Co-working: a Cultural Approach

I recently came across an article describing the journey former anthropologist Joe Henrich took that shook the field of social science like an earthquake. Like many prominent social scientists’, my mind was blown. 

There is a psychological game known as the Ultimatum Game. One person is given an amount of money and must decide how much of that they will give to another person. The other person can accept the offer or reject it, which causes both the receiver and the donor to walk away with nothing. Westerners typically give fair amounts and reject unfair amounts. This experiment has been replicated so frequently that it has become the basis for many behavioral understandings regarding fairness. 

But when Henrich played Ultimatum with the Machiguenga people of the Amazon basin, he found drastically different results. They gave unfair offers to the recipients, but the recipients almost never rejected them. In different cultures, Henrich found that donors offered upwards of 60% of the money, only to be rejected by the recipients. After realizing there were drastic differences in cultural behavior, Henrich looked at the demographil pool of subjects conducted in many social science experiments. 

It turns out that 96% of psychological test subjects, used to analyze human behavior, came from just a few western countries making up 12% of the population.

In western culture, our eyes presumably make (B) appear longer because we imagine these lines in the context of a home, where depth makes (B) look longer. For cultures that don't spend as much time in doors, this difference is far less pronounced. 

This led Henrich to believe that though we may understand how parts of the mind work, those understandings will be relatively superficial if our rich cultural influences are not accounted for. After I contemplated the magnitude of this revelation in social science, my thoughts turned to my internship with the New Leaf Initiative.

Collaborative working spaces, Impact Hubs, and varieties of communal environments intentionally designed to bring different types of people together—like New Leaf—are exploding throughout America, in number and popularity. Examining co-working through the same cultural lens Henrich pronounced helps to explain this. 

The majority of co-working hubs exist within western culture. 

Western civilization is very individualized, meaning we act on behalf of what is best for the individual. This is not to say we’re selfish (though some of us certainly are), but we are the most likely to promote ourselves over group advancement. Similarly, we try focus on concepts, identifying specifically their characteristics instead of analyzing them in the context of their surroundings. Other cultures seem to emphasize collectivist culture, which is everything an individualistic culture is not: working for the success of the group over the success of the individual, seeing everything in a broader context. There is nothing inherently wrong with either of these cultures, but they do play a role on our actions and behavior.

With our individualistic culture in mind, I am not surprised that groups like New Leaf are materializing rapidly. Our culture pushes away from large-scale collaboration, focusing typically on self-improvement, while other cultures naturally incorporate elements of co-working into their lives. Except there, it’s just called working. 

And applying this concept to co-working makes sense—the concept of co-working is essentially a large social experiment to see if people and communities will work better, together. 

Unfortunately, our western motivation for co-working might be just a different means to further our personal goals—that’s not too far-fetched for an individualistic society jumping into co-working with such enthusiasm. And if that is the case, then I believe that we need these co-working environments even more than we know, to strengthen the values that lead us to appreciate selflessness and community. One culture may not be better than the other, but possessing an understanding and appreciation for both can provide a unique, knowledgeable perspective that would benefit everyone. 

For whatever reason, co-working is exploding here. So like New Leaf says, let’s “work better, together;” we may discover another piece of humanity in the process.

**Also published on New Leaf Initiative's Website: http://newleafinitiative.org/blog/**

Understanding our Perceptions

“It’s what you make of it that counts.” I’m sure we’ve heard this expression so many times in regards to colleges, experiences, and other choice events that may not always go our way. Even though this cliche seems like a cop-out for someone who doesn’t know how to properly console you, there is a lot of truth behind it. Our perceptions control how we appreciate (or don’t) our lives.

Daniel Kahneman, the founder of behavioral economics, illustrated this concept in a beautifully stunning manner: by tracking the pain in colonoscopy patients. He measured both the patients’ reported pain as the procedure occurred and their reported pain after the procedure has ended. He found that people perceived worse experiences when their colonoscopy ended on a high spike of pain, even if they had had relatively no pain up until then. Kahneman tried on more thing with this experiment, too. After that big spike of pain where the procedure would normally have ended, Kahneman had the doctors extend the colonoscopy’s duration. This extended time added just small levels of pain. So what happened?

When the operation was over, the patients perceived the extended colonoscopy as a less painful experience than the colonoscopy ending in a pain spike, even though they received that  pain spike and additional pain. The only difference was that the patients who ended with the small amounts of pain remember it ending relatively painlessly, so their perceptions were drastically different from those who received overall less painful procedures. This tells us that our perception of the world around us has powerful implications regarding how we react, consciously and subconsciously, to the events in our lives.

College life also illustrates the power of perceptions well. Though the tier of a college can determine the quality of an education you receive, most of the learning and experiences you will have will by dictated by how you view your college. If you believe you will have a good time and can make the best of your college experience, then you will seek out the experiences and educational opportunities that mean the most to you and have an amazing, immersive time. If, however, you go into a college thinking, “man, this wasn’t even in my top three choices, this is going to suck!”...well, it might suck. Not because of the college though, because of your attitude towards it.*

Even the types of phrasings in popular expressions, like “coming out of the closet,” contain subtle hints as to how society perceives certain kinds of action. Though coming out is thankfully more celebrated and acceptable than it previously was, the phrase “coming out” still bothers me. Coming out of a closet (or I guess anything else) sounds like something one would be ashamed to do—they must have gone to the closet to hide their shame from the people enjoying life outside. Even though we may not realize it, phrasings like the shameful “coming out” impart negative connotations on those who do it and our attitude towards homosexuality. If we wanted to empower those who are publicly announcing their orientation, as we should, we need to use an expression that does not carry negative connotations. Maybe our new word for that should be “sharing.” Yeah Johnny? He shared with me about two months ago. Sharing is something that is done on an even field—one person has information that they willingly choose to divulge with another. “Coming out” puts the person who is already vulnerable on a psychologically lower level than the rest of society even before they begin that often arduous process.

It doesn’t seem like it, but our perceptions play a bigger role in our lives than we realize. They shape our views of important issues and can dictate our beliefs. They can be easily manipulated, however, for good and for bad. I want to impart to you the power that perceptions play in our daily lives, and get you to think about how you once perceived something big in your life—and if you could have viewed for better or for worse.

______________

*I think this perception applies mainly to freshman who were incessantly told throughout high school that they need to attend the best schools, get the best degree, etc. I think that as people progress through college, they start to see how it is an all-around great opportunity regardless of where they went. I talked about this in a previous post: http://moderatelyunbiased.blogspot.com/2013/11/more-thoughts-on-education-our-culture.html

The Power of Shamelessness

You are about to give the most important speech of your life but you’re a wreck: you’re sweating, your hands are trembling, and your mouth is drier than a ball of cotton. You remember a good public-speaking tip you once heard: picture the audience in their underwear. You try it, and the speech goes…actually, I have no idea how it goes. I have never tried that approach with public speaking. What I instead rely on in situations like those is my shamelessness.

Shamelessness is an underrated tool in our personal arsenal. It isn’t something you do, it’s how you respond to your and others’ actions. For me, it is mainly brushing off the embarrassment I inevitably incur from freely expressing myself.

I’ve found that a big part of shamelessness is the ability to laugh at yourself after you’ve done something that, well, deserves it (like me walking into a tree branch the other day while I wasn’t texting…I’m still not entirely sure how that happened). Once you make fun of yourself, the stage is set—no one else can bring you down because you’ve already done that. When people laugh at themselves, they become more relatable in the eyes of others. Many comedians are successful because they know how to leverage this concept. Things happen to us all the time, dumb things that we are embarrassed about. But when we hear people sharing their own embarrassments, we relate to them.

I think this is a major reason why we also tend to laugh at the sufferings of others: it is an inconspicuous way to mask our own. With the attention focused on someone else, we aren’t reminded of the things that we would otherwise be shameful of.

I should mention that shamelessness alone does not grant these powers. It takes confidence to laugh at yourself, do stand-up, or speak in public. But most of society already understands the benefits of confidence. What I don’t think society knows is the potential of shamelessness. Confidence and shamelessness work together to empower people to try things they’ve never done before. You could be confident and share an idea you think is good, but then if people react badly to it and you are prone to shame, you could lose that confidence and become scared to offer your ideas or suggestions. If, however, you are less shameful, you could take that bad idea in stride, recognize that not every idea you put forth will be perfect, and move on.

So after considering our original scenario, I don’t think the best way to get over the fear of public speaking is to imagine everyone else in their underwear; I think the best way is for you to be in your underwear. If you can keep going after that, there won’t be a thing you can’t do: you’ve transformed a terrifying atmosphere into a casual, one where you can speak freely without worrying about messing up…it’s really strange how badly I want to try this at some point in my life.

So recognize that not all of your ideas and actions will be considered normal. It is likely that you’ll do or say something stupid that made more sense in your head. But when this happens, laugh at yourself! Embrace shame, that natural human feeling, and transcend it. It may surprise you how far you can go.

___________

And in reference to my initial point, is this really what you want to imagine?

More Thoughts on Education: Our Culture of Comparison

Two weeks ago I wrote about the potential of implementing flipped learning-style classroom models. While flipped learning, and especially Khan Academy’s approach, is drastically better than normal educational methods, there is another problem in our educational culture that may be even greater than than pitfalls of traditional teaching: the attitudes towards testing.

Testing has obvious benefits; it’s important to measure how good students are at something. With that information, we can target what students know and what needs to improve. The problem is that our attitude towards testing breeds comparison rather than emphasizing improvement. Teachers’ salaries are increasingly being determined by how well kids perform, which was the cause of the Chicago teachers’ strike. Students become competitive and care more about their grades rather than what they learn from the class. Especially for standardized testing, the need for comparison puts more emphasis on rote memorization and template completion than on the intellectual venture that is learning.

Testing should focus on improvement. Kids are bound to fail at things, but our scholastic culture leads those kids to believe that their failure is a sign that they are not smart enough for school. They learned at a young age that failure is not an option, and if they cannot get themselves out of a rut, they can ultimately become disinterested in school altogether. We need to encourage a culture where failure is acceptable because otherwise we will not be prepared for it when it will inevitably occur.

We’ve created a culture of comparison where students must not only pass their classes, but do so with flying colors. They face expectations from their peers, parents, teachers, and just about everyone else. This doesn’t prepare people for college and the real world. We aren’t teaching kids what it’s like to fail, and that’s a really important experience to go through. Think about how some college denials affect kids who’ve never experienced failure before. At least 25% of Harvard applicants with a 2400 SAT get rejected, and that was in 2007. The numbers of rejected 2400s have gone up drastically since then. This shows more than anything that the real world takes a dynamic, multi-dimensional approach in evaluating the capabilities and performances of students. Kids are not going to be able to cope with this sort of rejection because our culture teaches instills unhealthy values.

In this culture of comparison, we are punishing kids for failing when failing is how you learn. This is related to many things I’ve heard about innovation recently.

To foster an atmosphere conducive to innovation (which people are going crazy about these days), we should be encouraging fast failures. How quickly can you fail, pick yourself up, and fail again? If you keep on trying, one of those failures just might bring success. It is in our continued failures that we learn about ourselves and the world around us, why we failed and what we can do to prevent it from occurring again.

The other day I heard of a journalist who hung up every rejection letter he’d received from the companies he applied to. He used that wall as motivation and, because he never lost sight of his dream, eventually found employment.

I’m not sure how to tackle this problem—eliminating standardized testing and weighting students’ improvement over their numerical grades seems like a good start. I think an amazing way for students to learn would revolve around a lenient curriculum the students create for themselves. This way, they’re passionate about the material they’re learning and they wouldn’t have to worry about “performing to the grade;” they could express themselves and find out what they truly want to do.

Even if that idea is utopian, one thing’s for sure: students will not be prepared for their lives if they are bred in our unhealthy culture of comparison.

The Future of Education

In 1991, Harvard professor Eric Mazur was trying to find a better way to teach his students physics. He was often unable to explain things to his students because he possessed such a mastery of the material that he couldn’t understand where and how students were misinterpreting it. Eric realized that other students who had a stronger grasp of the material could help those struggling students because they better understood what they were thinking. Eric soon came to believe that the time spent lecturing his students would be better spent in peer discussion. He changed his entire teaching model: his students would read the material before coming to class and they would spend their class time reviewing concepts they didn’t grasp with peers and doing practice problems to solidify their knowledge. What Eric named Peer Review was one of the first modern models of what is now known as “flipped learning.”

In typical classrooms, children are (A) bored because they grasped the information quickly and have to sit through the teacher reviewing it, (B) learning the information at the same speed the teacher teaches it—what school systems hope for—or (C) falling behind because the teacher is moving too fast. I have been in each of those situations more than once, as I’m sure many people have also been. In this normal teaching style, students are taught the material at a pace that satisfies the courses’ time requirement, not the learning needs of the individual students. If a student doesn’t understand the concepts by the end of class, he must then complete the homework, a more difficult test of the conceptual knowledge which he does yet understand, all on his own. Is the educational environment we want our children to be raised in?

The future of education is constantly discussed, but what do we have to show for it? Is the future just high-tech gadgets, or should we change the way students learn. I believe that flipped learning is the future of education. It offers the students the opportunity to view the material as many times as they need to understand it; they can skip ahead or go at a slower pace until they get it. If they still don’t comprehend it, they have the entire next day of class to receive help from classmates who did understand it or the teacher. And this is just with books—technology can truly revolutionize the way children learn and are taught. In fact, it's happening now.

The Khan Academy is a website created for students and educators. It has over 3,000 videos offering lectures in subjects from advanced physics to 3rd-grade math. But for mathematics, the subject for which Khan Academy was initially created, it is so much more than just a lecture library. Khan Academy prompts quizzes after every mathematical concept taught. Students must get 10 problems on a certain topic correct before they can advance to the next. To measure students’ progress, Khan Academy has a teacher interface designed for teachers: teachers can view the individual quizzes students take and see which concepts they’re struggling on, at what point in time they completed different benchmarks, and more individualized information. This allows the teacher to come to a student knowing exactly what they’re struggling with. 

Khan academy has taken education to a personal level and children and educators love it; kids are talking about math in the hallways and they’re excited to go home and do work. And teachers won't lose jobs over this new type of learning. As the embedded video shows, the teacher is still essential; their method of teaching just changes from static to dynamic. Getting kids involved in programs like these could eliminate the kids who just assume they’re “bad at school.” The personalized learning will allow a much higher percentage of students to understand the material; students will learn the material better, and more importantly, gain confidence in their abilities. Adopting a flipped learning model is so simple, too--the professors wouldn't have to do much differently and they already possess the materials to make it happen. It is important to note, however, that the flipped learning approach doesn’t apply to every class model, nor should it be a substitute for all types of learning; it applies best to lecture-based classes where the teacher is writing equations on a board or going through a powerpoint for students to copy down.

Though some college classes are starting to be taught with a flipped model in mind, many still aren’t. Worse yet, almost no classes in levels of lower education are taught this way. Why is this? Flipped learning is of course a new concept, so it’s possible many just do not know about it (I didn’t until recently). But there’s a bigger reason: society is hesitant to change the status quo. When it comes to something as precious as our children, why change what has been working for ages? There is always a risk in change, that is true. But change consistently occurs because the potential results are too great to pass up. In schools, every effort should be given to nest learning at the core of students’ interests. We don’t want to wait for those who change the world, we want to shape them.

My Hope for Iran: Hassan Rouhani

I picked up a copy of the New York Times on my way to lunch and looked at the front page. My heart started racing after reading a headline: Iran’s Leaders Signal Effort at New Thaw.

Iran has been antagonistic with the west ever since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the following hostage crisis. Iran was becoming more amiable around the second millennium, but soon reverted to its 1979 self. Iran’s refusal to disclose information about its nuclear program and proliferation of anti-western sentiment has pushed them further away in the eyes of our people and our government. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) were leaders responsible for the direction Iran has recently taken.

Yet reading today's New York Times article gave me hope that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Recently-elected Iranian president Hassan Rouhani is promising the change that can improve and fortify relations between Iran and the US: he is emphasizing flexibility in negotiations, releasing political prisoners, and promising that Iran will never seek nuclear weapons. Already working on the reforms he promised during his campaign, Hassan Rouhani seems like he truly wishes to repair and strengthen Iran's ties with western nations. Even the anti-western Supreme Leader (who is the true ruler of Iran and much more powerful than any president could ever be) is endorsing his plan.1

Rouhani at a press conference before his inauguration.

So why am I so happy about this? I am happy that America may reconcile with one of its biggest adversaries, yes. But I’m excited for the people of Iran and the US. 

Though some Iranians are anti-western fanatics who believe nothing but the creed the revolution was founded upon, many Iranians understand that the West, and in particular the US, is comprised of good people. It’s the US government the Iranians don’t like, not the people. Unfortunately, we Americans do not view Iran and Iranians the same way. Believing that every Iranian imitates the ideals their government displays, many Americans develop an internal mistrust or dislike of Iranians that is rooted to our core.

When many US citizens hear about Iran, they are only capable of seeing the image of the enemy.  We hear speculation about Iran’s ongoing nuclear program and fear for the worst. We see an American flag-burning on TV so we denounce them terrorists. These scenarios are real in Iran, yes, but it is imperative to realize that they are not representative of all Iranians. It’s representative of a tiny minority, and Americans judge nations like Iran off of those small moments that receive disproportionally large media attention.2 What if Iranians saw the Westboro Baptist Church protesting the Sandy Hook vigil? Iranians would conclude that Americans believed that those murdered kids got what they deserved.3 Those scenarios are not at all representative of our beliefs or attitudes, but they are used as a foundation for judgment and condemnation.

In regards to Iran’s nuclear program, it is likely that it was initiated for harmful purposes. But the same way that it wasn’t individual Americans’ faults that we sent troops into Afghanistan or Iraq, it is not Iranians’ fault they have that program—Iranian citizens do not even know how developed it is because the government keeps that information classified. I’ve studied the Iranian political scene; the institutions are not democratic and citizens have much less influence than we do over policy and policymakers. It’s not the citizens’ fault, and we must recognize that to break the stereotype surrounding Iranians like a dense smog.

I think I have these viewpoints and am particularly interested in Iran because two of my best friends are Iranian. I became friends with them before I knew too much about Iranian-US relations, but I don’t think it would have mattered. Becoming friends with someone who differs from us illuminates the humane, relatable side they had all along—the side often ignored when minorities or potential enemies are depicted. I was fortunate to have been exposed to diverse people from a young age. Sure, their skin color and religion and culture are different, but they have the same feelings, sense of humour, and basic wants we all have. We cannot continue to stereotype and condemn a people because their government follows policies we don’t agree with. It is not fair to them and to ourselves.

This is why I’m so happy that Hassan Rouhani is bringing Iran closer to the US. Though ideally we should appreciate the Iranian people for who they are, many Americans are blinded by the stereotypes they're consistently exposed to. But if Hassan continues to bring Iran closer to us, we see Iranians up close and recognize that they are no different from us. With increased exposure to them, the attitudes once held will vanish to but a whisper of our biased past. A world full of growth and friends is out there. We just need to let ourselves see it.

__________________
1. There is a good chance this is just because the sanctions have crippled Iran’s oil income.
2. So does the media control our perception of the world around us? Another time, passion blog.
3. If you’re curious why the Westboro Baptist Church protested the vigil, it’s because they believed the murderer’s acts were judgement from God —judgement we deserve for allowing gays and lesbians to live in our society (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/westboro-baptist-church-picket-connecticut-school-shooting_n_2312186.html).

Riddle Me This: The Challenge of a Riddle

Why are riddles and brain teasers popular in our culture? What do people get out of hearing confusing, contrived scenarios that sort of make sense in the end? Are they just fun, or is there something more at play? I was thinking about these questions a while back and drew some conclusions that might just make sense.

To start with, humans are naturally competitive. We have sports teams, business, and even games to illustrate this (you could argue that games are just entertainment, but doesn’t some of that entertainment derive from winning and losing?). So as competitive beings, when someone comes up to us and says “I have a riddle,” what we’re essentially hearing is, “I have some knowledge that you don’t, but I’m going to test you to see if you can figure it out.” The riddle is interpreted as a challenge and we must prove ourselves to the riddler by completing that challenge.

After initially conceiving this idea, I asked my brother, Nick, if he wanted to hear “something confusing that sort of makes sense.” He said, “how long?” I responded, “never mind, do you want to hear a riddle?” He instantly said yes. This made sense to me: why should Nick have wasted his time hearing something confusing that sort of makes sense? There was no potential benefit for him, no positive incentive. But when I instead offered him a riddle, the incentive appeared: he could prove to himself and to me that he possessed the same knowledge I did. The challenge had been accepted.

Unfortunately for Nick, I did this for the sake of the experiment and thus had no riddle or confusing tale prepared for him. But wait, isn’t a riddle “something confusing that sort of makes sense?” That’s exactly what a riddle is. Changing the phrasing of something that had no personal benefit to a riddle was all it took for Nick to go from an unenthused “how long” to an instantaneous “yes.” His inherent competitiveness took over and he eagerly awaited the riddle.

On TV shows and in movies this hidden aspect is not only understood but made obvious. Many scenes involve heroes unable to advance unless they can solve a riddle. Whether it’s simple wordplay or the thing with the twin brothers (one always lies, the other tells the truth) the riddle determines whether or not the hero is worthy of passing. In viewing these scenes, we assign the “challenge” of the riddle only to the specific cinematic scenario, but in reality a riddle’s challenge grips us more often than we realize.

I’m going to show you one of my favorite “riddles.” Below there’s a white sheet of paper with a dot in the middle.

What is it?

Give up?

It's a polar bear blinking in a blizzard, of course!

Now what do you feel? You’re probably thinking that that was pretty dumb and there’s no way anyone could have guessed that correctly. If someone tells a riddle or presents a problem with a bad or unsatisfactory solution, we’re likely to call them out. By having us hear the answer (and thus admit defeat) we have given up the challenge. So when we learn that the challenge didn’t make sense or was un-aswerable, we want to redeem that moment of intellectual inferiority by calling out the riddler and discrediting their entire problem. This also explains why we don't readily welcome hints. A hint provides assistance, so if we solve the riddle with a hint then we don't feel as if we truly match up to the riddler.

So what is my point here? Should we stop telling riddles altogether? No, they’re good fun and can be quite clever. I’m not suggesting abandoning the competition. I’m merely offering up why we are interested in them. They provide us competitive humans with a little challenge, a little brain exercise that measures and compares our abilities. The Riddler wasn’t a good Batman villain just because he threatened to kill someone; he was a good villain because he’d keep you entertained with a riddle while threatening to kill someone. That’s probably taking the competitiveness aspect too far, but at least now we know why he was so entertaining.

________________

Also, watch Batman face off against the Riddler in this collegehumour video!