Exposure to Other Religions Could Help Stem Science Denial

Insights by Stanford Business, September 5, 2024

by Theodore Kinni


Researchers and educators should think about how scientific information will be perceived by people of different religions, says Yu Ding. | iStock/Aleksei Morozov/JakeOlimb/Rinat Khairitdinov

When someone rejects scientific findings that collide with their religion, it may be seen as a sign of their strongly held beliefs. Yet religiosity alone does not explain why some believers are skeptical of science. A multifaceted new study by Yu Ding, an assistant professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, finds that there is another strong predictor of science denial: how much exposure religious people have to members of other faiths.

As Ding reviewed studies of religious intensity and science denial, he found several unanswered questions. For instance, why don’t all religious people find their faith incompatible with science? Quakers and Jews often have strong religious convictions yet are well represented in the STEM disciplines. Likewise, why does individual religious intensity not account for geographic variations in levels of science denial? A Pew Research Center study found that 42% of Muslim respondents in Tunisia believe there is a “general conflict” between religion and science versus 16% of Muslim respondents in Morocco.

This led Ding, along with professors Gita Johar and Michael Morris of Columbia Business School, to examine a lack of religious diversity as a pathway to science denial. The trio hypothesized that science denial may arise from religious intolerance — an unwillingness to accept any view that contradicts the accepted dogma — and that intolerance may be the result of a lack of religious diversity within a particular area. Read the rest here.

 

What People Really Think About Search Engine Ads. (You Might Be Surprised.)

Insights by Stanford Business, March 7, 2024

by Theodore Kinni


iStock/Nuthawut Somsuk

Revenues from search ads are expected to exceed $300 billion in 2024 — making search the world’s largest advertising channel online or off. The ads are essential to search companies, but their value to users, who collectively make more than 1.2 trillion queries per year on Google alone, has always been something of a mystery.

Some experts argue that search ads are intrusive and even scammy — a distraction users must tolerate in exchange for free access to search engines. Others see the ads as a convenience, enhancing the search experience by offering users additional information and easy access to products and services related to their interests. “The utility of search advertising has been a controversial question and people have written positive and negative points of view on it in the media for a long time,” says Navdeep Sahni, an associate professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “But it is a question that needs to be answered with data.”

Sahni now has that data. Sahni and Charles Zhang, PhD ’22, then a GSB graduate student focused on quantitative marketing, got it from real users and real ads in a large-scale field experiment on a widely used U.S. search engine. While there has been copious research on the efficacy of search advertising for ad buyers, this experiment was unique for its scale and empirical focus on the value of ads to search users.

Collected over a period of five months in 2017, the data reports on queries submitted to the search engine by nearly 3 million unique users. For two months in the middle of the experiment, half of the users saw search results that included the usual number of ads that appear among the top results and in the middle of the page, known as mainline ads. “Whenever there’s a search query,” Sahni explains, “search engines use a proprietary algorithm that scores every ad that could appear with the results. Only those ads whose quality exceeds a certain preset threshold get placed in the mainline positions.” These ads are the most visible on the page and have the most effective positioning.

During the same two-month period, the search engine tweaked its ad-scoring algorithm so that the other half of the user group saw fewer mainline ads with their results. “The experiment increased the threshold cutoff of that algorithm just enough so that 17% of the ads that would have received mainline positions got pushed to less visible positions on the side of the page,” Sahni explains. Read the rest here.

Getting the Short End of the Stick: Racial Bias in Salary Negotiations

Enjoyed lending an editorial hand on this one:

MIT Sloan Management Review, June 15, 2016

by Morela Hernandez and Derek R. Avery


Gender and racial inequality in pay is making headlines these days, and many companies are moving to eradicate it. One major and often unrecognized obstacle companies face is a less-than-robust understanding of the role of the salary negotiation process and the biases and behaviors of job seekers — as well as the people responsible for hiring them — in the problem. This may be a function of the taboos associated with offering prescriptive advice by gender and race. Nevertheless, decades of social psychological research demonstrate that these differences can play a key role in producing pay inequality.

