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Streamline Training & Documentation
Streamline Training & Documentation
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Timothy Murphy on Jazz Improvisation
Readers of this blog will know that I'm fascinated by the process of improvisation, a subject I discussed most recently here. I'm firmly convinced that one of the prime aspects of expertise is the ability to conjure up promising ideas on the fly. I'm also confident that this is a skill that can be steadily honed through practice.
The Spring 2010 issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine gives its last page over to a summary of how an accomplished jazz pianist in an ensemble undertakes to improvise. The summary is provided by Timothy Murphy, a keyboardist and teacher at Hopkins' Peabody Conservatory and at Towson University.
Murphy's offers these four bits of advice:
First, clear your mind. Get rid al all the words coursing through your head. Sit quietly about 30 seconds before putting your hands on the keyboard.
Improv is a conversation. Watch the facial expressions of the other players, listen to them, try to respond to what they do with the least predictable thing that's still musical.
If you suddenly go blank, just smile and keep pressing the keys until something good happens. Now and then, the best thing to "play" is silence.
A good solo should have a shape. Pay attention to the inner voice that's telling you that you've reached a high point and it's time to wind it down and get out elegantly.
The most direct business application of Murphy's schema is to meetings in which creative thinking is needed, for example, concerning the design of a new product or service or the solution to a problem. An individual's contributions don't have to be "the least predictable thing," but they certainly shouldn't be trite. Everybody should contribute, but no one should overwhelm the conversation. Soliloquies should "have a shape" and, even if the speaker doesn't end elegantly, he or she should not run on.
In "The Perception of 'Things,'" Chapter 19 of The Principles of Psychology (1890 edition), William James explains his view of genius . . . In logic a concept is unalterable; but what are popularly called our 'conceptions of things' alter by being used. The aim of 'Science' is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them. There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a cease-less compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors. Every new experience must be disposed of under some old head. The great point is to find the head which has to be least altered to take it in. Certain Polynesian natives, seeing horses for the first time, called them pigs, that being the nearest head. My child of two played for a week with the first orange that was given him, calling it a 'ball.' He called the first whole eggs he saw 'potatoes' having been accustomed to see his 'eggs' broken into a glass, and his potatoes without the skin. A folding pocket-corkscrew he unhesitatingly called 'bad-scissors.' Hardly any one of us can make new heads easily when fresh experiences come. Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways. Old-fogyism, in short, is the inevitable terminus to which life sweeps us on. Objects which violate our established habits of 'apperception' are simply not taken account of at all; or, if on some occasion we are forced by dint of argument to admit their existence, twenty-four hours later the admission is as if it were not, and every trace of the unassimilable truth has vanished from our thought. Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
According to Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, working up to one's potential requires a growth mindset, i.e., the belief that one's abilities are malleable and can improve.
This is in contrast to a fixed mindset, i.e., the belief that one's abilities are inborn and fixed and, therefore, one is basically helpless in the face of skill deficits, such as poor public speaking or written communication.
(click to enlarge)
Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset (Nigel Holmes [pdf])
Fortunately, there is good evidence that it is quite realistic to believe that one can improve one's abilities. What's needed are challenging opportunities to acquire experience in specific fields, which, over time, develops into deep expertise.
Most of Dweck's work has been directed at school students. For example, she and a colleague, Lisa Blackwell, have recently launched Brainology, a computer-based training program for middle school and high school students aimed at producing better academic outcomes by imbuing students with a growth mindset.
Dweck's research has demonstrated that students with a growth mindset have higher motivation to learn. When this heightened motivation is coupled with plenty of good instruction and practice, the students show solid increases in achievement.
A corollary of Dweck's findings concerning the importance of a growth mindset is the idea that trying to build students' belief in themselves by telling them how smart they are is not helpful. Doing this can, in fact, lead to worsened performance. Students are demotivated to undertake learning tasks at which they may initially fail because they're afraid their "native" intelligence will be called into question.
A much better approach to building students' belief in themselves is helping those with a fixed mindset to convert to a growth mindset.
The Brainology program is an example of how to achieve this conversion. It consists of an introduction and four units. In sum (pdf), the four units cover:
Unit 1— basics of brain structure and function, particularly what is required to maintain readiness to learn.
Unit 2 — brain behavior, how it functions, effect of emotions (e.,g., performance anxiety), and strategies to manage emotions (e.g., strategies for handling tests calmly).
Unit 3 — how learning changes the brain, and what sort of activities promote learning. You can exercise your brain "by exploring new information, learning new concepts, and practicing skills. [P]ractice is the key to learning."
Unit 4 — how memory works, and study strategies to apply the Brainology lessons in real life. "[I]nformation moves from working memory to long-term memory through a process called encoding. In order for encoding to happen you must pay attention, attach new information to existing information that supports it, and repeat the information. [O]ther mnemonics (memory strategies) include connecting information together by chunking, visual images and acronyms."
Organizations that want to cultivate learning-oriented behavior among their employees are well-advised to encourage a growth mindset, accompanied by opportunities to build experience. In practice, this means that a company's performance management system should give heavy weight to skill development, with lesser weight placed on grading employees in order to make compensation and retention decisions.
Gary Klein, a research psychologist, published his most recent book, Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making, in October of last year. The book continues in the vein he has been exploring for many years, namely reporting on what his research reveals concerning the way in which experts make decisions.
The MIT Press's summary of Klein's book explains that he offers
... realistic ideas about how to make decisions in real-life settings. He provides many examples — ranging from airline pilots and weather forecasters to sports announcers and Captain Jack Aubrey in Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander novels — to make his point. All these decision makers saw things that others didn't. They used their expertise to pick up cues and to discern patterns and trends. We can make better decisions, Klein tells us, if we are prepared for complexity and ambiguity and if we will stop expecting the data to tell us everything.
The first chapter of the book is available online. You can preview the book — on a limited basis — at Google Books.
There is an informative review at Diane Coyle's blog, and you can read an excellent overview of Klein's work, as of ten years ago, in an article Fast Company published in August 2000. Five years later, Klein was interviewed by NASA's ASK Magazine, producing another clear, compact account of his thinking on decision-making.
Yesterday's post referenced Don Vandergriff's workshop, "Deciding Under Pressure and Fast." Today I'd like to call attention to an overview of research on performing under pressure that lends support to Vandergriff's insistence on the necessity that people get ample practice in making decisions under time pressure.
The article in question is "Avoiding the Big Choke," by Elizabeth Svoboda, in the February/March 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind. Choking is defined as "performance decrements under pressure circumstances."1
Though much of Svoboda's article is devoted to activities like playing golf and public speaking, not to Vandergriff's main focus on training people who need to plan and execute military and law enforcement actions, there is a key point in Svoboda's report that is clearly applicable to any job requiring an ability to think on one's feet: "The best way to make a performance situation feel like rehearsal ... is to subject yourself to the same anxiety-packed conditions during practice that you expect to encounter" in the actual situation for which you are preparing.
