Posts Tagged ‘appropriate humor’
Memory and the Recency Effect
It’s tempting to think that knowing about a cognitive bias or logical fallacy makes them immune to it. I’m no exception, but I constantly find myself falling prey to the recency effect, or recency bias. The good news is that I catch myself from time to time — the bad news is that I have no idea how many instances slip through.
The recency effect describes a condition where the most recent information you learned has a disproportionate impact on your opinion about a topic. I find myself watching TV programs or reading articles where the author sets out arguments on an issue and I often think, “Oh, I didn’t know that. I’ll have to revise my opinion.” The rest of the time I think, “Yeah, right” and move on with my day. If the topic’s one I don’t know much about, the information I just learned will affect my view more than it would if I knew a lot about the issue.
As I mentioned in my review of The Gamble, published here and on Technology and Society Book Reviews, the Romney 2012 presidential campaign managers attempted to use the recency effect to their candidate’s advantage. The authors cited a significant body of research showing that political ads sway opinion, but only for a few days at most before viewers’ opinions revert to their personal baselines. The Romney campaign took out a large number of ads in the days before the election in hopes of using the recency effect to their advantage. In fact, the campaign bought the entire available ad inventory in several states. Rather than leave the money in the bank, they bought ads in states they deemed less important.
If you really want to see the recency effect in action, watch the U.S. stock markets whenever major events occur. Every bit of news causes the markets to move as investors try to out-guess each other and make a profit on competitors’ decisions. I’m not sure how much of the action is individual speculators trying to get a jump on the market and others trying to guess the reactors’ reactions (and so on up the chain), but the short-term volatility can be astonishing.
Confirmation Bias Proves What You Already Knew
Human beings deal with complexities by creating mental models. Our models are necessarily simpler than reality and are based on our experiences. These considerations imply two things. First, models are intensely personal constructs. Second, personal models are difficult to change. When we find something that works, we’re reluctant to change it.
There’s a strong temptation to fit what we see into our models rather than invest the effort (and ego) into admitting our model is wrong, or at least incomplete. Oswald and Grosjean define confirmation bias as “the tendency to search for, interpret and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.” You probably know someone who engages in impressive mental gymnastics to fit everything into their world view.
In business, falling prey to confirmation bias can cost you money. If you developed a process that worked for years but doesn’t meet your company’s needs, you must be open to change. If you interpret critiques as personal attacks, you’re much less likely to improve your processes.
You can take advantage of confirmation bias to create interesting characters or “find the game” within an improv scene. Improv scenes run on justifying why something someone else said or did is true and important. If your character’s perspective uses “Yes, and…” to bring everything into his or her world view, you can be an interesting character and entertain your audience. Like in business, you have to be careful not to let your internal game hurt your team’s performance, but it’s a fun approach to take on occasion.
The exercise “Your Place or Mine?” provides an interesting context for justification and fitting incidents into your character’s world view. In this exercise, you and a scene partner play characters in two different locations. For example, one of you might be a fast food worker in McDonald’s and the other an archery instructor on the range. If the fast food worker hands the archer a french fry, the archer could interpret it as a small arrow and shoot it into a target, which the fast food worker could interpret as throwing the food into a customer’s mouth.
Cognitive Biases are Fun!
George Carlin once pointed out that comedy depends on exaggeration — to make something funny, you must distort one aspect of the situation or description to introduce humor.
If you’re thinking, “I don’t have to exaggerate anything…I make enough mistakes to feed a hundred comics for a year,” you’re probably right. We’re all susceptible to cognitive biases that skew our judgment. If you’ve read any of Dan Ariely’s work (Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty) or read the pop psych literature, you know the human mind is a frighteningly powerful yet flawed instrument.
I have good news: you can identify and minimize the impact of cognitive biases. What’s more, performers can use them to create humorous situations on stage. I downloaded a list of cognitive biases and will do my best to explore how they affect the world where business and funny intersect.
I first thought of writing a series of posts after a ComedySportz gig for health care professional employed by the Oregon penal system. One of their handouts (I always grab the handouts) listed about 120 cognitive biases and logical traps affecting the reasoning inmates and others use to assess their circumstances. I’ll leave the connection between prison, work, and comedy to your fertile brains.
