Why we do dumb things and how to stop it!

Have you ever done something really stupid and wondered... what the hell was I thinking?

You are certainly not alone. Some people, especially teenage boys and the creators of the Jackass movie franchise, are masters of the ridiculous decision but why? What is going on that leads us to do dumb things?

As Lady Gaga on track #27 of A Star is Born, in the most repetitive song since Baby Shark asks...

“Why did you do that?”

A fair and simple question from the American singer, songwriter and actor.

One would think it an easy question to answer. Think again.

For the last century psychology has been exploring human behaviour, humanity at its best and worst, trying to understand why some of us some of the time behave with extraordinary brilliance and at other times with exceptional brutality.

If we can work out how to cultivate more of the brilliance and less of the brutality then we move down the yellow brick road towards utopia.

This is particularly relevant to the workplace as organisations spend huge amounts of time and money to cultivate a culture fit for purpose. 

Culture can be defined most simply as ‘the way we do things around here’

so understanding why we do the things we do is key to creating the culture we want.

The answer to this question however is not so simple and it turns out to have as much to do with biology as it does to my field of psychology.

And you may be surprised to know just how far back in time we need to go to accurately answer the question

where does my behaviour come from?

So buckle up for a rapid ride from moments to minutes to millennia to millions of years prior to decode why you do what you do, inspired by the brilliant book on the biology of behaviour (Behave) by Stanford Professor and neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky.

One second before you react your brain’s amygdala (your emotional centre and part of the limbic system) is wired to protect you from any and all threats. It can over-ride your conscious and rational processing capacity located in the brain’s frontal cortex if the perception of threat is strong enough.

One minute to one hour before you react your brain is scanning the environment around you to determine what program it should be running. Our brains run three core programs and they vary in terms of dominance based on our context. They are flight or fight, rest and digest, flow and grow. More on these another time.

One hour to a day beforehand the role of hormones become key. For example if you have elevated testosterone and/or stress hormones in your blood you are more likely to focus on potential threats around you.

One week to months beforehand your action will have been influenced by your brains ability to adapt and change based on its general environment. Prolonged exposure to stress for example will have enlarged your amygdala and your frontal cortex will have atrophied.

One year to decades previously also plays a role, especially your experiences as an adolescent and early adult. Your frontal cortex does not fully develop till around 25 years old so what happened to you prior to then sculpts its formation. 

Early childhood experiences obviously count too with new research revealing that even experiences you had in utero impact your development. The growing field of epigenetics shows us that many of our genes’ characteristics switch on or off based on our environment. Whilst we are still in the womb our mother's environment can change how our genes operate too.

One generation or more earlier has an influence via the genes we inherit. Just as tall parents are likely to have tall kids, the same is true of many behavioural traits that are passed on to us by our parents. This is further reinforced by epigenetics too. We are becoming increasingly aware that the experiences of our ancestors influence the genetic coding they pass on to us.

One million years or more ago there is still an influence, believe it or not. If genes play a role in how we behave then the evolution of genes is relevant too. Behavioural patterns vary greatly by species. The genes we commonly share as humans predispose us to a certain behavioural range.

So from the moment before you behave to millions of years prior biology is playing a role. Click here to watch Sapolsky explain this himself. As the professor says

“Every level of behaviour has multiple levels of causality.”

So what does this all mean I hear you ask?

A fair question and an important one.

If our behaviour has so many causes, many of which are not only beyond our control but beyond our lives then we are well advised to ensure we take responsibility for the variables we do control.

Aussie bride-to-be Justine Damond’s tragic death in Minneapolis 2017 is an incredibly sad and totally unnecessary example of the cost of not taking control of the behavioural variables we can control. 

This beautiful photo of Justine, a local from Sydney’s northern beaches, featured as headline news all around the world for all the wrong reasons a couple of years ago. Before continuing my deepest condolences, respect and regards go out to her family, fiance and friends. No one can possibly imagine what you have been through. Justine’s life has touched the world.

For others you may recall that on the night of 15 July 2017 Justine called 911 to report a possible rape in an alley behind her house. 

10 minutes later a patrol car turned up. Having made the call Justine left the safety of her apartment around 11:40pm in her pyjamas to talk to the officers. 

One of the officers, apparently startled by Justine, fired shots from the passenger seat fatally wounding Justine.

Why did he do this? What possibly possessed him?

No one will ever really know but everything from the moments before to the millions of years prior were factors.

• The millions of years contributed to a gene pool that forms all our brains with five times the real estate designed to detect pain over pleasure.
• The millennia before the officer’s family lived in Somalia, a country with a long history of affluence combined with warring tribes, trade wars and religious confrontation.
• Not much is known about the offending officer’s early life but we do know he had only been a policeman for a couple of years and during that time had received a number of complaints against him. 
• We also know that police shootings are relatively common in the US. In the year before Justine’s death 524 people were fatally shot by police in US. One fifth of them were in Minnesota.
• Then in the few weeks prior to the shooting police were on high alert following the execution of a female NYPD cop and mother of twins in her car in a very similar scenario.
• The Officer’s hormone levels the day before the shooting are unknown but given the context of the NYPD shooting combined with officer’s inexperience it could be assumed his stress hormones were at high levels.
• Then in the minutes before the incident the call out for the officers to attend a possible rape no doubt would have triggered the officers’ flight or fight programming.

With all these variables colluding the stage was set. The stimulus of Justine approaching the vehicle was all it took for things to turn horribly and devastatingly wrong.