Svoboda cites Raôul R.D. Oudejans, a professor in the Faculty of Human Movement Sciences of VU University Amsterdam. Oudejans conducted a study with Dutch police, the results of which "indicate that turning up the heat from the very first day of practice may be one of the most effective ways to immunize yourself against blowing it."
Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, weighs in with the complementary idea that "[t]he more exposure you get to these high-pressure situations, and the more you succeed [despite them], he less likely you're going to get that whole affective experience" of feeling distractingly nervous about your performance.
Svoboda summarizes: "the more comfortable you feel, the less likely you are to be affected by pressure." To become as comfortable as possible, you should devise "a high-tension practice regimen appropriate to your particular performance situation."
In concluding, Svoboda cites Harry Wallace, a psychology professor at Trinity University in San Antonio. She says:
The most effective strategies ... are the ones that imbue performers with the assurance that they can deal with any eventuality. This mind-set proves helpful even (and perhaps especially) when something goes wrong. According to Prof. Wallace, "Part of the key is not being overconfident in advance and recognizing that you may feel more anxiety than you expect. You want to address any concerns far in advance of performance. You don't want to have any second thoughts about your likelihood of success."
The affinity of this admonition with the philosophy underlying "Deciding Under Pressure and Fast" is apparent.
__________ 1 Svoboda adopts the definition used by Roy Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University.
On October 20 Henry Roediger, a psychology professor at Washington University, and Bridgid Finn, a post-doc at the Memory Lab that Roediger heads, published a short article at ScientificAmerican.com reporting on recent research that provides further evidence of the power of the testing effect, defined as "improved performance on a later retention test arising from an earlier test."1
Roediger and Finn outline the findings from two sets of experiments aimed at determining if testing people on material they have not studied boosts their recall of the material on a subsequent test even though the testees, understandably, get most of the answers on the initial test wrong.
The first set of experiments is described in a paper (pdf) by Nate Kornell, a psychology professor at Williams College, Matthew Hays, a post-doc at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, and Robert Bjork, a psychology professor at UCLA.2. As the abstract explains:
Taking tests enhances learning. But what happens when one cannot answer a test question — does an unsuccessful retrieval attempt impede future learning or enhance it? The authors examined this question using materials that ensured that retrieval attempts would be unsuccessful. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were asked fictional general-knowledge questions (e.g., “What peace treaty ended the Calumet War?”). In Experiments 3–6, participants were shown a cue word (e.g., whale) and were asked to guess a weak associate (e.g., mammal); the rare trials on which participants guessed the correct response were excluded from the analyses. In the test condition, participants attempted to answer the question before being shown the answer; in the read-only condition, the question and answer were presented together. Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhanced learning with both types of materials. These results demonstrate that retrieval attempts enhance future learning; they also suggest that taking challenging tests — instead of avoiding errors — may be one key to effective learning.
In sum: the read-only condition emulates someone sitting down and reading a portion of a textbook. How much does the person remember? Not as much as if he/she had been quizzed in advance on the material, even if the answers he/she came up with were largely wrong.
A key point is that the unsuccessful retrieval attempts need to be followed by feedback providing the right answers in order for enhanced learning to occur.
Kornell, Hays, and Bjork (KHB) also found, as have previous researchers, that the benefit of testing increased as the delay between study and the final test of the material increased. The reason seems to be that testing is more effective at preventing forgetting than is a read-only/no-initial-test approach to learning.
KHB offer three conjectures concerning the reason for the testing effect:
Testing enhances deep processing (elaborated thinking about the material), which, in turn, enhances learning.
Retrieval strengthens retrieval routes from the question to the correct answer. And "it could be that exploring incorrect retrieval routes actually weakens, rather than strengthens, those routes."
"... information generated from memory during a retrieval attempt, even if it is incorrect, can serve to cue future recall attempts. In other words, incorrect information can serve as a mediator, connecting the question with the correct answer. ... unsucessful retrieval attempts are likely to produce related information that can serve to mediate recall of the correct answer." [reference omitted]
KHB close their paper with the advice that "educators and learners should introduce challenges into learning situations, including using tests as learning events, even if doing so increases initial error rates."
The second set of experiments is described in a paper (pdf) by Lindsey Richland, an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, Nate Kornell, and Liche Sean Kao, a graduate student in education at Irvine.3 As explained in the abstract:
Testing previously studied information enhances long-term memory, particularly when the information is successfully retrieved from memory. The authors examined the effect of unsuccessful retrieval attempts on learning. Participants in 5 experiments read an essay about vision. In the test condition, they were asked about embedded concepts before reading the passage; in the extended study condition, they were given a longer time to read the passage. To distinguish the effects of testing from attention direction, the authors emphasized the tested concepts in both conditions, using italics or bolded keywords or, in Experiment 5, by presenting the questions but not asking participants to answer them before reading the passage. Posttest performance was better in the test condition than in the extended study condition in all experiments — a pretesting effect — even though only items that were not successfully retrieved on the pretest were analyzed. The testing effect appears to be attributable, in part, to the role unsuccessful tests play in enhancing future learning.
What this research suggests is that if you have a chunk of time available in which students can get themselves "in gear" for a class session on a new topic, it's better to use the time for testing — even if the students give a lot of wrong answers — than to adopt a "study hall" approach of having the students spend the time reading about the topic.4
Richland, Kornell, and Kao emphasize the importance of following the pre-testing with instruction that provides answers to the tested questions. They go on to say that
... our data suggest that instruction following testing need not be individualized to learner errors. Rather, instruction that appropriately draws attention to key content may build on the previous cognitive acts performed when attempting to answer a test question. This implies that standardized tests, or other test situations where it is difficult to provide timely item-by-item feedback, could still provide learning benefits for successful and unsuccessful test takers, as long as those test takers are given an opportunity to learn the information on which they were previously tested.
For an overview of research relating to the testing effect, you can see a survey paper published by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke in 2006.5 In the paper Roediger and Karpicke argue:
The testing effect cannot be explained by additional exposure to the material. This suggests that retrieval processes engaged in during a test are responsible for enhancing learning. More specifically, elaboration of encoding [processing of sensory input into memory], more effortful or deeper encoding, and creation of different routes of access can account for the basic effect. ... The concept of transfer-appropriate processing is also congenial, albeit at a general level, to explaining the testing effect. [As explained earlier in the paper, "The idea behind transfer-appropriate processing is that performance on a test of memory benefits to the extent that the processes required to perform well on the test match encoding operations engaged during prior learning."]
