My favorite "research translation" site, BPS Research Digest, reports a new study that provides an interesting counterpoint to yesterday's post about how, after seeing just 30 seconds of video of teachers (with the sound off), research subjects were able to predict the evaluations given by students who had these same teachers for 16 weeks.  This study by Wilhelm Hoffman and his colleagues found that, although outside observers can detect personality characteristics by watching a videotape of others, when people watch videotapes of themselves, they don't detect these characteristics.  In other words, because of some kind of cognitive blindspot or "egocentric bias" we are able to decode others' nonverbal behavior, but not our own.  As BPS summarizes:

The key question was whether seeing their non-verbal behaviour on video
would allow the participants to rate their personality in a way that
was consistent with their earlier scores on the implicit test. Long
story short – they weren't able to. The participants' extraversion
scores on the implicit test showed no association with their subsequent
explicit ratings of themselves, and there was no evidence either that
they'd used their non-verbal behaviours (such as amount of eye contact
with the camera) to inform their self-ratings.

This research is part of a long line of studies that show people can be remarkably clueless to their own behavior and how others perceive them. As I have written here before, if this research is valid, it means that you — as a leader or follower — should come to grips with the fact that others' perceptions of your actions are probably a lot more accurate than your own.  It seems we are all, to some degree, living in a fool's paradise. 

Check-out the BPS story and you will see that this may happen, in part, because "One answer could lie in cognitive dissonance – the need for us to hold
consistent beliefs about ourselves. People may well be extremely
reluctant to revise their self-perceptions, even in the face of
powerful objective evidence."  In other words, we don't decode data about ourselves very well because our brains some "defend" against challenges to our sense of self. We believe what we believe about ourselves, evidence be dammed!

This helps explain a lot of things, for example why the Zogby survey a couple years ago found that over one-third of American's reported being bullied at work and yet less than 1% ever ever reported bullying others.

P.S. The reference is Hofmann,
W., Gschwendner, T., & Schmitt, M. (2009). The road to the
unconscious self not taken: Discrepancies between self- and
observer-inferences about implicit dispositions from nonverbal
behavioural cues. European Journal of Personality, 23 (4), 343-366

I was reading through some old research on emotional expression, and in the process re-read one of the most astounding studies I've ever seen.  It is by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal and is called "Half a Minute: Predicting Teaching Evaluations from Thin Slices of Behavior and Physical Attractiveness." It was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1993; I think you can download it here (at least it worked for me).  They report three studies, but I will focus on the first, as it is makes the point.

Here is what they did.  They brought in nine female undergraduates and showed each just 30 seconds of videotape (with the sound off) of 13 different instructors.  For each instructor, these undergrads saw 10 seconds of them teaching at the start of class, 10 seconds in the middle, and 10 seconds at the end.  On the basis of these 30 seconds, the undergraduates rated the instructors of 15 dimensions, things like competent, confident, honest, likable, professional, warm, and dominant.   They then correlated these "thin slices" with the evaluations given by (different) students who had taken a semester long class from these same teachers. The correlation's were staggeringly and disturbingly high.  The overall correlation for the 15 item scale was .76 — meaning that those 30 second silent slices were remarkably similar to what students concluded about their instructors after spending 16 weeks in class with them.  Looking at the individual dimensions, some of the individual correlations were even a bit higher, such as confident (.82), optimistic (.84), and dominant (.79).  But to me the really striking ones were judgments that seem mighty hard to make from 30 seconds of silent video, notably competent (.56), professional (.56), and supportive (.55).  If you read the rest of the paper, you will see that they then replicated the study with high school teachers (achieving similar but slightly weaker results, as the overall correlation was .68) and then in a study with even thinner slices of teacher behavior (6 second and 15 second clips) they also replicated the pattern.

I was also taken with two other things about these studies. First, the researchers used statistical controls to remove any effects of physical attractiveness (it had little effect, although in one study the effects were even stronger when the controls were used). Second, all of these ratings were done by female undergraduates, and my guess is that they were female undergraduates at Harvard University. They say they used women because studies have shown that women are more skilled than men at decoding nonverbal emotions.  I would also add that, as the population of Harvard undergraduates is from a similar pool as Stanford undergraduates, I expect that this is as emotionally sensitive a group of young people as you can find.  To get into a university like Harvard, you need to not only have great grades and scores, you need to impress a lot of people along the way and often hold diverse leadership positions — accomplishments that depend on being able to read and respond to small emotional cues from others, especially from your teachers. So, as impressive as these results are, the question of how strong they are in broader population remains — although it does appear that this "thin slices" approach has since been replicated in more diverse samples.

These details aside, this research is stunning because –even if the effect is say only half as strong in the general population– the degree to which people can make accurate evaluations on the basis of the smallest hints is scary for job candidates and for bosses… it means that people size you up very quickly and make judgments that may turn out to be quite consistent with those who know you well.  It also is related to the research I talked about on the toxic tandem and the baboon stuff — one reason I suspect these undergrads were so skilled at judging teachers was that by the time they get to the university, they had 13 years of experience watching for tiny emotional cues among those who wielded power over their grades and recommendations. This continues in the workplace, of course, as underlings become remarkably astute at making correct interpretations of their bosses non-verbal behaviors, as we saw with the "interesting shoes" story and the stuff on baboons and bosses.

