Mike Lehr's Blog

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.

The two aspects of every interpersonal interaction are thoughts and feelings. You can change people’s views of your ideas by changing how they feel about you; you don’t need to change your idea. This is because emotions are more powerful influencers than cognitive tools such as reason, logic and thoughts. However, we still need cognitive tools. They serve as the diversion, distraction and excuse allowing the emotional aspects of relationship building to work. This is because emotions can create discomfort for people especially in a business setting.

The right-hand diagram expresses this by showing the direct nature of thoughts (red arrow) and the indirect one of feelings (blue arrow). While thoughts become the overt focus of the interaction, the message’s real impact arrives through the back door on a deeper level in the form of impressions. Therefore, thoughts become excuses to build relationships.

For example, when a boy carries a girl’s books home, it’s not because he likes to carry books. He wants to interact with the girl. The visible, tangible acts are carrying books and conversing. The invisible, intangible ones involve developing a emotional connection.  If he were to overtly state his romantic intentions, he’d likely scare off the girl. Carrying the books serves as the boys excuse, diversion and distraction while feelings do their subliminal work.

Even though the emotional connection we develop with employees is not the same as the one in our example, we observe excuses to foster relationships every day in business as “face time” with the boss. From the perspective of the right-hand diagram, the feelings developed in this face time are more important than the actual exchange of ideas. Thus, we should evaluate every interaction’s potential for relationship building, not just for the objective communication of ideas.

One aspect of sensitivity that I find challenging to explain to sensitive people is their natural intimidation of other people.

As we saw in Part II about the unconscious, emotions are churning outside of our unawareness. This includes emotions related to our defense mechanisms that are frequently triggered when we meet people very different from us. However, on the surface we will often just rationalize these feelings as, “I don’t like that person because . . .”

Emotions, especially intense emotions, trigger defense mechanisms because they are very unpredictable. These emotions are the source of strong passions that move us to tackle situations when the odds are against us.

Since sensitive people often have many emotions, especially intense ones, flowing through them, it can be intimidating or, at minimum, frustrating to work with them. It’s intimidating because they are likely aware of something that we aren’t. It’s frustrating because simple man-made creations like logic, numbers, rationale and reasons can’t alter the innate nature of emotions.

For sensitive people, this means working covertly with the rest of us. Sharing some of their emotions with us can be awkward, humiliating and even dangerous because often they can’t be quantified, reasoned, proven or even verbalized. Since we aren’t aware of the emotions running through all of us on an unconscious level like they are, sensitive people will find working with us similar to a sighted person working with blind folks. How do they explain what they see to us? Moreover, once we even sense they can see things we can’t, our defense mechanism kicks in.

Thus, sensitive people need to be aware of their intimidating nature and of the fact that they are talking to very blind people from a situational awareness perspective.

Other posts in this series:

• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt I): Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt II): The Unconscious
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt IV): Talent
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage

Intuitive approaches require the identification of emotional drivers in influencing and problem solving. They generally work better than cognitive approaches because emotional drivers tend to impact behaviors, thoughts and decisions far more than logic, reasons and rationales. Therefore, if we want to effectively identify these drivers, we need techniques to help us. Our word choice is one such technique.

Generally speaking we can uncover feelings by simply asking, “How do you feel about . . .” If we ask, “What do you think about . . .” we’ll tend to receive a heady response rather than a heartfelt one. The word “believe” gives us more of a middle-of-the-road response. We need the mid-range approach because some people do not like to be asked how they feel about things. I once asked a woman how she felt about something, and she replied, “I hate it when you ask that question.” Therefore, we need a mid-range approach for these folks.

Furthermore, we can incorporate these words into our discussion, not just our questions. The more we use the word “feel” the more likely our discussion will hover on an emotional plane. Conversely, the more “think” is used the more likely it will hover on a logical one. In order to avoid redundancy we can incorporate more feeling words like emotions, empathy and sympathy. Thinking words would include reasons, rationale and logic and keep the discussion on a heady level.

If you will be teaching others how to use these words, you need to be aware that some people don’t like to even use the word “feel.” If so, they will have difficulty using this technique.

The difference between cognitive and intuitive arguments can best be summarized as one between reason and belief. Just as the strength of someone’s reasons can persuade us so can the strength of his beliefs. However, this strength of belief can be used against us as well as for us. An August 19th, 2010 Economist article demonstrates this by reporting five cues bosses give when they lie, but they could apply to anyone.

