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  • Practical Priming

    I recently described the concept of priming, along with some research that has been done to demonstrate this effect.  This article follows directly from that one, so if I mention something that I ‘discussed earlier’, it’s in there. The priming studies are all very interesting, but the question now becomes, how are we going to use priming to our advantage?  Here are some suggestions.

    1) Figure out what you want to be primed for (duh)

    Priming activates certain traits and behaviours, which are usually associated with a certain stereotype. For this reason, this isn’t an exercise you can do without direction, like meditation for instance. With meditation, you just do it, then various benefits come. With priming, you need to know what benefit you want first, and then work out how to prime yourself for it.

    2) Out with the old

    The next step should be awareness of what we are currently being primed for.  In your mind, go over the locations you frequent, try to work out what what stereotypes are associated with the things you perceive.  What traits belong to these stereotypes?

    If you identify something that might prime you for a behaviour you don’t want, try remove that thing for week or so, and see what happens (please use your head when doing this; don’t throw your dog out because you think it will prime you to pee on lamp posts).

    What do you regularly read, and what is that priming you for?  What about the TV shows you watch (including the adverts). One other piece of advice is to stop reading newspapers! Apart from the sports section, that is. Given what you now know about priming, read the next newspaper you buy with a careful eye. Notice:

    • What you’re being primed for
    • Whether any of the information is really worth knowing.
    • What purpose headlines like “Terror” “Stabbing” “Crime” and “Recession” serve.

    3) In with the new

    The third step is to work out what you can add to your environment to prime the goal or behaviour you want. Many self-help authors recommend putting your goals and targets up on the wall, in written form.  For example, Steve Pavlina and his Belief Board. We saw in the last article that exposure to written words can prime behaviours associated with those words, and also that the longer the longer the exposure to a prime, the bigger the effect; so this technique should work well.  The only problem I can think of, is that we tend to get a bit blind to things after a while, so maybe move them around, change the colours, or reword them fairly regularly.

    Schwarzenegger, Zane, Draper, Gold's Gym

    The basic premise is to douse your environment with words, images, and anything else you can think of that relate to the target you’re aiming for.

    If you’re planning to bulk up, then maybe put pictures of gym equipment and Arnold Schwarzenegger around your house. If you’re a student, words and pictures related to professors and intellectuals.

    It’s probably best to put some time aside and really think about what primes would work for you, and come up with many of them. Remember the immersion study by Ellen Langer, which made the elderly men younger? This was a full immersion into life 20 years earlier. The carpet, appliances, everything. And this study had a great effect on the participants. It seems like the more primes, the better.

    4) Other activities

    In Langer’s experiment, it wasn’t just the environment that was manipulated, it was the behaviour of the participants. How they acted, how they spoke, what they spoke about; everything was done in the present tense, as though it was 1959. This might well have played a part too – we know that changing self-talk can influence behaviour and emotions, so it’s not such a large stretch of the imagination that this would work as a prime too.

    So self-talk in the present tense about the goal you want to reach (ie, how you would self-talk as if it were already reached) is worth trying, as is changing your actions to be in line with the goal, though there will be obvious limitations to how and where you can do this.

    What about the writing exercise from the professors/hooligans study? People spent 5 minutes listing the behaviours, lifestyle and appearance of professors and hooligans, which made the better and worse at general knowledge tests, respectively.  In another study. people were asked to write about themselves as they would like to be, which had the result of making them happier. (1)  This seems like another exercise worth doing, then, especially when done right before a task related to your goal (eg writing about professors before an exam, writing about an Olympic sprinter before a race.   What stereotype is most conducive to the goal you are aiming for, or the task ahead of you?

    Remember that the more time people spent on this task, the stronger the effect.

    I should also mention visualisation.  There’s potentially a cross-over between this line of research and the popular self-help technique, the “Law of Attraction” (eg., The Secret).  Could mentally visualising a certain goal serve to prime us to adopt behaviours favourable to that goal?  I’m currently working on a separate article on the evidence behind visualisation, but for now, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d say yes; it’s definitely worth a try.

    Some things to keep in mind

    The experiments measured the effect of the primes directly after the participants were primed. I can’t imagine people who had been primed with ‘elderly’ stereotypes walking slowly all day and all night after that point: so maybe the best time to apply a prime is right before a specific task.  I always find I work harder if I spend 30-60 minutes reading Atlas Shrugged, a book where the main characters love their work and do it all day long.

    A limitation here is that we can’t really generalise beyond what the research actually says.  There’s evidence you can become younger, ruder, smarter, more physically persistent, and so on, but we can’t just take these findings and generalise them to any particular goal.  The things people did as a result of their primes were all things they had done before; knowledge structures they already possessed becoming active. However, I do think it’s worth trying these techniques on just about any goal.

    A final point to make is that the effect of priming might be cumulative.  As we discovered earlier with the basketball video, priming reduces our input.  Therefore the range of things we can potentially be primed by is reduced also.  It is possible that you could get into an upward or downward spiral, by receiving a prime and then being more likely to be primed by something similar again in the future.

    So perhaps a key to positive priming is regular and consistent priming, until you reach such a critical mass as the majority of the primes you receive on a daily basis are conducive to your goals.  This is just a guess though; don’t quote me on it.

    To conclude, I hesitate to say you “will” get a certain response from the priming.  All I can say for sure is what the evidence has shown.  But I think there’s enough evidence to recommend the use of this technique, at the very least, just as a personal experiment.

    References

    (1) Lyubomirsky, S., Sousa, L., & Dickerhoof, R. (2006). The costs and benefits of writing, talking and thinking about life’s triumphs and defeats. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(4), 692-708.

    Gold’s Gym image credit: d_vdm

  • Positive Priming

    Practically nothing you can measure about a person is completely fixed.  Some days you don’t concentrate as well, some days your more sociable, some days you have more energy.  Even your height varies subtly throughout the day.  If we’re interested in positive psychology and self-improvement, a constructive line of inquiry would be working out what causes these variations, and seeing if we can manipulate that cause to give us more of a particular behaviour, emotion, or whatever.

    One of these causes is ‘Priming’.  Priming is a phenomenon where being exposed to a certain stimuli makes a particular response to a second stimuli more likely to happen.  For example, smelling the freshly baked bread when you walk into a store makes you more likely to buy some bread.  That’s a simple example, but incredibly, priming also applies to motor skills, physical exertion, intellectual capacity, social graces; even our mental and biological age.  Some portion of our performance in these and many more areas is dictated by how we’ve recently been primed.

    “Affirmations are not the most effective way to prime.”

    ‘Positive Priming’, in this context, simply means to use this phenomenon to our advantage.

    This is going to be a fairly long article.  I did a lot of background reading, and doing that really helped drill the main points into my head, so I wouldn’t be giving you the same benefit if I didn’t cover the topic in depth.

    I recommend reading from the top down, rather than scanning, as the points build upon one-another as you go along.  Feel free to bookmark and return later.

    “Every day in every way….”

    Originally, this piece was going to be called “Affirmations: Self-Help Scam or Useful Technique?”.  I was researching affirmations; the common practice of saying or writing your goals regularly, which is supposed to program the goal into your subconscious.  But affirmations fall into the larger group of priming techniques, and as we’ll see, they’re not the most effective way to prime.

    A pretty blonde
    A pretty blonde

    I mentioned above some examples of how priming can effect behaviour, but it can also alter your perceptions – being primed for a certain thing seems to filter out other things – a goal reduces input.

    When you’re walking around the world, you get bombarded by stimuli from all directions. How does your mind know which ones to pay attention to, and which to ignore?  Human nature plays a role; some things are just hardwired into us.  If I walk past a pretty blonde on the high street, you can be pretty sure I won’t be looking in the shop windows.

    Sex and danger are probably the two main things we’re hardwired to look out for.  But our brain also has the function to adopt other “rules” on the fly; presumably this helped our nomadic ancestors adapt to the new and varied environments they were so fond of wandering into.

    Watch the team in white
    Watch the team in white!

    Here’s an example. In the video below, you’ll see two basketball teams, each with three members, one team wearing black, the other wearing white.  They each have a ball, and will pass it between their team mates.  All you have to do is count how times the white team pass the ball.  The black team will try to confuse you by weaving around and making passes of their own.  See how effective you are at filtering the black team out so as to only count the white team passes.  Come back when you’re done and see if you counted correctly (don’t cheat and skip ahead!).  By the way, one particular gender is better at this task than the other.  Which do you think it is?

    Video (opens in a new window)

    Did you do it?  I’ll tell you the correct answer in a moment.  You can only be successful at this task by setting up that goal in your mind, in other words, to be primed for it, and have that goal reduce the other input so you can focus on your goal.

    Filters

    A prime is like a filter, then.  It blinds you from other things that are irrelevant to your goal, and focuses you on things that are relevant.  The classic example is buying a new car of a certain colour, and then suddenly seeing that colour car everywhere.

    That’s just like your previous goal of counting the ball bounces.  Watch that video again.  This time, don’t have the goal of counting.  Just watch it.  What happens about half way through?  You’d think you would have noticed a huge gorilla walk through the middle and beat his chest, wouldn’t you?  And maybe you did – some people see it, but a substantial amount (over half) don’t.  Your prime filtered out everything that isn’t to do with counting the passes – everything that’s irrelevant to your goal.