First up? Everyone’s favorite trap: confirmation bias.
Improv Should NOT Be a Surprise
My friend Rick Maue, a talented performer and innovator in the branch of stage magic called mentalism, identifies three types of performances:
- Theater, which is a show people come to see in a formal setting
- Entertainment at events such as banquets, where the performance is part of the overall evening’s activities
- Filler, where the audience has absolutely no idea you will be there or that there will be any kind of show
I’d like to add a fourth type: Hell, which is a Virgin Atlantic flight with musicians and improv comedians roaming the aisles. Don’t believe me? Here’s part of a Fast Company article describing the scheme:
Virgin Atlantic Little Red, a U.K. domestic rebranding of Virgin Atlantic, will feature “in-flight gigs” on selected flights that include live music and improv comedians. Entertainment will take place on flights headed to Edinburgh and Manchester, and performers will be selected from the talent pool at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
But here’s the kicker: While the acts will be mentioned on Virgin Atlantic’s Facebook and Twitter pages, the flights they will be performing on will be a surprise. We’re guessing that business travelers, improv comedy, and a confined environment will be a volatile mixture, but that’s just us.
I do improv and stage magic and think I’m pretty entertaining, but I only take a few strolling mentalism gigs at company parties a year. I want to be sure I’ll be a good fit and often look for reasons to break off from a group early rather than overstay my welcome. I don’t want to be what sports commentator Joe Buck refers to as “the guy at parties who insists on doing card tricks no one wants to see”. I don’t mind stopping to watch a street performer for a few minutes. In fact, I tipped a terrific human statue when my wife and I were in Tallinn, Estonia, in July.
I’d rather donate three pints of blood in an hour than be on a flight with a live musician or improvisers. I’m one of you, guys, and I don’t begrudge you the money, but I will not interact with you.
I think someone in Virgin corporate learned the wrong lesson from the funny PA announcements some Southwest flight attendants make. Those presentations work because they’re fast, they’re hilarious, and they’re over.
Prisoner’s Dilemma, Part 5
This is the final post in my series on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Five blog posts might seem like a lot, but many doctoral dissertations have been written on the ramifications of this deceptively simple game.
Robert Axelrod was one of first researchers to study how competing strategies for playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma interacted in a tournament setting. One of Axelrod’s main conclusions is that you can maximize your payoff in a Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament by following a nice strategy. That is, not defecting first. He also noted that it was possible for other strategies to beat the winner, Tit for Tat, by defecting first to get the higher payoff and then defecting every turn thereafter to ensure that the other program could never retaliate effectively. Over time, this strategy does not yield a higher payoff than the nice Tit for Tat; the aggressive strategy did not win either tournament.
But what happens if you put the nice Tit for Tat in an environment with a lot of aggressive programs? The answer is that Tit for Tat will always give up the higher payoff to its opponent in the first round and get the minimum payoff in every subsequent round. Based on those rules, Tit for Tat is guaranteed to lose. If you were to put a set of strategies into a tournament and then eliminate the bottom half of the field, Tit for Tat would always be eliminated, and the other more successful strategies would continue on. Those strategies being the aggressive, not nice, strategy of always defecting first and continuing to do so on every subsequent turn.
This type of attack is called an invasion. If you run a tournament and eliminate the bottom half of the field at the end of each run you’ll find certain strategies win out. If you introduce even a small number of these dominant strategies into a tournament, they will eventually take over. The problem becomes even worse if you create a series of strategies that can recognize kindred spirits, enabling them to work together to maximize their payoff by cooperating.
You can find the same type of behavior in business. In many cases when the group or company starts, you’ll find that everyone cooperates. The problem comes in when someone who doesn’t cooperate starts to get some success in the company. As the aggression is rewarded, other individuals adopt the same strategy. In time, those players can squeeze out the players who play a nice, cooperative strategy within the business. It’s a true management headache, one that is extremely difficult to stamp out once it gets started. Plus, as the aggressive players get promoted higher and higher, the reward structure changes. Now individuals who are willing to work with the aggressive individuals are rewarded with their own promotions and higher responsibilities.
