Will at Work Learning

Are you being fooled by claims of brain-based learning?

What happens when people add scientific-sounding words to their arguments--even if the scientific-sounding words have nothing to do with those arguments?

Research now has the answer. Here's the research abstract from a recent publication:

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation.

We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) × 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design.

Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects.

Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without.

The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts' judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

So, if you're swayed by "brain-based learning" and other such scientifically-sounding arguments, you might ask yourself, was the argument really persuasive or was I just fooled into thinking it was.

Weisberg, Deena Skolnick; Keil, Frank C.; Goodstein, Joshua; Rawson, Elizabeth; Gray, Jeremy R. (2008). The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. Weisberg, D. S., Keil, F. C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., & Gray, J. R. (2008). The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(3), 470-477.

Video about New Media and the Young Generation

Check this out (I can't say more):

Charley Morrow on Today's Employment Handcuffs

Charley Morrow, assessment guru, opens his new blog with a brilliant analysis of one of the biggest issues in today's workplace: Employment Handcuffs (my term--don't blame Charley).

More than at almost any other time, today's workers feel stuck where they are. Figuratively, they are handcuffed to their current companies, positions, and bosses.

Charley's got hard data on this, but I've seen this too. I've seen people who hate their bosses who just can't find a job when they are competing with five other applicants (there are six applicants for every job available in the United States).

Employment Handcuffs leads to depression, anger, sabotage, lack of effort, productivity decline, etc.

These handcuffs also puts managers further into the dark then they already are.

Management Blindness Worse Than Ever

Managers are always in the dark about their own leadership performance. The only people that can tell them how well they are doing as leaders are the people they're leading, their direct reports---and their direct reports are scared/inhibited/hesitant to tell the truth about their boss's leadership performance.

But now it's worse than ever. Workers are scared to death of losing their jobs. They've seen their friends and colleagues out of work for months or years. They've seen friends, family, or neighbors' houses go into foreclosure. They've heard stories about how people lose their health care insurance after the Cobra has unwound itself. 

These smart workers won't do anything to upset their bosses---the people who are most likely to fire them.

How this Hurts Organizational Performance

This hurts manager performance and hurts the productivity and performance of all the employees who have bosses. It's a spiraling down effect.

From a CLO's perspective, you better be doing something to improve your managers' performance in this time of employment handcuffing!! Contact me here for consulting advice.

How Managers Can See the Light

1. Managers have to ask for feedback from a place of authenticity. They have to want to improve their own performance. Ya just can't fake it.
2. Managers have to listen to any feedback they get.
3. Managers have to make changes/improvements in what they do.
4. Managers have to avoid being defensive---even when the feedback is harsh, cutting, or wrong.
5. Managers have to thank those who give them feedback.
6. Managers have to be patient. Your folks don't trust that you're not going to retaliate. It will take time to build that trust.
7. Managers have to ask for feedback routinely, not just at performance-review time.
8. Managers have to be available. So many managers are just too busy to be available. Stop going to all those meetings with folks senior to you!! Your job is to get work done through your direct reports---you need to be there for them.
9. Managers may benefit from multi-rater 360-degree assessments or other assessment-like interactions. Ask Charley about this stuff.

And again, Charley's great blog post is worth the read.

Thanks Charley!! And welcome to the Blogosphere!! Glad you're here.

Learning about the Financial Crises. Michael Lewis Interviews...

Michael Lewis's new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, sounds fascinating---and important.

Brad Pitt bought the movie rights, so it's clearly got an interesting story to tell.

Michael Lewis tells the story of the folks who first figured out that the financial disaster was coming (the one that caused our current Great Recession). Lewis shows how these oddball stock traders figured out how Wall Street was making huge mistakes---when no one else could see it coming.

The following two interviews are must reading if you want to know how we got into the economic mess we are in. They're also riveting storytelling for the most part.

Learning professionals should listen to the interviews---and read the book too---for two themes: (1) How do people's mental models make it hard for them to understand the changing landscape, (2) How attempts at persuasion often fail in the face of these mental models. You might also find it fun to consider how you would "train" the citizenry to have a better understanding of how its government and Wall Street tycoons failed, how financial markets work, etc. Finally, note how Michael Lewis (and the interviewers) set up the dialogue to make a very difficult topic understandable. Great stuff!!

Interview with Terry Gross of Fresh Aire
About 40 minutes.

Interview with All Things Considered
About 9 minutes.

New Look at Schools. Diane Ravitch's New Book.

Nice review of Diane Ravitch's new book on schools, schooling, and the importance of good teachers.

Seems like it shows just how hard it is to find easy answers.

Getting Journalist Skills (for us bloggers)

I'm thinking some of us bloggers ought to learn from journalists.

Here's a whole group dedicated to citizen journalism. AND, they have a book available to help us learn how to do it.

The Information Explosion

Great article in the Economist on the Information Explosion.

This has huge implications for human learning and performance.

Here's what Bob Cialdini wrote in his masterful book, "Influence: Science and Practice."

More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of the lower animals---with a mental apparatus that is unequipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside environment...The consequence of our new deficiency is the same as that of the animals' long-standing one: when making a decision, we will less frequently engage in a fully considered analysis of the total situation. In response to this "paralysis of analysis," we will revert increasingly to a focus on a single, usually reliable feature of the situation...The problem comes when something causes the normally trustworthy cues to counsel us poorly, to lead us to erroneous actions and wrongheaded decisions. (p. 232)

As learning professionals, our clients---our fellow workers---will be more and more confused and duped by information overload. To be successful, we'll have to figure out ways to help them fight their way through the accelerating storm of information.

Again, read the Economist article.