What Research Tells Us About the Power of the Tribe

Below is a guest post from Steven Sloman and Mugur Geana

Image of Steven Sloman
Steven Sloman
Image of Mugur Geana
Mugur Geana

“…human beings are tribal all the way down, all the way to the processes that govern thought. In other words, we let others think for us.”

We thought we had a solution. After a year of cowering in our homes, science had come to the rescue in a way that sounded like science fiction. We had not one but two vaccines based on what seemed fantasmagorical methods from the cutting edge of molecular biology. They had greater efficacy than anyone had dreamed, upwards of 90% ability to prevent infection. Yet, as we write this, the US is experiencing a 4th Covid-19 surge. To those of us who raced to get vaccinated as soon as we could, something has gone terribly wrong.

We knew that a coronavirus variant might evolve that could wriggle its way around the vaccine’s defenses. Most experts believe that, to some extent, that is what the Delta variant is doing. It is almost surely more transmissible than previous variants, and therefore has become a dominant strain globally. But we don’t really know how transmissible this latest and greatest contender is because it isn’t facing the same obstacles that its immediate predecessors faced. Many Americans have decided that the pandemic is over. So it is hard for epidemiologists to measure the transmissibility of the Delta variant, because they have to do it in a society with full restaurants and bars, and with thousands of fans screaming their approval and disapproval at sports venues. Some of those patrons have been vaccinated. Some have not. The surge is occurring not just because of the new variant but because so many people have entirely given up on wearing masks and social distancing, never mind their unwillingness to vaccinate.

There are other reasons people may have given up, including the inconsistency of the messages put forward by public health authorities. The CDC did issue guidance that vaccinated people need not wear masks indoors when they are with other vaccinated people. But recent studies show that vaccinated people can become carriers (although substantially less often than unvaccinated people). Furthermore, people get their information about Covid from a multitude of sources, and misinformation abounds. Nevertheless, the vaccines have lowered the risk of getting and certainly of dying from Covid-19. So, are people just making rational risk assessments to decide whether or not the discomfort of masks and the isolation of social distancing is worth it? Alternatively, people might be ignoring scientific advice because they lack trust. Some come from racial minority groups that have historically been poorly served by the medical community, or their behavior is driven by information from sources that do not share the medical establishment’s views.

The word on the street, and on many newscasts, is that the issue is ideological. Is it? Ideology seems to pervade so much these days. There is clearly a split in Americans’ confidence in experts; Democrats show more than Republicans (Pew Research, 7/21/19). Experts themselves are speaking pretty much with a single voice: With only a few eccentric exceptions, medical experts recommend avoiding close proximity to strangers, wearing masks in public, certainly indoors and outdoors if you have to be close to people you don’t know (or don’t trust), and get vaccinated. Who is following the advice, and who isn’t, and why?

In two surveys involving almost 1700 US adults, we asked people whether they take preventive behaviors (mask-wearing and social distancing) and whether they support policies that encourage such behavior. We also asked respondents several questions about their political attitudes (conservative versus liberal), about their own risk from the coronavirus, their understanding of the transmission of the virus, how well they perceive their own understanding of the virus, and some other facts about themselves. We found that the best predictor of their behavior and their attitudes was their political leanings. Suppose you want to know whether an American is likely to wear a mask or practice social distancing. In that case, the single best question to ask them turns out to be what party they vote for.

This finding is consistent with a plethora of research. We looked for published and unpublished manuscripts made available by early 2021 that included measures of Covid-mitigation attitudes and also measured political ideology. Forty-four papers provided data that allowed us to evaluate which variables predicted those attitudes. Out of 141 observations from the 44 papers, political ideology was a significant predictor of responses in 112 (79%). Moreover, ideology was by far the best predictor of COVID-19-related attitudes overall. Other factors did surpass ideology’s predictive value in a few cases: age (8 cases), gender (8 cases), education (14 cases), and race/ethnicity (7 cases), along with various measures of news consumption (10 cases). Ideology did best 62 times.