    (Note: the comment about one gender being better was a lie to make you focus more, I must give credit to Michael Kolster for that idea)

    The Effect of Primes

    Ignoring gorillas might be a good way to make a point, but it’s a pretty useless skill, if you think about it.  If we’re going to find a practical application for this phenomenon, we need to answer two questions:

    1) How exactly do we prime someone (or ourselves?).
    2) What exactly can we do with this technique?  How far we can take it?

    In answer to question 1, a prime doesn’t have to be an elaborate stimuli.  In fact, you don’t even need to see it consciously.  Take the emotions ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, or approach and withdraw.  Most, if not all creatures seem to have these – or a system that does a similar job.  Jonathan Haidt explains that these emotions run along a scale, a “like-o-meter”.  If the like-o-meter is currently set to ‘like’, it will take a while longer to get over to the other side when something you dislike comes along.

    Imagine you’re shown a word on screen, and asked to press a button to rate it as good or bad.  Pretty easy.  “Flower”; Good.  “Play”;  Good.  “Evil”;  Bad.  No problems.  But if, just before you saw the word, the screen flashed up another one, so quickly that only your subconscious picks it up, interesting things start to happen.  If the word “Death” is flashed just before “Garden”, it takes you longer to evaluate “Garden” as good, because your like-o-meter takes a while to swing back over. (1)

    So even a very short exposure to a written word can work as a prime, but again, it’s pretty useless.  We may need stronger primes to get a stronger effect.

    They Comments Leave see Usually

    Maybe a word scrambling puzzle could provide a stronger prime – something a person has to get involved in, put effort into.  One study took participants into a room, and gave them a simple puzzle to do – put some jumbled sentences into the right order.  After they were done, they were told to fetch the experimenter, who would be waiting in the next room.  Some participants were given ‘rude’ words to unscramble, such as “they her bother see usually”, others were given ‘polite’ words like “they her respect see usually”.

    After completing the puzzles, the participants went to the next room, but found the experimenter in the hallway; apparently talking to another participant who was having trouble with the task.  In fact, he was a confederate, and the conversation was faked to see whether the rude and polite words would prime the participants to interrupt.  Over 60% of the participants primed with ‘rude’ words interrupted their conversation.  Less than 20% of people primed with polite words interrupted. (2)

    Now we’re getting to some more tangible results.  By mere exposure to a few words for about 5 minutes, we can influence how likely someone is to interrupt a conversation.

    But it gets better.

    Dumb hooligans and slow walkers

    That’s a pretty impressive result, but there have been many priming experiments, with more powerful effects.  How about intelligence?  In another study, participants sat at a a computer and spent a few minutes listing the behaviours, lifestyle and appearance of either professors, or soccer hooligans.  Afterwards, a multiple-choice general knowledge test was given.  The participants receiving the ‘professor’ prime did better than a group that had no prime, and those primed with ‘hooligan’ did worse.  Priming these stereotypes actually seemed to make people more or less intelligent.

    2518883715_79c0d14969

    Also, the strength of the effect could be altered by changing the priming time – the longer the better – people primed for 9 minutes showed a stronger effect than people primed for 2 minutes.

    The research base on priming is massive.  Here’s a rundown of just some of the other impressive findings:

    • When the participants were primed with words related to elderly stereotypes, they would walk more slowly down the hall after finishing the experiment.  (2)
    • Voters are more likely to support tax raises to support education when the polling location is a school. (3)
    • In a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, players play more aggressively if there is a briefcase in the room, and more cooperatively if there is a backpack in the room (executives compete; rock climbers cooperate). (4)
    • Visual exposure to a sports drink led to more persistence on a physically demanding task.  Not drinking the sports drink: looking at it! (5)

    It appears that by being primed for a certain stereotype, the behaviours and traits we associate with that stereotype become active in ourselves.  We start to play that role.

    At this point things are looking promising.  We can alter the results of knowledge tests, change competitive behaviours, make people rude; just by exposure to a few words in a lab.  Can we take this further?

    I’m a big reader of fitness and nutrition literature.  I love the subject and could easily have followed that path instead of psychology (although there’s plenty of time for both).  I have also noticed that the times I exercise the most and eat the healthiest are the times I’m spending a lot of time reading about the subject.

    Could this be priming at work?  Maybe the deeper I immerse myself into fitness primes, the stronger I play the fitness role?  If so, what would happen if we threw ourselves into a world where everything around us was intended to prime us for a particular response?  The next study I’ll describe is incredible!

    The Fountain of Youth

    In 1979, famous psychologist Ellen Langer and colleagues took a group of participants – all men over 70 – to a five-day retreat in search of the fountain of youth – and found it.

    The Fountain of Youth

    The retreat was a mock up of life some 20 years previous. No modern conveniences were present, participants had to talk in the present tense about the 50s, and before going, they wrote an autobiography as though it were 1959.  A week’s worth of activities were devised, all based around daily life in 1959.

    How would you measure age?  Interestingly, there’s no biological marker of age.  Without knowing your birthdate, there is no scientific way to tell you how old you definitely are.  To make up for this, a massive group of related variables were measured instead: weight, dexterity, flexibility, vision, taste, intelligence, memory – all things that deteriorate with age.  Photographs were  also taken, and participants were asked to fill out a self-evaluation test.

    The participants spent only five days in the faux 1950’s environment, and on leaving, the same tests were given again.  The results were incredible.  They performed better on the cognitive tests.  Their memory had improved.  Even their eyesight and hearing had improved!  As far as science was able to tell, the clock had turned back – they got younger!

    Maybe the phrase “you’re only as old as you feel” should be “you’re only as old as you’re primed to feel”.

    At this point I was going to add a section called “Practical Priming”, with suggestions on how to put this information to use. It’s 90% done, but I have to go away for a couple of days, so I’ll finish it off and put it up separately when I get back.

  • Where to find good information online

    Are you sick of looking for information on a topic, but only finding the standard “Four Secrets Of….”, or “The Ten Best Ways To….” articles?  You know what I mean, they usually have about 3 sentences for each point, no depth, no meaningful commentary, just a few of the author’s unsubstantiated opinions puked onto a web page?  If you’re like me, you don’t just feel disappointed or let down, you feel…what’s the word?

    Used!

    “OK pal, great, you fooled me.  You got your God-damned page view.  Happy now?  Hmm?!”

    I throw my keyboard across the room every time it happens.  Thrown that damn keyboard about 500 times now.

    Don’t get me wrong.  Snippet articles can be good: they can be used as refreshers, the can have references and links to related good stuff.  They can even make good points by themselves.  But let’s be honest, maybe 75% of them are crap.

    “Good information can be hard to find…”

    This kind of comes with the internet.  Boundaries to publishing are lower, anyone can do it.  This gives us a huge knowledge base literally at our fingertips.  For example, my shower is quite weak, I wanted to know how to increase the pressure.  Ten years ago I’d have to ask around, maybe visit a DIY shop for answers.  Yesterday, I found out in about 11 seconds.

    But this has downsides.  Lowering entry requirements generally lowers quality.  Well, it lowers average quality; the good stuff is still there, it’s just harder to find.  For example, my shower is still weak.

    As boundaries are lower only in cyberspace, some of the highest quality sources of information are outside of the web.  Books, journals, magazines.  College courses, university degrees.  Experts’ brains.

    If only there were some way to get this type of information onto the web, in an easily digestible format!  Of course, that’s the primary purpose of the site you’re reading now; but luckily I’m not the only one with this goal.

    In fact, there are sites which get information, often cutting-edge, up onto the web in the YouTube generation’s favourite format: video.

    People have been recording university lectures and posting them up for a while now, although I’ve only just become aware of this.  The sound quality of these videos range from absolutely crisp to barely coherent, but the content is usually going to be good stuff.  Plus, there are other clever sites with good information.

    Here are the ones I’ve looked at so far:

    TED

    TED is made of talks – up to 20 minutes long – given by experts in all kinds of fields, focused on Technology, Entertainment and Design.  See their about page for more details on why they do this.

    Really, really good site: short and digestible talks, good video and sound quality, and big name speakers.  If you haven’t seen it already, you’re in for a treat.

    Some of my favourites:

    Vilayanur Ramachandran on Your Mind

    Barry Schwartz on The Paradox of Choice

    Martin Seligman on Positive Psychology

    Richard Dawkins on Our Queer Universe

    Academic Earth

    Academic Earth‘s mission is to make a world-class education available to everyone with internet access, by getting courses and lectures from leading scholars up on their site and available for free.  You can browse by topic or by university, with the big names like Harvard, Princeton and MIT up there.

    There are 1500 videos up at the time I write this, although some subjects covered more comprehensively than others (psychology only has a few up, but they’re good introduction ones).   Many of the lectures are grouped into courses, and they are all downloadable.  Also, by registering, you can save your favourites for easy access next time.

    Big Think

    In Big Think you’ll find various experts giving their big thoughts on specific questions.  It’s not quite as in-depth as the sites above, from what I’ve seen so far, but still very interesting.

    Experts range through many fields, from academics, to celebrities, to journalists and so on.  Maybe you’d like to see Dan Dennett explain the mechanics of studying consciousness, or maybe you’d prefer Ricky Gervais’s take on animal rights instead.  Of course you can search by category or by expert, to find what you like.