They also note that the testing effect can be exploited with more complex learning than memorization — such as the learning required in college-level courses or at business firms — by adopting an approach of frequent assignments. In other words, "testing" should be interpreted broadly; it's not just multiple choice, true/false, and fill-in-the-blank testing of memory.
In closing, let's return to the Roediger/Finn article. The authors offer this practical advice, reflecting all the insight that has accumulated concerning the testing effect:
By challenging ourselves to retrieve or generate answers we can improve our recall. Keep that in mind next time you turn to Google for an answer, and give yourself a little more time to come up with the answer on your own.
Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading it. When the chapter is finished, go back to the questions and try answering them again. For any you miss, restudy that section of the chapter. Then wait a few days and try to answer the questions again (restudying when you need to). Keep this practice up on all the chapters you read before the exam and you will be have learned the material in a durable manner and be able to retrieve it long after you have left the course.
Of course, these are general-purpose strategies and work for any type of material, not just textbooks. And remember, even if you get the questions wrong as you self-test yourself during study, the process is still useful, indeed much more useful than just studying. [emphasis added]
The key take-away from all of the testing effect research is that testing is useful not only for assessment but also as a tool to promote learning.
__________ 1 Mark McDaniel, Henry Roediger, and Kathleen McDermott, "Generalizing Test-Enhanced Learning from the Laboratory to the Classroom," Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2007), pp. 200-206.
2 Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays,and Robert Bjork, "Unsuccessful Retrieval Attempts Enhance Subsequent Learning," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2009), pp. 989-998.
3 Lindsey Richland, Nate Kornell, and Liche Kao, "The Pre-testing Effect: Do Unsuccessful Retrieval Attempts Enhance Larning?" Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2009), pp. 243-257.
4 It should be noted that Richland, Korness, and Kao did not find that their pretesting slowed the rate of forgetting.
5 Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, "The Power of Testing Memory: Basic Research and Implications for Educational Practice," Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2006), pp. 181-210.
At his Memory Lab, Roediger oversees the Test-Enhanced Learning in the Classroom (TELC) project, which is based on these four principles: "(1) Testing enhances learning (better than repeated studying), and students should be tested frequently; (2) Production tests (short answer or essay tests) produce better retention at delays than do recognition tests (multiple choice, true/false); (3) Multiple tests are better than single tests in enhancing learning; and (4) Immediate feedback improves the effect of testing, especially for facts missed on the tests."
The Moral Sense Test (MST), sponsored by the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard's psychology department, is "a Web-based study into the nature of human moral judgment." Researchers at the lab use the MST as part of an effort to understand how people decide what is right and wrong. As the researchers explain:
To answer this question, we have designed a series of moral dilemmas to probe the psychological mechanisms underlying our moral judgments. By presenting these dilemmas on the Web, we hope to gain insight into the similarities and differences between the moral judgments of people of different ages, from different cultures, with different educational backgrounds and religious beliefs, involved in different occupations and exposed to very different circumstances.
. . .
Our aim is to use data from the MST, as well as other experiments, to characterize the nature of our moral psychology, how it evolved, and how it develops in our species, creating individuals with moral responsibilities. The MST has been designed for all humans who are curious about that puzzling little word “ought” — about the principles that make one action right and another wrong.
You can take the test yourself here. The lab promises strict confidentiality both for the demographic information you provide (age, sex, etc.) and for your responses to the test items.
Those test items are moral dilemmas (when I took it, there were twenty-one), for which you are asked to indicate your assessment of the moral course of action.
There is no immediate feedback. Instead, you are able, if you wish, to browse through the lab's publications to see which of the publications referencing the MST might be of interest.
Is moral judgment accomplished by intuition or conscious reasoning? An answer to this question demands a detailed account of the moral principles in question. Here we investigate three principles guiding subjects’ moral judgments and then ask whether they are invoked to explain those judgments. Across a variety of moral dilemmas, subjects’ judgments about the permissibility of harming an individual aligned with three principles: (1) harm caused by action is worse than harm caused by omission, (2) harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm foreseen as the side-effect of a goal, and (3) harm involving physical contact with the victim is worse than harm involving no physical contact. Subjects generally appealed to the first and third principles in their justifications, but not to the second principle. This finding has significance for the methods and theories of moral psychology: the moral principles used in judgment must be directly compared to those articulated in justification and, when they are, evidence emerges that some moral principles are available to conscious reasoning while others are not.
The article appeared n Psychological Science in 2006 (vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 1082-1089).
Thanks to the Greater Good blog, I have been alerted to a study that suggests people can learn to be more emotionally intelligent.
The study was conducted by four Belgian researchers — Delphine Nelis, Jordi Quoidbach, Moïra Mikolajczak, and Michel Hansenne. Nelis, Quoidbach, and Hansenne are at the University of Liège; Mikolajczak is at the Université Catholique de Louvain.1
The construct of emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the individual differences in the perception, processing, regulation, and utilization of emotional information. As these differences have been shown to have a significant impact on important life outcomes (e.g., mental and physical health, work performance and social relationships), this study investigated, using a controlled experimental design, whether it is possible to increase EI. Participants of the experimental group received a brief empirically-derived EI training (four group training sessions of two hours and a half) while control participants continued to live normally. Results showed a significant increase in emotion identification and emotion management abilities in the training group. Follow-up measures after 6 months revealed that these changes were persistent. No significant change was observed in the control group. These findings suggest that EI can be improved ...
Because the text of the study is not available for free online, you might want to turn for additional detail to the description of the research Timothy A. Pychyl, a psychology professor at Carleton University, provides at www.PsychologyToday.com:
The EI training intervention consisted of 4 sessions of 2.5 hours each over 4 weeks with participants divided into two smaller groups (10 and 9 participants, respectively). The training was based on Mayer and Salovey's model of EI,[2] with an emphasis on: 1) perception, appraisal and expression of emotion; 2) emotional facilitation of thinking; 3) understanding and analyzing emotions; 4) reflective regulation of emotion. During the program, particular emphasis was placed on techniques to enhance emotional regulation and emotional understanding. These sessions were based on short lectures, role plays, discussions and readings. Participants also completed a daily dairy of emotional experience that they analyzed in light of the theory explained in class as part of their learning.
The moral for corporate trainers is that well-designed coaching and training in the interpersonal skills that reflect emotional intelligence can equip people to do a better job of communicating with each other and managing conflict — assuming training participants are willing to learn.
(I will be on the lookout for further information on the exact nature of the training the Belgian researchers used in their experiment. I am also interested in anything I can find about their thoughts concerning how to improve the specifics of their training in light of their experience with their initial group of subjects.)
