Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Why we Read

2017-02-23T06:53:00-05:00

“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”

[Michel de Montaigne]

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut,” says Stephen King. So that's a good starting point—we want to read books, good stories, all kinds of timeless stories. Fiction is where we can learn from some of the masters of the craft, like King.

To understand why we read so we can translate that to our writing, we want to be particularly observant of how the story makes us feel. When explaining why people buy books in On Writing King says:

Book-buyers aren't attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel; book-buyers want a good story to take with them on the airplane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep then turning the pages. This happens, I think, when readers recognize the people in a book, their behaviors, their surroundings, and their talk.

When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own like and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story. I'd argue that it's impossible to make this sort of connection in a premeditated way, gauging the marker like a racetrack tout with a hot tip.

Applying this to our writing, even when we talk about work—“people love to read about work”—we want to practice finding our sweet spot, the voice coming from a combination of what we know and the story we want to tell. But the work is in service of the story, and the story in service of the connection. There's no escaping that.

Reading the great writers is much easier, and much more enjoyable, than becoming a good writer. Beyond knowing the work, this requires we have knowledge of life, relationships, to have experienced friendship, love and loss—this is how the depth of despair in Greek tragedies pulls us in. Aristotle described the effect of tragic drama on its audience as a purifying or figurative cleansing of the emotions like pity and fear.

An example:

Consider John Grisham breakout novel, The Firm. In this story, a young lawyer discovers that his first job, which seemed too good to be trues, rally is—he's working for the Mafia. Suspenseful, involving, and paced at breakneck speed, The First sold roughly nine gazillion copies.

What seemed to fascinate its audience was the moral dilemma in which the young lawyer finds himself: working for the mob is bad, no argument there, but the frocking pay is great! You can drive a Beemer, and that's just for openers!

And yes, as readers we also enjoy how he tries to extricate himself, his resourcefulness. Because that's how we'd like to behave. There's a reason why it's easier to like than to do. We should also not be fooled by what looks simple, as simplicity in writing is a testimony of mastery. When a writers constructs a world that is “impossible not to believe,” like Grisham did, it means he's been there. That's the difference.

Michel de Montaigne In an essay on The Vanity of Words retold a story of a Spartan rhetorician that his trade was to make big shoes for little feet. “Eloquence most flourished at Rome when the public affairs were in the worst condition and most disquieted with intestine commotions; as a free and untilled soil bears the worst weeds.”

We read for enjoyment, but also to learn the difference of what it takes to write a story well told. In our times there are no end of little footed people wanting to walk around in big shoes full of pride and vanity, deceiving themselves to be wise and intelligent.

A good book opens a secret door to a new experience of imagination. But it's doing the work that brings it to life.

Universal Principles of Influence

2017-02-22T05:50:00-05:00

The psychological frame we build around an appeal has as much or more weight on us getting through than the request by itself. Learning how to prepare the ground for what we'll present to take root is an important step toward our message or request sticking. Just like when we paint, if we want better results, we use a primer.

Thanks to the success of Influence, many are now familiar with the tactics we can use to increase our odds—reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. We tend to return a favor, when we commit to something we tend to want to do it to be congruent to our self-image, people imitate other people, we tend to obey authority figures and yield to the persuasion of people we like. If we think there isn't enough of something, we want to acquire it.

Social psychologist Robert Cialdini has written a pre-quel his national bestseller. In Pre-Suasion, he shines a light on how effective persuasion can happen moments before we deliver a message—we prepare the ground by making sure our audience will be receptive.

Cialdini calls the anchors or primers we use openers because they have the dual function of starting the process and clear the way for the persuasive part. A frequently asked question businesses typically ask is whether we should map certain principles to certain stages of the commercial relationships.

Dr. Gregory Neidert has developed a “core motives model of social influence” to affect change based on the stages of one's relationship:

stage 1—the goal at this stage is to cultivate a positive association. Reciprocity and liking are a fit to establish mutual rapport. When we give first something that is meaningful, unexpected, and customized, highlight commonalities, and express our liking, we're off to a good start.

stage 2—is about reducing uncertainty. From the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kanheman, we know we're loss averse, so anything that confirms our wisdom in decision-making is helpful. Here social proof and authority are a good match. We go along when many others have picked an option and evidence from experts increases our confidence.

stage 3—we want to motivate action. It's not enough to know something, we need people to do something with what they learn. We know diet and exercise help with weight loss, but unless we apply this knowledge to act and start creating better habits, we're not going to benefit from it. Consistency and scarcity help here. When our friend reminds us of what we said, we are more likely to follow through. Plus what we would miss if we didn't.