    I haven’t tried this, but you’re able to suggest questions for the experts, and new experts to ask the questions to by email.  There also appears to be a big community section to the site, which again I’m not really interested in, but you might be.

    Good for getting some basic ideas or perspectives on different topics, and probably a better way to spend time than strange YouTube videos!

    iTunes U

    iTunes U is a section of iTunes, where you can get over 100,000 educational audio and video files, coming from universities, museums, and other institutions.

    Of course, you’ll need iTunes to access this, but even if you prefer to use some other media playing program, it’s worth getting iTunes just for this.  The information is all in the iTunes store – but don’t worry, it’s downloadable for free.  You can search by category or institution.  This is easily the largest resource of the four.  There really is a staggering amount of information on here.

    That’s it!  If you’re like me you’ll like these sites.  You don’t get to ask questions or speak to the lecturer after the class, but you do get to rewind and fast-forward as you like.  I don’t watch TV (something I highly recommend), because I prefer to watch more constrictive things; these sites are one way to do this.

    All four are a great way to look for expert opinions on subjects for which there is little information on the web, or where the information is of lower quality than you might like.

    Plus they’ve saved me a fortune on keyboards. 🙂

  • "You can do anything you set your mind to" Vs "Stick to your strengths"

    This title fight pits two classic pieces of folk wisdom against each other! Both ideas are fully indoctrinated into our culture, but which one is correct?

    Introducing first, in the red corner, hailing from the depths of human optimism, the current, reigning and defending champion: “You can do anything you set your mind to!”

    And in the blue corner, hailing from parts unknown, weighing in at a few books and some empirical studies, the challenger: “Stick to your strengths!”

    Scheduled for three rounds, this might be the biggest title fight in the personal development history! The outcome of this fight might determine what you choose to do with the next phase of your life, and change your destiny forever!

    Or, it might just be mildly interesting. Either way, keep reading.

    Round 1 – Definition

    What exactly does it mean to say “You can do anything you set your mind to”? It’s a tribute to the power of dedication, persistence, and time, or course. It means that even against all odds, these three pillars will support your success; all you have to do is try hard enough for long enough.

    This perspective may or may not include the idea that “all men are created equal”. It may or may not concede that certain things comes easier to some people than they do to others. The phrase simply means that over the long-term, no inherent talent or current ability will play a greater role in getting you what you want than the above three factors.

    “You can do anything…” is simply a tribute to the power of dedication, persistence, and time.

    Of course, this is a very positive and uplifting message. It gives us hope and makes us all that little bit more equal. So naturally, it’s a popular concept within motivational literature.

    What about the opponent? When we say “Stick to your strengths”, what do we mean by that? We mean actions you can consistently do well, which lead to productive results. We also mean useful traits, and strengths of character.

    A strength is a label given to a part of your brain or nervous system that is more efficient than other parts. As you go about your life, different types of thought, behaviour and feeling are called upon, either by your own actions or in response to something happening to you. The requests that your brain processes quickly or effectively are your strengths.

    In Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham uses a technological analogy. He explains that if your brain is like the internet, with the synapses in your brain being equivalent to the different connections between computers, your strengths are like your T1 lines (or whatever technology happens to be fastest at the time you read this!). They process input and provide an output much faster than other areas of the brain.

    If you’ve got a tendency to respond to the world with what we’ve labelled “kindness”, it’s because the synapses that lead to altruistic actions are strong and fast. Nature always takes the path of least resistance, so when you perceive an opportunity to be “kind”, you usually take it. So the idea behind the saying is, shape your life around your strengths, because it will be hard or even impossible to go against the grain.

    Round 2 – Evidence

    Try googling “You can do anything you set your mind to”. You’ll find a load of very inspirational articles, each containing examples of people who have defied the odds. A cancer-ridden triathlon winner, an entertainer who succeeded across multiple fields, a man who became a kickboxing champion in six weeks. From this, the articles conclude that yes, you can do anything you set your mind to. These people did, so why can’t you?

    Well, maybe it’s because these examples have all been selected specifically to support that point! I could write an article called “You can’t do anything you set your mind to” and fill it with some great examples of human failure – unsuccessful political systems, disastrous military campaigns, music careers that never left the ground; it would be no more valid. More on why, here.

    We need stronger evidence than this. It comes in part, from Carol Dweck. Dweck and colleagues have studied the effect that beliefs about intelligence can have on various types of task performance. Basically, if you believe intelligence is a fixed entity, you’ll perform worse than if you view it as malleable. In the book, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Dweck’s chapter explains these concepts and gives examples of some of the studies that have been done. For instance, when college students were taught that intelligence is malleable, their GPA increased, along with their commitment to their school work.

    These results show that positive beliefs about the effects of effort can increase performance and motivation. So far so good, but they don’t explain how far a person can go with this. For that information, we turn to a different area of research.

    Some interesting studies have been done on the effects of deliberate practice. At low levels of practice, things like genetics and natural aptitude account for most of the variation in ability. But after ever increasing amounts of practice, the sheer volume of training starts to take over, and eventually it accounts for more ability than any other factors. In many fields, it was found that no one had reached the level of mastery without around 10 years of deliberate practice, involving about 10,000 hours of training. This is regardless of natural strengths or ability. (1)

    That’s a strong case for the champion, but what about the challenger?

    “The ‘best of the best’ shape their lives around their strengths.”

    The Gallup Organisation has been very active in researching strengths. As part of their work they interviewed over 2 million individuals in almost all professions, looking for patterns between the top achievers. They found that the “best of the best” shape their lives around their strengths, and found ways of developing and applying these strengths in the areas they wanted to become effective in.

    So while practice might override talent at the highest levels, it seems it’s easier to get there by using practice that involves strengths: If this wasn’t the case, Gallup would have found many top achievers who weren’t employing their strengths. (2)

    Researchers have also looked at the quality of activities that employ strengths versus those that don’t, finding that people are more intrinsically motivated to do activities which use their strengths. (3) In my own dissertation, I found that people using their strengths experienced more flow (the state of being ‘in the zone’, totally focused on the task), and enjoyed the activities more.

    Perhaps because of the above benefits, people who start to use their strengths on a regular basis become happier. One study asked people to integrate their strengths into their lives, and measured their happiness over the next six months. They found their happiness had increased each time it was measured. In StrengthsQuest, Donald Clifton and Edward Anderson note that regular strengths use leads to more confidence, optimism, and direction in life. (4)(5)

    Round 3 – A thought experiment

    Let’s take the points from the previous round and see how they might work in an example.

    Imagine two people, Bob and Jane. Bob is extroverted and full of zest, with a natural sense of humour. He’s always ‘on the go’, looking for something fun to do. Jane is introverted, intelligent, and prudent. She spends most evenings in front of a fireplace with a good book. How well would each of them do in the role ‘stand up comedian’? Could Jane, do well in this field, if she put her mind to it?

    If self-help books could speak, they’d chorus an enthusiastic ‘yes’. People supporting a strengths perspective would answer a resounding ‘no’. Who’s right?

    “Going against the grain would be a tough, inefficient, unsatisfying way to reach excellence.”

    The work on dedicated practice suggests that given enough practice, and a long enough timeline, the answer is, yes, Jane could be an expert comedian. Of course, Bob could get there more easily; he would find more satisfaction in practising, be more motivated, and progress faster. Because Jane is going against the grain, her success depends on whether her natural tendencies allow her to get enough practice in. The process of reaching excellence would be a chore, and she’d have more setbacks and frustrations to overcome. But if she could find a way to keep going, in theory, she could make it.

    I say ‘in theory’, because in practice it’s probably rare that someone could maintain that level of training without any intrinsic enjoyment of it. Without love for the activity itself, it’s easy to imagine Jane burning out long before reaching 10 years and 10,000 hours of practice. It would be a tough, inefficient, unsatisfying way to reach excellence.

    On the other hand, employing strengths is much easier. Bob would be happier overall, have more motivation to practice; for him, it will all just seem easier and more natural. Another great example is The Beatles, who clearly had a natural aptitude for music, and loved performing. They had clocked up nearly 10,000 hours of practice before they even released a single – they are an extreme example of what can happen when you combine your strengths with massive amounts of practice, rather than have the two work against each other!

    Final Bell!

    When the final bell rings, both fighters are still standing. The first two rounds were pretty even, both combatants landing some strong blows. But in the third, “You can do anything you set your mind to” started looking a little worse for wear. “Stick to your strengths” is your winner and new champion, earning the victory on points!

    When people say “you can do anything…”, they mean that even against tough odds, you can succeed if you have enough persistence and determination. While that may technically be true, the phrase speaks only of the end result, and says nothing about the quality of the journey we must undertake to get there. By sticking to your strengths you reduce the number of options you have, but what you lose in quantity you make up for in quality. Unless there is some hugely important reason to go against your strengths, or a massive sense of meaning you attach to it, being happier and deriving more satisfaction from what you do is always going to be the better option.

    Recommended Reading:

  • 21 days to form a habit? Bullshit!

    We’re in such a rush these days, aren’t we? Whatever we want, we want it yesterday. Unfortunately, things usually take a lot longer than that. To get any kind of good result, we usually have to take some kind of action regularly, over a long period of time. Especially if it involves learning a skill. This is where the idea of habits comes in – you make a habit of the action you need to take, and do it everyday automatically. Then, somewhere down the line, the result will just happen – if you can wait that long.