__________ 1 Delphine Nelis, Jordi Quoidbach, Moïra Mikolajczak, and Michel Hansenne, "Increasing Emotional Intelligence: (How) is it possible?" Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 47, No. 1 (July 2009), pp. 36-41.
2 John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey, "What is Emotional Intelligence?" (pdf) in Peter Salovey and David J. Sluyter (eds.), Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications (Basic Books, 1997), pp. 3-31.
I'd like to follow up briefly on Sunday's post about research concerning how a message deliverer's expertise and expressed degree of certainty affect persuasiveness.
The research indicates that surprising consumers by having a message containing a subjective judgment be delivered by a somewhat uncertain expert, or by a highly certain non-expert, will engage consumers' interest and make it easier to persuade them that the message is valid (assuming it includes a strong argument in favor of the judgment in question).
This notion of using surprise to gain audience attention, and get them thinking about what you have to say, came back to mind as I was reading a review of William Trevor's latest novel in the November 19 issue of The New York Review of Books (not yet online).
Reviewer David Lodge likes Love and Summer. After several paragraphs explaining Trevor's long career — he is now eighty-one — and introducing the novel, Lodge makes the following comment about Trevor's writing technique: The novel begins:
On a June evening some years after the middle of the last century Mrs Eileen Commulty passed through the town of Rathmoye: from Number 4 The Square to Magennis Street, into Hurley Lane, along Irish Street, across Cloughjordan Road to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Her night was spent there.
In short, it begins with a funeral, though it is not until you get to the last sentence that the penny drops. This is typical of Trevor's technique: enlivening the meticulous realism of the scene-setting not by metaphor and simile, but by little enigmas and surprises in the way information is fed to the reader. He belongs in a tradition classically represented by the fiction writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries like Maupassant, Chekhov, and the Joyce of Dubliners. The narrative voice is impersonal and detached but reliable, in complete possession of the story and its milieu, giving us enough information to be interested, but withholding a good deal to ensure that we read on, and think about what we read ...
Lodge's description of how Trevor presents his story carries a lesson for anyone wanting an engaged audience. A major part of your job in planning the flow of a presentation, especially if the size of your audience limits mid-presentation dialogue, is to decide how to launch your story in a way that gets people to sit up because it is somehow unexpected, and then how to parcel out your information and supporting arguments in a way that continues to inject surprising points that keep listeners' minds in gear.
For related ideas concerning use of stagecraft as a tool for persuasion, see this post from 2006 that talks about David Gergen's views on what effective leaders do that makes them persuasive.
Back in June I wrote a post about David Kennedy's approach to deterring criminal offenders, who had not yet perpetrated violent crimes, from continuing their illegal activities. Now, thanks to a book review, also dating from June, I've become aware of an approach to reducing recidivism among jailed offenders that seems to be attracting increasing attention in the US after being used successfully in San Francisco since 1997.1
Schwartz is a program administrator in the San Francisco Sheriff's Department who co-founded the department's Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP), along with Assistant Sheriff Michael Marcum and Captain Rebecca Benoit.
Participants in the RSVP Expressive Arts program learn about replacing the macho image of superiority that contributed to their violent behavior, with a more humane view of the male role in society. The theater program also helps participants learn ways of expressing their feelings and needs in a nonviolent manner. (sunnyschwartz.com)
RSVP is a version of what has come to be known as restorative justice, which is most simply defined as:
all approaches to crime that attempt to do justice by repairing the harm crime causes.2
RSVP's founders made a point of designing the program based on input from an advisory committee made up of representatives of a broad cross-section of law enforcement and community stakeholders, including crime victims. The program was the 2004 recipient of the Innovations in American Government Award, presented by the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
You can get a quick overview of RSVP in the 3:08 video below.
A longer account of the program is offered in the 28:23 video below, which ran on PBS in 2005 as part of the Visionaries series hosted by Sam Waterston.
Among those interviewed are Sunny Schwartz; Michael Hennessey, Sheriff of San Francisco; Ronald Rosado, a Deputy Sheriff working in the dormitory where the RSVP program is based; George Jurand, RSVP Program Coordinator and Manager; Sheryl Corke, Principal of Five Keys Charter School (see below); Teresa Camajani, a history teacher at Five Keys; Delia Ginorio, Survivor Restoration Coordinator; and Jean O'Hara, a former Victim Impact Coordinator, who lost her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson to murder.
There is also footage of unnamed inmates participating in RSVP discussions, including a victim impact presentation by Jean O'Hara.
Using data from a two-year period beginning nine months prior to the inception of RSVP, and continuing for fifteen months after its launch, James Gilligan, then a visiting professor of psychiatry, criminology, and public policy and practice at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bandy Lee. a clinical professor of law and psychiatry at Yale, evaluated the program's effects on inmate behavior. Their hypothesis:
... the dormitory in which violence-prevention skills are taught through RSVP would create a cultural environment that would generate fewer violent incidents than the dormitory without such a programme, [which] turned out to be the case.3
The effect on the frequency with which ex-offenders were re-arrested for violent crimes was also positive: Among jail inmates who took part for a full sixteen weeks, the reduction was over 80% for the first year after release, compared to a control group of non-participants.4
Gilligan and Lee argue that
The seeds of a change in [the in-jail] culture can be seen in some of the principles that characterized the in-house version of RSVP: (1) redefining the male-role image of superiority; (2) holding oneself accountable rather than minimizing or blaming; (3) offering peer-directed guidance and having avenues for promotion; (4) verbalizing rather than acting out: (5) expressing emotions as needs; and (6) offering intimacy rather than offence. ... Finding violence to be not only an ineffectual but counterproductive means of gaining respect in [the] new culture, the inmates would quickly search for other means, which facilitated their compliance and adaptation.
I was particularly interested in the nature of the integrated pre- and post-release services provided to inmates to assist in their transition back into the community, services which bear a not surprising resemblance to those offered in various programs around the country directed at populations with employability barriers.5
The services include:
Core RSVP curriculum designed to change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors — includes male role re-education (using the Manalive curriculum), victim impact presentations, drug and alcohol recovery, theater, and release planning (further details below).6
A propos of the victim impact presentations, Gilligan and Lee comment that "we have been astonished by ... how little awareness most of these men had had as to how much power they had to hurt others, until they listened to ... victims describe their own reactions to being victimized by others." 7
Community meetings — held weekly in the RSVP dormitory to allow participants to discuss day-to-day issues they are coping with.
Loss of Innocence class — participants can explore and address trauma and victimization they experienced in childhood.
Fatherhood curriculum — a twelve-week program in which participants "discuss the father's role in a child's life, the importance of providing children with a consistent and supportive environment, and issues children face as they grow up in a single parent's home."
