Category: Psychology

Why Diversity Pays – Diverse groups tend to make more sensible decisions

Tim Harford has an interesting article where he has collected together data from various sources indicating that groups that carve out space for different perspectives tend to make more sensible decisions.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

In the Journal of Financial Economics, Renée Adams and Daniel Ferreira found that female directors seemed to provide better oversight, and to inspire their male colleagues to do likewise. In the Financial Review, David Carter, Betty Simkins and W Gary Simpson found a correlation between firm value and diversity on the board.

and, according to a study, of trades by female company directors, that looked at tens of thousands of trades in UK companies from 1994 to 2006,

fund managers should be paying more attention to what female directors do.

Why? Because they make more money when they buy shares. On a medium-term timescale, from three months to a year, their trades outperform those of their male counterparts.

Read the full article

To appreciate or not to appreciate kids/students

Recently, a friend of mine asked me this question:

In my last few interactions with freshers, I have found some to be really good. Although a lot of my conversations with freshers covers encouragement and motivational phrases, I also appreciate (from my heart) good work when I see it, good thoughts as soon as I hear it.

But I have realized that appreciation gets to their head, and they just stop delivering immediately. A day or 2 from the appreciation they just stop.

I was talking to one of my friends and he said something that surprised me. He said, dont appreciate in lots, infact do it in phases. Club appreciation with some criticism/feedback. Freshers have use this a way of feeling really good and actually start thinking that they will get 50L jobs starting tomorrow.

Throw some light on this. I am looking for some wisdom here.

I don’t really have enough expertise in this area, so I did not really venture an opinion.

However, I do remember reading about some research in the area of kids’ motivation, which essentially said this:

Do not praise the achievement. Praise the effort.

Here are more details from an New Yorker Magazine article about experiments conducted by psychologist Carol Dweck and her team:

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

These days, I am skeptical of these psychological studies since they study some tiny aspect of psychological theory in isolation, and there is no guarantee that any of this really works in practice. As someone said, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.

But that article does have a lot of interesting insights to chew up.

In any case, those who have some experience in this area (those with grown up kids, or those with some sort of a teaching background, or any other relevant experience), can you weigh in on this topic. What do you think?

(You should also check out the comments on this topic on my Facebook page)

Reasons for suicide: “I am alone” “I am a burden” “I am not afraid to die”

A long but interesting article on why the rate of suicide is increasing all over the world. My friend who is a psychiatrist called it “well written, with some really good insights”, so I assume that the points made in the article are worth keeping in mind.

Here are some of the more intriguing points:

Throughout the developed world, for example, self-harm is now the leading cause of death for people 15 to 49, surpassing all cancers and heart disease.

and

In 2010 worldwide deaths from suicide outnumbered deaths from war (17,670), natural disasters (196,018), and murder (456,268)

and

And this assumes we can even rely on the official data. Many researchers believe it’s a dramatic undercount, a function of fewer autopsies and more deaths by poison and pills, where intention is hard to detect.

And none of this is easy to explain:

If four out of five suicide attempts are by women, why are four out of five suicides by men? If big cities and beautiful architecture are magnets for suicide, why are natural wonders and public parks as well? Prostitutes, athletes, and bulimics have an above-average risk for suicide, but what else do they have in common? Why are African-American people relatively safe? And twins?

So Thomas Joiner is now trying to come up with a theory of suicide, which attempts to explain why people commit suicide. According to him, people will die by suicide when they have a desire for suicide and the ability to kill themselves. And the desire to die comes from loneliness (“I am alone”) and a perceived burdensomeness (“I am a burden”).

He calls the first “low belonging,” and it’s the most intuitive idea in his formula. Joiner argues that “the desire to die” begins with loneliness, a thwarted need for inclusion and connection. That explains why suicide rates rise by a third on the continuum from married to never been married. It also accords with the fact that divorced people suffer the greatest suicide risk, while twins have reduced risk and mothers of small children have close to the lowest risk. A mother of six has six times the protection of her childless counterpart, according to one study. She may die of work and worry, but not of self-harm.

And if you think that having lots of friends on Facebook helps, think again:

But Facebook doesn’t help. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are,” John Cacioppo, a professor at the University of Chicago and the world’s foremost expert on loneliness, told Marche. The opposite is also true: more face time, less loneliness.

The other condition for the desire to die is the feeling that you are a burden on your friends/family/others.

This explains why suicides rise with unemployment, and also with the number of days a person has been on bed rest. Just the experience of needing and receiving help from friends—rather than doing for oneself and others—can make a person pine for death. We’re a gregarious species, but also a gallant one, so fond of playing the savior that we’d rather die than switch roles with the saved. In this way suicide isn’t the ultimate act of selfishness or a bid for revenge, two of the more common cultural barbs. It’s closer to mistaken heroism.

The third condition is less intuitive. The “ability to kill yourself” really has to do with the fact that it’s hard to kill yourself. Joiner calls this condition “fearlessness.”

In this way, suicide isn’t about cowardice. It’s not painless or easy, like pulling the fire alarm to get out of math class. It takes “a kind of courage,” says Joiner, “a fearless endurance” that’s not laudable, but certainly not weak or impulsive. On the contrary, he says, suicide takes a slow habituation to pain, a numbness to violence. He points to that heightened suicide risk shared by athletes, doctors, prostitutes, and bulimics, among others—anybody with a history of tamping down the body’s instinct to scream, which goes a long way to unlocking the riddle of military suicides.

For the population at large, it might seem mildly reassuring at first. After all, most of us don’t fall into these categories. But Joiner believes there may be a side door to fearlessness: exposure to violence in media. Remember this debate? Well, it’s basically over. “The strength of the association between media violence and aggressive behavior,” the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded in 2009, “is greater than the association between calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, and condom nonuse and sexually acquired HIV infection, and is nearly as strong as the association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.”

So, here is my non-expert (possibly flawed(?)) conclusion: what could help with reducing suicidal tendencies and depression? Try to have more friends/family – the kind you meet in person regularly. This will not help when you’re already depressed; so you need to start now. And help other people – the more you help others, the more you’re helping yourself. And try to stay away from violence and pain in media and in real life.

Read the full article. (You can skim over the early parts which are focused on proving that the incidence of suicide is increasing, and go to the more interesting parts later on which give Thomas Joiner’s theory of why people commit suicide.)

Note: In the comments, Sandeep Gautam points out that Joiner’s theory seems to be more targeted towards developed nations, and does not account for the extreme financial hardships in developing countries which can drive people to suicide. He has a bunch of other interesting points to make. Read the full comment below.

And, by the way, if you’re in India and feeling emotionally distressed, or suicidal, and can’t think of anyone to share this with, call the Connecting India helpline at +91 9922001122, or 18002094353 (Toll-free). Or if you know someone else who is in this situation, give them this information. See Connecting India website for more details.