    “Whatever we want, we want it yesterday.”

    The standard self-help advice for installing a new habit is to do the activity on a daily basis, for 21 consecutive days. Thirty days is also popular. The idea seems to originate from Maxwell Maltz’s famous book, Psycho-Cybernetics. Maltz was a plastic surgeon, and noticed it took around 21 days for people to become accustomed to their new appearances, or for ‘phantom limb’ sensations to disappear. He later linked his observation into theories of self-image, and the 21 day rule came to be.

    Despite its popularity, the 21 day rule has never been tested empirically, to my knowledge. I’ve even read sites claiming that 30 days is overkill when forming a habit. These are all sweeping generalisations, obviously. It would depend on exactly what you meant by ‘habit’, and the nature of the behaviour you’re trying to establish.

    Repetition over a period of time seems like a sensible way to form a habit; but what if the habit involves lots of smaller behaviours and tasks? If the 21 day rule is accurate, would you need to multiple the amount of sub-tasks by 21, to get the true amount of time required?

    Take something like healthy living. Within that, you’ve got exercise, healthy eating, not smoking, and so on. Within that, you’ve got stretching, weights, cardio, eating whole foods, vegetables, no processed foods, and so on. If you’ve ever seen someone try to do all this at once, you’ve seen someone fail (in less than 21 days).

    Twenty-one days is an improvement on ‘yesterday’, but maybe it’s still a bit short. If you can install just one of the above, say, eating no processed foods, you’d probably be better off one-year down the line than if you tried all of the above for 3-4 weeks, spread out over that same year (each followed by a week of bingeing after you burn out). If you turned a new point from that list into a habit every 21, 30, or even 60 days, the long term benefits are not only greater, but more sustainable too.

    This is a completely testable idea. At the moment, I’m trying to become more organised and productive. I’m overcommitted at the moment, I have this site and a few other sites to run, I’m writing up my dissertation for submission to a journal, plus normal stuff on top of that like the gym and my day job. While I was at university, I was similarly swamped, and bought the classic productivity book Getting Things Done (GTD), by David Allen.

    Here’s GTD in a nutshell: Write down everything that you need to do or plan to do in your life. Then store all these things in a system which alerts you when each thing needs to be done. Simple. By doing this, you get everything ‘off your mind’, and you never feel overwhelmed. You know the system will let you know when you have something to do, so you can relax until then.

    It works exceptionally well. You most important thing to do is always at your fingertips, you never get that “what should I do next?” feeling, and you don’t feel so overwhelmed that you seek out your preferred method of escapism (beer and films for me).

    The only problem for me, was that the system falls flat after a few weeks. I set it up, it runs perfectly for a while, then it gradually deteriorates until it no longer exists. Then I start again.

    This is apparently a common problem with GTD – it’s too much. Leo Babauta, of Zen Habits, follows a similar philosophy to me. He created a book to supplement GTD, called Zen To Done, which breaks the GTD system down into 10 parts. You employ only one or two of these each month, until the whole thing becomes habitual. I bought Zen To Done as it seems ideal for me: I’m probably not going to get any less busy over the next few years, and if it takes 10 months to get to the finished product, so what? It’ll be less stressful, much less effort, and a perfect test of my theory (for myself at least).

    I’ll let you know how it’s going each month. In the meantime, if you want to join me in my experiment, feel free. It’s easy, just pick something you want to do, break it down into 10-12 things, and add them in, one month at a time. Then, if you can, compare your progress after a year to the previous year. I’ll bet you did better. This is not new advice: every school kid hears about the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise won, remember. 🙂

  • Self Determination Theory – Finding the right kind of motivation

    After you saw ‘motivation’ in the title of this article, maybe you thought this would be one of those moving, inspirational pieces, designed to spring you into action, immediately.  You know the sort; written in a lively and stimulating way, they bestow you with a sense of purpose and enthusiasm that you’re certain to carry with you for at least the next ten minutes.

    But it’s not.  I’m not really qualified for that, to be honest.  To me, the people that write those things seem like some kind of super-efficient neo-human.  Like they leap out of bed at 6am every morning (doing their affirmations before they land), do some morning yoga, then in an efficient and streamlined way, get a full day’s work in before 9am.  Yikes!  On a morning, I’m barely conscious enough to make my fried egg sandwich for breakfast.  OK, a little more conscious than that, but you get my point.

    So I’m not explaining how to increase motivation, but rather I’m describing the types of motivation that exist.  If you find yourself with ‘no motivation’, maybe it’s not that you don’t have any, but that you have the wrong type.

    Two Main Types of Motivation

    Motivation is a useful thing.  It’s the driving force behind our behaviour.  It produces.  But it’s not necessarily a single concept – there are many types of motivation.  You could break it down in many ways, but almost any will include the two main types: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.  With extrinsic motivation, you’re doing something because the activity will bring some reward or benefit at the end of it.  With intrinsic motivation, you’re doing something purely because you enjoy the activity itself.

    For example, take job hunting.  Chances are, job hunting isn’t on your list of hobbies.  You probably don’t spend your spare time filling out applications and going to interviews just for the fun of it (or maybe you do).  People do it because they want the outcome – a job.  And it seems to me that in the majority of cases, the motivation to go to these jobs is extrinsic too.  Would you do your job even if you didn’t get paid for it?

    Of course, things aren’t this black and white in real life, there are shades of grey between the two extremes, which I’ll describe later.  But it’s interesting to note that over the life-span, we start to take less intrinsically motivated actions.  As children almost everything we do is for the enjoyment of it; this spontaneous learning and curiosity is vital for our cognitive development.  As we get older, rules and regulations mean that most of what we do is extrinsically motivated to some extent.

    The Benefits of Intrinsic Motivation

    Think about some of the things you do on a regular basis.  Are you mostly extrinsically motivated, acting in preparation for rewards to come?  Or are you mostly intrinsically motivated, seeking engagement and well-being within the things you do?

    It should come as no surprise that the more intrinsically motivated an action is, the more enjoyable it is; it’s practically the definition.  So from the point of view of pure enjoyment, it makes sense to have more intrinsically motivated activities in your life.  People who are intrinsically motivated show more interest and excitement over what they do, and have more confidence. (1)

    But apart from the pure enjoyment of the activity, you’re actually better at intrinsically motivated actions too.  You show more persistence and creativity, and because of that you’ll have increased vitality and self-esteem. (1)

    As I mentioned earlier, there are shades of grey, and you don’t need to be fully intrinsically motivated to get these benefits.  In various fields, positive outcomes have been found from motivation that is almost, but not quite intrinsic.  To name a few, these include: exercise, where it is easier to stick to exercise routines as intended; religion, where people who identify with their religion have better mental health and well-being than people who see religion as a means to an end; and environmental behaviours, where more intrinsic environmental motivation leads to more activities that are better for the environment. (2)

    So if you want to do more of something, you could try to change your motivation to something closer to intrinsic motivation.  If you do so, your performance will improve, and you’ll generally be happier.  Before explaining exactly how that’s done, I’ll describe the shades of grey that exist between the extremes of motivation.

    Shades of Grey (or orange)

    The gradations of motivation have been classified by psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci of the University of Rochester, in what they call Self-Determination Theory, or SDT for short.  In this model, the types of motivation exist on a continuum, with pure intrinsic motivation on the right, amotivation on the far left, and four shades of extrinsic motivation in between them.  Your motivation towards a particular activity will fit into one of these categories, although there may be some overlap with its neighbours. Here’s the diagram they use to illustrate this (opens in new window):

    The Self-Determination Continuum
    The Self-Determination Continuum

    From left to right, we have:

    • Amotivation – The state of lacking the intention to act.  In this state, a person either won’t act at all, or will ‘go through the motions’, lacking any specific purpose or intention.
    • External Regulation – Activities are done purely to satisfy some external demand.  When doing externally regulated activities, people typically feel controlled or alienated.
    • Introjected Regulation – Behaviours are still performed to achieve a reward or avoid a punishment, but these things are internal; for example, to avoid guilt or anxiety, or to boost the ego with pride.
    • Identified Regulation – This reflects a conscious valuing of a behavioural goal – they are activities people identify with, that are seen as personally important.
    • Integrated Regulation – An identified regulation has been fully integrated into the self.  It has been brought into congruence with the other values and needs a person has.
    • Intrinsic Motivation – An activity is carried out purely for the inherent satisfaction of doing so.

    (The diagram and these notes are based on reference 1)

    For example, I try to do some form of exercise 3-4 times per week, usually weights.  For me, this is integrated regulation.  It’s been a regular part of my week for over 10 years, and it fits in with my other values and habits.  Still, it’s not intrinsic.  Despite how integrated it is, and how congruent it is with the rest of me, if it didn’t make me stronger, healthier, and look good naked, I doubt I’d do it.  Imagine a guy who does not value health or fitness, and only works out so that people react to him more positively.  For this guy, it’s introjected regulation – his motive is ego-based, he does it to maintain self-esteem.