Here Cialdini identifies a new principle. The seventh universal principle of influence and that is unity.

Social connections have power, personal relationships intensify willingness to help. The experience of unity is rooted in shared identity based on similar beliefs, backgrounds, upbringing, and genetic makeup. Categories where “the conduct of one member influences the self-esteem of the others.”

When we're together or act together in particular ways, we feel a sense of unity.

We're “family”

The stronger form of kinship is that of our genetic commonality with parents, siblings, and so on. Groups that create this sense of belonging use terminology and images that recall the family—“brothers, sisterhood, forefathers, motherland, heritage, which lead to an increased willingness to sacrifice one's own interests for the welfare of the group.”

In 2015, Warren Buffett released his annual letter on the 50 year anniversary at the helm of Berkshire#. To commemorate, the letter included remarks by both Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger. Both added their thoughts about the next 50 years. It begins:

A note to readers: Fifty years ago, today’s management took charge at Berkshire. For this Golden Anniversary, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger each wrote his views of what has happened at Berkshire during the past 50 years and what each expects during the next 50. Neither changed a word of his commentary after reading what the other had written. Warren’s thoughts begin on page 24 and Charlie’s on page 39. Shareholders, particularly new ones, may find it useful to read those letters before reading the report on 2014, which begins below.

This introduction tells shareholders where he sets the frame for the report. In it, Buffett lays out the far-reaching consequences of the Berkshire Hathaway's proven business model and says the firm has already identified the right person to become CEO, when appropriate.

In the letter itself, before he gets to the plans, he lists his blunders early on in the life of the company. Of his fortuitous encounter and working relationship with Charlie Munger, who started business life as a lawyer and then architect, he says:

From my perspective, though, Charlie’s most important architectural feat was the design of today’s Berkshire. The blueprint he gave me was simple: Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices.

Then he talks about what makes Berkshire Hathaway different and a choice for businesses:

Berkshire offers a third choice to the business owner who wishes to sell: a permanent home, in which the company’s people and culture will be retained (though, occasionally, management changes will be needed). Beyond that, any business we acquire dramatically increases its financial strength and ability to grow. Its days of dealing with banks and Wall Street analysts are also forever ended.
Some sellers don’t care about these matters. But, when sellers do, Berkshire does not have a lot of competition.

In both instances, Buffett says how we're in this together. But it's when he talks about the next fifty years that he spells out the word:

Now let’s take a look at the road ahead. Bear in mind that if I had attempted 50 years ago to gauge what was coming, certain of my predictions would have been far off the mark. With that warning, I will tell you what I would say to my family today if they asked me about Berkshire’s future.

He's advising shareholders as he would if he were talking to a family member. The disclosures help establish trust and credibility.

Another strong cue of commonality is physical proximity. There's no place like home, but we also favor people from the same locality, and region.

... and we act together

“All for one, and one for all” creates a visceral reaction in people. When we respond to something together, in unison, the synchronous experience elicits a powerful response in us. Songs, marches, rituals, chants, prayers, and dances are all forms of unified action. The shared experience draws people together.

Acting together, whether in walks or marches and runs, singing or chanting and praying, and dancing helps us feel a temporary sense of kinship. The consequences most important as the effects of common action are enhanced liking and greater support from others. Both important to pre-suasion.

We tend to like people in our group more visible than people outside it. If we were able to transfer some of that positive body language to members of the out group we might have better chances in situations such as job interviews, sales calls, and first meetings.

Doing things with someone else as part of a group also predisposes us to offer support to that person, even if we don't know them. For example, being part of a consistent group of people who take exercise classes in the same days and times for several weeks creates a sense of cohesion from the shared experience. If someone needs help, they're more likely to receive it from other members of the group.

Synchronizing movements and body language are also ways to act together with another person. But they're not always practical. There is a universal way to achieve unity of action and that is with music:

Because of a unique collection of detectable regularities (rhythm, meter, intensity, pulse, and time), music possesses rare synchronizing power. Listeners can easily become aligned with one another along motor, sensory, vocal, and emotional dimensions—a state of affairs that leads to familiar markers of unity such as self-other merging, social cohesion, and supportive conduct.

Music influence belongs to what Kahneman labeled System 1, which operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. We're carried away by harmony. This is why we still remember successful TV jingles years later.

Other powerful ways of acting together include engaging in a reciprocal exchange, for example answering a series of questions in turn, co-creating something, and asking for advice.