Young Adult class — inmates twenty-eight and under address their violence, drug dependency, and recidivism problems.
Creative writing — participants contribute to the dormitory's newsletter, with the aim of strengthening writing skills and exercising creativity.
Transfer planning — produces an exit plan spelling out the steps and tools the inmate will continue to employ in order to maintain a life free of violence and substance abuse.
The transfer planning includes plans for restoration of victims and the community. For details of RSVP's services for crime victims and survivors, see here. For services to communities, see here.
Post-release programs — designed to assist ex-offenders in maintaining behavior changes learned in the in-jail program. Include the Post-Release Education Program (PREP), which continues, at least for the first year, participation in Manalive discussion groups and weekly facilitated support groups. PREP also includes a Life Skills program with three components, the first dealing with job readiness, exploration of career opportunities, and apprenticeship programs; the second involving resume preparation and practice employment interviews; and the third covering tracking of ex-offenders' progress and ongoing support with work-related issues. Participants get counseling and support in such areass as substance abuse avoidance and parenting.
Internship Program — for select participants, a four- to six-month training program that prepares them for employment as peer counselors in the jail or at human services agencies.
Community advocacy programs — ex-offenders can give back to the community in such ways as leading Manalive groups, performing in theater programs for the public, counseling youth groups, and engaging in victim restitution programs.
I'll wrap up with a summary comment from Sunny Schwartz, et al. that indicates why emulation of RSVP elsewhere is important:
As an affirmative crime prevention tool that actively engages inmates, RSVP has been successful in giving participants, collaborators, and the community a greater understanding of the nature and dynamics of violence, including the spectrum of abusive behavior, the importance of gender-role training, the significance of learned behavior, the methods for unlearning violence, and the criminal implications and consequences of violence.8
__________ 1 Helen Epstein, "America's Prisons: Is There Hope?" The New York Review of Books, Vol. 56, No. 10 (June 11, 2009).
As an example of the spread of the RSVP program, see this report by Kate Stone Lombardi in the July 6, 2008 edition of the New York Times, which describes the introduction of the RSVP approach to Westchester County.
2Restorative Juvenile Justice: Repairing the Harm of Youth Crime, Bazemore and Walgrave (eds.) (Criminal Justice Press, 1999).
3 James Gilligan and Bandy Lee, "The Resolve to Stop the Violence Project: Transforming an In-house Culture of Violence through a Jail-Based Programme," Journal of Public Health Vol. 27, No. 2 (June 2005b), pp. 149-155.
4 James Gilligan and Bandy Lee, "The Resolve to Stop the Violence Project: Reducing Violence in the Community through a Jail-Based Initiative," Journal of Public Health, Vol 27, No. 2 (June 2005a), pp. 143-148.
5 Some of these programs have been the subject of previous posts. See here, here, here, and here.
6Sunny Schwartz, Michael Hennessey, and Leslie Levitas, "Designing: Not Business as Usual," American Jails, Jan-Feb 2005, pp. 10.
Perceived Expertise, Expressed Certainty, and Persuasiveness
A recent paper by graduate student Uma R. Karmarkar and professor of marketing Zakary L. Tormala of the Stanford Graduate School of Business looks at an aspect of being persuasive to consumers that in all likelihood has broader applicability.1
Karmarkar and Tormala investigate the effect on persuasiveness of whether someone making a subjective recommendation (e.g., concerning a restaurant) expresses certainty or, alternatively, a degree of uncertainty about the recommendation.
The research indicates that the effect of expressing certainty/uncertainty on persuasiveness when subjective judgments are involved and when the argument presented is strong depends on whether the recommendation comes from a perceived expert or a perceived nonexpert. Specifically,
... low[-]expertise sources violate expectancies, simulate involvement, and promote persuasion when they express certainty, whereas high[-]expertise sources violate expectancies, simulate involvement, and promote persuasion when they express uncertainty.
Karmarkar and Tormala reached their conclusion by analyzing the results of three experiments:
An initial test of the incongruity hypothesis, i.e., the hypothesis that an expert who expresses uncertainty, or a non-expert who expresses certainty, will intrigue message receivers and thereby make them more susceptible to persuasion. The results supported this hypothesis.
An investigation of the effect of the message deliverer's certainty on persuasion. Karmarkar and Tormala tested the hypotheses that (1) violation of expectations concerning the relation of expertise and certainty increases the message receiver's involvement (attention to and interest in the message), and (2) increased receiver involvement increases the persuasiveness of the message (assuming it includes strong arguments). The results supported these hypotheses.
An investigation of the impact of varying argument quality. Karmarkar and Tormala tested the hypotheses that (1) increasing receiver involvement by establishing incongruity between the deliver's expertise and certainty has more of an impact on persuasiveness for strong arguments than for weak arguments, and (2) strong arguments produce higher "thought favorability" (e.g., favorable ideas about a restaurant under review), which, in turn, produce more persuasion (in the form of favorable attitudes toward, and interest in, the restaurant). The results supported these hypotheses.
Note that incongruity between expertise and certainty, by increasing receiver involvement, will tend to undermine persuasion if the arguments in the message are weak. At best, there will likely be no effect on the receiver's attitudes and intentions.
Karmarkar and Tormala conclude their paper by pointing out the tactics that their results suggest people should consider when delivering messages involving subjective judgments:
"... individuals lacking in established expertise can augment their persuasive impact when they have strong arguments by strategically incorporating expressions of high certainty into their message."
"... when experts have strong arguments on their side, they will be more influential if they express uncertainty rather than certainty about their opinion or recommendation."
My own thought is that this research has likely applicability for messaging outside the consumer context. For instance, in facilitating classroom training, it is probably advisable not to adopt too strong a tone of certainty when discussing subjective recommendations. Indeed, good facilitators know that leaving space for participants to explore issues about which the facilitator has a point of view (not the same thing as utter certainty) increases participant engagement and promotes learning.
Note: You can read the Stanford business school's summary of Karmarkar and Tormala's research here.
__________ 1 Uma R. Karmarkar and Zakary L. Tormala, "Believe Me, I Have No Idea What I’m Talking About: The Effects of Source Certainty on Consumer Involvement and Persuasion," Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 36, No. 6 (April 2010); published online October 6, 2009.
From Part III, Chapter 2, of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, whose first edition Adam Smith published in 1759 . . . He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. Rather than see our own behaviour under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavour to exasperate anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us; we endeavour by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments: we even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose, and thus persevere in injustice, merely because we once were unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so.