    On the other hand, playing the guitar is 100% intrinsically motivated for me.  No one hears me, I don’t play to anyone but myself, and I don’t have any goals with it whatsoever.  I scarcely even try to get better, I just enjoy playing a few songs I know.  But I only play very rarely; in fact, my guitar isn’t even in my house presently.  It’s not an integrated behaviour, but I’m intrinsically motivated to do it.

    If you have a goal you’re working towards, where is it on the scale?  Where’s your profession?  If it’s far to the left, but important to you, you can take steps to move it to the right, but note that this isn’t a developmental scale – you don’t figure out where you are, then move through all the stages, mastering each one on your way to intrinsic motivation.  Ultimately, the procedure to move a regulation further to the right is similar wherever you start from.  However, if you’re not already intrinsically motivated, you might just end up at integrated – which shares many of the benefits.

    How to develop intrinsic motivation

    There are many things that we have to do in this complex modern life, and we can’t expect everything to be intrinsically motivating.  But since it seems worthwhile to get more of our actions to the right side of the continuum, the question is, how do we stay motivated to do nonintrinsically motivating things?  The answer lies in our psychological needs.  Intrinsic motivation is developed and maintained when three of our basic psychological needs are satisfied.  These needs are competence, autonomy, and relatedness.  They are thought to be essential to human motivation and growth.  Here’s a description of each and suggestions for how to satisfy these needs. (3)

    Autonomy is the need to have control over what you do – to self-regulate, and make your own choices.  I talked about its relation to happiness here.  You’ll see that in the diagram above, the more to the right you go, the more internalised the behaviours are within the self – in other words, the more they feel ‘you’.  This process involves adopting values from other people and from the environment.  But a new value needs to be understood and synthesised with existing goals and values, which is a self-directed process – we need the opportunity to freely subscribe to new values.  Any external pressures and controls will obstruct this process.  As well as the integration of values, autonomy is important in a more general sense – having control over what you do and how you do it.  The more control you feel you have, the more intrinsically motivated you’ll tend to be.

    How to support autonomy:

    1) Increase Control/Choice – Find ways to direct your actions and environments.  Things as simple as controlling the layout of your furniture have been shown to increase autonomy, right up to having ultimate control over what you do.  See what you are able to control and have choice over.

    2) Integrate Values – Think about the ways in which you agree with the actions you’re taking.  Why are they right and correct?  Considering the value of a behaviour to yourself will facilitate its integration.

    3) Create Novelty – Look for ways to inject novelty into your actions.  Can you do the same thing in a different location, or alter the task or goals in some ways?  Or can you even find new reasons to do them?  This way you’ll get the benefits of increased novelty as well as autonomy.

    4) Remove Deadlines – Deadlines will reduce intrinsic motivation drastically.  Even if it’s a task you really like to do, the pressure of a deadline will remove your sense of autonomy and your motivation along with it.

    5) Remove Pressured Evaluations – As with deadlines, high pressure evaluation will also reduce your autonomy and your motivation, and should be avoided if possible.

    Competence refers to our innate drive to engage new challenges and experience mastery – to get good at things.  For motivation, perceived competence is the important thing, rather than objective performance.  Positive feedback on performance tends to enhance a person’s perceived competence, but only where they feel that they are responsible for the good performance.  If they feel they did well by chance, and then receive positive feedback on the performance, this will tend to undermine intrinsic motivation because it will overshadow their feelings of autonomy.  So it’s better to say what a person did well, rather than just saying “heck of a job, champ!”

    How to support competence:

    1) Get better – Sounds obvious, but the more competent you are at a certain activity, the more motivated you’ll be to do it.  If you’re trying to learn a new skill and losing motivation because it’s difficult, at least take heart in the knowledge that the better you get, the more motivated you’ll typically get.

    2) Get positive feedback – Your motivation will become more integrated if you can find some way of getting positive feedback on your progress.  This feedback should be informational rather than controlling, and should highlight specific positive aspects of your performance. (4)(5)

    3) Avoid negative feedback – Likewise, negative feedback will stand in the way of perceived competence, and therefore block intrinsic motivation too. (6)

    4) Break complex tasks down – If a task is very complex and challenging, don’t take it on all at once.  Break it down into moderately challenging subtasks.  Once competence has been reached for each of the subtasks, then move on the the task as a whole. (7)

    5) Set appropriate difficulty levels – Difficulty needs to be moderately challenging – not so easy that you become bored, but not so difficult that your feelings of competence diminish.  If a task is too easy or hard, find some way to adjust accordingly.

    Relatedness is the basic human need to feel connected to others. SDT suggests that people naturally internalise and integrate the values of the social groups around them, and as they do so, their motivation to do things in line with this new value system will improve – as long as they do not feel coerced, and have a sense of competence.  This natural human need seems to be a part of our tendency to merge into social groups.  Knowing this, we can hijack this system, and use it to consciously internalise behaviours that we want.

    Relatedness is not essential for intrinsic motivation, which we can achieve alone (like my guitar playing, although some might say other people are better off not hearing it…).  But, it is very important for internalising and integrating behaviours and activities – bringing activities into the ‘good’ side of extrinsic motivation.  Note that researchers have not yet found high levels of intrinsic motivation without autonomy and competence to go with it.

    How to support relatedness:

    1) Improve the interpersonal climate – in group situations, the atmosphere should be supportive and informational, as opposed to pressuring and controlling. (8)

    2) Find social groups – When people feel involved with groups that espouse certain values and behaviours, the way is smoothed for these values to be integrated.  By finding groups that embrace the values and behaviours you want, you can adopt them yourself by joining these groups.

    3) Supportive social connections – Friends, family and associates that are autonomy supportive and competence supportive (eg., encourage you to make choices, give positive feedback and encouragement, have the same values as you, and so on) will be generally beneficial to integration and intrinsic motivation.

    When you’re using this model to increase your motivation, there are two ways to go about it.  The first is to look at your life as a whole, and shift things around so that these three needs are better met.  For example, switch jobs to one that better meets the above criteria, use your spare time for things you enjoy doing simply for their own sake, spend time with people of similar values, etc.  This way, you’ll experience more integration and intrinsic motivation overall, and as the research indicates, greater well-being and psychological health will follow.  If there’s a regular part of your life which thwarts these three needs, it would be worth thinking up ways to get out of it.

    The second way, is to to take an activity that is important to you, but you are extrinsically motivated to do, and then integrate the three needs into the activity, such that they are better satisfied.  This will increase your integration relative to that specific task.  That’s what I’ve assumed you would be doing as I wrote this, so I’ve written the above suggestions from that perspective.

    If you’re trying to motivate yourself to do something, this by definition is a self-determined process.  So it would make sense to adopt more of a self-determined motivational style, rather than spend all day recanting affirmations, and reading uplifting stories.  You can read all the motivational literature you like – and these things are well enough in their own way – but according to this theory, if you’re not doing anything to meet the three needs of competence, autonomy and relatedness, you might as well read cereal packets.

    Recommended Reading:

  • Divided Minds

    Have you ever started a diet or exercise program, and quit after a week?  Have you ever lied in bed too long when you know you should get up?  Ever woken up next to the missing link?  Everyone has taken actions that they didn’t consciously plan to do.  The reason for this is that different parts of your mind have different agendas.  It’s pretty common knowledge these days that there’s a ‘conscious’ mind and a ‘subconscious’ mind. The conscious part is what you experience as being ‘you’.  All the other parts of your mind are subconscious, and work away without your involvement.

    Having a mind like this quite an interesting experience.  The subconscious parts make a lot of our choices, and guide a lot of our actions.  But because we only experience the conscious part of our mind, we don’t fully realise this.  Plus we are very good at inventing stories and rationalisations, to make it seem like we decided to do all these things in the first place.

    How we experience the mind makes it seem like driving a car.  The subconscious is the car, and we’re the driver. With this metaphor, we call the shots and decide where to go – the unconscious mind then puts its resources to work in taking us there. We’re driving the car… we steer, we choose how fast we go, and we can change direction at any time.  The subconscious can get us from A to B, but can’t choose where B is – all it can do is offer suggestions on the sat-nav, and hope we listen.

    In reality though, it’s the other way around – the conscious mind exists to serve the subconscious mind. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Heidt offers a different metaphor – a rider and an elephant. The elephant is the subconscious mind, the rider the conscious mind.  The elephant is a big, burly beast, and will pretty much do whatever it wants. The rider isn’t strong enough to push the elephant around; all it can do is shout and nudge, and hope the elephant will listen.

    Thailand Elephant Rider - painting by Helen Carson
    Thailand Elephant Rider – painting by Helen Carson

    The painting to the right, by Helen Carson, illustrates this idea perfectly.  The rider has no whip, no reigns – no means of directing the elephant besides a word in it’s ear. The elephant leads the way and goes where it wants – even if the rider doesn’t want to!

    Many clever studies have been done to show that the elephant is calling most of the shots.  In one famous study, researchers asked people to write down behaviours they thought were characteristic of either intelligence or stupidity.  Then each person was given a general knowledge test.  Even though the participants had no idea that these two tasks could be related, the people that wrote about intelligence did better than average on the tests.

    If you did a task like this, you might think it was a bit mundane.  You wouldn’t really care about the characteristics of intelligence… but you’re getting paid, so you do it.  Besides, maybe you can get in a bit of daydreaming while you’re at it.  But behind the scenes, the elephant is doing some processing of its own, priming you for what might be ahead.  The people that wrote about stupidity did worse than average on the tests.