In another study of over 1100 Americans led by Mae Fullerton, we found that not only did people’s risk profiles fail to predict their mask-wearing and social distancing, but even their perception of their own risk failed to predict them. As usual, partisanship turned out to be a better predictor, along with being an essential worker. Not surprisingly, another good predictor was believing compliance was important.

These studies are, of course, correlational. We have no direct evidence that one’s partisanship causes one’s willingness to take mitigating or preventive behaviors against Covid. It could be, for instance, that Republicans tend to live in Republican communities or regions of the country and Democrats in Democratic communities, and that people behave in line with their community, as opposed to their ideology. But alternative explanations like this just emphasize our bottom line: In the case of Covid, health-related behavior is not governed by a rational assessment of risk but by the attitudes of the people who surround us. Our data suggest that it is not primarily a function of race, age, or any of the other variables that have been offered as big players, but rather variables related to ideology.

In a recent book, one of us argued that human beings are tribal all the way down, all the way to the processes that govern thought. In other words, we let others think for us. We keep expecting to find exceptions to this rule. When it comes to matters of life and limb, for instance, or when behavior is obviously foolish or capricious, we would expect people to rely on their ability to reason, not to simply channel the people around them. Yet we keep being surprised. Covid is a matter of life and death and the strong consensus among experts means that deciding what to do is not very complicated, and yet people seem to be as influenced by social processes and pressures as they are in cases that seem much more benign (like how much respect one should have for economists) and topics that do not lend themselves to such easy conclusions (like how we should handle immigration).

Everyone makes mistakes. But when it comes to freeing the country from the bonds of a tiresome pandemic, some of us keep making the same mistake over and over.

You can reach Steven at: Steven_Sloman@Brown.edu. His website is: https://sites.google.com/site/slomanlab/

You can reach Mugur at geanam@ku.edu

and Check out the Human Tech podcast episode where Steven Sloman and his co-author, Philip Fernbach talk about their book The Knowledge Illusion.

Humans Calculate By Feel on the Human Tech Podcast

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In this Human Tech podcast episode we talk about behavioral economics, specifically about the idea that people don’t calculate the value of products and services rationally, but they do so by following how they feel about what something is worth. Guthrie walks us through the research and the practical implications.

Amy Bucher and Behavior Change Design on the Human Tech podcast

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Amy Bucher, Vice President of Behavior Change at MadPow, and author of Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change, joins us for this episode on Human Tech.

And if you are interested in purchasing the book the publisher,  Rosenfeld, has a coupon code for us:  Go to this webpage: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/engaged-designing-for-behavior-change/

and when you are checking out use this code: HumanTechEngaged0620 

for 20% off through August 15, 2020.

 

Engaged Cover


 

 

7 Science-Backed Tips To Be More Productive

Whether you work at a job or work at a hobby or work at an avocation, if you are like me you want to be productive. You want to get more done, with less effort, and enjoy it as much as possible.

Maybe not everyone cares about this as much as I do. For me, one of the joys in life is feeling like I have accomplished something worthwhile and useful. And if I can feel energized before, during, and after so much the better.

There’s no dearth of advice about how to be more productive, but recently I set out to find out what I could about the science of productivity. I ended up creating an online video course based on what I learned. Here’s a summary of the science of productivity. See how many of these you currently use:

  1. Work with your own rhythms. We all have our own cycles of work and rest. Whether it is a daily circadian rhythm or a week rhythm or even months long rhythm, observe your own rhythms of when you are at a high work energy and when you are in “rest” mode. Fighting your own rhythm won’t make you more productive.
  2. Break tasks up into smaller steps. When you accomplish a task your brain chemicals change. Accomplishing a step is like a small reward AND it stimulates you to want to start the next task. If you are working on one big long task it takes a long time to accomplish something. If you partition the big task into smaller tasks then you have lots of accomplishments.
  3. Pay attention to the room and furnishings. Set up a place to work that is only where you work. If you have a comfortable and efficient space to work in, and if the only thing you do when you are in that space is your wonderful productive work, then your body and your brain form a habit. Everytime you walk into the “work” space your brain automatically goes into productive work mode.
  4. MInimize multi-tasking. The estimate is that you can lose up to 40% of your productivity switching from one task to another, which is what happens a lot of the time when you are multi-tasking.
  5. Minimize alerts. To make multi-tasking less tempting, turn off automatic alerts and notifications on your computer, laptop, and phone.
  6. Sleep.  The research shows that being sleep deprived makes you less efficient in  your work. Try getting  7-8 hours a night. Napping for 20 minutes during the day can also boost your productivity.
  7. Work with a team. There is a lot of research, from Allport’s study in the 1920s up to research in the present day , that shows that when people work in a team they are more productive and they enjoy the work more. Sometimes working alone can be a good thing, but don’t forget the power of the team.