So partial are the views of mankind with regard to the propriety of their own conduct, both at the time of action and after it; and so difficult is it for them to view it in the light in which any indifferent spectator would consider it. But if it was by a peculiar faculty, such as the moral sense is supposed to be, that they judged of their own conduct, if they were endued with a particular power of perception, which distinguished the beauty or deformity of passions and affections; as their own passions would be more immediately exposed to the view of this faculty, it would judge with more accuracy concerning them, than concerning those of other men, of which it had only a more distant prospect.
This self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable.
As indicated in a number of previous posts, I'm quite interested in learning what I can about the nature of improvisation.1
Among other things, improvisation an important aspect of handling problem situtions in which time is of the essence, which means developing skill at improvising is important for businesspeople. Indeed, a good working definition of improvised decision-making is that adopted by Mendonça, Wallace, and Beroggi:
reworking knowledge to produce a novel action in time to meet the requirements of the given situation.2
In June of last year, Aaron Berkowitz, then a graduate student in ethnomusicology at Harvard, and Daniel Ansari, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, published a paper reporting the results of research investigating which regions of the brain are active during musical improvisation.3 The Harvard Gazette published a summary of the research in February.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Berkowitz and Ansari identified three regions of the brain involved in melodic and rhythmic improvisation:
The inferior frontal gyrus seems to be activated for generating musical-motor sequences. It is an area "known to be involved when people speak and understand language. It's also active when people hear and understand music." Now Berkowitz and Ansari have produced evidence that "it's involved when people make music."
The rostral cingulate zone of the anterior cingulate cortex seems to be activated for selecting the musical-motor sequences to use. It is "a part of the brain that appears to be involved in conflict monitoring — when you're trying to sort out two conflicting possibilities ... It's involved with decisionmaking ..."
The dorsal premotor cortex is seems to be activated for executing the musical-motor sequences the improvising musician has selected. It "takes information about where the body is in space, makes a motor plan, and sends it to the motor cortex to execute the plan."
In talking about his findings, which were part of his dissertation research (he received his Ph.D this year), Berkowitz emphasizes that not only do we now know more about where in the brain the act of musical improvisation is processed, but we also know more about the functions of the three regions that fMRI indicates are involved.
2 David Mendonça, William A. Wallace, and Giampiero E.G. Beroggi, "Development of a Decision Logic to Support Group Improvisation: An Application to Emergency Response," 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (January 7-10, 2002), Vol. 8 (2002), p. 220b.
3 Aaron L. Berkowitz and Daniel Ansari, "Generation of Novel Motor Sequences: The Neural Correlates of Musical Improvisation," NeuroImage, Vol. 41, No. 2 (June 2008), pp. 535-543.
It is always encouraging to find research support for techniques promoted by business trainers, since all too often trainers' prescriptions and advice are not backed up by solid evidence of effectiveness.
What I have in mind at the moment is the recently published paper, "Lessons from a Faraway Land: The Effect of Spatial Distance on Creative Cognition," by Lile Jia, Edward Hirt, and Samuel Karpen (JHK), social psychologists at Indiana University.1
The experimental results JHK report indicate that, for example, the S.C.A.M.P.E.R. brainstorming technique, the subject of one of my earliest posts back in 2006, embodies a cognitive principle that has a plausible theoretical basis for which there is growing experimental confirmation.
According to the authors' abstract of their paper,
Recent research ... has identified temporal distance as a situational moderator of creativity. According to Construal Level Theory ... temporal distance is just one case of the broader construct of psychological distance.2 In the present research, we investigated the effect of another dimension of psychological distance, namely, spatial distance, on creative cognition and insight problem solving. In two studies, we demonstrate that when the creative task is portrayed as originating from a far rather than close location, participants provide more creative responses (Study 1) and perform better on a problem solving task that requires creative insight (Study 2).
The JHK research came to my attention from reading a July 21 article at ScientificAmerican.com by Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman of Tel Aviv University. In addition to describing the JHK article, Shapira and Liberman outline how inducing other types of psychological distance can boost creativity. As Shapira and Liberman explain,
... previous studies ... demonstrated that distancing in time — projecting an event into the remote future — and assuming an event to be less likely (that is, distancing on the probability dimension) can also enhance creativity. In a series of experiments that examined how temporal distance affects performance on various insight and creativity tasks, participants were first asked to imagine their lives a year later (distant future) or the next day (near future), and then to imagine working on a task on that day in the future. Participants who imagined a distant future day solved more insight problems than participants who imagined a near future day. They also performed better on visual insight tasks, which required detecting coherent images in "noisy" visual input, as well as on creative generation tasks (e.g., listing ways to improve the look of a room). Similar evidence has been found for probability. Participants were more successful at solving sample items from a visual insight task when they believed they were unlikely, as opposed to likely, to encounter the full task.
As Shapira and Liberman point out, one of the implications of the JHK research is that actually traveling a significant distance from home might promote creativity, and there is indeed evidence that this is the case.
__________ 1 "Lessons from a Faraway Land: The Effect of Spatial Distance on Creative Cognition," Lile Jia, Edward R. Hirt, and Samuel C. Karpen, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 45, No. 5 (September 2009), pp. 1127-1131.
2Shapira and Liberman explain, "anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the 'psychologically distant' category."
A few days ago I wrote about Daniel Willingham's views on learning styles (he says research demonstrates that there is no such thing), and now would like to comment on what he has to say about teaching critical thinking.
In the Summer 2007 issue of American Educator, Willingham, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia, talks about the difficulty teachers have when they try to help students strengthen their ability to think critically, by which he means "seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth."
Willingham's basic argument is that "[t]he processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thinking." Therefore, it "makes no sense to try to teach critical thinking devoid of factual content." And, in addition to acquisition of relevant knowledge, development of critical thinking requires considerable practice.
Willingham reports that experience with programs specifically designed to teach critical thinking shows that they are not very effective. Given sufficient practice, students learn how to apply critical thinking strategies to the particular areas of knowledge that the examples in the programs deal with. Outside of these areas, students are likely to know they're supposed to think critically, but not actually be able to do so because of too little specific knowledge and/or practice in different content areas.
Because of people's inability, even after considerable training, to consistently apply critical thinking in all situations where doing so is appropropriate, Willingham says that critical thinking can't really be classified as a skill. He goes on to say,
This understanding that critical thinking is not a skill is vital. It tells us that teaching students to think critically probably lies in small part in showing them new ways of thinking, and in large part in enabling them to deploy the right type of thinking at the right time.1
In Willingham's view, the need to have a knowledge base in order to do a good job of deploying critical thinking in an area like science, makes it essential to combine teaching of content with teaching of strategies for analyzing information and arguments critically. Willingnam cites a meta-analysis of forty experiments investigating methods for teaching scientific problem solving which
showed that effective approaches were those that focused on building complex, integrated knowledge bases as part of problem solving, for example by including exercises like concept mapping. Ineffective approaches focused exclusively on the strategies to be used in problem solving while ignoring the knowledge necessary for the solution.
