Emotional Resilience: with emotion

One of the areas I have been focussing on both in terms of work and research (there is another book on the way) is emotional resilience (we run The Fear Course in many UK universities). One of the most common misperception about emotional resilience is that it means people are able to do things like make decisions, deal with situations without emotion.

Cutting off from your emotions is not a useful trait, in fact it can cause many problems especially in leadership and management situations. Our perception of situations is as much the ability to be able to feel a situation as well as think about it. Our emotions and thinking operate together to give us a fuller sense of a situation and importantly for managers and leaders operate with empathy as well as ethically and morally in any situation.

Additionally an individual without emotion would have a sever problem with logic or reason. Reasoning requires a level of understanding of emotions.

More on this soon.

Action Bias in Decision Making & Problem Solving

The blogs have been a little sporadic in the last few weeks as I have been in the Middle East running workshops for a series of universities and agencies on how to develop critical and creative thinking, as well as higher levels of problem solving, decision making, greater levels of autonomy and leadership capabilities in students and employees.

Anyway...

Another factor that alters decisions to make a decision (!) ( or what it is that triggers us to make a decision) and contributes to the decisions we make is a phenomena called action bias. Simply put this means that just about everyone, when faced with ambiguous situations, especially those circumstances associated with risk, gets the feeling that they need to take some action regardless of whether this is a good idea or not. This frequently contributes to misjudgments about when to act (usually too soon or in the wrong direction) and misperceptions of the nature of the problem facing them, which means that people not only make decision too soon but they could often, almost always have easily made a better decision if they had an awareness of the unconscious psychological drivers we have to make decisions.

Simply put action bias states that when faced with uncertainty or a problem, particularly an ambiguous problem we prefer to do something, in fact we are happier doing anything, even if it counterproductive, rather than doing nothing, even if doing nothing is the best course of action. Action bias was noticed by Bar Eli et al (2007) in a study of goal keepers behaviour in soccer games when faced with trying to save a penalty. When they analysed where most penalty kickers place the ball on taking the penalty they found that just over 1/3 of the time they shoot for the middle and the remaining times, just under two thirds they aim for either the left or right corner. And yet when faced with the decision of what to do almost all goal keepers prefer to leap either to the left or the right rather than standing in the middle, where on average they are marginally more likely to save more goals. The thinking behind such a decision is that it looks and feels better to have missed the ball by diving (action) in the wrong direction than to have the ignominy of watching the ball go sailing past and never to have moved. Action bias is usually an emotional reaction based on the feeling that ‘I have to do something’ even if I don’t know what to do.

The same often applies in many other situations. In a study of police officers dealing with minor disorder outside of night clubs in the UK for example, it was noticed that when some (a minority of more mature and often more experienced) officers were present at the scene they were much more likely to be tolerant of minor disorder and hang back and not act. Preferring instead to keep an ‘eye on the situation’ when they considered the behaviour was ‘horse play’ and without consequence to other members of the public. When other, usually less experienced (the majority),police officers witnessed such behaviour they were much more likely to act, engaging with the ‘offenders’ at an early stage of the situations. The result was that where police officers didn’t act, there were fewer arrests, fewer injuries and the situations usually defused itself without intervention. However when officers did intervene early the situations were far more likely to escalate and more people were likely to be sucked into the situation. When the police took action more of a crowd of onlookers usually developed with the result that some of them got drawn into the situation. The police officers who did act early almost all reported that they felt compelled to ‘do something’ and that ‘sitting around doing nothing isn’t an option’.

Action bias frequently draws us into ‘doing something’ when hanging back, observing and exploring the situation for a while is often the best action to take. As you can see action bias can make easily situations worse and is the foundation of a lot of poor decision making in companies and organisations around the world. This is linked to both the illusion of control phenomena and regression fallacy which were the subject of the last two blogs.

It is also worthwhile noting that action bias leads us to jump into developing solutions before we have the problem fully articulated (solutionizing). A subject that has been the focus of previous blogs.

Also there are one or two places left on the March 4th workshop.

Michael Bar-Eli, Ofer H. Azar, Ilana Ritov, Yael Keidar-Levin and Galit Schein (2007) Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers: The case of penalty kicks. Journal of Economic Psychology Volume 28, Issue 5, October 2007, Pages 606-621

Illusion of Control

Last week at the Medical Sciences Division (Oxford University) one of the subjects we explored follows on nicely from the last blog, illusions of control. In 1995 Langer wrote a paper in which he showed that many people tend to believe that they can control and change events that are in fact beyond their control. Even during truly random events like the lottery, rolling dice etc. people often believe that they have the skills and attributes to change or influence the events. Such a belief is not confined to individuals. Teams also fall foul of this decision making bias, which because others are involved in the bias, usually removes all doubt of the entire group that they can in fact influence events that when examined somewhat more objectively are beyond the control of the individuals and teams concerned.

