The Upside of Your Dark Side by Todd Kashdan

Author:Todd Kashdan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Spend a small amount of time mindfully contemplating the situation.

Stop.

Skip over to another unrelated activity for an incubation period.

Render a decision.

Mindless Interventions

For decades, people have been looking to boost success by increasing self-awareness, but the researchers discussed in this chapter suggest a different approach. As an alternative, we offer the promise of (un)consciousness-raising strategies to help us all perform better at the goals we care about, and thereby live better. We offer the provocative notion that our behavior can be dramatically changed without any awareness on our part. Unobtrusive, unconscious information processing can lead us to be stronger, faster, and wiser in our decision making.

Consider the goal of increasing performance. At a call center, Gary Latham and Ronald Piccolo tested out a low-cost intervention on employees by giving them a photograph to view before calling customers. One photograph depicted three telemarketing reps smiling during a phone call (relevant accomplishment), another showed a woman triumphantly raising her arms as she crosses the finish line of a running race (irrelevant accomplishment), and a third portrayed the office building where they worked. Employees viewing photographs depicting accomplishments experienced a whopping 58 percent increase in the number of callers they persuaded to pledge money, whereas those viewing pictures of buildings showed zero improvement.

But that’s not the amazing part. Get this: employees staring at the photograph of smiling telemarketers raised 85 percent more money than people staring at pictures of buildings. When asked how they ramped up their performance, not a single person mentioned the new, inspiring picture in their cubicle. Which do you think makes more sense: spending $10 for a poster and frame, or thousands of dollars on advanced trainings to improve employee morale, motivation, and performance? Here, researchers also found that subconsciously priming someone for high performance has an impact that lasts not seconds, or minutes, or even hours, but an entire work week.

Now let’s move to bigger societal problems. Trying to convince people to stop using stereotypes about adults who are older, handicapped, gay, or of a different race has the unintended effect of making stereotypes easy to retrieve and therefore to use. In a similar vein, when smokers view antismoking advertisements, they end up smoking more. So when researchers corralled a group of white adults who admitted prejudicial views and a desire to avoid contact with blacks, the researchers wondered whether these views could be reconditioned without ever trying to convince their participants that prejudice and racism are bad.

When shown positive images and words about black Americans on a computer screen (picture a black child sharing her lunch with a hungry classmate), the white adults in the study were instructed to “approach blacks” by pulling a joystick toward them. When shown images and words of white Americans, they were instructed to “avoid whites” by pushing a joystick away from them. The idea was that repeatedly pairing subtle positive images of black people with the motivation to approach and appreciate them might revise the mindless habit of viewing black people as enemies who should be avoided.

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