Consider gender: There is a substantial and significant body of research examining how gender differences influence negotiation strategies and outcomes, how they stem from conformity with social roles, and how they depend, to some extent, on context. Specifically, researchers consistently find that women tend to negotiate lower salaries than men because of gender-specific role expectations. Women are expected to value the relational aspects of employment over more instrumental exchanges. Therefore, they can be more sensitive than men about being perceived as pushy or aggressive, and end up with lower pay.

In the case of race, markedly less is known. There is relatively little research examining its influence on negotiation. And scholars have focused more on discriminatory behaviors minorities must contend with in employment processes, rather than the role they themselves play in those processes.

We do know that a Black-White salary gap exists, and that researchers have attributed it to factors such as social network differences, salary expectations, and risk aversion due to different perceptions of economic insecurity. In our own research, we have found that the context of the job negotiation itself is partly responsible for the salary gap. That is, because of the distinctive race-related psychological features that influence people’s expectations, a Black job seeker can face unique challenges...read the rest here

Ode on a Grecian Urn

I did a Q&A with an interesting guy for Stanford Business Magazine:

What We Can Learn from Ancient Athens’ Manufacturing Industry

 

A former vice president at Boston Consulting Group analyzes an ancient sector and how it parallels changes in today’s economy.

 

March 10, 2015|by Theodore Kinni

 

Consultants often analyze industries, but Peter Acton has taken a much bigger step back in time than most. When the former vice president at the Boston Consulting Group decided to pursue a PhD in ancient history at the University of Melbourne, he chose the manufacturing sector in Athens in the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. as the subject of his thesis and, now, his new book, Poiesis: Manufacturing in Classical Athens (Oxford University Press, 2014).

 

Poiesis portrays classical Athens as a vibrant society of makers. Moreover, Acton’s application of modern theories of competitive advantage to an ancient economy offers a promising new analytical framework for historians. Acton received his MBA from Stanford in 1980. Here are excerpts of a conversation with him about his new book.

 

Classical Athens is commonly associated with a flowering of the arts, philosophical thought, and democracy. How did manufacturing fit into the picture?

When you look at the high standard of living in Athens and think about all the things Athenians needed — housing, furniture, pottery, clothing, shoes, armor, ships, and public buildings — you realize it had to be a busy manufacturing city. Oddly, however, that reality wasn’t reflected in the scholarly literature, which has never paid much attention to how Athenians made a living ... read the rest here.

Soccer and economics

My new book post is up on s+b's blog:

What the Beautiful Game Reveals about the Dismal Science

A lot of people watched the World Cup in Brazil this past month. The final numbers won’t be in for a while, but with record-breaking viewership for the first round of matches and a big bump in the U.S. audience, it’s a good bet that the 2014 Cup eclipsed the more than the 3.2 billion viewers (nearly half the people on earth) who tuned in at some point or another during the 64 matches in 2010. It’s also a good bet that Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is one of very few soccer fans who watched this year’s matches for insights into perverse incentives, market efficiency, and other economic concepts.

What can the beautiful game tell us about the dismal science? As Palacios-Huerta explains in Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics (Princeton University Press, 2014), soccer—and indeed many other professional sports—is a terrific laboratory for testing economic theories. “There is an abundance of readily available data, the goals of the participants are often uncomplicated (score, win, enforce the rules), and the outcomes are extremely clear,” he says. “There is an abundance of data, the goals are uncomplicated, and the outcomes are extremely clear.” 

Take incentives, for instance. We’re often warned that incentives can have unexpected consequences, but it’s tough to isolate the effects of an incentive—such as stock options, for instance—in the business world. Are senior executives neglecting the long-term well-being of their firms to bump up the value of their options in the short term, or is something else going on? Are managers sabotaging one another to boost their own performance in forced ranking systems or not? That’s tough to prove without a smoking gun, and managerial saboteurs tend not to leave that kind of evidence lying around.

For a more rigorous test, Palacios-Huerta and his colleague Luis Garicano examined the outcomes stemming from a 1994 FIFA rule change in which three points, instead of two, were awarded in round-robin tournaments for a win. (It was an attempt to drive up soccer scores and attract U.S. fans, who presumably find the subtleties of the game far less appealing than a Pelé-style bicycle kick into the net.) In doing so, the economists found empirical evidence for the risks attendant in strong incentive plans.