In a sidebar at the end of the article, Willingham sums up his recommendations for teaching students to think critically:
Special critical thinking programs aren't worth it.
Instead, thinking critically should be taught in the context of subject matter. Also,"students must be given opportunities to practice — preferably in the context of normal classroom activity." This is something I heartily endorse, and I would hope that its successful implementation is picked up in tests such as the College Learning Assessment.
Critical thinking is not just for advanced students. "Virtually everyone is capable of critical thinking and uses it all the time ... The difficulty lies not in thinking critically, but in recognizing when to do so, and in knowing enough to do so successfully."
Student experiences offer entrée to complex concepts. "Although critical thinking needs to be nested in subject matter, when students don't have much subject matter knowledge, introducing a concept by drawing on student experiences can help." One example Willingham cites is illustrating the principle that "correlation does not imply causation" by discussing the high correlation between "consumption of ice cream and the number of crimes committed on a given day. With a little prodding, students soon realize that ice cream consumption doesn't cause crime, but high temperatures might cause increases in both."
To teach critical thinking strategies, make them explicit and practice them. Willingham suggests proceeding in three stages:
"The first time (or several times) the concept is introduced, explain it with at least two different examples ... [L]abel it so as to identify it as a strategy that can be applied in various contexts, and show how it applies to the course content at hand."
"In future instances, try naming the approrpriate critical thinking strategy to see if students remember it and can figure out how it applies to the material under discussion."
"With still more practice, students may see which strategy applies without a cue from you."
Although Willingham is most directly concerned with teaching in schools, his advice is a good guide for business training, as well.
__________ 1 Willingham does observe in a footnote: "... it is important to note that for people with extensive training, such as Ph.D-level scientists, critical thinking does have some skill-like characteristics. In particular, they are better able to deploy critical reasoning with a wide variety of content, even that with which they are not very familiar."
There are many versions of the concept of "learning styles." For instance, an earlier post discussed a two-dimensional model, in which the dimensions are action/reflection and feelings/facts.
Today's post focuses on a particularly popular model — the visual-auditory-kinesthetic (VAK) model — which is the focus of the video below. In the video, Daniel Willingham, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia, explains why he rejects the notion of learning styles.
The VAK model posits that some people are visual learners, some are aural learners, and others are kinesthetic learners, and, therefore, teachers should devote time and energy to making sure their approach for each student matches the student's preferred style.
As you will see from Willingham's video, he emphatically disagrees with this advice. He accepts that people differ in what types of information they learn most readily — e.g., some, due to a combination of ability and interest, are especially able to learn information presented visually, while others learn most easily information presented auditorily, etc. What Willingham rejects is the idea that teachers should present information in different ways to to different students in order to match each student's learning preference.
Instead, Willingham's advises presenting information in the way that best suits the particular information in question. As an example, he cites the objective of having studients learn where the various countries of Africa are located. This information is most clearly presented visually, i.e., by presenting a map of the continent. Regardless of whether a student learns best visually, auditorily, or kinesthetically, the best way for any student to learn where each African country is located is to work with a visual presentation of the information — a map.
An earlier post discussed the work of Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, one of the fathers of behavioral economics, a burgeoning area of research.
Behavioral economics departs from certain fundamental assumptions of neoclassical economics, notably the assumptions that
People invariably make rational decisions.
Markets are self-regulating.
In an article in the July-August 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, highlights findings from his research of particular significance for business managers.1
In his article, Ariely is looking to help managers "defend against foolishness and waste" that result from irrational behavior. He focuses on two behavior patterns that he has studied experimentally:
Cheating — People on teams tend to engage in mutually reinforced departures from ethical behavior. Managers need to counter this tendency by reminding teams of the organization's ethical requirements, a practice that has been shown to significantly reduce cheating.
Revenge — "If someone who works for you upsets a customer — even in ways unrelated to the job — you will very likely pay the price. Even the smallest transgression on the part of an employee can ignite the instinct for strong revenge against the employer, regardless of who is at fault."
Experiments show that apologizing can significantly dampen the impulse to wreak revenge (assuming the transgression is not repeated to such a degree that the customer decides the apology is insincere). Companies can also monitor sites like Twitter to pick up complaints and respond to them promptly.
Ariely recommends that organizations invest in behavioral experimentation because doing so "can radically improve decision making and lessen risk." He offers several examples, such as running a pricing test for a new product.
Ariely explains that "the goal [of such a test] is not simply to find out the optimal price but also discover how people arrive at a decision to buy at that price." He goes on to caution that a company should "consider also how the introductory price could influence the perception of value for a long time." Think iPhone pricing, which started at $600 and has since come down dramatically. __________ 1 For an extended treatment of Ariely's work, you can see his 2008 book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions.
I was happy to find advice in the July-August issue of Scientific American Mind concerning how to get your brain to forget something you've learned incorrectly, and to substitute in your memory the correct information.
Gordon Bower, a professor of psychology at Stanford, explains that what's involved is memory monitoring — the process of identifying, correcting and averting memory errors.
The key to replacing incorrect information in your memory is "consistent (even silent) correction." Bower explains that it's best to consciously "rehearse" the correct information at spaced intervals (i.e., cramming is not particularly effective).
Bower also suggests, "Building on the correct information can help you learn new associations to it: add something to change how you retrieve the item from your memory." For example:
If you're having trouble calling a man's second wife by her own name rather than by the name of his first wife, "You might replace your question 'Name of John’s wife?' with 'Name of John’s second wife?'"
To cement correct spellings of words like "weird" and "niece," you can "use an elaboration that contains the accurate information, such as 'We are weird' or 'My niece is nice."
If you're having trouble remembering that 7 x 9 is 63, not 65 or some other incorrect amount, "convert 7 x 9 into 7 x (10 – 1) = 70 – 7 = 63. As you practice the elaborated association, the simpler direct association (7 x 9 = 63) eventually replaces the earlier one, which weakens without rehearsals.
Finally, Bower cautions, "Labeling and rehearsing the wrong association (for example, saying to yourself, '7 x 9 is not 63'), ... are distinctly counterproductive."
In the May 18 issue of The New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer has an article that provides a helpful review of what researchers have learned concerning people's ability to exercise self-control. Specifically, Lehrer discusses what we are coming to know about why some people are able to delay gratification and to control their temper to a greater degree than other people.
The protagonist of Lehrer's story is Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia University. Contrary to those who view personality as an essentially fixed set of traits for any given individual, Mischel takes the view that a person's personality is expressed differently depending on the situation with which he/she is dealing. In other words, Mischel argues that "personality can't be separated from context."
