Mike Lehr's Blog

Part of what makes intuition so powerful is the assumption that we are born with personalities, talents and knowledge. Life then becomes the challenge to express them.

For example, we are born knowing about the “opposite sex.” It’s only later in life we arrive at an understanding of it and the ability to verbalize it. However, this contradicts the more popularized view of humans being born a “blank slate.” The article, “Transporter of Delight”, in the October 15, 2011 edition of The Economist, severely undercuts this notion by beginning:

“The idea that the human personality is a blank slate, to be written upon only by experience, prevailed for most of the second half of the 20th century. Over the past two decades, however, that notion has been undermined.”

The article cites research concluding, “personality is the single biggest determinant” of happiness with “a third of the variation in people’s happiness [being] heritable.” For example, extroverts tend to feel happier than introverts do. Thus, what I wrote regarding free will (more) and “who we are” being quite different from “who we think we are” is really about us being substantially more than “the sum of our experiences” and more than “a product of our environment.” There are opportunities for us when we realize we weren’t born slaves to our conditions, environments, societies and cultures.

Yet, this poses some thought provoking questions such as, “What happens to us when our nature is in conflict with our culture, our society or our upbringing?” Also, “What happens when we try to express ourselves in the midst of such conflict?” In such situations, we can easily see how God or Nature created us to alter the status quo, to change things . . . to encourage growth where stagnation exists. Growth cannot occur without change.

As I had mentioned in The Rise of Intuition, the biggest advancement we’ll see in the next five to fifteen years will not be in biotechnology, cloud computing, medical treatments, alternative energy, personal computing devices or any other tangible technology. It will be in understanding ourselves as human beings.

Technology and new research methodologies are fueling this revolution. In these previous posts, I highlighted what these methodologies are showing about what influences us:

• Eloquence Trumps Honesty in Trust & Likeability Wars
• Information You Know Is Wrong Still Influences You
• Rude More Powerful than Respectful

Now, in the October 29, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article, “Mind-goggling,” tells of four different technologies capable of reading our minds:

• Bin He of University of Minnesota (more)
• Martin Dressler of Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich (more)
• Jack Gallant of University of California, Berkeley (more)
• Francisco Pereira of Princeton University (more)

While the readings are crude today, work is rapidly progressing. Remember the medical tricorder Doctor McCoy used in Star Trek to scan bodies? Even as fantastic as that was, Spock still had to read minds via a mind meld. Now, imagine if McCoy had a brain tricorder capable of reading thoughts.

These technological advances are going to revolutionize our understanding of how we work. Early returns show an increasing amount of complex brain activity occurring on a subconscious level beyond the classical reflexive functions. This will directly challenge our concept of free will (more) as I have written earlier.

Amazingly, this revolution is silently flying under our radars and continuously fails to garner the hype of the other advancements I mentioned. Of course, this may be fitting since the revolution will likely uncover many thoughts and emotions that live outside of our consciousness.

When I’ve written about the illusion of free will, I’ve focused on the advancement of technology and research methodologies to uncover subconscious thought patterns. However, these advancements are also discovering a connection between chemical reactions and some of our emotions.

In the September 24, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article, “Rogue Hormones,” reports on the research of John Coates, a  neuroscientist from Cambridge University. His research of derivative traders showed that when they “are on a winning streak their testosterone levels surge, sparking such euphoria that they underestimate risk.” This biochemical process produces extremely “powerful emotions” encouraging traders to “go crazy.”

This helps to explain why we often learn more from our failures than our successes and why success can deliver us to a state of hubris, an exalted arrogance that can corrupt our decision-making processes. Such biochemical processes help explain why such exuberance can infect many people to think and act similarly without communicating with each other while each is believing he is responding of his own free will. Thus, such events as financial bubbles and housing bubbles can occur on a broad scale.

A way to mitigate this effect is to diversify your workforce to include many types of personalities in decision-making positions. For instance, the article concluded that hiring women, who generally have about 10% as much testosterone as men, could help offset “irrational exuberance.” Experience can also help especially if it contains crises brought about by excessive risk taking. Moreover, even from strictly a gender perspective, not all men will experience the same increases in testosterone levels from success making them prone to erroneous risk assessments.

Of course, it’s not easy to manage a diverse workforce.

I decided to revisit the illusion of free will after running across two other articles reinforcing it. As technology and research methodologies advance, we are finding more and more that biological and psychological factors heavily influence us without our knowledge, further eroding the rational actor theory. This theory forms the basis of many decision-making models in business; however, it’s turning out we cannot expect people to behave rationally.