By analyzing the incidence of dirty play before and after the rule change, they discovered that increasing the points awarded for a win caused a rise in sabotage on the field: fouls and unsporting behavior resulting in yellow cards increased. By analyzing the results of matches, they further determined that the rule change did not change the number of goals scored. Teams played more aggressive offense until they got their first goal, then they hunkered down defensively to protect the win. “The beautiful game became a bit less beautiful,” concludes Palacios-Huerta.

In Beautiful Game Theory, Palacios-Huerta also reports on how he used soccer to prove the long-standing efficient-markets hypothesis—a theory suggesting that in the stock market, for instance, information is processed so efficiently that “unless one knew information that others did not know, no stock should be a better buy than any other.” The problem with proving this hypothesis is that you can’t stop time to analyze the effects of a piece of news on the market. But time does stop in a soccer match.

Palacios-Huerta realized that at halftime, “the playing clock stops but the betting clock continues.” So he identified matches in which a “cusp” goal was scored just before the halftime break, and then analyzed the changes in betting odds during the break at the Betfair online betting exchange. He found that Betfair lived up to its name: “Prices impound news so rapidly and completely that it is not possible to profit from any potential price drift over the halftime interval.”

This is good news for sports bettors, but it’s far less reassuring in light of the New York Times exposé that broke on May 31. It seems that some gamblers are allegedly paying off referees to use penalty calls to rig soccer matches. Efficient or not, when it comes to economic markets, it seems like somebody always knows something that no one else knows.

Gregory Clark on how we get ahead

My weekly book post on s+b:

Does Capitalism Create Social Mobility?

 The storyline of capitalism—and the technological innovation that simultaneously supports and drives it forward—is almost always one of ever-greater personal freedom and opportunity. Slaves and serfs, whose families had been chained to the plows of noble-born landowners generation after generation, are transformed into wage earners who sell their services in demand-driven labor markets. Wage owners pull themselves up by their bootstraps and educate their children, who then enter the professional ranks. With the liberal application of hard work, inventiveness, or entrepreneurial chutzpah, anyone can rise through the ranks of society. The sky is the limit. Or is it?

This is the question that Gregory Clark, economics professor at the University of California, Davis, seeks to answer in his new book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (Princeton University Press, 2014). Clark has a predilection for investigating interesting questions, as well as for literary puns. His last book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton University Press, 2007), sought to explain why the Industrial Revolution sparked and caught fire in England, and not in other parts of the world. His Darwinian answer was that England was peopled by descendants of the upper classes, who over hundreds of years had survived at higher rates than people in the lower classes. As a result, English upper class values, such as hard work, rationality, and education, which were conducive to an industrialized society, also survived.

Clark figured this out by collecting and analyzing data on the English economy from 1200 to 1870. In The Son Also Rises, he uses a similarly data-driven approach. This time, he uses uncommon surnames, such as Pepys, “to track the rich and poor through many generations in various societies—England, the United States, Sweden, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Chile.” Specifically, he matches up the wealth of parents and that of their offspring. The more correlation, the less social mobility.

Just as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (Belknap Press, 2014), calls into question the role of capitalism in wealth creation, Clark calls into question the role of capitalism in social mobility. But both conservatives and liberals will find justification for their views in the facts uncovered in The Son Also Rises. Clark, who rightfully opens his preface with the words, “This book will be controversial,” found to his surprise that intergenerational social mobility cannot be taken for granted. Industrialization did not move wealth to the wider population, at least not as freely as the prevailing free enterprise storyline would suggest. (Clark basically says that “a hundred years of research by psychologists, sociologists, and economists” into social mobility has all been incorrect.)

Instead, Clark’s research reveals that the global level of social mobility is basically unchanged over the past 800 years. In England, for instance, he finds that the level of social mobility was the same after the Industrial Revolution as it was before it. “The rich beget the rich, the poor beget the poor,” Clark concludes. “Social status is inherited as strongly as any biological trait, such as height.”