Mischel's view reflects an interactionism model of personality. Lehrer quotes Mischel:
“I’ve always believed there are consistencies in a person that can be looked at,” he says. “We just have to look in the right way.” One of Mischel’s classic studies documented the aggressive behavior of children in a variety of situations at a summer camp in New Hampshire. Most psychologists assumed that aggression was a stable trait, but Mischel found that children’s responses depended on the details of the interaction. The same child might consistently lash out when teased by a peer, but readily submit to adult punishment. Another might react badly to a warning from a counsellor, but play well with his bunkmates. Aggression was best assessed in terms of what Mischel called “if-then patterns.” If a certain child was teased by a peer, then he would be aggressive.
Mischel looked particularly at what determines a person's ability to exercise self-control. He concluded that the person needed to develop a skill which he called "strategic allocation of attention." I.e., instead of obsessing about something you want, that you really should avoid, or at least wait to get, you consciously decide to direct your attention elsewhere, preferably in a productive direction.
Mischel argues that this ability to constructively distract oneself, like any skill, is something you can improve through practice. The goal is to develop good self-control strategies that become second nature. As Mischel puts it, "Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it." And you can get closer and closer to ensuring that your decisions are based on valid thinking, rather than impulsive inclinations.
For a more technical discussion of Mischel's views, you can look at a 2002 article (pdf) he co-authored with Ozlem Ayduk, a psychology professor at the University of California – Berkeley.1 Note that Mischel and Ayduk point out that an individual must not only have self-regulatory competencies, but also the motivation to exercise them. Such regulatory motivation "is the outcome of how the individual construes/encodes the situation as well as the values, beliefs, standards, goals, and emotional states that become activated by it."
Mischel and Ayduk also point out that an "excess of will can certainly be as self-defeating as its absence. Postponing gratification can be an unwise — and even stifling — joyless choice, but unless people develop the competencies to sustain delay and continue to exercise their will when they want and need to do so, the choice itself is lost."
__________ 1 "Self-Regulation in a Cognitive-Affective Personality System [CAPS]: Attentional Control in the Service of the Self," by Walter Mischel and Ozlem Ayduk, Self and Identity, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2002), pp. 113-120. ("In the CAPS model, personality is a dynamic system — an organized network of interconnected cognitions and affects that are activated in response to particular situations in stable patterns that characterize the individual.")
What experiences help people think creatively? William Maddux (INSEAD) and Adam Galinsky (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University) have recently published a paper (pdf) detailing the results they obtained when they investigated whether there is an association between living abroad and creativity.1
Maddux and Galinsky carried out five studies:
"Studies 1 and 2 provided initial demonstrations that time spent living abroad (but not time spent traveling abroad) showed a positive relationship with creativity."
Study 1 involved tackling a problem that required creative insight to solve. Participants who had lived abroad had a greater success rate than those who had not lived abroad.
Study 2 involved a mock negotiation. A successful outcome required "outside the box" thinking. Again, those participants who had lived abroad succeeded more often than those who had not.
Study 3 investigated why living abroad seemingly contributes to creativity. The study "demonstrated that priming foreign living experiences temporarily enhanced creative tendencies for participants who had previously lived abroad." [link added]
Study 3 used an experimental approach with participants, all of whom had lived abroad. The participants were assigned randomly to four groups:
One group "were asked to imagine living in a foreign country and, in particular, about the types of things that happen, how they feel and behave, and what they think during a particular day living abroad."
A second group "were asked to imagine and write about a day traveling in a foreign country."
A third group was primed "with cognitions associated with a nonforeign experience: a day in their life in their hometown."
The fourth group was a control. They were given a prime in which they "were asked to recall and write about what happened the last time they went to the supermarket."
As hypothesized, the first group had a higher success rate in solving the creativity challenge — a word game — than those in the other groups (and the remaining groups had descending rates of success, as expected). Furthermore, the "temporary facilitative effect of comtemplating experiences living abroad was strongest for those participants who had lived abroad the longest."
In Study 4, participants worked on the same creativity task as in Study 1. Maddux and Galinsky hypothesized that adaptation to a foreign culture is a key mechanism underlying the link between living abroad and creativity. The results of the study indicated that, indeed, "the degree to which individuals had adapted to different cultures while living abroad mediated the link between foreign living experience and creativity."
Study 5 was another experimental effort. The creativity task was drawing an imagined foreign alien. As in Study 3, all participants had spent time living abroad and were assigned randomly to four groups:
One group "were asked to imagine adapting themselves to a foreign culture and to write about the types of things that would happen, how they would feel and behave and what they would think about during a particular day adapting themselves to a foreign culture."
A second group "imagined and wrote about observing a foreign culture."
A third group was a control. Participants "recalled and wrote about learning a new sport." The idea was "to present a condition that was similar to adaptation in novelty but that did not involved a foreign experience."
The fourth group was also a control. They received no priming prior to drawing their imagined space alien.
As hypothesized, "priming the experience of adapting to a foreign culture temporarily enhanced creativity for participants who had previously lived abroad."
To summarize: "Across all five studies, [Maddux and Galinsky] consistently found that living (but not traveling) in and adapting to other cultures was associated with greater creativity." Note that "this effect occurred independently of a number of personality variables and other possible confounding factors (e.g., cognitive ability)." Studies 4 and 5 demonstrated the importance of adaptation in explaining the link between living abroad and creativity. "Overall, [the] results suggest that the experience of living abroad, as well as the specific attitudes and approaches individuals take during their foreign culture experiences are significant predictors of creativity."
Maddux and Galinsky "acknowledge that the current data do not demonstrate that living abroad causes permanent changes in trait-based creativity." Further research is necessary to test the longevity of the impact of living abroad on creativity. Maddux and Galinsky also note that "the current studies cannot rule out the reverse pathway: that creative people may be more likely to live abroad than noncreative people," On the other hand, Maddux and Galinsky are able to cite a number of reasons to believe that the causation indeed runs from living abroad to creativity, rather than vice versa.
As Galinsky puts it in a brief report of the research published by the Kellogg School, he and Maddux show "that there is some sort of psychological transformation that needs to occur when people are living in a foreign country in order to enhance creativity. This may happen when people work to adapt themselves to a new culture."
And Maddux comments, “This research may have something to say about the increasing impact of globalization on the world, a fact that has been hammered home by the recent financial crisis. Knowing that experiences abroad are critical for creative output makes study abroad programs and job assignments in other countries that much more important, especially for people and companies that put a premium on creativity and innovation to stay competitive.” (An earlier post on the value of studying abroad is here.)
__________ 1 William W. Maddux and Adam D. Galinsky, "Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 96, No. 5 (May 2009), pp. 1047-1061.
