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Thank you, sir!

The human mind is filled with and run by cognitive biases. We are players in the game of life without even understanding its rules. We think we are in complete control though our own thinking is below our own awareness. Let me ask you a question.

You are in an electronics store. You see a calculator for Rs.300. The shop executive says their nearby branch is offering the same at Rs. 200. Will you buy there or go to the other store to save Rs. 100?

In experiments, a majority said they will go to the other store to save Rs. 100.

You are in a store to buy TV. It costs Rs. 39,800. The shop executive says their nearby branch is offering the same at Rs. 39,700. Will you buy there or go to the other store to save Rs. 100?

Majority, in experiments, said they would buy it in the first store itself.

The amount you save in both the cases are the same. Yet, the human mind acts differently in both cases. Thanks to the cache of cognitive biases that afflicts us. Here is one more…

You are in a theatre and realize you have lost some money. Will you still buy a ticket and watch the film?

In research, many said they will.

You are in a theatre and you realize you lost the ticket. Will you buy another ticket or go home?

Many said they would go home!

Dr. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli-American psychologists, exposed such hard-wired mental biases in people’s economic behaviour. They proved human beings, left to themselves, are apt to engage in methodical fallacies and systematic errors.

Thanks to his work, Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002, ‘for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgement and decision-making under uncertainty’.

While many have won, Daniel Kahneman was the first psychologist to win the coveted prize in economics! He and Tversky helped establish the field of Behavioural Economics which applies psychological insights to the study of economic decision-making.

Dr. Kahneman spent a great deal of his career with fellow psychologist and friend, Amos Tversky. He always felt Tversky deserved more credit than he did. They even tossed a coin to find out whose names should appear first in their research work. Tversky would have shared the Nobel prize with Kahneman if only he had not died in 1996. Nobel is never awarded posthumously.

Dr. Daniel Kahneman, the man who made us realize the folly of the human mind and its cognitive conundrums, passed away yesterday. To go meet his long-lost friend, Amos Tversky!

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The Power Pose

Not all of us are born Alpha Male – strong, confident, assertive and dominant member of a social group. Alpha is a leader, motivator and an inspiration to those around him while maintaining a sense of power over others!

Ok, we are not born Alpha. But can we become one? Or at least fake it?

You can, claims social psychologist Amy Cuddy. In one of the most celebrated TED talks, she said when people assume an open or expansive stance – make themselves appear taller and wider – they subsequently feel more powerful.

Her research found that after adopting an expansive pose, participants felt more powerful, took more risk in a gambling task and performed better in interviews than those who had adopted contracted poses.

She calls it Power Posing. A technique that suggests how you hold your body influences how you feel and how you behave. While many claimed power-posing as a pseudoscience, new research has confirmed the effects are real.

A meta-analysis, a statistical summary of 73 such studies, found robust effects for changes in both behaviour and mood. The researchers concluded that the way we approach the world with our physical bodies shapes the way we think and feel.

Cuddy advises everyone should spend at least two minutes power posing. She urges us to adopt stances associated with confidence, power and achievement like having our chest lifted, holding our heads high, lifting our arms up or propping them on the hips.

Cuddy shows that simply holding one’s body in expansive ‘high-power- poses for as little as two minute stimulates higher levels of testosterone – the hormone linked to power and dominance and lower levels of cortisol – the stress hormone that can cause impaired immune functioning, hypertension and memory loss. Thus, power posing leads to increased feelings of power and a greater tolerance for risk.

Is power posing only for males?

Nope. Cuddy’s research found that it works for both sexes – equally. In fact, the most well-known high-power pose is called the ‘The Wonder Woman’ pose. You simply stand tall with your chest out and your hands on your hips.

Our behaviours and emotions are inextricably tied together. Alpha males and females don’t just think in a certain way. They carry themselves in a certain way too.

Try it or like the Yankees say, fake it till you make it!

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The Burning Platform

You are a superintendent on an oil-drilling platform in the North sea, off the coast of Scotland. At midnight, you are woken up by an explosion. The whole rig is on fire. You run to the edge of the platform. You realize you are 150 feet up. Below are icy waters. Behind you is a rig ravaged by fire.