But Clark does not say that mobility doesn’t exist, or that social positions never change. Indeed, his research reveals that upward and downward mobility are both continuously at play in human society. One critical factor is the intermarriage between rich and poor, which over time creates a constant regression to the mean. “In the end, the descendants of today’s rich and poor will achieve complete equality in their expected social position,” explains Clark. “This equality may require three hundred years to come about,” but it will inevitably come, unless a family takes dramatic steps (for example, through its choice of marriage partners) to maintain its position in society.

For me, the salient point is that social mobility is being driven by “innate inherited abilities,” not by the ascendancy of capitalism or democracy or any other economic or political ideology. People born rich may go on to be successful, but wealth is not the most important thing they inherit. Far more important are nature and nurture: the genetic abilities they get from their parents (which they will only pass on if they marry people as capable as themselves), and the confidence, education, and connections their families provide.

This is a difficult message for the unlucky people born to less capable parents; they have high barriers to social mobility, as they have throughout history. Capitalism may make it easier for some individuals to realize their potential, but it does not create that potential in the first place. That’s an insight worth remembering when you hear claims to the contrary.

Zachary Shore on getting a sense of the enemy

My Q&A with professor Zach Shore for strategy+business was published today:

Zachary Shore on How to Predict the Future
A historian’s approach to strategic empathy can help you anticipate your rivals’ next moves.

If Komatsu decides to cut prices in a bid to grow its market share, will Caterpillar match the cuts? If Amazon makes a full-out run at the grocery business, will Kroger compete online? If Google refuses to censor Internet searches, will China’s government deny its citizens access to the search engine? Predicting the actions and reactions of competitors—and other stakeholders—is often an essential element in executive decision making, and getting those predictions wrong can have costly consequences.

Historian Zachary Shore believes leaders in all spheres can reduce decision risks and improve the accuracy of their predictions by developing a skill that he calls strategic empathy. In his fourth and latest book, A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival’s Mind (Oxford University Press, 2014), the professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, a research university operated by the U.S. Navy in Monterey, Calif., offers a new perspective on predicting the behavior of others. Shore discussed his findings and their applications with strategy+business.

S+B: What is strategic empathy, and why does it matter?
SHORE: Strategic empathy is the ability to step out of our own heads and into the minds of others. It’s the ability to discern someone else’s underlying drivers and constraints—to understand what makes someone tick.

The idea behind strategic empathy has been around for a long time in the military and politics. Two thousand years ago, Sun Tzu wrote about the importance of thinking like the enemy. What we don’t have is a reliable way of doing it... read the rest here

Business lessons from U.S. foreign policy failures

Stephen Walt, the noted international affairs professor from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, spent a day at William & Mary last week, and I got a chance to attend a thought-provoking and highly articulate talk that he gave courtesy of the Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations. Walt says that U.S. foreign policy has been pretty abysmal for the past 20 years. He enumerated the external and internal reasons for this, and as he discussed them, it occurred to me that each of these reasons represented a flaw or pitfall that large, powerful companies--like large, powerful countries--would do well to consider and avoid. The talk was about 40 minutes long (sans questions) and well worth the investment in time.

Culture building with vocal silence

My weekly book post on s+b's blog is about an insider's view of teaching at HBS:

The Management Stylings of Harvard Business School

We’ve been treated to several insider accounts of Harvard Business School (HBS) over the years.

Robert Reid’s Year One: An Intimate Look Inside Harvard Business School, Source of the Most Coveted Advanced Degree in the World (William Morrow, 1994) and Philip Delves Broughton’s Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School (Penguin Press, 2008) covered the experience from the student’s perspective. But Michel Anteby’s Manufacturing Morals: the Values of Silence in Business School Education (University of Chicago Press, 2013) is the first I’ve seen that describes HBS from a professor’s point of view.

Anteby, an associate professor of organizational behavior, turns his experience of being hired by and teaching at HBS into an ethnographic study that explores how the “way we do things around here” is communicated to the faculty—a highly skilled and highly independent workforce. In doing so, he’s written a book that works on several levels.

First, Manufacturing Morals is a fun read. It’s packed with stories about what it’s like to teach at a leading (arguably, the leading) business school. As you might expect, the standards for faculty at HBS are high, and everything from how pictures get hung on office walls to what professors wear reinforce those standards.