So there’s seven ideas on productivity that are backed up by science. What do you think?

If you want to learn more, check out the online video course: The Science of Productivity. 

How Trust Affects Creative Collaboration


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Control freaks and psychological safety — We brought Eric Olive on the podcast as a guest to talk about the science of decisions and we ended up talking about control and safety. How do you create an environment of psychological safety? And how does that encourage creative collaboration?

Eric has also offered a list of articles and books for more reading which we’ve added below.

You can reach Eric at:

uiuxtraining.com
eric@uiuxtraining.com

Articles

A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making by David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone HBR November 2007

Fooled by Experience by Emre Soyer and Robin M. Hogarth

Leaders as Decision Architects by John Beshears and Francesca Gino— Harvard Business Review. Structure your organization’s work to encourage wise choices.

“Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking”, Organization Science, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 409-421.

“The Identification of Solution Ideas During Organizational Decision Making,” Management Science 39: 1071–85. Paul C. Nutt (1993),

“Surprising but True: Half the Decisions in Organizations Fail,” Academy of Management Executive 13: 75–90. Paul C. Nutt, 1999.

Only for HBR (Harvard Business Review) Subscribers

Before You Make That Big Decision by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony. Harvard Business Review.

The Hidden Traps in Decision Making by John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa. Harvard Business Review, January 2006.

Books

A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger

Beyond Greed and Fear by Hersh Shefrin

Decisive by Dan and Chip Heath

Educating Intuition by Robin Hogarth

Focus by Daniel Goleman

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Intuition at Work by Gary Klein

Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

Seeing what Others Don’t by Gary Klein

The Art Of Thinking Clearly by Rolf/Griffin Dobelli

Winning Decisions by J. Edward Russo and Paul J.H. Schoemaker’

 

Human Tech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

How do you build a culture of trust?


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How’s the trust quotient where you work? Or in the country where you live? How do you build a culture where people trust each other?

We talk about the research on cooperation, punishment and trust in this episode of Human Tech.

For more details on the topic after you listen to the podcast, you may want to check out the blog post and video post on the same topic.


Human Tech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

Heuristics: The Unsung Heroes Of How People Think

Logo for HumanTech podcastWe talk a lot about “cognitive biases” — the tendencies we have to think and act in ways that are not always logical, and not always accurate, but we forget that many of these brain shortcuts are very adaptive and very successful.

In this podcast episode we dive into the positive side — Heuristics. What they are, why we use them, and how they are so successful that we may even want to program them into machines.


Human Tech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

How well do you know your EEG from your GSR?

Logo for HumanTech podcastOur guest, Spencer Gerrol from Spark Neuro gets in the weeds with us in this episode and explains all things neuro-measurement.  How well does EEG measure interest and engagement? Can you tell what people are feeling? Which emotion? What does GSR (galvanic skin response) add? Anything? And facial recognition? Are these measurements better than using fMRI? Spencer has a unique ability to really go deep and yet make the information easy to understand. If you want to learn about the latest in neuro-measurements listen to this episode.


You can find out more about Spark Neuro and contact Spencer directly from the Spark Neuro website.

HumanTech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

Rating Your Projects A- Vs A+

Logo for HumanTech podcastIn the last blog post Guthrie Weinschenk explained his idea about saving time and money by rating your projects before you start them. In this podcast Susan and Guthrie discuss how this works and why it works.


HumanTech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.