Getting together and acting together both help us prepare the ground for creating a sense of unity with others. Unity is the seventh principle of influence.

Influence and Pre-Suasion are useful references for understanding the universal principles of influence. We can find another application of fast thinking or System 1 thinking in improving simple rules and understanding why weather forecasters get paid even when they get it wrong.

Are Men and Women's Brain Different?

2017-02-21T05:40:00-05:00

Men and women are physically different, a statement that falls easily in the realm of observable knowledge. It takes 46 chromosomes to create a human being—23 from each parent. Two of them determine whether we become men or women—and at least one of them has to be an X (or we die).

We all start life as females for six weeks, then the SRY gene of the Y chromosome develops males. SR is for “sex reversal.” SRY kicks in at week six to cue the formation of testicles. Y can only come from the father. Surely Henry VIII's wives would have loved to know that data point, even as it's rather doubtful the King would have beheaded himself. Goes to show how we often learn vital information too late in the assumption game.

Another curious data point is that inequality starts at chromosome level—the X chromosome carries around 1,500 genes and they do most of the heavy lifting in embryo development. While the Y chromosome is down to less than 100 genes and has been shedding them at the rate of 5 every 1 million years.

In Brain Rules John Medina says since females carry two X chromosomes, they have double the necessary amount. Thus the embryo simply ignores one of them, a tactic that continues to work to this day. It's not a systematic cut of one set—the embryo picks and chooses from the pool provided by both parents. Hence why sisters may be so different from each other.

Males however need all of their 1,500 genes (which come from their mother) to survive, plus the SRY genes. X genes govern how we think—a large percentage of them are involved in the creation of the protein that builds the brain. “Researchers call the X chromosome the cognitive hot spot,” says Medina. Genes are mediators of cell functions and collections of these cells form brain structures.

There's no question that women are genetically more complex.

How male and female brains differ

Just like the physical appearances of men and women—and though this is a meta-pattern that replicates at individual levels, there are person to person nuances, as we should expect.

When it comes to neuranatomy, the real challenge is finding areas that aren't affected by sex chromosomes. You can see differences in the cortex, the amygdala, even the biochemicals that brain cells use to communicate with each other.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania conducted a study# of about 1,000 brain scans and found that male and female brains are wired differently. The scans showed few differences in connectivity up to the age of 13, but became more differentiated in 14- to 17-year-olds.

There's greater connectivity between women's left and right sides of the brain—women have 10 times more white matter, responsible for faster connections. In their brains neurons are also closer together, another data point in favor of speed.

Some women even have as many as 12 percent more neurons than men do. They are mostly found in the layers of the cortex responsible for signals coming in and out of the brain. Psychologist Sandra Witelson says this may be one reason why women tend to score higher on tests that involve language and communication.

The connections in men are mostly within each hemispheres with the exception of one area—the cerebellum, which plays a vital role in motor control. Men also have approximately 6.5 times more gray matter, full of active neurons.

As for the differences in brain structure, Medina says scientific labs have found that certain parts of the cortex is thicker in women than in men. The front and prefrontal cortex control the majority of our decision-making ability. The limbic system where we find the amygdala controls the generation of emotions and the ability to remember them—this region is larger in men.

Men can produce serotonin 52 percent faster than women. This is the biochemical that regulates emotion and mood. Scientists don't know if this makes a difference. They do know that the response to stress is different—women's left hemisphere's amygdala activates, which is responsible for remembering emotional details. In men it's the right hemisphere's amygdala that lights up, which gives a gist of what's going on.

Genetics account for some structural differences. But we know from neurological development that all human beings inherited the homo sapiens genes (homo includes Neanderthals), which we share with some of the smartest people who ever lived. At the time of birth we have the same potential as Leonardo da Vinci.

How our environment influences us

From anthropological research and observation we know that our environments plays a key role in our development. Humans are born before being fully developed. The reason is our brain would become too large for the birth canal. So we rely heavily on our environment as the context that guides our growth.

Studies have found that when the ground is not safe to put babies onto, for example in the jungle, they learn to walk later. But not only that. The marvel that we hold in our skull is cross-networked, which means that when one function in the brain grows, the whole brain capacity expands.

Mobility builds our lung capacity and it in turns feeds the brain where synapses fire to help us do many other things. Visual competency helps us distinguish between light and dark and then from outlines we see details until at some point we can see big words. Growth here also expands our abilities.