Second, the publication of Anteby’s study is timely in light of Jodi Kantor’s New York Times article about the ongoing effort to promote gender equality within the school. It’s interesting that with all the attention paid to how things are done at HBS, its aggressively masculine student culture, the performance gap between male and female students, and the dearth of tenured female professors has only just begun to be addressed.

Finally, Manufacturing Morals is useful as a guide to creating corporate culture via “vocal silence.” Anteby finds examples of vocal silence at work throughout HBS, and thinks it can be a particularly effective means for communicating organizational mores. I asked him to explain the seemingly oxymoronic concept, and how companies can use it...read Anteby's response here

China's real industrial advantage

My post on the s+b blog this week is about a book that seeks to illuminate one of the less understood sources of China's industrial might:

Government Subsidies Pave the Way in China

In the 2000s, China transformed itself from a net importer to one of the largest producers and exporters in the world in four mature, capital-intensive industries: steel, glass, paper, and auto parts. What accounted for this success, which in each case was achieved in a short five-year span? 

Industry research reveals that each of the four has relatively low labor requirements, so it wasn't China’s seemingly endless supply of inexpensive workers. The Chinese companies didn't enjoy economies of scale or scope. Nor did the undervaluation of the renminbi explain their growth.

According to Usha Haley, director of West Virginia University’s Robbins Center for Global Business and Strategy, and George Haley, a professor of marketing and international business at the University of New Haven, it was government subsidies that drove this industrial transformation. In Subsidies to Chinese Industry: State Capitalism, Business Strategy, and Trade Policy (Oxford University Press, 2013), they calculate that subsidies from China’s governmental bodies—in the form of free or low-cost loans, energy, materials, land, and technology—provided the dollar equivalent of as much as 30 percent of the output of these four industries...read the rest here.

Business ethics reader

I was pleased to see an article of mine included in Annual Editions: Business Ethics 10/11 (McGraw-Hill) edited by John Richardson at Pepperdine.

The article, "An Ethical Dilemma," was published in Selling Power in 2004. It uses the TAP Pharmaceutical case, in which the company paid an $875 million fine to the government, to illustrate the dangers of unethical and illegal sales practices. It goes on to describe how to build ethical integrity into the sales function in four ways, by:

• Specifying boundaries that are supported by corporate values and policies;
• Including ethics as a consideration in hiring decisions and training curriculum;
• Building ethics into selling and compensation systems;
• Enlisting unwavering managerial support in terms of compliance and enforcement.

The reader is part of McGraw's Annual Editions series, which publish selected articles from periodicals in topical collections and sell them for use in college courses. I wonder if I'll be getting a little payback for all the boring reading I had to do as a student.

One more on Circuit City

Knowledge@Wharton has also weighed in on Circuit City's firing of 3400 employees in an April 4 article titled "Short-Circuited: Cutting Jobs as Corporate Strategy." Here are a couple of comments from the Wharton School profs featured in that piece:

Peter Cappelli, management professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at Wharton, says Circuit City may have valid reasons for having to reduce costs, but the way it treated the 3,400 workers was highly unusual. "That's the most cynical thing I've heard about in a long time," Cappelli says. "I like to think I'm cynical, but sometimes it's hard to keep up."

According to Cappelli, Circuit City's decision to replace the terminated workers with lower-paid people is like saying: "We made a mistake in compensation by paying them more than they were worth for their performance, so we're going to get rid of them." Cappelli adds that he "had never heard of that before. Companies have always done sneaky things like getting rid of higher-wage workers with two-tier wage plans, but this ... takes the cake."

Wharton management professor Daniel A. Levinthal points out that Circuit City's decision to cut 3,400 veteran sales people "sounds like a massive de-skilling" of the company. Since the people who will be hired to replace the laid-off workers probably will not know the merchandise as well as the workers who were dismissed, customers who want to know how to set up a high-definition TV or why one music player is better than another might not receive the best advice.

New headquarters for business at W&M

On Friday, I attended the groundbreaking for Alan B. Miller Hall, the much needed, new home of William & Mary's Mason School of Business. The b-school at W&W was founded in 1967 and I'm told it didn't have enough or the right space from its first day. When I first saw it in 1996, I was shocked -- the library was squashed into a classroom, classes were being held in two different buildings, and the students were holding meetings in the halls. Hardly the b-school that I expected in such a well-regarded college.

