Work Matters

Category: Classic Studies

  • Richard Feynman On The Folly Of Crafting Precise Definitions

    One of my best friends in graduate school was a former physics major named Larry Ford.  When behavioral scientists started pushing for precise definitions of concepts like effectiveness and leadership, he would sometimes confuse them (even though Larry is a very precise thinker) by arguing "there is a negative relationship between precision and accuracy."   I just ran into a quote from the amazing Nobel winner Richard Feynman that makes a similar point in a lovely way:

    "We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers… one saying to the other: "you don't know what you are talking about!". The second one says: "what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?""

    Feynman's quote reminded me of the opening pages of the 1958 classic "Organizations" by James March (quite possibly the most prestigious living organizational theorist, and certainly, one of the most charming academics on the planet) and Herbert Simon (another Nobel winner).  They open the book with a great quote that sometimes drives doctoral students and other scholars just crazy.  They kick-off by saying:

    "This is a book about a theory of formal organizations.  It is easier, and probably more useful, to give examples of formal organizations than to define them."

    After listing a bunch of examples of organizations including the Red Cross and New York State Highway Department, they note in words that would have pleased Feynman:

    "But for the present purposes we need not trouble ourselves with the precise boundaries to be drawn around an organization or the exact distinction between an "organization" and a "non-organization."  We are dealing with empirical phenomena, and the world has an uncomfortable way of not permitting itself to be fitted into clean classifications." 

    I must report, however, that for the second edition of the book, published over 20 years later, the authors elected to insert a short definition in the introduction: 

    "Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ." 

    When I read this,  I find myself doing what Feynman complained about.  I think of things they left out: What about norms? What about emotions?  I think of situations where it might not apply: Doesn't a business owned and operated by one person count as an organization?  I think of the possible overemphasis on differences: What about all the times and ways that people and groups  in organizations have similar preferences, information, interests, and knowledge? Isn't that part of what an organization is as well?  I could go on and on.

    I actually think it is a pretty good definition, but my bias is still that I like original approach, as they did such a nice job of arguing, essentially, that if they tried to get more precise, they would sacrifice accuracy. Nonetheless, I confess that I still love trying to define things and believe that trying to do so can help clarifying your thinking.  You could argue that while the outcome, in the end, will always be flawed and imprecise, the process is usually helpful and there are many times when it is useful pretend that you have a precise and accurate definition even if you don't (such as when you are developing metrics). 

  • Robert Cialdini’s Classic Football Fan Study

    Influence
    Robert Cialdini’s  book Influence is the classic text for teaching the art and science of persuasion to students of all kinds and of all ages — in psychology, marketing, organizational behavior, and political science, and that is just for starters.  I’ve used it to teach groups ranging from undergraduates to CEOs. It is the best place to learn about the psychology of how to persuade people to do what you want them to do AND how to defend yourself against people who are trying to persuade you to do things that you don’t want to do.  It is filled with great stories and is one of the best translations of research into practice that I’ve ever seen — the only thing I’ve seen in recent years in the same league is the Heath’s masterpiece Made to Stick. 

    Cialidini
    I’ve been assigning Influence to my organizational behavior students for about 20 years, and when I run into a former student, many will admit that they don’t remember much from my class, but they nearly always bring up Cialdlini’s book and how useful it has been in careers ranging from sales, to politics, to practicing law, to medicine, and on and on.  Mark Twain once said something like a classic is a book that everyone talks about, but no one reads. Influence defies that truism — people continue to read it and use it.

    I was thinking about Cialdini because it is the start of college football season.  I am not an especially avid football fan, although I do root vaguely for the Cal Bears (Stanford is my employer, but Cal is my alma mater).  My wife and I were in downtown Palo Alto on Saturday night, and I was pretty surprised to see that – although there had just been a Stanford game with UCLA a few hours earlier, played about a mile away, I was seeing few people wearing Stanford colors.  There were a lot of UCLA colors.  That wasn’t a surprise because there were thousands of their fans in town for the game.  What surprised me, however, was that I was seeing as at least as many people in downtown Palo Alto wearing Cal colors as Stanford colors (note that Cal is about 50 miles from Palo Alto, and Palo Alto is clearly Stanford territory).

    It all seemed a little weird until I remembered the study conducted by Cialdini and five other colleagues in 1976:  Stanford had lost that day (walloped by UCLA, 45 to 17) and Cal had won an exciting game (beating Tennessee 45 to 31).  Cialdini did years of research on impression management and persuasion before he wrote his wonderful book. And although most social psychologists do all their work in the laboratory where they have full experimental control, but a lot less realism, Cialdini has always been very imaginative about finding ways to study people in "real" settings.

    The study is called "Basking in Reflected Glory: 3 (Football) Field Studies." It was published in 1976 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  Cialdini wanted to show that when people are associated with a winner, even in most tangential ways, they take steps to "bask" in the reflected glory and when they are linked to a loser, they take steps to distance themselves.  Cialdini did this brilliant thing of — rather than just asking students at football schools how they felt about their teams and so on — he recruited other colleagues who taught large introduction to psychology classes at six other "big time" football schools (Cialdini was at Ohio State at the time, a school that takes its football very seriously).  On the Monday after each game during the football season, these psychology professors simply counted the percentage of students in their seven classes who wearing their school’s logo and colors to class. 

    There was a very strong effect. When their football team had won, students were far more likely to wear school colors to Monday’s psychology class than when their team had lost. Moreover, an added twist was that the bigger the margin of their team’s victory, the greater the percentage of students who showed-up wearing school colors and logos. Cialdini and his colleagues also did some cool follow-up studies showing that students were far
    more likely to use the word "we" when describing their team’s victory than when talking about their team’s defeat.  As I once heard Cialdini put it at a Stanford talk, ‘Fans say "We are #1" after a victory, but say "they sucked" after a defeat.

    This research, to me, not only shows the power of the "basking in reflected glory " phenomenon, where people try to claim status by their (objectively very weak) association with a winner.  It shows, following my earlier post on the dangers of quantitative evidence, that a simple count can be very powerful when the researchers does it in a context where the numbers matter.   So, counting the number of Cal colors and logos that people are wearing to class over at UC Berkeley this morning means something; and the comparison between Cal and Stanford psychology classes will mean something once school starts at Stanford in a few weeks. Unlike the man that Steinbeck complained about who pulled a dead, evil smelling fish out of a jar to get an accurate count of the number of spines, but in doing so recorded many lies, Cialdini’s simple counts do reveal many truths about the phenomenon he is studying.

    Bear_helmet
    Meanwhile, in the spirit of Cialdini’s research, since Cal won on Saturday, see the logo to the left. Go Bears! We’re #1! And all that.