In most cases, the company can continue on with this type of environment, despite the fact that there is a lack of trust among the players. In fact, this type of environment can fuel creativity for those individuals who revel in interpersonal conflict and feel it helps their creativity. At the same time, though, an organization might begin to experience problems associated with a lack of cooperation. Always looking to put one over on the other guy makes it difficult to trust anyone else, especially when you’re looking over your shoulder to see who will get the next promotion. These behaviors can lead to stress, burnout, and high turnover. In a company that requires highly skilled personnel, losing a solid contributor because of a toxic work environment is extremely costly.
In improvisational comedy groups, you find the same thing happens especially at the beginning of the group’s life. As individuals jockey for position within the group and try to have an impact on how things will be run, you will often find that individuals who started in the group either drop out or get kicked out after they try to change the group through aggression or passive aggression by not following directions of the group’s leadership. Well-established organizations with a solid player roster and workshops from which to bring in new players are less susceptible to this sort of issue. The group’s culture is solid, and the workshop process allows management to decide which players will be promoted and included in the team.
Smaller groups, such as touring companies with only four or five players, can be susceptible to problems. The trick, as always, is to select your fellow performers wisely. In many cases, it’s better to join another group or start a new group of your own than it is to continue on in a bad situation. Sometimes leaving a bad job is the best thing you could possibly do.
Prisoner’s Dilemma, Part 4
I’ve spent the last few posts talking about the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where two individuals must decide whether or not to cooperate. There’s a harsh penalty for having one’s trust violated, so the most risk-averse strategy is to violate the other player’s trust. RobertAxelrod’s analysis gives us a number of results that we can use both in the realm of improv and in the realm of business. He enumerated these five principles in The Evolution of Cooperation:
- Enlarge the shadow of the future
- Change the payoffs
- Teach people to care about each other
- Teach reciprocity
- Improve negotiation abilities
Enlarging the shadow of the future simply means taking a long view of your interactions. When you form an improvisational comedy group, you should plan to have many performances over a number of months or years. This sort of ongoing interaction, like any other relationship, requires nurturing and mutual trust. Just like saving for retirement, the more you set aside in terms of money or trust at the start, the higher your return and, as the years go by, the interest accumulates. The same principle holds for business interactions. Americans on the West Coast tend to change jobs a lot more often than folks on the East Coast, but many of us stay within the same industry and interact with our colleagues from previous jobs frequently. Within a company, you’ll find that fostering a spirit of cooperation on your team will help you generate better results. Hopefully that conclusion won’t be too surprising.
The next question is how to reward different behaviors. In the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma payoff matrix, the only logical choice is to defect. Doing so limits the damage that would be caused by trusting another individual whose rational calculus would push them to defect. In business, anyone who sees their business as a series of one-time relationships will not be all that keen on building a trusting relationship with their business partners. In the entertainment industry, it said that you haven’t really sold someone until you’ve done business with them twice. If they’re not willing to rehire you, it means that they don’t trust you based on their experience with you.
Teaching people to care about each other can be tricky, particularly if you have individuals who are not prone to trusting relationships with others. Sociopaths, who don’t empathize with other individuals at all, are a particular problem. I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t tell you how to deal with them, but there are a number of online resources that you can use to see where to go and what to do. For individuals who do have feelings toward others, you can use teambuilding exercise rewards and the warm afterglow of successful shows or projects to develop a sense of camaraderie.
In the improv world, in which interactions in local groups are reasonably equal, you don’t often have that much trouble with these relationships. Yes, every so often members of the group will disagree intensely, but if everything is in place and the relationship is solid, it’s likely that you will get through the difficulties. In a business in which promotions, internal awards, and raises are at issue, the stakes are quite a bit higher. Managers need to keep everyone’s wants, needs, and desires in mind as they manage their projects.
One of the best ways to ensure people are satisfied is to give them work they care about and reward them for doing good jobs. The nature of those rewards will vary based on your business and the resources available to you, but rewards and recognition, even if only at the personal level, go a long way toward making those relationships more solid.