When we're safe and our needs are attended to, we begin to explore what is around us using vision, auditory, and tactile sensation to both communicate and interact with our environment. We learn “this is how it feels to roll over or move” when we see something different in our immediate field of vision, and “this is what happens when I move arms and legs,” as our visual clues let us discover.

If we grow up in a house full of books, and our guardians or parents facilitate our path to them through reading and teaching us how to read, we learn to appreciate that reading opens our door to new worlds. It's the same with music and auditory refinement. The same with mobility and sports.

It's an equal opportunity that depends on two factors—the ability to explore safely with degrees of support, and also the specific self-interest of the individual child. Siblings who grow up in the same house do have a different genetic makeup—females select from each parent's set—and a different environment—older siblings have younger siblings, may go to different schools, and so on.

What about mobility? How can we tell if a child will become a great athlete? We can help to a certain extent says David Epstein in The Sports Gene. And yes, there differences in athletic performance between men and women. Even factoring in predisposition and opportunity, we're built differently. In week six, SRY cues the formation of testicles inside which are the Leydic cells—they synthesize testosterone.

In turn it drives the development of longer forearm—male athletes can throw three standard deviations faster than women, “about twice as large as the male/female disparity in height.” Boys are also more skilled at tracking and intercepting flying objects, a direct result to exposure to testosterone in the womb:

“In the long jump, women are 19 percent behind men. The smallest gap occurs in distance swimming races. In the 800-meter freestyle, top women are within 6 percent of top men.”

This even taking into account a large disparity in the type of environment men and women were immersed in:

“In the first half of the twentieth century, cultural norms and pseudoscience severely limited women's opportunities for athletic participation. At the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, the media account (which was fabricated) of exhausted female competitors lying on the ground after the 800-meter race was so distasteful to some doctors and sports writers that the event was deemed hazardous to female health.”

The New York Times headline read—“This distance makes too great a call on feminine strength.” The consequence was a banning of all women events longer than 200 meters from the Games for the next 32 years.

How culture determines opportunity

It was worth a small detour into athletic performance to bring up the question of culture. Aristotle is typically quoted among the great ones. What he said in this case is illuminating of the times:

“The female is an impotent male, incapable of making semen because of the coldness of her nature. We therefore should look upon the female state as if it were a deformity, though one that occurs in the ordinary state of nature.”

Except of course that without women we would have no mothers... or life. That pesky X chromosome everyone needs.

The differences in the structure of male and female brains account for the propensity to do certain things better. As we said above, women are better communicators, they process information at greater speed, remember details about emotional experiences—more data points and greater resolution.

Women recover verbal impairment from strokes more quickly. They also cement relationships with their group by maintaining eye contact when they communicate.

Men get the gist of things, use verbal skills to negotiate their status in a large group, and tend to withdraw under stress. They see the world as a hierarchy and prefer a very direct approach to communication. Asking, “would you like to get a drink?” when we're thirsty may backfire. A better option would be to say, “I'm thirsty, let's stop here and get a drink.”

Culture is the biggest and most persistent environment we have. It has a strong role in influencing how we make decisions. We have a personal culture, a family culture, a local community culture, a culture at work, in our region, in our country, nation, age, and so on. Brain biology and genetics also influence us.

Behavior drives performance but is in turn driven by input—how we treat one another, the demands placed on us, inform what we learn and our development. Social forces are part of the mix. Cultural norms may dictate what we want to see or hear. An Italian proverb says, “there's no worst deaf than the one who doesn't want to hear.” It rings wise, pardon the pun.

We need some caution also to navigate the right and left brain distinctions. Renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist says the divided nature of our brain has profoundly altered human behavior, culture, and society. In The Master and His Emissary, he says we now know that every type of function —including reason, emotion, language, and imagery— is subserved not by one hemisphere alone, but by both.

The physical organ we call brain is different in men and women. What we do with it depends on a number of factors, including health, opportunity, desire, and social norms. Because it is so hard to isolate people from the context of their lives, scientists and research are still largely inconclusive as to the consequences of the brain's physical differences, though they won't stop trying.

By definition, every theory we formulate is a calling card for setting out to prove it—to explain a group of facts, which we manufacture (for the Latin root). We also use hypotheses as tentative explanations for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem to test and investigate. How often do we look to disprove our theory or hypothesis?

My empathy levels are fine, but it's the systems-thinking that gets me going. There's much more to say about this fascinating topic and applications. To get to better answers, we should have smarter aims. It starts with asking better questions.

Brain Rules and The Sports Gene are instructive readings to start building our knowledge of what's going on inside our heads and what determines athletic success.