The question, as I frequently ask lecture and workshop participants, is; So What?

When you think about the decisions governments, boards and committees make for example, you don’t need to go too far to see the effect of ‘illusion of control’ playing out. That some policy or other actions can do things like reduce crime, increase educational attainment, solve market related issues and so on. This does not mean that I am not a believer in action, only that many actions we take and assume have solved whatever the problem is, have not in themselves been the solution. It has often rather been some other effect like regression fallacy etc.

There are a couple of interesting things here worth mentioning:

The first is that the cognitive bias we develop called the ‘illusion of control’ is frequently a response to ambiguity. Disambiguating something beyond our control appears to help emotionally. Ok it doesn’t lead to good decisions but we feel a whole lot better. A nice example of this is the difference between being passenger on a plane and the varying degrees of ill-ease felt say compared to the pilots who have a sense of control. A smaller effect can be felt often driving your own car or being a passenger in someone else’s. Yesterday I flew to Riyadh (where I am now) and was asleep when the plane hit a patch of really bad turbulence. I found myself sitting up and becoming alert, just in case. In case of what??? I found myself reasoning that we were 37,000 feet up flying at 550 MPH. If anything went wrong what was I going to do about it? Sod all really apart from probably scream and even then for what purpose? It just felt better to be alert and have the illusion of control even though in reality I had zero control over the situation. I was just trying to disambiguate the situation and (this is an important point) feel better – the emotional connection again. Once I realised what I was doing I relaxed, gave myself up to the uncertainty of the situation, stopped disambiguating and fell asleep!

The second is something called activity bias. More of which next blog. Oh and we will cover the recency effect as well!

Leadership when people are scared II

We have covered some of the physiological effects of being scared. These in turn create change in the heart and the mind. The heart sends signals to the brain affecting the way it operates. We get to a situation where we can't think straight and we soon have the sensation of this. Thought becomes difficult, in fact all we can often to is concentrate of the feelings, which makes the situation worse. Basically our cognitions become flooded and overwhelmed. There is a very good reason for this. Danger produces a fight or flight response, which is fine when there is an immediate physical danger present that we either need to get away from or confront quickly and overpower. However as our lives are a tad more complex than when these responses were required our system doesn't have a way of easily distinguishing between fear from immediate physical danger and the danger of loosing our jobs, or the perceived danger of new and uncertain situations. Our minds and bodies therefore react the way they were programmed; for the more binary threats that existed when the programming was set.
Anyway the issue is that because many people react to uncertainty in this way the important point here is that in this state people are in an emotional space not a cognitive one, so simply resorting to 'reason' and 'logic' is unlikely to work at least in the first instance. Next some smart (and not so smart) things you can do as a leader of scared people

Emotional Intelligence / knowledge 1.

"Emotional Intelligence" is a much used and abused term. The concept of an emotional intelligence was first raised by the researcher John Mayer who together with Dr. Peter Salovey developed the idea of EI and later emotional knowledge - a metacognition of a representation of the emotions.

Outside of the current debate about the measurement of emotional intelligence, a useful definition for emotional intelligence is:

An ability, capacity, or skill to perceive, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups.

This is worth thinking about in the context of leadership, problems solving and ambiguity. Defining EI as an ability, capacity or skill suggests that ones EI can be raised or developed. Mayer talks much about this and one of the central arguments about EI is whether it is a fixed attribute or whether it can be developed. Notwithstanding this, my argument here is that the ability to perceive or recognise our emotions can be developed (or raised) as can the ability to control and manage those emotions.
Further, that if emotions can affect our behaviours, interpretations and thinking then those behaviours, interpretations and thoughts are more likely to be historically based reactions rather than contextually sound actions based on some form of logic. For example a person who is frightened or in some other emotional state is more likely to react differently to a situation than if they were in a more stable, emotionally neutral state where they could apply a logic not contaminated by emotion. The idea is that emotionally intelligent people can identify what emotional state they are in at any time and understand the affect this is having on their perceptions of the situation, their behaviours and their cognitions. People who are not as emotionally intelligent are more likely to be at the mercy of their emotions in that they will colour and change their perceptions of reality, their behaviour and the way they think and think about their thinking and emotions without being aware of this.

We all probably know leaders like this.

In my next post I will explore the affect of this on how leaders deal with ambiguity.

Oh yes what is the picture all about? The Amygdala at the centre of the brain are almond-shaped groups of neurons located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans. Shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions. More about this later.