    This makes you wonder about news headlines.  If exercises like this can affect things like test results, what’s the net effect of headlines like “Financial Crisis!”, “Knife Crime Increasing!” and “Terrorist Attacks”?  Yet another justification of my decision not to watch television or read newspapers!

    But why does the mind work like this?  Why aren’t we in control as much as it seems we are?  It’s because consciousness is a pretty new invention, whereas the rest of the mind has been around for a long time. It has survived millions of years of evolution, and been passed through many species.  Along the way, bits have been added on and taken away – whatever didn’t work was weeded out.  What’s left is a tried and tested formula.  The rider is just the latest addition to that design, the latest hardware upgrade.  The elephant is better off for having a rider, or it wouldn’t have one, but there’s no sense in reshaping everything that has proven effective for millions of years, just because the mind suddenly realised it can think!

    All our subjective experiences, our identities and identity crises are basically the result of this new addition.  They are there because they help the elephant to survive, just as things like memory and emotions helped other species’ to survive, at earlier points in time.

    In reality though, there isn’t a divided mind.  It’s all the same thing, just like the liver, lungs and heart are parts of the same body.  It’s only the new rider module’s ability to self-reflect that makes it seem, to the rider at least, that there’s a divide.  But as we’ll see, when the rider figures out that he exists, some more practical and useful conclusions can be reached – which is kind of the point of him being there in the first place!

    Recommended Reading:

  • How to be Lucky

    Although it’s hard to believe, luck is actually something that can be learned. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist, known for studying quirky topics, decided to spend a few years using science to learn what luck actually is, and how people can get it. His book The Luck Factor describes his findings, which I’ll review here. Luck seems like a strange thing to study scientifically, but as you’ll see, it can be done.

    The common sense notion of ‘luck’ is that it’s what you get when you mix chance with benefit; and both have to be present. For example, accidentally leaving your science experiment out overnight is probably quite a rare occurrence, but it’s not lucky, because it’s not beneficial. Unless your name is Alexander Fleming, that is, and a piece of mould falls into your petri dish leading you to discover penicillin. That’s lucky!

    So you’d think that being lucky, by definition, is something you can’t control. Because once you start to control it, you’re taking chance out of the equation. You’re moving away from the concept of luck, and into something else; ‘strategy’, maybe. But isn’t it interesting, that when we talk about luck as a trait – when we say someone is a ‘lucky’ person – we don’t seem to worry about chance? We don’t investigate what they did to improve their odds, we just see some beneficial things and say “they’re lucky.”

    “From one point of view, nothing is based purely on luck – just better or worse odds.”

    From one point of view, luck exists, and is random. From another point of view, nothing is based purely on luck – just better or worse odds. From that perspective, there are things you can do to improve your luck. This doesn’t involve influencing the outcome of completely random events, like lottery draws; it means increasing the chance of certain outcomes happening, like buying more tickets.

    This, in part, is what ‘lucky’ people do – buy more ‘tickets’ in all areas of their lives. They think and act in different ways to unlucky people. The end result of these thoughts and actions is more ‘wins’; but as it’s not apparent that they are doing anything different, it seems like pure luck.

    Wiseman spent years researching luck, by studying exceptionally lucky and unlucky people, and noticing the differences between them. From this work he devised a system that people can use to become luckier. The system boils down to the following four principles:

    1) Maximise Your Chance Opportunities

    You’re more likely to win the lottery if you buy more tickets. There are many similar things you can do to increase your chance of having a ‘lucky’ experience. Networking is the main one. The more people you know and are open to knowing, the more likely you are to meet someone who knows of a job vacancy. or has a single friend you’d get on with. This explains why extraverts tend to be luckier than introverts.

    But you also need to keep a relaxed attitude. Lucky people buy more tickets, but they are also good at noticing ticket stands when they see them. I’ve mentioned in a previous article that positive emotions have the effect of broadening your attention, while negative emotions tend to narrow it. It stands to reason then, that the more relaxed and happy you are, the more opportunities you’re likely notice. This explains why lucky people also tend to be less neurotic than unlucky people.

    The final way that lucky people buy more tickets is by being open to new experiences. They are more likely to try new things, and as a result expose themselves to more potential opportunities – if you do the same things all the time, you’re limiting your chances of having a lucky event happen to you. Of course, the same holds true of having unlucky things happen to you, which is why you need to employ the other principles too!

    2) Listen to your Lucky Hunches

    Intuition is an interesting thing. Put very simply, intuition works like this: We take in a lot of information as we go through our lives. A a lot this gets stored in our brains. Our brains make links between this information. When we’re in a situation similar to one we’ve experienced before, our brains look to see what that similar thing links up to. Then we get a feeling about it, based on that stored information.

    “Lucky people trust their intuitions, and are better at hearing them.”

    We get a feeling because it’s a fast way to get information to us. Our brain could just as easily flash a string of words into our minds – and that might be fine if we’re choosing between red and green pesto. But our brains evolved in the wild, where decisions are more important. By the time we’ve thought out “better watch out, there’s probably a dangerous animal in that bush ahead of you!”, we might be dead. So we get hunches instead.

    Lucky people trust these intuitions, and are better at ‘hearing’ them. They have strategies to help them tune into their intuitions more; things like meditation, and ways of clearing their heads. Unlucky people, in contrast, tend to ignore their hunches, and miss out on some useful information their brains have stored up.

    3) Expect Good Fortune

    Positive thinking can be quite an annoying thing. At least, reading about it can. It gets thrown around the internet ad nauseum, you can’t read anything about it without getting the predictable picture of a rainbow, and the language used to describe it is always so…cheesy. But believe it or not, that’s not actually why it’s annoying. What’s annoying, is that all those hippies are actually right: expecting good things to happen does tend to make good things happen.

    Lucky people, unsurprisingly, are very optimistic. They expect things to go well, so they don’t give up as easily – even when the odds are slim and they’ve already encountered setbacks. They expect to meet good, friendly people, and this attitude is reflected back by the people they meet. Unlucky people are the exact opposite. They expect to fail, so they give up at the first setback, and they expect interactions to go badly – making them nervous.

    4) Turn Bad Luck into Good

    As well as being optimistic about the future, lucky people are also optimistic about past setbacks. They are well trained in finding a positive spin on a situation, and don’t see setbacks as an opportunity to indulge in negative emotions. An example Wiseman used is this – say you’re in a queue at a bank when all of a sudden a robbery occurs, during which you get shot in the arm. Was this lucky or unlucky?

    Unlucky people say things like “Duh, it’s unlucky, unless you like being shot!” Lucky people say things like “Wow! You’re lucky you weren’t shot in the head! Plus you can sell the story to the newspapers and make some money!”

    Whether a situation is absolutely positive or negative isn’t the issue here. The relevant point is just the way lucky people think. They find the good fortune in the bad, are convinced things will work out for the best, and don’t sit around dwelling on their ill fortune.

    Being Lucky

    The risk with correlational research is that the findings might be reversed – maybe luck creates good intuition, sociability, and positive thinking, not the other way around. The only way to find out is to do experiments – teach people these principles, and see if they become luckier. Wiseman did exactly this, creating his very own ‘Luck School’.

    He explains what happened on graduation day in detail in his book, but essentially he found that luck was the end result of these principles, not the cause. After luck school, unlucky people got lucky, and lucky people got even luckier.

    The overview I’ve given here of the principles should be enough to get you started, but if you really want to improve your luck I highly recommend getting a copy of Wiseman’s book, The Luck Factor. It’s very readable and has several laugh-out-loud moments, as well as questionnaires and exercises you can use to measure and improve your luck. And unlike most self-help books, this one is based on years of research – so it might actually work!

  • The Self-Help Book Reader’s Guide

    “…question any claim to truth, asking for clarity in definition, consistency in logic, and adequacy of evidence.”
    – Paul Kurtz

    There are thousands of self-help books available for sale, and they can’t all be good. In fact, good ones are probably the minority. If you are a buyer of self-help literature, what strategy do you use to separate the good from the bad and the ugly? Do you exert any kind of conscious effort to find the good ones? Or is your buying decision based purely on what the book claims it can give you?

    That’s not good enough, you know. More thought should go into your purchase. This type of book is a big investment – financially speaking, it’s not much – it’s about the same price as a meal out. But you’re putting a lot of other stuff on the line: your time, your world view, what/how you think, your beliefs, what actions you’ll take over the coming weeks and months, and so on. That’s a big investment.

    If you’re not planning to invest these things, why are you buying this type of book? You’d be better off going out for a nice meal. If you are, you should be as sure possible you’ll get a return on your investment. So you need more than a quick flick through at the bookshop!

    This is a list of a few ways to evaluate a book before buying it. I wrote this with self-help books in mind, so the examples lean in that direction, but the general methods apply to books, newspapers, blogs; anything really.

    Critical Thinking

    Critical thinking, the buzzword of universities, is exactly what it sounds like: being critical of an idea, and looking into it’s truth before accepting it. Critical thinking doesn’t mean to be a critic. The point isn’t to search for faults and flaws until you find them; it’s to put ideas through fair but tough testing.

    “The point isn’t to search for faults and flaws until you find them; it’s to put ideas through fair but tough testing.”

