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The very latest research briefings about leadership, management, organisational and human development (inc. coaching and work psychology) from OR Briefings an Oxcognita LLC service
Episodes
Tuesday Feb 19, 2019
Tuesday Feb 19, 2019
In this extended episode David and Sarah discuss a new research briefing about the validity of common digital maturity assessments, what digital maturity is and what the difference is between evidence-based practice and evidence-informed practice.
The annoying squeak in the background is a bird!
The research briefing and full reference can be found here:
Sunday Feb 03, 2019
Sunday Feb 03, 2019
Some people just appear to have the knack of doing very little or wasting time at work and getting away with it! When I was a police officer we had a sergeant who was nicknamed ‘Blister’ as he had a reliable tendency to turn up after the real work had been done. A new study looking at time wasting at work has made some useful findings for managing such people at work.
For the text version of this research briefing go to: https://www.oxford-review.com/time-banditry/
Saturday Jan 26, 2019
Saturday Jan 26, 2019
In this episode David looks at a study about how organisations can develop greater levels of innovation across the organisation through developing higher levels of self-leadership skills. In particular the study found that one aspect of self-leadership had the biggest impact in developing what are known as innovative work behaviours.
Friday Jan 18, 2019
Friday Jan 18, 2019
In this episode David and Sarah discuss new research looking at whether it is possible to coach people to help them change personality. The results may surprise you.
Sunday Jan 06, 2019
Sunday Jan 06, 2019
In this episode Sarah and David discuss a research briefing looking at negative capability and why organisations should be developing it.
Sunday Dec 23, 2018
Sunday Dec 23, 2018
In this episode David and Sarah (our new commissioning editor), start a new series of podcasts presenting and discussing the latest research around leadership, management, organisational development, organisational change, Human Resources, organisational learning, coaching, decision-making and work psychology.
In this episode we discuss a new research briefing that was recently sent out to members about practical leadership and management wisdom and the state of
Friday Apr 13, 2018
Friday Apr 13, 2018
In this podcast I am talking with Professor Mary Uhl-Bien from the Neeley School of Management at TCU in Texas about a paper she published with Michael Arena titled 'Leadership for organizational adaptability: A theoretical synthesis and integrative framework'.
Transcript:
David Wilkinson: Hello again. Today I'd like to introduce a professor ... we're talking to Professor Mary Uhl-Bein. She is professor of management in the department of management entrepreneurship and leadership at TCU in Fort Worth in Texas.
David Wilkinson: Welcome Mary.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Thank you for having me.
David Wilkinson: It's an absolute pleasure. What we're interested in is this paper which is ... I came across recently which is about leadership for organizational adaptability, the theoretical synthesis and integrative framework.
David Wilkinson: Mary can you just, just to give us a bit of background, can you just take a couple of minutes to introduce yourself? Give the listeners a little bit of background about your personal journey so far and your academic history about how you got here in terms of your research interests.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Sure. I'm the BNSF railway endowed professor of leadership at TCU here in Forth Worth, Texas. I've been here for four years and prior to that I was in Nebraska. Prior to Nebraska I was in Florida and then prior to that I was in Alaska.
David Wilkinson: Wow.
Mary Uhl-Bien: We grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, so from all the moves, my husband and I realized that we must be high on sensation seeking. You learn about yourself by seeing what you do.
Mary Uhl-Bien: We went from Cincinnati to Alaska which was about as far as you could go in the country, and then we went from Alaska to Florida which was a bit ... again, about as extreme as you could go. We then went back up a bit and now we're down, we decided we like the south and the warm.
Mary Uhl-Bien: We live here with our youngest son and our Siberian dog which, poor thing, she's supposed to be in the north and she's down here in the heat. And then my two older children, we left one behind in Nebraska ,so he just graduated college there. And my daughter's actually in England, over with all of you. She's living in London right now. She graduated with her master's from Oxford last year.
David Wilkinson: Really? In what? What was she ...
Mary Uhl-Bien: She did it in evolutionary biology which is a field in anthropology. She's working now with a company in London, they're doing data automation.
David Wilkinson: Fantastic. Great. I hope she enjoyed herself at Oxford. I'm sure she did.
Mary Uhl-Bien: She loved it. I think she got into it because of Harry Potter.
David Wilkinson: Really? That's fantastic.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Yeah, Harry Potter is based on it, I wasn't aware of that but she told me.
David Wilkinson: Yeah, a lot of the scenes were shot in the colleges here so absolutely. Oxford's a weird place. I came here to do a master's and never left, so it's just become a life choice.
Mary Uhl-Bien: I can see that, it's a wonderful place.
David Wilkinson: Have you been?
Mary Uhl-Bien: I have, yes.
David Wilkinson: Fantastic. I love it. Anyway, great.
David Wilkinson: That's fantastic. Could you just give us a quick overview about how you ended up doing this particular paper, the research that went behind it, and include any previous research that you've been involved in that this was actually built on?
Mary Uhl-Bien: Sure. I was not planning to do a PhD. I was recruited into the PhD program by George [Grain 00:03:10] who studied leader-member exchange theory, he was the father of that theory. I was in his undergraduate class and I guess I was really obnoxious, I kept asking him a lot of questions and challenging him and engaging with him, so he told me I had to come into the PhD program.
Mary Uhl-Bien: It was a time when we were ... there was a recession in the U.S. and the job market wasn't very good. So I came into the field that way and I worked with him on leader-member exchange, and I always wondered why my view of leadership was a little bit different from the other scholars I've seen in leadership. I knew there was something different but I couldn't figure out what it was, and I realized it's because I was trained in this model of leader-member exchange and so I always saw leadership as a relationship.
Mary Uhl-Bien: In that relationship with George, he was the mentor and I was the protégé, but our relationship was very much one of doing this: he brought me in because I would challenge him. I would sit on his couch in his office for hours on end because we would just go at it, and from all of that we generated really creative work. So that's how I view leadership. He trained me in the definition of the ... leadership as a relationship.
Mary Uhl-Bien: So we studied leader-member exchange and I then started getting into [exec ed 00:04:28] and working with practitioners, I was hired on as a consultant. In doing that I started to realize ... I tried to consult and say, "You need to build these relationships," and the leaders I was working with pointed out to me pretty quickly, "That's not really my job." So then I started to see the limitations of the theory that I was doing. I really wanted to have a theory work ... spend time in research doing ... developing a theory that had rigor and relevance.
Mary Uhl-Bien: All of that set me up that I was looking for something different, something bigger and broader, and I was introduced to Russ Marion who was doing research in complexity. From that we started doing complexity leadership and we wrote our first paper in 2001. We continued that work and so then in 2007 we got the theory hammered out, we started working on the empirical work, and this paper is the follow-up to all of that.
David Wilkinson: Got you. Now I understand the background of how you got to where it was. Interesting.
David Wilkinson: It's a fascinating paper. It pulls together a lot of thinking that hasn't been pulled together in this way, and certainly the whole area behind exploitation and exploration. [inaudible 00:05:47] been a lot of work done on that, actually pulling it together and looking at how that works within an organization, particularly drew me to this.
David Wilkinson: I suppose there's a few things that, from my point of view anyway, I found that there is really new ... in the paper, three main areas. The first one is the relabeling of three types of leadership required for developing adaptive capability in an organization. It's entrepreneurial leadership, enabling leadership, and operational leadership.
David Wilkinson: Do you just want to spend a couple of minutes talking across those three and what you mean by them?
Mary Uhl-Bien: Sure. I was thrilled when you were writing me your overview, that you actually got the gist of the paper. I thought, "God, he really gets it," when you were describing it and pulling out the pieces that really matter.
Mary Uhl-Bien: To tell you how we got here, what happened was we had our 2007 paper when we wrote the theory, and we spent six years really deep trying to figure that out. It was not easy and we had a lot of pushback doing a lot of presentations to practitioners. So then we started collecting data. We went out and we did a lot of qualitative work, we did some interventions, we did field studies. As that work was unfolding we kept getting calls from practice to come into their companies.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Usually when we start to, what you do is you do a study and you publish it. Well, what was happening was this was going so quickly that we said, "We are discovering so much we don't want to just publish what we're doing," and we didn't want to stop and slow down. So Michael Arena, who was my co-author, he was in practice, he got an opportunity to go to General Motors as their chief talent officer. He said, "Mary, this is our living laboratory. We're going to see if we can make the theory in the 2007 paper work." And we had a lot of learning so ... If you aren't sure, theorize is one thing, when you try to do it in the real world it's quite different. It took a year or two of Michael working in it and then me interviewing him, so we were doing this study all along the way before we really started to have the, "A-has," to say, "Now we've got it."
Mary Uhl-Bien: Michael and I worked really hard to refine a model we presented to practice and we got it to the point where it was tight and solid. So now that challenge was, "How do we get it into academic research?" That was what I did with this paper, is we had so much ... a massive framework, you can't put it down into one study, and had to figure out how we could get academics to understand this and ground this in theory. So this is all set up to tell you about the the leadership style.
Mary Uhl-Bien: What I realized in doing all of this is people were not resonating with the complexity idea, it was just too hard. People weren't going to go learn complexity theory, and while that's an incredibly rigorous grounding and theoretical framework for this, really at the core of the model's about adaptability. So then I started looking for leadership for organizational adaptability and realized that it was being covered in all these different areas, so I proposed this review piece. Well, I had no idea what we were going to find when we did the review. So we had all of our understanding from practice, no idea what we were going to find in the literature, but when we started looking and we found these different areas that we're talking about, what was so shocking was it all came together. People were finding the pieces of what we had found in our overall framework and we were pulling from a lot of [qual 00:09:12] work, because the qualitative work is what many of these approaches use, or different kinds of approaches from just the survey work.
Mary Uhl-Bien: When we saw it we pulled all of the different pieces and it went into a nice, neat framework that we had developed from practice. In that framework, what we did was we took the initial leadership styles that we knew about in the 2007 paper and then just updated them. If you look at the 2007 paper, the theory paper, we talked about it as adaptive and administrative, and then we had enabling in the middle. What we discovered was we had the adaptive wrong. We were thinking adaptive was bottom up, really it's more of the middle piece. It was a whole long story about how we figured that out.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Then when we look at the literature it became so clear. So figure one in the paper really shows it. Across all of these different areas this is a very robust, resound finding that you have the two sides, but the adaptability lies in the middle. But nobody gets that. They don't really understand it and it's like they're touching the different parts of the elephant.
Mary Uhl-Bien: So what we did with this paper was pull it all together. You've got entrepreneurial. You've got operational, which was the administrative piece, and then you have enabling. With the entrepreneurial, what you're doing is you're pushing method exploration. You're looking for innovation, learning, and growth. With the operational you're pushing for results, so that's the administrative piece where organizations have managers who drive for results or operational leaders who do that. And then the enabling piece is the middle pieces that's about adaptability, and what that does is work to enable adaptive space.
David Wilkinson: Brilliant. Actually, the figure one diagram, can I just have your permission to reproduce these so-
Mary Uhl-Bien: Absolutely.
David Wilkinson: ... I can send it to my members.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Sure.
David Wilkinson: [inaudible 00:11:05] is a really-
Mary Uhl-Bien: I might need to ask Elsevier, but right now they're offering it free online so I think you have permission probably.
David Wilkinson: I think you've got the copyright actually because it's yours. That's usually what happens.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Mo, they keep it.
David Wilkinson: Oh, do they? Anyway, I won't go ... Choose your publications wisely. Okay, that's great.
David Wilkinson: The second idea that really comes out of this is the idea of leaders creating and holding an adaptive space. For me that was the really big idea in all of this. Can you just explain what you actually mean by that?
Mary Uhl-Bien: Sure. What we found in our research, and you can see this in an article that I wrote for Organizational Dynamics that came out last year and that was geared toward practitioners, the major finding we had in our work was that the world is more complex, in a more complex world. What that means is that the world is ... has rich interconnectivity. In this interconnectivity, that we have increased interconnectivity, [inaudible 00:12:15] means that when things come together they interact, they fundamental change each other. They create phase transitions which leads to unpredictability and it leads to dynamism and speed and all of these kinds of things.
Mary Uhl-Bien: In that world you need to have complexity to respond to complexity, but the problem is that organizations strive to order. Our organizational systems are designed to go to order, which is a more bureaucratic or structured or standardized response.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Organizations that live in complexity and that are highly adaptive and innovative, what they do is they don't go to order, they go to a complexity response and they do that by using adaptive space. Adaptive space is conditions that allow for adaptability to occur in a system, they're not part of our natural organizations. Nowhere in an organization design, structure, chart in a bureaucratic organizing system, is this adaptive space. So what you need to do as a leader in organizations is you need to work to create that adaptive space.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Now the nice thing is, what complexity does is it naturally opens that up. So when complexity happens it creates these conditions and organizations, well, they have to adapt. But the problem is, what managers do and what employees want managers to do, is they close that back down. When they're being disrupted or it's uncomfortable or they have tension or these complexity pressures, what they do is they take care of it, they fix it, they problem solve, "Oh good, we got that one, the fire's put out. We fixed it, it's now going away and we can go back to our happy lives." That's the order of response.
Mary Uhl-Bien: We really need to be able to play in that adaptive space and to keep it open and use it appropriately.
David Wilkinson: I think part of that's about creating the space for people to be able to look for emerging properties. Quite often in organizations there isn't the time, and holding that adaptive space, allowing for noticing those things rather than creating, as you say, order rather than actually creating certainty, allowing the uncertainty be and looking at the uncertainty and looking for patterns in that uncertainty. That's part of the work that I've been doing and one of the reasons why I connected so much with the paper I think.
David Wilkinson: It's really interesting. Have you got examples of organizations that are actually holding an adaptive space?
Mary Uhl-Bien: We have actually, yes. We started with the companies that were coming to us that said, "We need help with this," and we have a whole bunch of those. What we began to realize was, "We've studied this, but most of these are more bureaucratic. They're struggling with the adaptive space, so we need to go out and see if we study highly innovative and adaptive organizations if they have it." So we did a second follow-up study validation study after we developed our model with these highly innovative, adaptive ... and yes, this is what they do.
Mary Uhl-Bien: We were doing things like looking at Facebook which actually has been in the news this week. Facebook and Google and a lot of the high tech companies. We have another organization, W.L. Gore which does Gore-Tex, and they were one of the early ones that were really talking with us, Debra France from W.L. Gore who said, "This is what we do at Gore that keeps us so innovative and allows us to have this different model."
Mary Uhl-Bien: Michael then started doing it at General Motors. He's had really good success in developing adaptive space and really has developed expertise. The thought was, "If we can do it in General Motors, we could probably do it just about anywhere."
David Wilkinson: Fantastic.
Mary Uhl-Bien: So I think [inaudible 00:16:16] feel pretty confident that this is what organizations that are adept in this world, this is what they're doing.
David Wilkinson: There's two ... the ideas of conflicting and connecting come out of the paper in large. Can you just explain what you mean by those and how they affect practitioners?
Mary Uhl-Bien: Sure. Conflicting is the idea that you have heterogeneous worldviews, you have different perspectives. When complexity happens, what's happening is that it's ... it creates pressures in the system. It creates an adaptive challenge meaning that you have to do something different. It creates conflicting perspectives and ... or, new partnerships. The second one was new partnerships. So adaptive challenge, new partnerships.
Mary Uhl-Bien: In new partnerships, people have to come together and work together who haven't done so before, and that happens all over the place. When those people come together they have diverse backgrounds, so they have different needs and they have different worldviews and different perspectives, different training, background. That creates this conflict in that relationship and what often happens is people shut that down, so they try to get rid of the conflict.
Mary Uhl-Bien: What we know from complexity is that a poor element of complex adaptive systems is tension and what I was calling the, "Tension dynamic," for many years. So we decided to use the word, conflicting, to get people to understand that what you need to do in organizations is engage that conflicting. There's a way to do that, there are processes for it. People who are good at complexity know how to do this, bring the different ideas together, and that's what adaptive space does is it brings these differences together in the right conditions to engage them. And we want that creative tension, that adaptive tension.
Mary Uhl-Bien: So you play on the tension, but the other piece of it is, conflicting is only good if you have connecting. Out of that conflicting, out of that diversity, when you have the heads butting if you will, something sparks. It's usually something that you haven't thought of before. That's where the creative ... creativity comes from, that's why they call it, "Creative abrasion." So you have to get really good at understanding to watch for those sparks and look for the areas where the connections can occur.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Now, that's in the creative process of adaptive space. The really fascinating thing about this is in complexity we talk about these fractals. Fractal means that it scales, it looks the same as it scales across the system. This dynamic could occur between you and me, which is what I discovered George and I did at ... doing when I was sitting on the couch, that was my training. Russ and I did it as we developed this work together.
Mary Uhl-Bien: So this is a core part of everything that went into this work, but that also occurs in the organization. So if we scale it up and think about it at a different level, when people have a new idea ... Let's take an entrepreneurial leader who has a new idea. That person starts to develop that new idea, then socializing in the local environment, and then the person, after they refine it a bit and decide it's got some legs, they decide, or a group decides, they're going to take it out into the organization and try to scale it to make it bigger. What happens is when they take it out and they go bigger, it hits up against the other parts of the system, so that's conflicting.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Now for many people, they perceive that as hitting a brick wall. They say, "I've hit the brick wall, this is done. This idea is dead," and they quit. What we're telling people is, "No, this is the conflicting process. You need to change your mindset about that. You need to understand that that is a conflicting process. You need to take that information back, iterate your idea, but figure out how you can get through that conflicting."
Mary Uhl-Bien: That conflicting goes all across the levels. It happens over and over again. You're trying to get through the conflicting to do what we call, "Linking up," or, "Connecting," so you then find a way. Okay David, I've just given you this idea, you saying, "No, it's not going to work." I take it back, I refine it, and I come back to you again and I continue that or I find a work around until I can get a way to link up with you. Now we're linked up and you say, "Okay, this will work," and then you continue to do that process. It's an ongoing and they're really not separable. They work together as a dynamic and it's a fractal dynamic. Pretty cool, huh?
David Wilkinson: It is. I'm getting excited here because it fits in with some of the work that I was doing in the early 2000s when we were looking at ... My area is to do with uncertainty and leadership and how leaders cope or don't cope or don't deal with uncertainty largely. One of the leadership modes that came out of that research was what we call, "Mode four," or, "Generative leadership." Generative leaders have this ability to be able to hold a conflict and look for the patterns and look for the things within the conflict that are enablers and learn from it. They're inveterate learners rather than ... and part of this is ...
David Wilkinson: This is why I [inaudible 00:21:29] emotional regulation's so closely to generative leadership, is they don't run away because of the conflict, they move into it to see what they can learn from it. And they don't start forcing things on people, what they're trying to do. It goes back to the whole thing about merging properties. They're trying to find out, "What's going on here?" And trying to work out what the worldview is and learn from different perspectives, so they become collective of lots of different perspectives and diversity. Not diversity in the sense of just skin color but in the way that people think and see things, because that enables them to start to work out what's actually going on with the conflict.
David Wilkinson: It just dovetails so beautifully into some of the work that we've been ... I've been doing for years which is why I got so excited.
Mary Uhl-Bien: That's exactly it. You just described it perfectly.
David Wilkinson: We're going to have to meet.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Yes.
David Wilkinson: When you're in Oxford next. In fact I will be coming to the states a bit later but anyway, we'll talk about that afterwards.
David Wilkinson: From practitioners' perspectives, because this whole thing's really for practitioners is, what should they really be taking away from your work and from this whole idea bout adaptive spaces and the three types of leadership that you've come down to?
Mary Uhl-Bien: The most important thing is to understand that the natural reaction in organizations and in systems is to go to the order of response, to drive to results, to problem solve. This is a huge problem for managers and for leaders because this is what we've trained them to do. The problem with leadership is we've told leaders, "Yes, you're problem solvers, you're decision makers. Here's what you need to do: build good relationships with your employees which means make them feel good." Quite often this is not a process that makes people feel good. People who are not comfortable with ambiguity or uncertainty, they experience this as extreme stress.
Mary Uhl-Bien: What managers do is try to make people feel better and take that stress away, fix the problem. That's one of the worst things you can do in this situation. We have to be very, very careful that we understand that the role of leadership today in the conditions of complexity, and there's so much more of it, is to enable this adaptive space, enable the conflicting and connecting in that process, and that it looks very, very different from normal leadership. So we actually need to change our competency models, we need to change our recognition and reward systems, because leaders who do this, they don't look like what we've described as leaders or defined as leaders.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Now in this current stage we're got a practice group we're working with, we've got some really carefully hand-selected leaders we're tracking. Michael already did it, we tracked him. Now we're tracking other leaders to see how they're doing and they're not always recognized as leaders. They can be flying under the radar or it can look like invisible leadership.
Mary Uhl-Bien: The other challenge is they need a lot of coaching and support because this is not an easy process to work through, and now we know of some of those nuances of what's happening. So we need to get more information out to these leaders to say, "Here's what's going to happen. Here are different stages of this. Here's some warning signals," et cetera.
David Wilkinson: That's-
Mary Uhl-Bien: Excuse me. Don't just push for results. I think that we've got to get organizations off this short term push for results, focusing on, "Yes, results is current, but we need adaptability. To have adaptability you need this entrepreneurial and innovation and the operational engaging in the tension to generate adaptability. You need results and adaptability."
David Wilkinson: It's beautiful. Actually, one of the ways that, just as you were talking it made me realize, is that we put leaders in organizations and that's what they do, they organize. Unfortunately what happens is they organize the living life out of complexity rather than holding the space to learn about the complexity.
Mary Uhl-Bien: That's right.
David Wilkinson: They end up getting rid of it, not learning, which is one of the big problems. I'll send you some stuff actually after the interview-
Mary Uhl-Bien: That'd be great.
David Wilkinson: ... that you might be interested in.
Mary Uhl-Bien: I'd love to see it.
David Wilkinson: Just brilliant.
David Wilkinson: What's next for you in terms of research? What are you working on that you can tell us about right now, and where next?
Mary Uhl-Bien: On the practice side we really ... we have so much interest from practice. I have never had more practitioners contacting me and so we've been prioritizing them. I'm working to get a companion piece out to the Org Dynamics article that I published last year with Michael and explain more about how you do this adaptive space, because in that one we gave the interview, and this next one we need to show more about how you do it.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Then on the research side we now have the new model, the revised model out which we're thrilled about. I'm so excited that you saw the paper and liked it, thank you for that.
David Wilkinson: I love it.
Mary Uhl-Bien: So the next step there is I want to write a piece on the tension dynamic because really the core of this, on the academic side, the core of this is this tension dynamic, and people just don't understand it. It's going to be similar to what I did with this other piece where I look all over in the literature, because when I was doing the first review I could see that there are insights there, so I'm going to call all of those findings. Then I'll write that one up in terms of explaining more about adaptive space, and the tension dynamic is the core of that.
David Wilkinson: Brilliant. Excellent. I'll send you some references actually because I've been doing quite a lot of work around this area. There's some really interesting stuff. That's fantastic.
David Wilkinson: That's brilliant. Is there anything else that you're working on in research terms? Sorry, that's my dog.
Mary Uhl-Bien: [inaudible 00:27:43] doing this from home.
David Wilkinson: I know, yes. I didn't realize you couldn't get through to there.
Mary Uhl-Bien: In research terms I think, again, we're going to do the tension dynamic, the adaptive space, and then we have lots and lots of studies. So once we get the big picture, then we're going to start providing more of those studies that I was describing. We'll go back and write those up.
Mary Uhl-Bien: The challenge for us on the research side is that ... getting the world of academics to understand it. It doesn't fit into the nice, neat little box. You had asked me in the original framing about what practitioners should know about evidence-based, and what I would say is this: be careful thinking that it's evidence. That what's being pulled from out literature is evidence. That again is some language that we use as academics and there's a group [inaudible 00:28:40] pitching it. I agree with where they're trying to go, I just don't know if I agree with the evidence piece, because the idea that we have evidence views [the methods 00:28:49] that we use, to me is questionable. A lot of those studies are perceptual, so the reason that I left the [inaudible 00:28:57] because it was a seven item measure of a perception of a relationship, and we would draw all of these conclusions that went way beyond the data, and I got fairly uncomfortable with it and I knew that there was much nuance to it.
Mary Uhl-Bien: So I would say just take ... there are ... definitely are key findings or principles we know, there's no question. It's all basic principles that we've known from eons of research and just from our theory, so that's really good stuff. Just be careful about the idea that one study can be so informative. Look at the methods to see what's going on in those studies and then understand that there's not a magic toolbox. You have to do the hard work of learning the stuff. Somebody's not going to come in and say, "This study shows this and I'm going to go implement this," that's really just not how it works.
David Wilkinson: There's a whole series of things there. In fact I've just been writing some stuff on this about the four areas for having this based-practice that includes, obviously, academic research, but it also includes the practitioner's experience, feedback from the organization, feedback from customers and clients, and these four things that come into having this based-practice, it isn't just the academic.
David Wilkinson: One of the things that actually drew me to the ... to your paper was the fact that it's grounded, it's actually based on ... it's based on things in organizations as opposed to a theoretical-base first.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Exactly. That's what we did with our research. People were saying to me after I wrote the 2007 paper, "You need to write a book," and I said, "No, I need to go see how this works in the world." And yet, as I said to you, the reason we have not published a lot of papers is the academic world doesn't have a forum for getting that work out because it doesn't fit our typical research methods.
Mary Uhl-Bien: So what we did is a combination of things and I think that that's really what we need to do in research. We worked with so many practitioners, they were partners in this all the way through, and yet we still had this ... the very scholared, theoretical grounding. I like rigor and relevance. Rigor in the theoretical side, relevance to practice. Or impact, you could talk about impact. I like that better than this idea of evidence.
David Wilkinson: Brilliant. That's fantastic. It's one of the reasons for the Oxford review actually, because that gap between academic and practitioner is usually huge, but trying to close that in this paper does it beautifully.
Mary Uhl-Bien: And that's what happened here is that Michael is a practitioner, he's got a PhD in practice and he's my partner in this work. We had our research team but then Michael and I went off to try to do this work, so that's what you see in it.
David Wilkinson: That's fantastic.
David Wilkinson: Mary, thank you very much for spending the time with us. I'll be in contact anyway, I've got some things to send you. Just, thank you so much for your time.
Mary Uhl-Bien: Thank you for having me, it's been really wonderful.
David Wilkinson: That's great. You take care
Mary Uhl-Bien: Okay, thanks.
David Wilkinson: And I'll talk to you again soon.
Monday Mar 19, 2018
Monday Mar 19, 2018
Podcast 1 - Emotions, expectations and behaviour
Research Interview with Maya Tamir - Hebrew University
With David Wilkinson - Editor of The Oxford Review
Research Briefing available here:
Interview: March 2018
Transcript
David Wilkinson: So, welcome to The Oxford Review video podcast. Today, I'd like to welcome Maya Tamir. She's in Israel, and she's done a very interesting paper, you've got the briefing about it: How expectations influence how emotions shape behavior.
David Wilkinson: Can you just take a couple of minutes to introduce yourself, kind of give the listeners a bit of a background to your personal journey sofar, and something about your academic history, and how you got to here in terms of your research interests.
Maya Tamir: Sure. I did my undergraduate degree in psychology and management in Tel Aviv University, a long time ago. And then I did my PhD at the University of Illinois, in the U.S. After that, I did a postdoc with James Gross at the University of Stanford.
David Wilkinson: Ah, [crosstalk 00:01:19].
Maya Tamir: Focusing specifically on emotion regulation. I then got a job at Boston College, where I was faculty member for four years. And then I moved back to Israel and joined the Hebrew University here.
David Wilkinson: Okay. Fantastic.
Maya Tamir: In terms of how I got to studying emotions. I mean for me, emotions has always been the most interesting thing, not just as a psychologist, but just as a person living in the world.
David Wilkinson: Yes.
Maya Tamir: I was always amazed by how, I guess, how much of what's meaningful in the world somehow is connected to emotions and I wondered how this incredibly powerful thing influences us, what it does, how it does it? I've always felt, before I actually started studying emotions, that these things are ... you know that they guide and drive us more than we sometimes want them to.
David Wilkinson: Yes.
Maya Tamir: And so I wanted to understand the mechanisms. And, of course, now I think about emotions in a very different way, but that's how I got to studying emotions.
David Wilkinson: Yes, interesting.
Maya Tamir: Most of my research actually deals with emotion regulation, but I've always been incredibly curious about emotions. The very, very key question of how it works, which brings us here.
David Wilkinson: Yes, brilliant. Yeah, I hadn't realized that you actually worked with James Gross. He's a big hero of mine, and he's very prolific in the area-
Maya Tamir: And rightly so.
David Wilkinson: ... of emotion regulation. I wish I had a citation record like his. So-
Maya Tamir: He's one-of-a-kind. He's a wonderful person.
David Wilkinson: ... Yes. Yes. I've met him once, and he's very generous with his time and his knowledge. Okay, brilliant. Can you just give us a quick overview as to how you ended up doing this particular, because this paper's actually three studies.
Maya Tamir: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Wilkinson: How you ended up doing this series of studies, and what led to that?
Maya Tamir: Yeah. So, I'm particularly interested, as I mentioned before, in emotion regulation. I've always been curious about how people ... why do people want to feel certain emotions and not others. A lot of the work that I do, focuses on the idea that people may be motivated to regulate their emotions in different ways.
Maya Tamir: Sometimes, we wanna feel good. Sometimes we don't wanna feel good. And so, I've been curious ... I wanted to understand why that is? And so, I, like I think many emotion researchers and most people, lay people who don't study emotion, always assume that emotions do certain things.
Maya Tamir: That certain emotions do certain things in a fixed way. That when we're angry, we then become aggressive, and when we're afraid, we then run away, and when we're happy, then we're more creative. That's been my assumption, like many others.
Maya Tamir: I was curious howcome some people wanna feel fear, and some people don't wanna feel fear. Could it be that some people are just right in knowing which emotions are good, and other people are just wrong. They think that some emotion is beneficial to them, but actually it isn't.
Maya Tamir: So then, I realized from my research that some people wanna feel emotions and some people don't wanna feel these emotions, and that people seem to benefit from emotions in different ways. And so I wanted to know, could it be that what emotions do is not necessarily fixed?
Maya Tamir: Now I know, because I studied emotion regulation, that some people expect emotions to help them, and some people may expect the same emotion to harm them. So some people expect anger to be useful in a certain situation, and some people think that anger will be harmful for them. And so I wanted to know, "Well, let's see if they're right?" And what I found, when I just looked at the effects of emotions, is that these effects are not very stable, that they vary and they're not fixed.
Maya Tamir: And so I thought, "What if, just like placebo, what we believe that emotions do for us, actually ends up shaping what emotions do for us?" And so it's not the case that people are right or wrong about what emotions really do, it's that what emotions really do kind of depends on what we expect them to do. And so that's how I got to the series of studies.
David Wilkinson: Yeah, that's fascinating kind of set of thinking, I suppose, to kind of get there. One of the things that interest me in what you were just saying is, about this idea of ... kind of going back a bit, just, people actually wanting not to feel good.
Maya Tamir: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Wilkinson: That's kind of a surprise to a lot of people, because people kind of make this assumption that everybody wants to feel good, but actually, because one of the things you talk about in the paper is about expectancy and goal-seeking behavior. Could you just talk us through that, why would somebody want to not feel good, for example?
Maya Tamir: Sure. So, when you asked me how I got to studying emotions, I began by saying that emotions always attracted me as something fascinating, because they seem to influence us in a variety of ways. In addition to making us feel good, or feel bad, they also seem to drive us to different types of behaviors, or different mode of thinking, or even, they seem to shape how we interact with other people in very meaningful ways.
Maya Tamir: A key assumption in emotion research is that emotions are generally, not always of course, but they're generally functional in the sense that they can lead to outcomes that are useful. This is true for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. There's a reason, potentially, for us having emotions like anger and fear, because these emotions can serve us in very specific ways when we need them to. So conceptually, anger can help us actually right a wrong, by propelling us to stand up for ourselves, and fear help us escape danger.
Maya Tamir: And so, theoretically, both pleasant and unpleasant emotions can be useful in certain situations. Now, the question of course is, do we take utility into account when we engage in self regulation? And of course, if we put emotion aside, and I ask you the same question, you would say, "Of course we do." I mean, that's the very key of self regulation, right?
Maya Tamir: We sit and study for exams, even though it's not fun, because we care about the grade and what happens with our profession, right? We sit and write reviews, or sit on projects at work, even late into the night, even if they're not fun and prepare reports because it's gonna be beneficial in the end. We go to the dentist, even though it's not fun, because we expect a benefit.
Maya Tamir: And so the key component of self regulation is, "I'm willing not to feel pleasant right now, in order to maximize utility."
David Wilkinson: Yeah.
Maya Tamir: And so, all I did is say, "Well, why isn't this true for emotions as well?" Could it be that there's some cases where we want to feel an unpleasant emotion now, because its useful. Now, if you ask me, "But how could negative emotions possibly be useful?"
Maya Tamir: Well, think about a situation that people in organizations encounter very frequently when we need to negotiate. When we need to negotiate a deal, or when we need to negotiate a raise with our boss, do we wanna feel very, very calm and pleasant, or do we wanna say, "Hey, there's something here that is rightfully mine, and I need to fight for it."
Maya Tamir: Now, what kind of mental state would be useful for you when you need to fight for something? Well, I think the answer, by the way, is, "Whatever you think is the right state of mind," but that's a slightly different question. But you can see how anger, when you need to fight for something, could be something that you may be motivated to feel.
Maya Tamir: And there are similar situations where sadness or fear could be useful and we may be motivated to feel them in order to gain some temporary benefit.
David Wilkinson: Yeah, and certainly, from some of the work that I've been doing, kind of some of the maladaptive behaviors that we see in people, where people are driving themselves into, not just fearful states, but depressive type states in order for some form of, as you say, some kind of utility, they see a payoff.
David Wilkinson: So, one of my big heroes in terms of therapy for example is, I don't know whether you've come across Frank Farrelly?
Maya Tamir: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Wilkinson: He's very interesting. One of the things he was talking about was ... So, he's seeing patients, in terms of emotion regulation. He said he was watching some of his patients arrive, and they seemed quite fine walking across the car lot, getting into the building, going up to his room, waiting in the anti-room.
David Wilkinson: It wasn't until they walked into the room, suddenly they started to emote and he started to realize that it was having a utility. They wanted him to believe something, and therefor they started to feel that emotion and portray it. Whereas in other sets of circumstances, in other situations, they wouldn't portray it, because it wasn't serving some kind of utility. It kind of feels a bit weird to say that sometimes we kind of put on sadness, or something, for that kind of utility.
Maya Tamir: We have a beautiful paper, and now, additional work that's gonna come out-
David Wilkinson: Oh.
Maya Tamir: ... showing that depressed people want to feel more sad, than non-depressed people. In our conversation, it's something that you and I find quite intuitive.
David Wilkinson: Yes.
Maya Tamir: But most people are not only ... they don't find this intuitive for people who are not depressed, but they find it especially surprising, when you think about depressed people, because if there's anyone in the world who should not want to feel sad, it's people who are clinically depressed.
Maya Tamir: But if you give people, who are clinically depressed the opportunity to regulate their emotions, in whichever direction they choose, and you teach them the most effective strategy and they understand how to use it, what we find in the laboratory, and actually outside the laboratory now too, they use these tools that you give them to increase or maintain their sadness, rather than to decrease it. They choose actively not to increase their happiness.
Maya Tamir: I think that the reason is that there's ... when you see yourself as a sad person, there's some utility in hanging on to that identity that you've developed that is, "I'm a sad person." And all of a sudden, "When I feel happy," you look at yourself in the mirror and you say, "Wait a minute, this is not me, this is something else," right?
David Wilkinson: Yes.
Maya Tamir: So we have an entire line of clinical work showing that people are motivated to feel various emotions and some of this motivation is driven by how they see themselves as sad, or as happy, or even as angry people.
Maya Tamir: So there are all kinds of benefits that we can gain from our emotions, and we're motivated to feel emotions that optimize these benefits, whether they are behavioral benefits, so emotions can influence our behavior, whether they are epistemic benefits, "Who am I, and what is this world about?" And whether they're social benefits, "How is this emotion gonna influence the person in front of me, and how is this gonna influence the relationship?"
Maya Tamir: And this leads people to seek emotions that are either pleasant, or unpleasant. Now, the question though is, are people right, or are people wrong? And this is where we get to the next set of studies that you wanted us to chat about.
David Wilkinson: Right. Can you just explain what you mean, "Are people right, or are people wrong?" What do you mean by that?
Maya Tamir: So the question is, can we say, "Well, depressed people who choose to be sad simply don't understand that sadness has no benefits." And we can choose that approach. Do we say, "People who expect sadness to make them more creative, are simply wrong."
David Wilkinson: [crosstalk 00:14:59]
Maya Tamir: Because we know that happiness and excitement makes people creative.
David Wilkinson: Yes.
Maya Tamir: Do we say, "People who expect anger to make them less aggressive, are simply wrong," because we know what anger does, anger leads to aggression. And so, if we wanna try to improve emotion regulation, or optimize the way that people use their emotions in daily life, whether in the workplace or outside the workplace, we need to teach people what emotions actually do.
Maya Tamir: And then, they will be motivated to seek emotions that really [inaudible 00:15:36] them, and they'll do better. So this is a really, really fundamental question about, "Well, what is the nature of emotions? What do emotions actually do?" Yeah.
David Wilkinson: Yeah, that's really interesting, because one of the things that I got interested in a few years ago was, psychological pay-off. So, what individuals expect the pay-off to be starts to drive the emotion, or they start to change the emotion in the direction of the pay-off. So if they think they're going to get sympathy and some help, and that's what they're looking for, their goal is that, then they'll go into that set of behaviors and that set of behaviors can actually start to bring on things like depression, whatever it happens to be, or they get stuck in that set of emotion. The connections between the emotions and the behavior, is a kind of a habit.
Maya Tamir: Right.
David Wilkinson: And that becomes actually, clinically quite a problem, because that habit gets stronger and stronger, and harder to break as time goes on. Yeah, that's really interesting. So, could we just go back to the paper that actually we're talking about, about how expectations influence and shape behavior. Can you just talk us through the three studies very quickly and what you actually did, Maya?
Maya Tamir: Our key question was: could it be that emotions don't have a one-to-one connection with behavior, but rather, that the way that emotions influence behavior is much more complex than that? And that people learn from experience how emotions typically shape behavior, in daily life, and they develop these expectations about how emotions are likely to influence behavior. And then, once they have an expectation, by the way, this expectation could come from a variety of sources, like our culture, for example.
Maya Tamir: Once they have that expectation, like many other expectations that influence many other outcomes, this expectation then influences how their emotional experiences actually shape their behavior. I mentioned before, the placebo effect. And so the idea is that, emotions could be a little bit like placebo when we expect them to work in a certain way, they do end up working in a certain way.
Maya Tamir: And so, what we did in a series of studies is, test this empirically. Now, how do you test a question like this? Well, if you wanna know whether expectations influence the way that emotions shape behavior, you need to first of all, manipulate expectations about what certain emotions are likely to do. You have to manipulate emotional states, to see whether there's a causal effect of emotions on behavior. And then you have to measure behavior in an objective way.
Maya Tamir: Otherwise, any type of ... whatever people say about their behavior, could just be a way of rationalizing or explaining an association that isn't really there. So, what we did in the studies, we tried to think about contexts in which we assume emotions to influence behavior in a certain way. Contexts in which we know we can assess behavior objectively. And then we manipulated emotions, we manipulated beliefs and we measured the influence of emotions on subsequent behavior.
Maya Tamir: I can give you one example of one of the three studies. We all know, obviously, that anger leads to aggression. Not only do we all know this, as a culture, not only do we all share this cultural assumption, but I myself ran a study where the entire study was based on this very idea, because I wanted to show, in a study a long time ago, that people wanna be angry when they think that anger is gonna be beneficial to them.
Maya Tamir: So I said, "Well let's have people play a computer game." And unfortunately for all of us, I think personally, there are a lot of very, very aggressive games out there, where the goal in the game is to kill as many players in the game, like virtual players in the game, as you possibly can and you get points for each person that you kill, and you walk around with a gun. It's called, "The first person shooter." I discovered that for the purpose of this study.
Maya Tamir: Anyway ... Right, so you walk around-
David Wilkinson: Amazing.
Maya Tamir: ... You can see how narrow my world is. You walk around with guns-
David Wilkinson: I'll bet. I've done a similar study.
Maya Tamir: ... and you kill people to get points. And so I thought, "Well, this is a wonderful platform to test ideas about what anger does." And we actually got people angry in the lab. We had them listen to heavy metal, and there's a great reason why we made people angry-
David Wilkinson: That's fantastic.
Maya Tamir: ... by listening to "angry" music. We did that because we wanted to make sure that we're not telling them anything about anger. We're not using words, because words are ideas, and so if we change ideas, we change how people think, but not necessarily how people feel.
Maya Tamir: So we used music that's entirely instrumental, and we got them kind of irritated, and we know this because they told us that that's how they felt. And then we had them play the first person shooter. We saw that people who were angrier actually did kill more people.
David Wilkinson: Oh, wow.
Maya Tamir: Yeah, in the game. So I said, "Well, why did we kill more people in the game?" It could be that it is really because anger makes people more aggressive, or because all these people, as I actually know because I asked them, they expected anger to kill more people.
Maya Tamir: So in this study, in the paper that we're talking about, I took the very same task and people were told that they're gonna play a game, and then we told them, you know, we gave them bogus, to manipulate their expectations, we gave them bogus information from presumably prior participants in the game.
Maya Tamir: And so they got little inputs saying, "You know, to do well in this game, you have to be really focused," which makes a lot of sense and it's entirely unrelated to emotions. But some of these little inputs said something like, "I arrived at this game and I was really irritated because of something that happened on the way to the lab and then I did really well in the task."
David Wilkinson: Oh, okay.
Maya Tamir: So we gently ... We insert the idea-
David Wilkinson: The [crosstalk 00:22:12].
Maya Tamir: ... that anger could be beneficial. And this is basically what we did to make them, potentially, expect anger to be useful in that task.
David Wilkinson: Indeed.
Maya Tamir: So some people were told this thing, and some people were told that either anger is unrelated, or that anger can be harmful. And then we induced anger in some people, by having them listen to the angry music, and other people listened to neutral music that did not get them angry. And then we had them play the game where they're ... It's a first person shooter-
David Wilkinson: Fantastic.
Maya Tamir: ... you get a virtual gun, and you have to kill everybody around you. We counted the number of people that were killed.
David Wilkinson: Ah!
Maya Tamir: Many people who study emotion would say, "Anger leads to aggression, and therefor whether you expect anger to help you, whether you don't expect anger to help you, that shouldn't make any difference whatsoever on what anger actually does. People who are angry should be more violent than people who are not."
Maya Tamir: But that's not what we found. What we found is that the impact of anger on aggression was dependent on what people expected anger to do. People who expected anger to help them, killed more people than people who did not expect anger to help them.
David Wilkinson: Brilliant. Actually, that's so interesting because I did, it's funny, I kind of did a reverse study of this, way back in the '90s, where we took people and gave them two different ... two different populations on two different types of video game. One was a shooting video game, which was an aggressive video game, and one was actually what they were doing was rafting down a river. Same controls, but completely different games and then what we did was measured the level of aggression afterwards, to see whether aggressive video games do promote aggressive thinking and behavior afterwards. And it fairly conclusively does, just doing those kinds of activities creates, at least for a short while, and I suppose it depends on how often you're doing it. But that's really interesting. A great way of doing it.
David Wilkinson: So, what can practitioners take away from this in organizations, that can help them at kind of an organizational level, or for their own personal behavior in terms of regulating their own emotions, or understanding what's going on in organizations, Maya?
Maya Tamir: Well, I think perhaps the most important thing to take away from this is to understand that emotions are not these fixed machines that operate in the same predictable way. They're very flexible, and they're very malleable, and they're very dynamic and they're likely to influence people in the way that people expect them to. And so, if you want people to optimize or maximize whatever benefit they gain from their emotions, then maybe one way to do it is instead of working really hard to change emotions, which is wonderful and important, and I think both you and I share a passion for emotion regulation, it's also incredibly hard to do.
Maya Tamir: So, what we can do is, we can try to change what people think about their emotions and what people expect from their emotions. And that is something that can help managers, and employers and employees use their emotion better if they can try to cultivate beliefs about emotions that are more reasonable.
Maya Tamir: You know, we all have beliefs about emotions that are potentially dangerous. We all believe that happiness is amazing, and wonderful and the best thing ever in the world, especially in some countries. Especially in the Western World. We've developed such a strong belief about the importance and utility of happiness, that we start to blame ourselves if we don't feel happy.
David Wilkinson: Yeah.
Maya Tamir: And so, people feel bad that they feel only a little happy and not extremely happy. And so, that's another example of how our beliefs about emotions may be as important as our emotions themselves.
David Wilkinson: Yes.
Maya Tamir: And so, changing these beliefs in a way that is useful, both instrumentally, but also psychologically, I think is an important point to take from this research.
David Wilkinson: Yeah, and this whole idea that actually, beliefs drive an awful lot of the outcomes that we have, behavioral outcomes, through our emotions is quite critical for people in organizations and not assuming that an emotion will necessarily lead to a particular outcome.
David Wilkinson: Are you okay? Have you got some water there?
Maya Tamir: I'm just choking to death slowly.
David Wilkinson: Oh no, no. We can't ... Don't choke, we need you. Yeah, and I think that's really important for people to understand in organizations.
Maya Tamir: I actually think that there's another aspect in organizations, that's especially important in this respect because organizations are also oftentimes, not always, but often a multi-cultural setting, where people from all kinds of backgrounds come together to do something together. It's important to understand that different people can have a different set of beliefs.
David Wilkinson: Yeah.
Maya Tamir: People who come from different cultures, or different backgrounds, or people from different ages, or different gender can bring different beliefs to the table, and these beliefs could change how their emotions impact them. Some people, in some cultures, think that worry is terrible. Other people think that worry is wonderful. And so, different people may work better if they're worried, or not.
Maya Tamir: And so, the more sensitive we are to each other, and to the set of beliefs we bring to the table, the more we can help people find those emotional states that would optimize their performance and their behavior in the organization.
David Wilkinson: Yeah, I think that's really important. This is completely anecdotal, it wasn't part of a study I was doing, it was something that I was just engaged in. I met a guy in Kabul, who was probably one of the happiest people I've ever met, even though he had no legs, both legs had been blown off in a mine explosion. I was talking to him and I was trying to work out what his mindset was and how he was thinking about things. As far as he was concerned, Allah had spared him, and therefor there was a reason for this, and he had to go and live the best life that he could.
David Wilkinson: On the other hand, a week later, I was dealing with somebody who had post traumatic stress disorder, who had actually been injured, not the same injuries, not quite a widespread. But the beliefs had actually driven that person down a different line of behaviors and sets of emotions that then cascaded into a very difficult place for the individual.
David Wilkinson: This idea, that actually we can start to control things and regulate our emotions through our beliefs, become quite an important part of organizational life, but everyday life. And actually, people have got a lot more control than they think they have.
Maya Tamir: Yes, I think there are two points to be made, that are not exactly the same. One is that, we can use our beliefs about emotions to regulate our emotions, and I certainly agree with that. If we think about emotions, for example, as something that's fixed and that's beyond our control, we're probably gonna be less effective in regulating our emotions, even if it's the same emotion and at the same intensity than if we believe that emotions are malleable and we can change them.
David Wilkinson: Right.
Maya Tamir: So, that's just one example of how beliefs can influence how we regulate our emotions. But the other point, perhaps a corresponding point is that, our beliefs shape not only how we regulate our emotions, but also how emotions themselves operate. Emotions don't operate in fixed ways. Their outcomes depend on our conception of the world. And so, if we understand that, then we could be less afraid of emotions that we typically consider to be negative.
David Wilkinson: Yes.
Maya Tamir: We can look at two angry people and say, "This person, now that I understand their belief, is likely to destroy this negotiation when they're angry. And that person, now that I understand her belief, could actually get the best deal possible, when she's angry. And I can understand this diversity and I can encourage it without being overly critical, because I understand the beliefs that underlie the connection between emotions and behavior in these different people."
David Wilkinson: Yeah, that's fantastic. That's really good. Can I just ask you, what are you working on at the moment that you're quite happy to talk about and the kinds of direction that you're going now? Just the things that you're happy to talk about, I understand that ...
Maya Tamir: That's like the hardest question, because there are always so many potential answers. Like, pick-and-choose is really hard. But one ... So, there are many questions that I'm curious about. One thing that I'm very curious about has to do with how people learn what emotions can do.
Maya Tamir: Even if emotions can do very different things for very different people, somehow, you know, we don't walk around in the world as we did in our little paper that you talked about, where we get these expectations inserted into our heads by devious experimenters.In the world, we somehow develop these expectations and I am very curious in understanding how they're developed.
David Wilkinson: Ah.
Maya Tamir: So some of the ... And what we're trying to do in my laboratory is, examine this question from multiple perspectives simultaneously. One way is to look at very, very basic learning mechanisms to see whether people develop these expectations from their own direct experience. "If I'm angry and I get positive feedback, and then I'm angry again and I get positive feedback, I then cultivate the expectation that when I'm angry, good things happen." That would be one possibility.
Maya Tamir: Another possibility is by pure observation. "If I look at other people around me, in my close circle, and I see that, whenever my best friend is angry, they then get their work done, then I may develop this expectancy that anger should help people get their work done."
Maya Tamir: Or, maybe there are not necessarily experimenters, but there are other ways of inserting ideas into our heads. We open the television, or we look at YouTube, and we get these examples or even quite explicit ideas about what emotions do and don't do. There's all kinds of movies. You take your kids to a Disney movie and in the Disney movie it says, "There's a blue person in your head, or a red person in your head and when that person blows up, all hell breaks loose." Okay, so now you've learned that anger leads to aggression.
Maya Tamir: So, I'm interested in learning and understanding how we cultivate these beliefs, partly because that will help us understand where these beliefs come from and how we differ from one another and why. And also, if we understand the mechanism, then we can see where it goes wrong.
David Wilkinson: Yes.
Maya Tamir: Because there are beliefs that are very maladaptive.
David Wilkinson: Oh yeah.
Maya Tamir: There are people who have developed these beliefs that sadness is somehow beneficial. Not pleasant, but beneficial. Or that fear is beneficial, or worry. And so they hold on to their worry and they don't let go, because they think that if they worry enough, they will prevent the next disaster from happening to them.
David Wilkinson: Yes.
Maya Tamir: And so they become ... they are those people with general anxiety disorder.
David Wilkinson: That's really fascinating, and this whole idea of moving into expectations and where they come from. I'm expecting, and certainly some of the research that I've seen is kind of a myriad places, that expectations kind of end up being embedded in our consciousness and also our unconsciousness, I suppose. That's really interesting and I look forward to those papers.
Maya Tamir: Thank you.
David Wilkinson: I know you've gotta go in a minute. So I'll cut it here. Thank you very much for spending the time with us.
Maya Tamir: Sure.
David Wilkinson: I do appreciate it. A fascinating series of research, and I'd like to keep in touch. We seem to be operating in very similar areas.
Maya Tamir: Thank you so much, and thanks for your interest in our work, that's wonderful. Thanks.
David Wilkinson: Yeah, it's really great. Thank you very much Maya, you take care and enjoy the rest of your day.
Maya Tamir: You too.
David Wilkinson: Take care. Bye.