Prima Donna or Why The Higher Power Must Listen To Me

As I re-read the astonishingly good book on the new science of cause-and-effect – The Book of Why – a fascinating insight into a celebrated man is revealed.
 
Karl Pearson, disciple of Francis Galton, is considered to be one of the founders of the science of Statistics and the man who gave shape to the idea of correlation.  Writing about him in an obituary for the Royal Society in 1936, one of his assistants, George Udny Yule, said this (note that he tried to write this in as polite a language as possible):

Quote:  
The infection of his enthusiasm, it is true, was invaluable; but his dominance could be a disadvantage….This desire for domination, for everything to be just as he wanted it, comes out in other ways, notably the editing of Biometrika – surely the most personally edited journal that was ever published.
 
Those who left him and began to think for themselves were apt, as happened painfully in more instances than one, to find that after a divergence of opinion the maintenance of friendly relations became difficult, after express criticism impossible. 

Unquote
 
A micro-manager, who demanded dissent-free, unquestioning loyalty (are these related traits?).

 
I put the book down, for this – instantly – reminded me of two, no three, actually four people of my acquaintance.  Perhaps there are more I will recall in good time.  Yet, let me take two immediate examples, the first being an excellent wildlife scientist of international repute, who has done more for conserving India’s wildlife in the last thirty years than anyone we recall. 
 
He is also among the most unpopular cult figures in the field. 
 
Aggressive in the guise of ‘talking straight’, dismissive and strongly opinionated, the man first spawned a generation of fans, most of whom then broke away when the heat under his umbrella grew too hot to bear as they began to think for themselves, question and express – even mild – dissent.  He picked up fights – for the right reasons – with senior officers of the Forest Department, who were entirely incompetent to take him on scientifically and were driven by the imperative to show ‘performance’, which meant that they inflated success and suppressed bad news.  Yet, their egos needed molly-cuddling and gentle aggrandisement.  His did too!  The result was – and remains – meanness and conflict and his success has been through the stress and grind of this attrition.   
 
There’s more: young people would love to learn from him and therefore want to work in his team, but they are terrified of saying anything that would show them up as inexperienced, ignorant or both.  Or worse, what if they were seen as having independent thinking skills (fate worse than death, note).  I wonder about his early years, was he always this way?  Did he suffer humiliation and take it all too personally, when choosing a field outside his initial competence?  Or was it – in his case – a storied family of stalwarts that gave him the assurance to be, well, blunt and acidic in tone?
 

The second person is an architect, one I have known for years, a prima donna, with fandom in her circs, who believes in micro-managing the window dressing of homes she builds, because that is her signature and it must be perfect, just perfect, practicality be damned.  She is contemptuous of folks who wonder as they question (Ask me.  I was at the receiving end for quite a while) and disdainful of those who are slow – what can be worse than being slow?  (Answer: being fried in hell).  Her anxious team takes notes and scurries around like rabbits awaiting execution.  She differs from the wildlife scientist in her speed and impatience, but that is of notional interest.  The essentials are the same. 
 
Karl Pearson is hardly unique, as we can see. 
 
There is another person I would love to talk about, but will not.  What goes around, comes around…..

 
 
 
 
 
 

Grook - Those Who Know

Those who always
know what’s best
are
a universal pest.

- Piet Hein

We Are Like That Only

 What is common to the two sentences in this conversation? 
“Take an unemotional decision please.” 
“Ok.  I will order a chocolate ice-cream.  But only – and only - if you serve it piping hot (alongwith ginger please).”
 
Quick!  What’s common to these two sentences?
 
Well, for starters, this isn’t an excerpt from a real conversation, but let us imagine it was.  Do you have your answer?  What is common?
Ans: they are both impossible requests. 
(I bet you did not get that right.  I am always doing such things, grrrr.)

For years and years (and years) in the 20^th century, everyone who studied or pretended to know management or economics - or, even worse, both - deluded themselves into thinking that decision making should be ‘unemotional’ (whatever that is).  For much of this time, emotions were also seen as a sort of negative interfering, troublesome lunatic, which we should shred off, a kind of manufacturing defect in constructing homo sapiens.
 