    It’s very easy for emotions to sway you into accepting or denying an argument. Marketers and the media know this well. And when you throw your pre-existing biases into the mix as well, you can sometimes end up even further from a logical response. So if you’re reading a self-help book, and it’s making claims that you want to be true, and using emotional language to get you pumped up, you might end up getting swept along in the moment. If you apply critical thinking to the same book, you may end up going through, saying “this point is not supported…that’s a circular argument….that evidence is not sufficient”. You might be surprised at how much is not up to scratch.

    Instead of buying the next self-help book you plan to get, get a text on critical thinking (like this one, for instance). It still counts as self-help, and fits in perfectly with your plans to improve yourself. It’s a mental skill that you’ll be able to apply to everything you read from then on. You’ll have a better idea of what is good and bad, and your future efforts will be more streamlined.

    I must warn you though, after learning this skill, you’ll find newspapers and other forms of media very, very frustrating. You’ll see exactly how they are intended to sway opinion, how there is no substance to the arguments, how emotion is used rather than reason. It will frustrate you even more when you hear people repeat these things back to you, people who haven’t looked any deeper into the issue than what they have been told to think. You have been warned!

    Unless a sufficient explanation is given for a claim, don’t believe it! Don’t accept things because they sound clever or the author sounds authoritative. Things will always sound clever. The author will always sound authoritative. As such, these things alone are not good enough. Feel free to disagree with things you read; it’s better to find the 10% of a book that’s good than believe the other 90% that’s incorrect.

    Bad Evidence

    Keep an eye out for the evidence given for an argument. Some self-help authors are very clever about using ‘evidence’. They use methods of illustrating points that are very touching, but do not actually support their arguments.  Your critical thinking book will give you more detail, but here are three commonly used tactics that are NOT to be regarded as sufficient evidence for an argument:

    Personal experiences, testimonials or anecdotes

    Very often, you’ll find a story about someone’s experience, that seems to back up a point. However, one person’s experience can only illustrate a point, not support it. Here’s an example:

    “The healing power of brown rice was highlighted to me over 7 years ago. I was suffering from migranes. I saw every kind of doctor I could, they ran all sorts of tests but all were baffled; no one could find the cause or the cure. Every night I found myself in incredible pain. Most nights I didn’t sleep a wink. It was only when I learned to direct the energy frequency of food that I saw the answer. I was vibrating at too low a frequency, and the low-frequency energy was being stored in the head, causing the migranes. I started eating brown rice twice a day, and I could feel the energy frequency of my body start to rise every day. Within a week, the migraines were gone. The doctors couldn’t explain it.”

    Does this format sound familiar? The author claims to have had some ailment, applied his method, and cured it. This is NOT evidence for the method! It explains why the author thinks what he does, but does not prove whether what he thinks is correct. Again, there are many unanswered questions: How does he know the migraines did not stop spontaneously? What is energy frequency? How does he know his energy frequency was raised? And so on.

    Even if the author gave 10 anecdotes, even that would not be enough. If I looked hard enough, I could probably find 10 people whose migranes disappeared soon after they added brown rice to their diet. It means nothing if I ignore the 1000 people whose migraines didn’t disappear after eating brown rice.

    “Because you can support anything with a testimonial, a testimonial can support nothing.”

    In The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need, Paul Pearsall recounts a story of a self-help obsessed couple who came to him for marriage counselling, after the husband unexpectedly hit his wife. The reason for the attack was a tumor in the area of the brain involved with motivational control. The signs had been there all along, but had been missed by leaders of the self-help groups they went to. They misinterpreted his symptoms, saying he had been suppressing his hidden rage, which itself was caused by his wife’s low self-esteem. Tumours of the type he had can be removed safely if found early enough. Unfortunately, by the time Pearsall referred the man for neurological assessment, it was too late. He died two months later.

    It would be a fairly simple matter to find 10 or so disasters of self-help such as this, fill a book with them, write it in an authoritative tone, and make a huge argument against self-help. But this would be no more valid than the self-help books that use this technique themselves. In both cases, the examples are pre-selected to support the argument in question. Because there is an example for everything, you can support anything with a testimonial. Because you can support anything with a testimonial, a testimonial can support nothing.

    An analogy for testimonials would be this: if I threw a dart at a wall, then drew a bull’s eye and the rest of the dart board around it, it would seem I had a perfect aim. In reality, you have no idea how good my aim is.

    Clinical experience

    This is something that can seem convincing. The reports of a professional doing his job must be a reliable source of information, right? Quite possibly, but the real question is how relevant is it to you, as the reader of a book?

    It’s just one person’s perspective. The only source of data are the people that go in and out of the clinic. If you go to a counsellor for some problem, and see an improvement after six weeks, what do you do? Probably go back for another six weeks. If someone else goes to the same counsellor and doesn’t see an improvement, what do they do? Probably go somewhere else. But that counsellor only deals with the people coming back, the successes. So maybe there’s a bit of bias there.

    Also, we don’t process all experiences the same way. One striking incident will take precedence over many non-emotional experiences. If you’re reading a book by some professional, are they giving you the statistics for all their clinical experiences? Or do they just give a few special examples? What about the experiences of their peers?

    Remember also that if you go to see a professional, they will talk to you and pick the best treatment for you. If they sense that you won’t benefit or might even be harmed by a particular treatment, they will refer you to someone else, as Pearsall did in the example above. If you’re just reading a book by that professional, he might well have many pearls of wisdom, but you are missing out on that expert diagnosis.

    A book is far removed from a one-to-one clinical setting, and the same treatment might not carry over to the written word. The therapist’s presence might be essential. If tests had been done to ensure that the treatments are effective in writing as well as in person, evidence of that should be given in the book. I like to think most one-to-one professionals are good people and highly skilled at what they do – the point here is how well that skill translates into book format.

    Circular Arguments

    Self-help books are full of these. A circular argument is where the evidence given to support an argument assumes that the original argument is true. For example:

    “Vanilla is the nicest flavour of ice-cream. Why? Because the other flavours don’t taste as nice!”

    In order for the reason to support the premise, the premise has to already be true. Remember the brown rice/migraine example above? Circular reasoning might go something like this: “Brown rice increases energy frequency, which improves health. How do I know this? I once had migraines. After I ate brown rice, they disappeared. Brown rice must have increased my energy frequency, because my health improved.”

    Circular arguments might seem persuasive, but when you break them down you see they don’t tell you anything useful.

    It All Makes Perfect Sense! (Or does it…)

    Take a look at the following fairly obvious findings from social psychology, which came out of studies of soldiers in the 1940s:

    1. Better-educated soldiers suffered more adjustment problems than did less-educated soldiers. (Intellectuals were less prepared for battle stresses than street-smart people).

    2. Southern soldiers coped better with the hot South Sea Island climate than did Northern soldiers. (Southerners were accustomed to hot weather).

    3. White privates were more eager for promotion than were Black privates. (Years of oppression take a toll on achievement motivation).

    4. Southern Blacks preferred Southern to Northern officers (because Southern officers were more experienced and skilled in interacting with Blacks).

    What university did these come from? The University of the Blatantly Obvious? Is this really what academics get paid for? Well, I’m assuming that you’re fairly intelligent, and given the topic of this article, you may have guessed that in each case, the actual finding was the complete opposite of the above statements.

    If that might was quite obvious to you right now, it wasn’t to the participants of Paul Lazarsfeld’s 1949 study, in which these statements were used. Most of the participants of that study said the findings were “obvious”. It just demonstrates that presentation and authority can trigger that ‘makes sense’ intuition in you – regardless of accuracy – this is what self-help must rely on, being largely a non-evidence based field.(1)

    Its important to keep this in mind, because not only do self-help authors have authority, and a snappy, persuasive writing style to throw at you, but they are also saying a lot of things that you want to be true. So can become difficult to resist the temptation of blind acceptance. Resist it!

    Look for References

    A good rule of thumb: no references, no purchase. Self-help books aren’t peer-reviewed, so there are no restrictions on what the author can write. References do not guarantee quality, and lack of references doesn’t necessarily mean a book is bad. But, if the references are there, at least you can see where authors are getting their ideas from, and you can see how much other work they are aware of in the same area. If you want to, you can look up the references.

    If there are references, take a look at them. Are they scientific journals or magazine articles? Or are they references to similar books, just there to give the illusion of research, or are they genuine attempts to back up the arguments?

    Author Credibility

    Always research the author of the book before buying. Google them, see if there are any major controversies or disputes that might be relevant to your purchase.

    What’s the authors claim to competence? Are they an expert in the field they are writing in? A celebrity cashing in on fame? A concerned citizen?

    Don’t assume that a ‘Dr’ in front of a name means something. Look into what field the authors doctorate is in, and look up their other qualifications. Check the other areas they have done work in. Some authors have a PhD in one area, but write in another. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course – but something to keep in mind.

    Remember that celebrity doesn’t always equal credibility. If you’re looking at a book from a self-help celebrity, look at their previous works. If you find they’ve written 15 books that are all slight variations on a single theme, you can be pretty sure they are just cashing in on an idea!

    A good way to find credible authors in a particular area is to go to a library and flick through a psychology text book. Get one of those huge ones that cover almost every topic in psychology. Go to the section covering the area you want help with, and see who the ‘big names’ are in that field. Write them all down, and then search Amazon for them, see if they’ve written anything for the general reader.