Let me know what you think about this research.  I know it seems hard to believe, but the power of "thin slices" has been replicated in multiple studies now.

Jeff Pfeffer has, for years now, been remarkably articulate about why some economic theories are often wrong and believing them can be hazardous to organizational health (full disclosure: I am biased as I have written some of these papers with him, but he worked in this area long before I started writing with him and he continues to do so).  Jeff has an especially lovely gem over at BNET that reflects his sense of humor, smarts, and persistent penchant to rely on evidence rather than to accept strong assumptions that cloud judgment on the trouble with "efficient market" thinking.

A taste:

You know the joke about two economists walking down the street and
seeing a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. The first economist says,
“Look at that $20 bill.” The second says, “That can’t really be a $20
bill lying there, because if it were, someone would have picked it up
already.” So they walk on, leaving the $20 bill undisturbed.

The logic — that there are no opportunities for achieving
exceptional returns because if such opportunities existed, they would
be quickly discovered and implemented by almost everyone — underlies
not only the efficient market theory in the world of finance but is
incredibly pervasive in management decisions about all sorts of topics.
I have had people tell me that downsizing must be effective —
notwithstanding lots of empirical evidence to the contrary — because if
it weren’t, companies wouldn’t be doing it. Similarly for individual
pay-for-performance incentive schemes and those pervasive, but
despised, forced-curve performance evaluations that neither managers
nor employees like but companies mandate. Most companies are doing
them, so they must be a good thing to do, again, evidence to the
contrary. Efficient market thinking presumes that not only are crowds
wise — if everyone is doing something it must be optimal — but that, by
inference, doing what everyone else does is the path to success or at
least to avoiding calamity.

We should know better. In fact, we do: Numerous behavioral scientists ranging from Duke University social psychologist Dan Ariely to University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler,
have shown that cognitive biases and irrational behavior are pervasive,
crowds can be foolish as well as wise, and neither asset prices nor
management practices necessarily make sense.

Jeff's arguments (read the rest, it gets even better) for some reason reminds of what one of my friends in college used to say when people were following the herd rather than thinking for themselves or taking a different path: "Eat shit, 10 billion flies can't be wrong."

I was just reading an old article by Karl Weick, one of my intellectual heroes that you hear about here now and then.  It is called "The Collapse of Sensemaking," Weick published in it in the Administrative Science Quarterly in 1993.  I played a modest role in its publication because I was an associate editor there at the time and after hearing Karl present the paper in Michigan, I asked him to submit to ASQ.  Karl certainly knew about ASQ, as he edited it for years, but his reaction was that this analysis of Norman McClean's lovely Young Men and Fire might just be too weird for this respectable (and I confess) rather stuffy publication (Note that both us were editors there, and it is a great journal, but well, that is how academic publications can be).  But I begged a little and argued that the reviewers would love it, and I think that helped convince him to submit it.  Luckily, it got rave reviews from distinguished peers and was soon published, and remains one of the most intriguing articles I've ever read. It is an interesting paper in that, every time I read it, I learn something new because there are so many twists and turns and Weick's mind works like no one else's I have ever read.

Here is a great part, which argues, essentially, that (near) randomness is sometimes the most rational decision process.  On page 641, Weick talks about how a hallmark of wise people is that they are neither too cautious nor too confident — both of which are dangerous because the overly cautious fear new information as it only deepens their uncertainty. And those who are too confident also are not curious, because of course, they already know all the answers and feel little need to learn more or to question their own ideas. 

Then, over pages 641 and 642, Weick tells a lovely story, and provides an intriguing analysis, which I reproduce below:

A good example of wisdom in groups is the Naskapi Indians' use of caribou shoulder bones to locate game (Weick, 1979).  They hold bones over a fire until they crack and then hunt in the directions to which the bones crack. The ritual is effective because the decision is not influenced by the outcomes of past hunts, which means that the stock of animals is not depleted. More important, the final decision is not influenced by the inevitable patterning in human choice, which enables hunted animals to become sensitized to humans and take evasive action. The wisdom inherent in this practice derives from its ambivalence toward the past. Any attempt to hunt for caribou is both a new experience and an old experience. It is new in the sense that time has elapsed, the composition of the hunter band has changed, the caribou have learned new things, and so forth. But the hunt is also old in that if you have seen one hunt you have seen them all: There are always hunters, weapons, stealth, decoys, tacks, odors, and winds.  The practice of divination incorporates the attitude of wisdom because past experience is discounted when a new set of cracks forms a crude map for the hunt.  But past experience is also given some weight, because a seasoned hunter "reads" the cracks and injects some of his own past experience into an interpretation of what the cracks mean.  The reader is crucial. If the reader's hunches dominate, randomization is lost.  If the cracks dominate, then the experience base is discarded.

The lesson, or at least one lesson (there are dozens in this paragraph), is that there is a delicate balance between acting as if everything brand new and everything is the same as it ever was, and wise people find constructive ways to strike that balance.  And the implication is also that, in many decisions we make, we are so biased by our past experience and cognitive biases that introducing more randomness (and perhaps naivete and ignorance than usual) rather than less might do the trick. Along those lines, I have had numerous people tell me that the first iPhone was designed by people who had never done a phone before, so they didn't know what it was "supposed to" do.  Is that so?

More generally, I would appreciate any comments on how Weick's perspective on wisdom does — does not have — implications for other decisions.