Axelrod also recommends that you learn to teach reciprocity. A willingness to respond to offers of cooperation allows teams to make much more progress than a loose collection of individuals would be able to. The form that reciprocity takes depends upon your organization. For businesses, providing a bit of after-hours help for others on their part of a project after they have done the same for you is a perfect example. In the improv world, we can try to “set up players for the slam.” Just as volleyball players run through the bump, set, spike sequence to go from defense to offense, improvisers can do their fellow players a favor by giving them straight lines, by allowing them to be the focus of the scene, and by staying off the stage when their presence is not strictly necessary. All these actions are judgment calls that improve with experience, but managers can improve their odds, both in the performance and business worlds, by bringing on individuals who are predisposed toward these behaviors.
Finally, you should improve your negotiation skills. Negotiation is the art of the compromise, and there are very few solutions that will meet everyone’s wants and desires. Some folks have to compromise, some more than others, and good leaders and team members will find ways to negotiate for what they feel is necessary and compromise when it’s called for.
Prisoner’s Dilemma, Part 2
In my previous post, I described the Prisoner’s dilemma, a classic 2 x 2 game structured so the players are coerced into violating the trust of the other player. The strategy for a single round of the Prisoner’s dilemma is to defect, selling out the other player and eliminating the prospect of a huge negative outcome for yourself. But what about playing the game multiple times, perhaps many times?
Improv groups and businesses are meant it to be long-lived entities. The group I’m with, ComedySportz Portland, was founded in 1993 – as of this writing, we’ve been around for 19 years. I like to joke that it means we’ve lasted 38 times longer than the average improv group. Sure, there are plenty of groups that have been around for a long time, but there are quite a few more that have blown up in very short order.
What makes some groups stay together and others break apart? One thing that can make it happen is taking advantage of the other individuals in your group, whether by not making good on your promises or by not cooperating during scenes. Some examples of not cooperating can include making personal comments at another player’s expense, such as about their weight, height, or the choices that they made; denying other players’ choices during a scene or game; or showing up late (or not at all) to a rehearsal or performance. Taking advantage of the goodwill of your fellow players is extremely shortsighted. Forming a successful group is incredibly difficult, so you should do your best to ensure the group you’re with carries on, or at least that you don’t burn any bridges if you do decide to leave.
As Robert Axelrod noted in his book, The Evolution of Cooperation, and Scott Stevens noted in his Games People Play course for The Great Courses, the more likely it is for the game to continue, the more incentive you have to continue cooperating throughout the entire game. The same consideration applies to business relationships. Con artists can get money out of their victims and disappear knowing that, if their luck holds, they will never have to encounter that individual again. For business professionals, you have to take the opposite approach. Even though many of us change jobs and industries, it’s very likely that we will encounter the same individuals during our work lives. We should cultivate the best relationships we can. In game theoretic terms, that means we should cooperate whenever possible.
Improv and the Game of Chicken
If you’ve watched any movies from the 1950s about disaffected youths, you are surely familiar with the game of Chicken. In the game of Chicken, two kids drive toward each other at high speed. The first person to swerve loses – that is, that person is the chicken. As with all 2 x 2 games, there are four ways for it to play out. The payoffs appear in the following table.
The first outcome is if both drivers swerve, which results in payoffs of zero. Both drivers swerve, so that means that neither of them won. But, because the outcome was equal, neither of them lost, either. The next two outcomes occur when one driver swerves and the other stays straight. In that case, we do have a clear winner and a clear loser, which is reflected in the payoffs of plus one for the winner and minus one for the loser. In the fourth case, disaster strikes. In that fourth case, neither driver swerves and there is a high-speed, head-on collision.
You probably don’t have to stretch your imagination to see how this game can play out in improv and business. When you create an improv scene, someone has to be willing to give up control. Even if it’s only for a moment, players must accept what other players say and do so they can continue to build a consistent reality without interrupting the audience’s enjoyment. The best outcome in a game of Chicken when you’re performing an improv scene is to have one player swerve and one player continue straight on. That means one player made a solid decision and all the other player has to do is follow along and build on what is been established. If both players swerve, that means no one is taking the reins and attempting to drive the scene forward.
Next…chicken and business.
Improspectives 
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