The article by David Eagleman, “The Brain on Trial,” appearing in the July/August 2011 of The Atlantic, discusses recent brain and genetic research. Whether you believe nature or nurture is the more impactive force in our development, the point is this: we control neither. If free will really existed, we wouldn’t need drugs to cure depression because threats would work. As Eagleman also indicates, free will has tremendous difficulty overcoming what our subconscious has already decided to do. We cannot divorce behavior from biology or the unconscious. At minimum, free will operates in an increasingly smaller field of play.

We are also learning that genes don’t just change at an evolutionary rate but at a generational one too. In the July 23, 2011 of The Economist, the article, Baby Blues, mentions, “a mother’s stress while she is pregnant can have a long-lasting effect on her children’s genes.”
Biology and genes form an integral part of our personalities. As I mentioned in my previous post, if we look at personalities as being analogous to software in computers, we can see where knowing the personality can help us predict behaviors in much the same way as knowing the software can help us predict what a computer will do.

What this means is that our decisions need to factor in a reality where people don’t behave rationally because they aren’t free to do so.

Related link: Illusion of Free Will

When we approach problems too logically and reasonably, we tend to place too much faith in the dominance of consciousness and to discount subjective influences that vary by person. For example, the Innocence Project, by using DNA evidence, has helped to exonerate 271 people wrongly convicted of crimes, but almost a quarter of these people had confessed or pleaded guilty. Why would people give false confessions?

What research shows is that we can easily extract false confessions from others especially when using certain interrogation techniques. The article, “Silence is Golden”, in the August 13, 2011 issue of The Economist mentions two such research projects. The journal, Law and Human Behavior, published one by Saul Kassin and Jennifer Perillo of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York while the other is the work of Robert Horselenberg and colleagues at Maastricht University.

Since we tend to believe in free will and the dominance of consciousness, we consider confessions fairly damning because no one in her “right mind” would give false ones. Therefore, interrogations assume false confessions aren’t possible. Yet, people give them for many reasons including:

• Avoiding unpleasant interrogations
• Accepting that they might have accidentally committed a wrong
• Believing that
  -   Investigative process will show innocence
  -   Authorities and experts know better
  -   Objective truth and justice exist and will surface
  -   Technologically collected evidence is faultless

Many times our business processes assume people behave with a “right mind.” Yet, as this example shows, by questioning this assumption in our processes, interrogations in this case, we automatically call into question the outcomes derived from those processes, here confessions.

Thus, our processes need to account for more subjective, subconscious and intuitive factors or risk disconnection from reality and erroneous analyses.

Intuitive approaches often work because we don’t believe they do. Advertising is an excellent example: it influences us because we often believe it doesn’t.

This extends to our complaints about politicians not answering the question. Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton researched this and were asked to “Defend Your Research” in “People Often Trust Eloquence More Than Honesty” appearing in the November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review. They found:

People who dodge questions artfully are liked and trusted more than people who respond to questions truthfully but with less polish.

In fact, when answerers perform the dodge effectively, less than half of the people could remember the question accurately. The key rests in the answer’s first ten words by disrupting the cognitive link we have for the question and expected answer. In everyday life, we like to complain about the fast-talking salesperson; however, on a higher level, fast-talking becomes eloquence. It’s here that we increasingly trust and like eloquence more than honesty.

Even though I promote the practical understanding and application of intuition in business on this blog, people can use intuitive approaches for ill or good. For instance, my guest 12 Most post, lists ways to influence people intuitively to build morale; however, people can use these techniques for questionable purposes too.

How do we defend ourselves? There are two broad introductory ways:

1. Realize people can influence us intuitively and subconsciously even if we believe they can’t
2. Raise our awareness regarding intuitive approaches

In this way, we can begin accounting for these natural biases in our decision-making and actions. However, believing others can influence us without our knowledge is scary for many of us, especially if we believe in the supremacy of the conscious mind and free will.

The notion of free will is a byproduct of our conscious, more specifically our ego. It treats emotions as a nuisance which it should control and the unconscious a fantasy which it should  ignore. Yet, these two are fundamental determinants of our personalities which make our choices quite predictable.

In the January 17, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, David Brooks writes in “Social Animal” that “A core finding of this work [cited in the article] is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking.” In other words, we just think we are making choices.

Some people use choice as proof of free will; if we have a choice, we have free will. However, we program computers to make choices all the time. Under one set of criteria, they choose “A,” while under another it’s “B.” They can even make random choices: choosing “A” 65% of the time and “B” 35%. But, do they have free will?

Yes, they are just following coded programs, but we could be following our own program. It’s called personality and is heavily influenced by genetic code. When we understand a computer’s code, we can predict its choices. If it’s too complex, we won’t. The same is true for personality. If we understand it, we can make predictions about a person’s choices. If we don’t, we can’t.

David Brooks describes everyday events that appear choice-filled but are quite predictable. The key is to remember that we are observing a people who 1) believe they have free will and 2) don’t believe they’ve been programmed with a personality.

Related link: Illusion of Free Will Revisited