    Ignore the Cover

    The cover is nearly useless in helping you decide whether or not to buy. It has the title, the name of the author and the price, but the rest is pretty much useless. The blurb will tell you what it’s about, but it won’t tell you how good it is. It’s not going to say “This book is mostly excellent but some parts are a bit sketchy, be careful while reading!” It’s always going glowing. Ignore the testimonials and celebrity quotes too. For the same reason, they are no use to you.

    Also, note that there’s no regulation or law governing the use of the term “best-seller”. It means nothing, and besides, popularity doesn’t always correlate with quality (you only need to look at boy bands for proof of that!).

    Final Thoughts

    Never buy on impulse. The thought and effort you put into buying books that offer you benefits, should be in proportion with the benefit that you want from it. So if you’re looking for advice on how to make a martini, a 5 minute flick through the books on the shelf is good enough. If you’re looking for advice on how to make your marriage work, put a bit more effort in than that!

    Being critical and skeptical does not mean being closed minded. You have to stay open to new ideas and perspectives, but the point is that some ideas are just plain wrong, and it helps to know which ones they are. As the saying goes, “be open-minded, but not so much that your brain falls out.”

    Recommended Reading:


    References
    (1) Lazarsfeld, P.F. (1949). The American Soldier: An Expository Review. Public Opinion Quarterly, 13(3), 377-404

  • The Self-Help Industry

    One sunny day when I was 19 or so, I came across a very intriguing book.  It was written by a tall man named Anthony Robbins, and it informed me that I had unlimited power.  Things that can be done by one human being, it said, could be done by any other.  It’s a mere matter of strategy; find someone who was once in the position you are in, but but got to where you want to be, and simply copy what they did.  This greatly interested me, for like many others I held fanciful dreams of the many incredible things I wanted to do.  At the time, I was greatly interested in becoming a famous rockstar.  I actually made a plan using this book, and started following the steps through.

    That plan didn’t quite work out (although I can still play a few Weezer songs fairly well on guitar).  But what’s interesting, as I look back on that experience, is how easily I bought into those ideas.  Without question, I accepted the idea that I could be whatever I wanted.  I read many self-help books after that one, all with a similar level of acceptance.

    My reaction did make sense; we all want to believe we can attain our loftiest desires.  If someone writes a book saying “I can get you those things”, it’s going to sell – no question.  People are going to believe it because they want to believe it.  Not to mention the fact that something in print carries an automatic air of authority.

    I’m obviously not alone in my reaction.  There are many books of this kind, all claiming the secret to success or the means to avail you of some malady or other.  In 2003, sales of self-improvement products reached $8.56 billion in all formats.  That’s in the US alone.  This industry is massive, which raises a very important question:

    Do self-help books work?  Do they deliver what they promise?

    (OK two questions)

    Unfortunately, this is pretty much impossible to say.  Do they work at what?  Each book makes a different claim.  The authors of individual books typically provide no support for their advice.  Sometimes, rarely, you’ll get references linking you to evidence behind the advice.  This usually happens because a psychologist has been studying an area for years and then decides to write a book about it (eg, The Luck Factor, Learned Optimism).  You don’t get people wanting to write a self-help book, but thinking “Wait!  Maybe I’d better test all this out first!”, and spending the next decade doing research.  They just write the book and people buy it.  

    “The overall impact of the self-help industry is unknown.”

    Buyers tend to be repeat customers too, and just like myself read several self-help books, which makes it even harder to measure any overall impact.  No studies have been done on the industry as a whole, and it’s impossible to know the impact it has.

    Some self-help critics (for example, Steve Salerno) try to use indirect evidence to make a case against self-help: things like increases in psychiatric drug use over the years.  The aim is to raise the question: why are these things so, if self-help books are having a positive impact on society?  This is thought provoking, but ultimately it’s impossible to link self-help to any other statistic without studying it directly.  It’s a (cleverly disguised) 100% complete guess.  

    Some self-help sub-fields have had attention in journals; mostly alternative therapies like homeopathy.  But the more general “self-improvement” variety of book is basically untested.  So we have to take a different approach to answer these questions, starting with another question…

    Is it possible for self-help books to work?

    Let’s start from the scratch: Is it possible for written advice to have a positive impact?  Obviously I think it is, or this website wouldn’t exist.  But to what extent is this true?

    It depends on the specific claim being made.  There are self-help books making big claims; the cure for depression, end to phobias, and remedies for all sorts of serious conditions.  For things like this, I would say no, it isn’t possible.  Or at least, it’s highly unlikely.  Even regular therapy sessions with trained and experienced professionals doesn’t get the results that some of these books claim.  

    There are many curable mental health issues, given the proper treatment.  However, a major factor in successful treatment is the relationship between the client and therapist.  Some studies even suggest this is more important than the style of therapy used.  In other words, the most important part of the treatment is exactly the part you miss in a book.

    “There’s no doubt written advice can be beneficial. There’s also no doubt it can be useless. How would you tell?”

    Whenever you see a big and unbelievable claim, be cautious.  Find out what the professionals in that area do, and what results they get for their clients.  If you see a book telling you it can get you millions from investments, look at what other investors do.  How much do professionals make?  Or the people they advise?  Don’t just look at the top 5% either!  If the book claims it can get you much more than the average that the pros get, ask yourself: why?  If someone who’s worked in the field for years gets a certain amount from investing, how could you get 20 times more from reading a book?  Is everyone really just missing out on this one vital piece of information?  It’d be unlikely, wouldn’t it?

    So larger claims you can safely ignore.  What about smaller claims, or books on general self-improvement, where the aim is just to take you up one step, rather than a whole flight of stairs in one leap?  Here there’s no doubt that written words can work – loads of studies are done by post or over the internet, and find positive results.  

    But that doesn’t help us much, because there’s also no doubt that written words can be useless, even detrimental.  And there isn’t a professional field to compare these claims against.

    Once again, we have been lead to another question…

    What is the quality of the self-help industry likely to be?

    Think about this:

    There are a LOT of self-help books out there.  Over 3000 new ones come out each year.  By the law of averages, there has to be some good ones, some bad ones, some average ones.  And because there are no entry requirements to write a self-help book – no credentials needed, no peer-review, no need to support advice with evidence, etc. – the variance in quality is likely to be quite large.  

    If quality isn’t controlled by an external body, then the only people who can control it are the buyers and sellers.  Either the authors employ some kind of quality control system, or the buyers discriminate when buying.  Let’s look at these:

    The authors – This is unlikely – I’ve already mentioned the lack of testing on the part of the authors.  Quality control just doesn’t seem to happen often.  Even simple backing ideas up with evidence doesn’t happen much.  Then there are examples of authors displaying unscrupulous practices in the creation and promotion of their work.  I won’t go into details of who and how, but the controversy is easy to find if you look for it.

    The buyers – Do buyers discriminate? This is hard to say.  It’s probably true to a point, but not to the point of having any effect on the industry overall.  Again there is no evidence, but I can’t imagine any conscious discrimination that could outweigh hype and mass-marketing.  Plus it’s easy to conceive a way that books that don’t produce the results they offer could do well; maybe they are just hope-inducing, with all the positive motivational statements in them, and that’s why people keep buying more books. 

    So it seems possible, even likely, that there are more bad self-help books than good ones.  But…

    Is that a problem?  It’s all just harmless fun isn’t it?

    Well, not really.  These aren’t cook books – they are not saying “put these ingredients in a pan, heat them up, and eat it”.  They are saying “this is how the world is, this is how you are, and this is how to live your life.”  If the author doesn’t have good reasons for saying things like this, they shouldn’t be saying them at all.  

    It’s unethical to use a position of authority to spread a certain model of the world, without sufficient evidence to back it up.  Your results in any particular area are only as good as your model; if your model’s wrong then your results will be bad.  When it comes to life in general, a bad model leads to bad decisions.  An author couldn’t know the accuracy of their model unless they test it.  Freedom of speech is  a great thing, but it doesn’t absolve responsibility for what you said!  

    I find it quite telling that few self-help books are based on huge research efforts.  In fact, you don’t need any idea of the research that has been done in an area!  That seems very strange.  If you’re an author writing about how some strange alternative therapy that develops, say, self-confidence, shouldn’t you at least be familiar with the science of that area?  Shouldn’t you address it, and present the reasons that your ideas are better?  Isn’t it irresponsible, arrogant, or negligent to simply ignore what’s already out there?  

    There are good and bad books.  If you can’t tell the difference, you’re in trouble – you’ll get swept along by hype and authority, and accept almost any information into your model of the world.  There needs to be a filter in place, before that information gets to your brain.  If you have a good filter, you’re potentially able to avoid the bad books, and even pull the one or two good paragraphs from them and ignore the rest.  

    If self-help authors are unwilling to control the quality of their products, it’s down to the readers to do it.  If Self-help buyers were all trained to evaluate arguments, and they all did research before buying, they would be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Weaker books would die off by natural selection, authors would be forced to up their game.  On the larger scale, this would be very hard, if not impossible to do.  On an individual level though, many readers would benefit from making their next purchase a book on critical thinking.  If you’re a self-help reader, seriously consider this.  It will give you a filter, and improve the purchases you make after that.

    Recommended Reading: