Posts Tagged ‘research’
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Following the flying pigs
I had a follow-up to my post on Managing in Africa.
My curiosity about the fate of warthogs that got in the way of a jet taking-off at Harare International Airport received some dry feedback. Apparently, there were no pigs. The plane ‘just’ lost its landing gear.
The pilot should obviously be congratulated for bringing the aircraft to a safe stop with no injuries. The media should be following up the safety of that make of aircraft!
But pigs at airports that turned out to be flying pigs . . .
A funny story that teaches us something about judging the accuracy of media reports
I was slow to detect BS. That got me thinking.
- I did notice that story was unfinished. No one told us what happened to the pigs ~ or congratulated the pilot.
- This is another example of how old media are only too willing to report the accounts of powers-that-be, even when they are in Zimbabwe.
- This is another example of how old media are only too willing to regurgitate each others “news” without checking for themselves.
And I have lost my instincts for the truth of stories coming out of Zimbabwe. I have been away too long.
We all judge stories by their narrative form and an essential player in every narrative is ourselves When we are not part of the story, we will have difficult spotting inaccuracies.
Third parties are not necessarily good observers
Good accounts always have many perspectives. Perhaps the first checks on any story is
- Who said it?
- Who repeated it?
- Who was left out?
And above all, follow the money!
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- Managing in Africa: We may have wild animals but we write concisely. We have a to-the-point culture. (flowingmotion.wordpress.com)
- Plane hits pig on runway and passengers panic (gadling.com)
- Managing in Africa: We may have wild animals but we write concisely. We have a to-the-point culture. (liveactivecultures.net)
- Plane hits warthog on runway (guardian.co.uk)
- Air Zimbabwe plane smashes into wild pigs (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
It’s a good thing they don’t know
Today I had glass of warm water and a few drops of lemon juice for breakfast to allow the medics to do a fasting blood test. A fasting blood test helps them get ‘reliable’ readings for something for other. Happy in my ignorance.
We spend most of our waking hours in ignorance of what we are doing or why – happy to let someone else decide.
So, for those of us who have taken it upon ourselves to teach, we find ourselves in a daft situation. We can be annoyed when the knowledge of our profession is not taken seriously. We are seriously annoyed when the professionals in our field don’t know the basics.
And none of us really know
To talk glibly of “evidence-based practice” is really rather irritating. We boil water for our glass of warm water, in many countries in the world to kill bugs. But let’s face it. Many bugs survive boiling water. Some thrive in concentrated sulfuric acid. What we mean is that of the things we know how to do and can do in our kitchen, boiling water is pretty useful at killing some bugs that kill us. A very northern hemisphere idea, btw. It’s just as good to put your water in a clear bottle and leave it in the sun. But of course, there is not to much sun in the UK. It works fine in hotter climes. Do you get my drift?
We need to communicate in terms that can be understood
All our knowledge is based on custom and folk-lore and we are not exempt. To pass on knowledge to people who are not experts in our field in language and practice they can relate to is not a disgrace. It is a professional necessity. They don’t want to know the ins and the outs. They want to know what to do. They are leaving uswith the responsibility for the result.
It is a disgrace not to know the basics
But what a disgrace it is to not know the basics. When we start to believe that boiling water kills bugs rather than some bugs do not survive boiling water, then we perhaps should have our license take away.
Knowing the basics leads to creativity
It is knowing the basics that helps us think of new solutions.
Imagine if I were on the proverbial desert island, wouldn’t it be better to have the idea in my head that I must get rid of bugs in the water that might kill me. I am abundant in my ignorance. There are so many bugs that can kill me and fair handful that scientists don’t even know about yet. Therefore, the question is not what is the solution but what are the many ways I can ‘purify’ [another misleading idea] the water. And the right action is to do what I can and begin as General Colin Powell says, when I have a 40-60% chance of being right.
Research-based practice or more snake-oil?
So don’t talk glibly of research-based practice. You are trying to wave a spell in the air. Actually, you are trying to get me to pay you more money.
Show me your protocols. And make sure
a. They are intelligible to me
b. I don’t know more than you
Otherwise, we might just chase you out of town. We won’t call you a witch, because that is still illegal in UK, but we won’t allow you near our food. Get your own.
Show me your protocols – in language and experiences I can understand and where I can see the goal and the basic idea.
Ned’s challenge
Ned has solved my dilemma about what to write about this weekend. Commenting on my post on Hope, he asks:
How do positive psychologists quantify this information if you are no longer studying behavior? In other words, how do you maintain empiricism?
Learning to be systematic
As I said in my post on Hope that during my training as a psychologist, Hope and such moral virtues, were out-of-bounds. Like most psychology departments at the time, we were behaviourists and positivists. We studied what we could see, and we looked for the underlying ‘laws’ of behaviour.
Learning to watch carefully
I am still in favour of psychologists being taught in this way. A lot of psychologists arrive from the ‘Arts’ and the ‘laboratory method’ is a good counter-balance to their prior training. The first step in developing empathy is to recognize the ‘other’. And even psychologists (particularly psychologists) struggle with this. If I have to describe you, and you alone, and if I am given the challenge of describing you in exactly the same way as the next person sees you, I begin the journey of separating what I want, from what you want. And as a result, I will be a lot more effective in everything I undertake.
Practically too, quantitative questionnaire-based studies are heaps easier to do for your dissertation!
Learning to tell a story
The analytical tradition is not, though, the whole story. When we work as psychologists, we have to learn to synthesize information about a person. We have to bring together all the measurements we have gathered, and understand the person as a whole. Regrettably, even at the post-graduate level where people are training to go into practice (as doctors do in the clinical part of their training) psychologists are given little help in this formative task. They are taught, after all, by people whose university careers depend upon being analytical.
At this juncture in a psychologist’s training, people who came from the ‘Arts’ have a better time. Our measurements need to be woven together into a coherent narrative and people who studied Literature and History at school are now at an advantage.
The new age is the age of synthesis and morality
Practising psychology has been a journey, for me, towards learning to synthesize information. I was pleased to see that Mihalyi Cziksentmihalyi, who you probably know for his concept of Flow, has predicted that synthesis is the new science. And more so, synthesis with a moral edge.
- It does mattter that we can walk in other people’s shoes.
- It does matter that we can judge the effects of our actions on others.
- It does matter that we can understand how our actions hurt others, and how an action that seems essential to us might be repulsive, disgusting and quite repellant to other people.
- It matters too, that we have the capacity to imagine a narrative, or story line, in which we are not at each others’ throats. Development and world peace depends on our imagination.
We are part of the contests and conflicts of life
The difficulty with the analytical tradition is that it pretends that we are above the fray. We are part of the story of this planet. Thankfully. And I intend to play my part in making the tough decisions of life. To raise issues. To look for ways forward. To press my case and the case of those dear to me To negotiate. To look for common ground. To apologize when I have it wrong. And to go to war when necessary. But understanding that to do so might put me in a position where I get a heap lot wrong. I’ll try the diplomatic route first.
But above the fray, No! Always right? Good lord. The only way to be always right is to be in a laboratory. To lock oneself up and throw away the key.
Rethinking psychology
The world is not like this. We are giving-and-taking all the time. That is life. That’s the part I like! Can psychology cope with it? We need to learn an expression common in management theory. A business is path-dependent. It is completely unique in other words. From studying other businesses, I can develop a sense of the possible. I can learn to look at my situation methodically from a variety of perspectives. But they way things turn out is not predicitable. The way things turn out is the result of all our actions – yours, mine and people we don’t even know. All these taken together are far too complicated to predict with any specificity.
Occupational hazards
The unknowability of life may be depressing if you are wedded to the idea that the world is predictable. But who said that it is? The analytical tradition asks, only, what can we predict? Unfortunately, if you spend to much time in a psychology laboratory, being rewarded for finding phenomena that are amenable to analysis, you start to think that everything must be analysed and if it can’t be subjected to experimentation that it is not important. An occupational hazard of being a research psychologist is that you gradually lose your capacity for synthesis under real life conditions.
Are we up for the fullness of life?
David Whyte, British corporate poet, has a wonderful poem that he calls a Self-Portrait. It begins:
“It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many gods”
and ends
“I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even gods speak of God.”
So while I endorse analytical training for people embarking on a career as a psychologist, training in synthesizing information is also a necessary part of our ‘clinical’ training. At the same time, we learn to understand that it is not about our clients getting it right, or avoiding the downside of life. It is about our clients entering the fray. Of putting their passions at the disposal of the collective. Of living with glory, and with defeat. And doing so knowing that a full life for the collective and themselves depends upon they doing their job ,with their special talents, even though sometimes it feels like a ‘cross to bear’, and a ‘cross to bear’ with no certainty that we are even doing the right thing.
One age at a time
That is life. For most twenty-somethings, this is very hard to understand. I am happy they take the first step in understanding their personality is different from others, and that to have winners, by definition we must have losers. Those concepts are hard enough. They will learn more later, just as our stumbling one years olds delighted us by running like gazelles in their teenage years.
What’s next?
2009 promises to be a hard year. The financial crisis is even worse than most people understand. My analytical training helps me here and I am collecting visual explanations on the page Financial Crisis Visually.
This month has also been a horrible month with out-and-out conflict breaking out in Gaza (hence some of the fiercer imagery, perhaps).
But it is our year. It is our time. And our life, in 2010, depends entirely on what we do together, now.
Come with me,
life is contested, but it is ours.
P.S. Ned has persuaded me to re-orient this blog more to non-psychologists. Please let me know if I am on the right path and what you think I should be doing!
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Breakthrough work on happiness
Happy networks
The blogosphere this week has been awash with comments on the article on happiness published by the British Medical Journal on happiness in social networks. What does it mean that happiness is collective? Are we also affected by our friends’ happiness online in networks like Facebook?
Expansive, successful business teams
Getting a lot less press, over at Pos-Psych, Marcial Losada has published two reports about increasing the emotional space in business teams and improving business performance. Losada aims to develop teams whose positive to negative talk falls between 3:1 to 11:1.
New stats and new ways to think about psychological phenomena
The BMJ article relies on network theory and analysis. Losada’s work relies on recursive differential equations. Lost you? Exactly. Few psychologists, and that includes me, studied this type of statistical modelling in their undergraduate years.
Moreover, these aren’t just new statistical techniques that we can plug into SPSS and go. Both techniques offer epistemological and ontological revolutions in the way we think.
A zeitgeist
The ontological revolution is also happening in the qualitative areas of our field. Take this phrase used by The Economist yesterday to describe India’s democracy: a political system that can cope with disgruntlement without suffering existential doubts.
That is a brilliant definition of happiness, though we might want a little more for flourishing!
Invitation
I started a wiki laying out the methodologies used by Losada in some detail and I would love a collaborator. If you are interested, please drop me a comment and I will send you its name and password.
We are entering an interesting time in psychology and I can see all the textbooks being rewritten!
5 important features of happiness
Posted on: June 12, 2008
Image by M@rg via Flickr
Critical thinking must be rigorous. Otherwise it is just negative
I set up a comprehensive Google alert for happiness and I saw two reports today saying that thinking about happiness makes us miserable.
I don’t think these reports meant to be ironical. I think they meant to be critical, in a rigorous way. But frankly unless you are rigorous, then being critical is just proving the point – being negative for the sake of being negative.
5 points about happiness
I think it is helpful to repeat five points about happiness.
Emotion is highly contagious
Yes, emotion is highly contagious. It spreads from one person to another like wildfire. We carry it with us from one situation to another.
Negative emotions are more virulent than positive emotions. When something goes wrong, as it will from moment to moment, we do have to make a special effort not to project our dismay to the next situation, which, after all, might not have bothered us had the last five minutes been fun!
Some people are highly emotional intelligent
Some people are more ’emotionally intelligent’ than others. Of course they are. Why wouldn’t we vary in our capacity to read emotions? Why wouldn’t we vary in our ability to distinguish between what we were feeling about the problem five minutes ago, from what we are feeling about the situation we are confronted with now? Why wouldn’t we vary in our confidence and experience of emotional situations?
Emotional literacy is learned
Emotional literacy can be learned. Of course it can. We have trained our children from time immemorial to understand and display emotion. It is called good manners, character, backbone and all sorts of other things as well.
I was taught emotional literacy in school as well as at home. After all from 5 to 17. we spend a good part of our time in school. In sixth form, the time previously allowed for denominational instruction was given over exclusively to psychology classes.
Psychology is no longer about sick people only
What is new is that psychologists (a relatively new profession after all) no longer study negative events exclusively.
Positive psychology regards happiness and virtues, such as gratitude and hope, as normal, and we study them as positive emotional and mental experiences in their own right.
This is the exact opposite of the therapeutic culture which assumes we are finding living a little overwhelming. It is also the exact opposite of a view that we should be “hard”, “uncouth”, “non PC” or any of these varieties! As these two views think they are opposites, let’s move on!
The models we use to study these phenomenon allow us to think differently
Psychologists are using new models to explore phenomena such as happiness, zest, justice, etc. Psychologists are using ratios and recursive models. For people who still remember their “Methods & Stats” classes, I bet you hardly every used a ratio and I bet you never ever used a recursive model. That’s if you studied psychology. It you studied economics or geography this doesn’t apply to you. I also exclude from this bet people trained at graduate school in the States in the last five years.
We are happy when life is more positive than negative. Ideally, we want to hit a ratio around 5:1. At 11:1, or around there, we are delirious or “over the moon”. At 3:1, we are beginning to struggle. We are going to start to find life threatening. Life gets tough and hard and we develop tunnel vision. We focus on our problems and loose the capacity for joy, warmth, celebration, etc.
We are happy when our behavior shows requisite diversity – when we smile at what is charming, when we laugh at what is funny, when we grieve for what is lost, when we celebrate what is won.
Good manners isn’t suppressing these emotions. Good manners is expressing these emotions in a way that includes people around us. I don’t cry at a funeral to make others sad. I cry with others to share our grief.
Happiness isn’t silly optimism in the face of difficulties. Nor is it collapsing in a quivering heap. Happiness is responding to challenge and threat meaningfully. It is living – joyously when joy is warranted – courageously when courage is called for.
Hope this is of some use to somebody!
PS Happy people live longer – a lot longer. And they are nice to be around!
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All the hype about positive psychology. Drill down to the essence. We must be real.
Posted on: January 28, 2008
What is Positive Psychology all about?
Positive psychology is about us. What we like to do, and are not even necessarily good at, what brings us alive, and what we contribute to the world through the interaction of our stories.
Understanding positive psychology through computer games
The internet and computer games help us understand the structure of positive psychology. As games become more sophisticated, the game is not even designed (c.f. Second Life).
The (mis) maths of positive psychology
Even the maths of positive psychology is different.
Old school psychology is based on regression. I have variable X (which becomes a strength when positive psychology is misapplied), and I have something of interest Y that takes place independently of X and at a later time. We are lined up on X and Y to see who is better or worse. And all we ask is whether we can predict who will be better or worse at time Y, with the information we have at time X. This is all we are doing with the statistics we learn so painfully at uni. Are the differences between you and me at this minute going to persist in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 days, etc.
Who cares, frankly? It’s like people who predict the outcome of a cricket game rather than watch it. They’d do better to enjoy the game evolving ball by ball. Better yet, they could take part with everything and have the real possibility of winning ~ and losing.
Understanding the maths of positive psychology
The new maths describes what is happening internally to one person (or group) and it understands that there will be several things happening and affecting each other (a recursive non-linear model).
So you spend some time thinking about the world. Then you spend some time reflecting. Then you go back to reflecting about the world.
The point is we are vary our behavior all the time, and what we do at one minute is determined by what we did the previous minute and the reaction we got from the world and ourselves. That’s obvious right. Well, actually it is not built into standard psychology.
Happiness is simply being willing to engaged with this dynamic process of changing from minute to minute determined by who were a minute ago and the reaction from the world.
Positive psychology and story-telling
The strengths-based positive approach to undertanding psychology focuses on is our narrative. We continually make sense of our lives and we are engaged in this to-and-fro business of making sense and taking action. We like our stories and we do better when we are around people who like them too. When we are ignored or our stories are deemed irrelevant, we sag.
Belonging is important. I can study it with a questionnaire, true. But I cannot make it happen with a questionnaire.
We need real people to listen to our narratives. We need real people to like us. And we need real people to like in return.
There are no guarantees either. Real people may not listen. They may not like us. We may not like them.
But do we enjoy finding out? Do we enjoy the adventure? What is it like to have the adventure? What do our stories look like when we stop adventuring? What happens to us when we stop adventuring? Can we start again? How would we start again? How do 2 or more people adventure together? How do our stories intertwine?
And most importantly of all? How does the adventure of being a psychologist intertwine with the adventure of our clients? Where are we going together? When do we hear each other? When do we like each other?
Oh, we must be real. We must be real.
flowing motion 
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