They are from a study by David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and include:

• References to general knowledge (i.e. “as you know”) as opposed to specific knowledge
• Use of fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words” to describe information and situations (i.e. using more “greats” rather than “goods”)
• Avoidance of using “I” and employing more third person pronouns
• Use of fewer “hesitation words” or utterances (i.e. pauses, “um,” “er”)
• More frequent use of swear words

Along with the influence one’s strength of belief can have on us, the other important intuitive lesson we can glean from the article is that people’s patterns of speech can reflect their emotional states. For example, the emotion that is being satisfied by someone who is lying is the desire to have us believe him. Extended further we could apply the same cues to someone who intensely wants us to believe what he is telling us such as in a sales situation. His phrasing will satisfy his desire to “sell” us.

However, a better way to convey the influence strength of belief has on us is to describe it as confidence. Since people tend to have a prejudice toward those who are confident, people who wish to deceive others will tend to express themselves confidently in order to do so.

While helping a non-profit, a board member said, “We can only deal with a problem if we know there is one.” Here the state knowledge assumes alters our perspective. In this case, it causes us to ignore the idea of prevention, dealing with problems before they arise. In reality, problems don’t care whether we know or prove they exist. Thus, if knowledge’s form can alter our perspective and prevent us from seeing potential solutions, it is important to have a grasp on the different states of knowledge.

To that end, I’ve created the map to the right. It has five basic states: Unknown, Aware, Know, Prove and Quantify. Each is a subset of the previous one:

Knowledge Map

• Unknown: Not knowing what we don’t know
• Aware: Knowing what we don’t know, or not being able to express what we do know
• Know: Knowing without proof but being able to express what we know
• Prove: Using approaches that adhere closely to the scientific method or the one used in courts of law.
• Quantify: Being able to count, calculate or formulate.

By looking at knowledge’s states in this manner, we see how much reality we exclude if we only accept what is quantifiable and provable. Imagine in warfare or the game of poker if we took no action unless we could prove it was the right one. Business is not immune to this. Therefore, success is more determined by how we treat what we don’t know or barely know and not by how we treat what we can prove and quantify. Thus, if we lived by the advice of the board member above, we would surely fail without a great amount of fortune.

The important practical implication of intuition and emotions in decision making is this: if we don’t grasp the underlying emotions and how intuition is driving a decision, then we really don’t understand the decision. That means we expose ourselves unnecessarily to error.

Said another way, no matter how logical or reasonable a decision might seem its tap root is still emotional. Any appearance of logic or reason is purely cosmetic. Looked upon another way, the rationale becomes the “excuse” justifying a basically emotional decision.

This even extends to the scientific method and statistical analysis. You don’t need either to arrive at a good decision. They are rationales allowing the expression of certain emotions, many rooted in the need to feel secure about a decision. Therefore, a person’s intuition will encourage the selection of science and statistics to satisfy security needs.

In everyday life, we will tend to observe the implications of intuition and emotions in decision making when we present a rationale that trumps the one being presented and the decision does not change. We will also tend to observe extremely contorted rationales simply to justify a decision. This is the origination of the derisive expression, “You’re just rationalizing your decision.”

As an example, take a sales situation. If we base our sales presentation on what appears to be the inherent logic of that person’s objections rather than the intuition and emotions driving them, we failure is quite possible: we address the logic but gain no decision to move forward. In the end, we might even conclude that the person is simply being unreasonable. However, we are projecting; it’s unreasonable to expect reason to prevail in decision-making rooted in emotions.

Cognition is the refining of knowledge and the justifying of decisions through rationales. Rationales are thoughts linked by such techniques as reason and logic. They impact how we view things, both tangible and intangible. Cognition gives us a way to express ourselves, to express our desires, wants and needs.

Cognition is a process occurring primarily on a conscious level. “Refining” and “justifying” indicate that process. Since the formulation of thoughts occurs primarily in our conscious, cognition gives form to what our intuition creates. This form allows us to change our world in accordance with our desires, wants and needs.

Cognition is the refiner of virtually every decision we make, because almost everything we think, do or say needs some sort of refinement to give it focus and specificity before it can effectively impact our world. In this way, cognition crystallizes into a goal, objective or some other tangible form the direction that our intuition gives us. It’s similar to the way an agenda, a score or a script gives form to a meeting, a song or a play in accordance with the tone we want for them.

As an example of what cognition is, consider a message that seeks to influence people. It will contain a rationale using reason and logic to demonstrate the positive benefits of adopting the message. However, if the rationale is not understandable it will appear as unreasonable, illogical, incomplete or indecipherable. As a result, the message will have difficulty influencing people. Witness what happens to a computer when the coding does not follow the language or logic of a certain protocol. The same thing happens with people when confronted by rationales they do not understand. That is cognition at work.