You are in a dilemma. If you don’t jump, you will be burnt alive. If you jump, you have to survive the fall first. If you survive the jump, you may have twenty minutes before you freeze to death. You are not sure if there is a rescue ship in the vicinity.

Amidst all the alarms, screams and fire, you don’t have time to think and make a decision. What will you do?


In July 1988, Andy Mochan had to make that decision on a burning rig. He jumped!

He was one of the lucky 63 crew members who were rescued. 163 of the crew and 2 rescuers died.

Later in the hospital he was asked why he took that potentially fatal leap into the icy waters. He said, ‘It was either jump or fry’. He chose possible death over certain death!
 
Normally, one wouldn’t do it. But it wasn’t normal time. It was fire or freeze. A burning platform had caused a radical change in his behaviour!

Since then, the term ‘Burning Platform’ burnt itself into the annals of management literature. Only when we are confronted by the dire consequences of not changing do we embrace change.

Burning Platform is certainly motivating but it leaves you with little time to explore alternative choices. You only end up rolling the dice and taking your chances!

Whoever you are or whatever you do, look out for Burning Platforms in life and in business that may need your urgent and courageous attention and action. Figure out the negative consequences of not changing. And jump!

It makes more sense to anticipate a crisis and change your behaviour well before the explosion. If you wait for a Burning Platform, you may be lucky like Andy Mochan.

But then, you may be one of the other 163 who stayed on the rig and found out it was too late!

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Why we remember to forget!

Daniel Wegner, psychology professor at Harvard and the founding father of Thought Suppression Research, asked a group of people to continuously describe their thoughts for five minutes, while thinking of a white polar bear. Every time they thought of a polar bear, they were asked to ring a bell.

Wegner then asked a second set of people to specifically not think of a polar bear for the next five minutes. Yet if they thought of it, they were asked to ring a bell.

The second group rang the bell more than the first group did. It’s painfully clear from this research that the mind keeps remembering the very thing it is asked to forget!

Next, Wegner asked the second group to think of the polar bear this time and asked them to ring the bell if they did.

This time the group rang the bell even more than the first group who had been specifically asked to think of the polar bear right from the beginning.

By this Wegner was able to prove that not thinking of something, ironically, made it only more likely that one couldn’t get it out of their mind!

While one part of the brain is obediently shutting out a certain thought, another part of the brain is trying to check in periodically to make sure the thought was being shut out. In the process, we are reminded of the same thing.

Have you noticed how you get irritated humming a certain song the whole day and decide not to, yet keep doing the same thing all day? Now you know why! Drunkards complain that they say ‘No’ to drinks yet the bottle never listens to them. That’s coz one part of the brain keeps checking the other part to see if it’s staying sober.

That is enough for the other part of the brain to be reminded and it screams, ‘Machi, open the bottle’!

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Limited data. Unlimited assumptions.

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Now that you have read about Linda, which one of the following two scenarios is more likely to be true:

Scenario One: Linda is a bank teller.

Scenario Two: Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

I bet you picked Scenario 2. If you did, pat your back. You are in the top 80% worldwide who picked the same.

Now, slap your head. You may be grossly wrong!

The chance of Linda being a teller, among millions of things she could be, is in itself highly unlikely. The second scenario is highly, extremely, incredibly even more so.

Let’s say the probability of Linda being a bank teller is as low as 0.05. Even if we presume the probability of her being a feminist is as high as 0.95, the probability of her being both a bank teller and a feminist is: 0.05 x 0.95 = 0.0475. This is lower than her simply being a bank teller. Yet, you picked a highly improbable scenario 2 over a fairly reasonable scenario 1.

Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman who posed this question and posited this theory named it the Conjunction Fallacy. The probability of two events occurring in conjunction is always less than or equal to the probability of either one occurring alone.

Logically speaking, we should not pick option 2. Yet we do coz we correlate it with what Linda did in college. Put simply, we join the dots that don’t necessarily exist!

We make irrational assumptions based on limited data and jump to conclusions without understanding the information laid before us. Want to try another one?

Of the following two scenarios, which one is more likely to happen:

Scenario 1: You will have a flat tire tomorrow morning.

Scenario 2: You will have a flat tire tomorrow and a cute girl in a Scooty will stop to help you.

I know what you picked. Sorry, that’s not going to happen!

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