Then, along came an academic, a super bright guy called Herbert Simon, who had done pioneering work in AI, political science and economics (and I am still not done – read the Wiki page on him for a full education).  Herbert-the-Stud said this:
 
Hence, in order to have anything like a complete theory of human rationality, we have to understand what role emotion plays in it.
-- Herbert Simon, 1983, Reason in Human Affairs
 
…and he got a Nobel Prize (not for saying this, but it sort of helped push the idea along, if you see what I mean).
 
Negotiation is a series of judgements and decisions: you decide whether to work or cooperate or agree with someone or not and you make a judgement at various points of the negotiation on what you are getting out of it – your ‘win’, so to speak – and what the other person is likely to be getting out of it too. 

A team (Jennifer Lerner et al) studied all the literature of the last fifty years and wrote up an insightful piece in the Annual Review of Psychology.  On page 1 – right upfront - here is what they say:
The research reveals that emotions constitute powerful, pervasive, and predictable drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices.
 
In the next couple of writeups in the Winfluence Blog, we will understand these emotions more….
 
ps: take an unemotional decision to continue reading the next post, ok?

Was it the coin that flipped, or you?

 I am offering you the following two options, pick one.
Choose either
a)     A 50% chance of winning ten lakhs of rupees, or
b)     One lakh fifty thousand rupees, cash down for you (i.e., it is a certainty).
 
(well, you have a third choice, which is to tell me to fly a kite, while you chill and refuse to play this.  But, heck, you have nothing to lose, no upfront fee.)
 
Have you chosen?
The 50% option?
Or the cert of 1.5 lakhs?
 
Do play along with me for a minute. 
Assume that you chose the 50% option.
I flip the coin and you call heads or tails.  You lose.  Get nothing.
 
Or assume that you chose the cert of cash in your pocket (1.5 lakhs).  I still flip the coin, while you call heads or tails – this is of academic interest now, for if you win, you will get nothing. 
You win.  You have just let go of 10 lakhs. 
 

What you will experience (now, don't deny it!) is regret at having chosen wrongly, despite much of this being outside our control.  Here is what we know: regret is that sinking feeling......., accompanied by more feelings (as if, the sinking one wasn't enough, grrrr) -

a) one should have known better

b) I am seriously dumb (kick, kick)

c) I must correct this (which often leads to more regret!)

d) I should have done something else 

There's no place like the financial markets to experience regret aversion.  Here is an example!

The hindsight bias is a close cousin of regret and is best defined by Investopedia:

Hindsight bias is a psychological phenomenon that allows people to convince themselves after an event that they accurately predicted it before it happened. This can lead people to conclude that they can accurately predict other events. Hindsight bias is studied in behavioural economics because it is a common failing of individual investors.

So, is there anything we can do about it?

Well, it is a palliative approach really, one that eases the pain, because regret is painful.  The best thing we can do,  Dan Kanhemann, the Boss (and the author of Thinking Fast and Slow), tells us, is to anticipate it, to expect us to feel that way later.     What does this mean?

 

For example: decisions that depart from what could be called the default choice produce the most regret.  People expect to feel more regret when an outcome is produced by action than when the very same outcome is produced by inaction.  So, if it is your standard practice to put all your savings in fixed deposits, but you chose, last year, to invest in a debt scheme of a mutual fund that is now down – way, way down – you will kick yourself harder (never mind if the fund is expected to bounce back in future). 

Lesson:  if you are going to deviate from the default choice in taking a decision, expect higher regret and therefore do more homework, with possibly a longer time period in mind.  Sometimes, it makes sense to ignore the immediate noise that triggers regret. 

Kahneman suggests that you can also take measures that will protect you against regret.  If you remember when things go badly that you considered the possibility of regret carefully before deciding, you may experience less of it.  His personal strategy to avoid regret coming together with hindsight (that is another bias!) is to either be

a)      thorough or

b)      completely casual, when making a decision with consequences.

That way you will not look back and say “I almost made a better choice.”