Seems like plenty of other people shared that view, including Alan Miller, a 1958 W&M economics grad who founded and runs Universal Health Services, a hospital management company with $4 billion in annual revenues. I interviewed Miller for a story in W&M Business magazine -- he's sharp, of course, but he's also direct, unpretentious, and he's got an infectious laugh. He's not, however, saying exactly how much he donated to make the new building a reality. Dean Larry Pulley said Miller "leads a team of million-dollar-plus donors who are bringing over $35 million to this project." There seem to be about seven or eight members on that team and they ponied up just under half of the entire $75 million cost of the new building, including furniture, equipment, and the kind of cutting-edge technologies you'd expect to find in a leading b-school. Nice to have people like this in the world.

It's a great looking building, from the drawing boards at Robert A.M. Stern's firm, which happily echoes the Georgian roots of the old campus. It's 163,000 sq ft; that's 100K more than the school's current home in Tyler Hall. It's also in a great location -- on the Western edge of the Campus just a mile or so from my house. (Nobody in town is gonna miss the parking lot it will replace.) Due to open in 2009, I expect it's going to attract a faculty and a student base that will put W&M's business program in a position to compete with best b-schools in the country.

A dip in the Panama Canal offers little relief

Books like Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and A Game as Old As Empire (both from Berrett-Koehler) offer a view of the actions and motives of our nation's companies and government that is at such odds with values and ideals that we profess that some part of me refuses to believe them. I don't know why I have a hard time swallowing these unpalatable versions of reality. I grew up with the Kennedy and King assassinations and Vietnam and Nixon. I shouldn't have any illusions and yet, I find myself looking for an out, looking for anyone I can trust who can "say it ain't so."

Anyway, that's why I was interested in reading "What Roosevelt Took," a fascinating working paper by Harvard Business School's Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu. (Read it here.) Maurer and Yu analyzed the economic benefits derived from building and operating the Panama Canal between 1903 and 1937. Who benefited most? The US, they say. And Panama? Panama was shortchanged on the purchase price and overtly excluded from participating in the construction of the Canal; it received almost no benefit whatsoever. In fact, the only significant benefit it received accrued from the campaign against disease, which was undertaken to preserve the health of the non-Panamanian canal workers, not the citizens.

Maurer and Yu's conclusion:

Panama’s experience with the Canal, therefore, holds warnings for modern underdeveloped countries that seek to rapidly develop through the construction of large infrastructure projects, be they pipelines (as in Central Asia and Africa) or “land bridges” (as in Central America). The spillovers from such projects may prove disappointing. Nor is it clear that greater international oversight is an efficient way to insure greater local benefits from such projects...Panama eventually developed the human and institutional capital needed to benefit from the presence of the Canal on its soil, but it was a slow process that took almost a century, and required multiple costly interventions by the United States. It is not clear how long it will take Bolivia, Chad, or Uzbekistan to do the same.

Which, by the way, sounds a lot like a polite way of saying exactly the same thing as the writers of the books mentioned above.

Flattery will get you nowhere

A decade ago, Lynda Obst, the Hollywood producer, wrote a forgettable book with an unforgettable title -- Hello, He Lied -- which pretty much sums up my initial state of mind whenever I'm accosted by retail sales clerks. They invariably say one or both of the things that make me grind my teeth: "That's really popular right now" or "That really looks great on you." I'd really rather be ignored.

Happily, it turns out that nobody believes this blather, according to Kelley Main, Darren Dahl, and Peter Darke, a trio of Canadian marketing professors. They conducted a set of experiments using a sunglasses kiosk in which the sales clerks flattered shoppers either during the sale, after the sale, or not at all. Then, they asked the shoppers to rate the trustworthiness of the clerks. Guess what? Flattery, whether it comes during or after the sale, lowers the shopper's perception of the clerk's trustworthiness. In fact, it automatically (that is, without conscious reflection) makes them suspicious.

