Food for Thought? Literally.

Hacking Humans: Leveraging Science to Lead and Influence Behavior

Every year countless inmates around the world pen their request for parole. They discuss their good behavior, skills training, and why their risk of recidivism is low. This is logical, it makes sense that those in jail would need to convince the legal system that they are no longer a threat in order to be granted early release.

But what if it doesn't really matter what they write?

What if their chance of being paroled has almost nothing to do with their actual petition or any legal basis at all?

This is exactly what was found in a 2011 study of over 1000 judicial rulings in a 10-month period from 8 different judges. The study found it was almost entirely luck of the draw based on the time of day the judge reviewed that petition.

The researchers discovered that all petitions had roughly the same 60% chance of approval when evaluated in the morning or shortly after food breaks, and that the chance slowly dwindled to nearly 0% before the next break and at the end of the work day. The researchers found that over time, and without a break, the judges were more and more likely to deny the petitions for parole.

This held up even when the researchers controlled for seriousness of crimes, length of time incarcerated, the minor variances between the individual judges, etc.

The world-renowned psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, has posited that our brains work within two different systems. The "cruise control" system, called System 1, and the deliberative system, called System 2. The brain uses glucose as energy, and System 2 thinking takes a lot more energy than System 1 thinking.

How often do you think about the next step you take when walking, what button to push to wake up your phone screen, or how to arrange your hands over the keyboard for efficient typing? Your body automates everything possible to conserve energy.

The study doesn't show that the judges were lazy or cruel. Rather, it shows that as they worked through the cases they were more and more likely to resort to System 1 thinking, which in this case was the status quo (continued incarceration), rather than working through the deliberate thought processes required to question the status quo.

For those like me who are parents, we often do the same thing. Have your kids ever asked to do something and you reactively said "no", and then thought about it and realized it wasn't actually a big deal? "No" is easy, it doesn't require thought, it's the status quo.

Spend a day doing your best to think about every action… 

For this exercise, and for just one day, you should try and deliberate over every action that you can possibly think of.

• When you walk, study where your feet are landing.
• Pay deliberate attention to your answers in conversation, are they reactive answers or ones that you thought about first?
• Consider how you hold your utensils to eat and think through why you hold them that way.
• When driving, take rolling mental notes along your route. Look at and think about landmarks, examine what other people are doing as you drive by, look at how your hands are on the wheel and consider why you hold the steering wheel the way you do.
• When you work, are your feet in front of the chair? Tucked up underneath? Stretched out straight? Why?

This may sound extreme, but the point of the exercise is to highlight how mentally exhausted you are by the end of the day. It's the System 1 thinking, the cruise control, that allows us to conserve energy and maintain a reserve of energy for the times that we need to be effective. Most of us would be continuously exhausted without it.

Using your newfound understanding of when people are most likely to resort to system 1 or system 2 thinking means that you’re no longer at the whim of time. In fact, it gives you the superpower to leverage time itself. The science opens a whole new world of strategies and possibilities to directly influence outcomes.

Let’s consider some examples:

• You have a bold new initiative that you want to propose, but it is going to take a lot of work and political capital. There’s a chance that your leadership will go for it, but you aren’t 100% sure. If you make the pitch right before lunch or at the end of the day, you are scientifically much less likely to get your desired outcome.
• But what if instead, this bold initiative is lunacy, and you were told to pitch it anyway. You don’t believe in it, don’t want executive buy in, but are obligated to do what you’re told. In this scenario, you’d want your presentation scheduled before lunch or at the end of the day.
• What if you’re the leader and you’re pitching a new direction to your team?
• What if you want to broach tough conversations that relate to performance concerns or request a raise?

Whether leading up or down, it’s important to understand the necessity of being deliberate with your decisions and be self-aware of those times when energy is lacking. Once you understand how the science works, you can also take measures to minimize the effects. Schedule important meetings when you’re fresh and well-fed and schedule the more routine meetings when you’re more likely to resort to system 1 cruise control thinking.

Psychology is great, use it wisely.

References

Extraneous factors in judicial decisions, Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, Liora Avnaim-Pesso, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Apr 2011, 108 (17) 6889-6892; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1018033108

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.