected to Wallace connected to Bellow.
What can we learn from this? First, this little story illustrates Steven Johnson’s idea of the “slow hunch”. Many good ideas – and most innovations – result from mashing up existing ideas. Unfortunately, we don’t get those ideas simultaneously. We may get one in 1980, another in 2012, and another last month. The trick is to remember the first one long enough to couple it with the second one. (Writing a blog helps).
The other point is that the pure act of thinking is (often) not enough. We need to kick ideas around with other people. Diversity counts. I’m lucky that I can kick ideas around with my students. And with Suellen. If not for them, I wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as I am.
So, how long does it take me to have a good idea? About 35 years.
Hate, Happiness, Imagination
Failure of imagination.
In The Power and The Glory, Graham Greene tells the story of a “whisky priest” who tries to keep his ministry alive during the Cristero War in Mexico. After the revolution of 1917, the Mexican government, seeking to suppress the power of the Catholic Church, seized church property, desecrated churches, and forced priests to renounce their vows and even to marry.
In 1926, some 50,000 peasants – many from the state of Tabasco – revolted against the government. They became known as Cristeros because their rallying cry was Viva Cristo Rey! During the war, which lasted until 1929, no Catholic mass was given in Mexico and many priests and nuns were summarily executed.
Against this backdrop, Greene tells a morally ambiguous tale. The whisky priest is no paragon of virtue. The lieutenant who doggedly pursues him is idealistic but violent. The lieutenant hates the church, believing it to be thoroughly corrupt. Does the priest hate the lieutenant? It’s an interesting question that allows Greene to write a brief meditation on the nature of hatred:
When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God’s image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.
In 2005, David Foster Wallace picked up the same thread in his commencement speech at Kenyon College. Wallace spoke of banal platitudes and the dreary rhythms of daily life. Life, he suggested, is often frustrating, infuriating, irritating, and just plain stupid. We’re surrounded by stupid, cowlike people and deal with petty, frustrating crap, day in and day out.
After painting a dismal picture of daily adult life, Wallace reminds us that that’s not the point. The point is that we get to choose. We can choose how to think and what to pay attention to. Our natural default setting is egotism. It’s all about me. Why are these people in my way?
Or we can imagine. We might imagine that the checkout clerk has a more tedious and painful life than even we do. Or that she’s just done something wonderfully generous and kind for another person. We can imagine that the person driving slowly ahead of us is tired from caring for a sick child. If we can see “the lines at the corners of the eyes”, then we can’t hate. It’s our choice.
I doubt that Greene and Wallace are compared very often in literature classes. But they’re mining exactly the same vein. We need to learn how to think and how to imagine. We don’t have to imagine new products or great art. We simply have to imagine how it is to be another person.
Another great novelist, Saul Bellow, wrote that imagination is “eternal naïveté”. We need to be naïve to imagine what another’s life is like. If we can be eternally naïve, we can stop being angry — at other people and at ourselves. Perhaps we can even be happy. It’s our choice.
(You can find a video of a portion of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech by clicking here).
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