The professors' results and conclusions were just published under the title "Deliberative and Automatic Bases of Suspicion: Empirical Evidence of the Sinister Attribution Error" in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. They could have used Obst's help there.

Gardner on your mind

I'm a fan of Howard Gardner, the Harvard psychologist whose theory of multiple intelligences won him a MacArthur genius grant and created serious doubts about the efficacy of standard IQ tests. I particularly liked his 2004 book, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and People's Minds, a thoughtful, authoritative read that offers a model and lots of insight into the mind-changing process without hype or oversimplification. None of that "how to get anyone to do anything you want in 5 seconds" baloney -- a fact that many reviewers complained about! (You can hear Gardner talking about the book on NPR's Talk of the Nation here.)

Gardner's new book from Harvard Business School Press, Five Minds For the Future, just arrived. In it, Gardner describes five uses of the mind that people, especially leaders and teachers, should cultivate if they wish to be successful in tomorrow's world. He calls these uses the Disciplinary Mind, the Synthesizing Mind, the Creating Mind, the Respectful Mind, and the Ethical Mind.

Why are these particular minds important? Gardner writes:

"Individuals without one or more disciplines will not be able to succeed at any demanding workplace and will be restricted to menial tasks.

Individuals without synthesizing capabilities will be overwhelmed by information and unable to make judicious decisions about personal or professional matters.

Individuals without creating capacities will be replaced by computers and will drive away those who have the creative spark.

Individuals without respect will not be worthy of respect by others and will poison the workplace and the commons.

Individuals without ethics will yield a world devoid of decent workers and responsible citizens: none of us will want to live on that desolate planet."

The ties that bind

Ran across a Newswise press release from the University of Washington Business School about an interesting concept called job embeddedness. A little searching revealed that the idea first emerged in 2001 in a paper titled "Why People Stay: Using Job Embeddedness to Predict Voluntary Turnover," written by an academic team headed by UW management and organization professor Terrence Mitchell.

The paper offered a new model, based on research and two samples, suggesting that the traditional wisdom that job satisfaction and money entice people stay at jobs was a less-than-complete picture. In fact, Mitchell and team found that job satisfaction plays a relatively small role in employee decisions to stay.

Instead, they discovered that people become enmeshed in their jobs thru a web of forces the team named "job embeddedness." They also found that the degree of job embeddedness that an employee perceives is determined by three dimensions: link, the extent to which the employee feels linked to other people and activities on the job; fit, the extent to which their job is a good fit with other aspects of their lives; and sacrifice, the amount of change leaving a job would entail.

Since 2001, there appears to be a growing number of academics conducting research in this area and surely, given the talent shortages everyone is predicting for the near future, HR pros and other organizational execs will want to know how they can utilize job embeddedness to keep good people...and I'm wondering why there haven't been any books on the topic.

The not-so-big story on email

The spate of recent stories which have referenced new research into the pitfalls of communicating via email conducted by Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management asst professor Kristin Byron made me curious enough to take a peek behind the press release. It turns out her research is a theoretical model derived from her study of “computer-mediated and nonverbal communication, emotion, and perception literature.” It’s titled Carrying Too Heavy a Load? and will be published by the Academy of Management in January ’08.

The gist of the study is a set of theoretical propositions derived from Byron’s review of the literature. She proposes:

• That we read email thru a lens, darkly -- messages intended to be positive are likely to appear neutral and messages are likely to appear more negative than intended;


• That this effect is magnified when the messages come from males, senders of high status (like your boss), or people with whom you don’t have well-established relationships;


• That this effect varies by the age (young people read more negative emotion; old people read positive as neutral) and the mood of the reader (bad moods means negative interpretations);


• That message rules and emoticons can dampen the effect by creating a shared context.

There’s no proof here, but I’ve had enough run-ins over misread emails that I'm not surprised by Byron’s conclusions. The big question in my mind is what can you do to minimize the likelihood of your own emails being misread.

Unfortunately, Bryon doesn’t offer many answers. First, she says, “recognize the possibility that, as the model suggests, we are fallible as both email senders and receivers.” Then, “use established, shared cues to communicate emotion” and "[seek] clarity by repeating important information or by asking for feedback [to] more accurately express emotions.”