By no means nor in any way should this be seen as justification for what happened. Quite the opposite. 

My point is in knowing how many variables over such a long period of time contributed to this terrible snap decision that we must work so much harder to ensure we can make informed rational decisions about our behaviour in the moments that matter.

And I say ‘we’ very intentionally. Officer Mohamed Noor’s actions that night had deadly consequences, but we make decisions all the time, influenced by the moments to millennia before them, without conscious awareness or consideration as to why or where the behaviour came from and without regard for the consequences.

Given we are all subject to these influences we owe it to ourselves and others to become more conscious about how we make decisions and choose to act.

And in being more conscious realize

we always have a choice about how we respond, no matter how small that choice may be, no matter what our background or context may be. 

All the greatest figures in history that have changed the course of humanity for the better understood this. Indeed it appears that the more contrary to popular response the figure has acted the greater their impact.

For example Jesus message of love, forgiveness and servant leadership in a time of slavery, punishment and oppression. Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst, Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks (above), MLK Jnr, Mandela, Malala Yousafzai and others equally disrupted society by choosing to behave in ways that were counter to their backgrounds and circumstances. 

The greatest influencers of world history were shapers of their times, not products of it.

• Despite our genetic inheritance,
• despite our epigenetic development,
• despite how our brain has evolved during our formative years,
• despite the influences over our brains plasticity in recent months or years,
• despite our hormone levels of the last few days or weeks,
• despite the programming running in our brains over the last few minutes, and
• despite the stimuli that trigger our desire to act,
• we always have a choice.

It’s important to remember however that choice is like a muscle. The more we use it the stronger it gets over time, but in the short term it gets fatigued.

The famous Israeli parole study brings this point to reality, finding that experienced parole judges granted freedom about 65% of the time to the first prisoner who appeared before them on a given day. By the end of a morning session, the chance of release had dropped almost to zero.

After the same judge returned from a lunch break, the first prisoner once again had about a 65% chance at freedom. And once again the odds declined steadily (see graph below).

The researchers concluded that making successive decisions depletes our limited mental facility. When this happens the safest thing to do is stick with status quo, i.e. no parole. Bummer if your hearing is just before lunch!

The good news is we can build up our decision making muscle. The more weight we lift the easier it is to make heavy decisions. The key is to simulate the environment in which we’ll need to make those decisions as close as possible to the real situation.

One of my favourite examples of how to do this I heard from Dr Andy Walshe (above), previously the High Performance Director at RedBull. Andy has not only trained 1000’s of RedBull sponsored atheletes and artists to perform at their best, he has worked with the US Army & Olympic teams plus countless other elite performers around the world.

To prepare his clients to perform at their peak Andy does what he calls ‘edge’ training. He exposes them to scenarios that push them to the limits of their perceived capacity, e.g. crawling thru a long pitch black small tunnel filled with snakes. He then teaches them to make rational and calm decisions about how to respond in that moment. 

The perceived risk in these edge moments is high, the actual risk is low, but thru the experience Andy’s clients learn how to manage their emotions, their programming, their hormones, their brain functioning, their genetics etc to make better choices when the heat is on.

Assuming your training budget and OH&S policy does not extend to buying a 10 foot coffin full of snakes you can replicate aspects of this training by simulation activities and scenario planning.

There are some simulations (above and see here) out there that put you under time pressure to make decisions revealing how you work as a team when in duress.

Scenario planning gives you the opportunity to explore different ways things could go wrong and what you would do if it did. Discussing these possibilities and creating a playbook of how to respond in advance of them happening can be very effective.

Before I finish however one final thought from Professor Sapolsky.

He suggests that given how much of our behaviour is influenced by variables in the moments to millennia preceding it maybe we can afford to be a little bit more understanding of others when they do dumb things that hurt us.

I'm not referring here to behaviours with tragic outcomes like Justine's, but to the everyday things people do that confuse, annoy, disappoint, anger and frustrate us.

Maybe we can all be a little slower to react and faster to acknowledge the myriad of precursors contributing to the person's actions. Maybe we can even develop some compassion for them.

Maybe the dumb things are a cry for help.

Maybe they are a sign that something is wrong.

Maybe there is something we can do to help.

Maybe this is worth considering.

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Rich Hirst is a leadership, change and high performance psychologist. His insights are based on real world experiences from his work with 10,000+ leaders and over 1,000 CEOs, underpinned by his knowledge as an organisational psychologist and expertise as a change agent supporting organisations for more than 20 years going through major transformation.

For more information please go to www.richhirst.com or contact me via email on [email protected]. For daily leadership tips on LinkedIn search for #dailyrichtips.

Please find below links to my previous monthly posts.

1. How is your 2020 vision?
2. How to be the best of the best and 10x the rest
3. 10 career lessons I learned the hard way
4. Don't make this high performance mistake in your company!
5. 7 Tips to World Class Performance
6. Winning in the turns
7. The #1 predictor of career success is not what you think
8. Don't die with your music still in you
9. Blasters, badmouthers, bottlers, brooders and builders. Which one are you?
10. P.S. I love you
11. The great change trap-eze!
12. What is your New Year's Evolution?
13. How to lead when change is NOT constant
14. All good things must...
15. This choke point may be slowly killing your company
16. Australia: The distrusting country
17. The most damaging four letter word to use at work is @#*!
18. Finding your moonshot
19. Sleeping your way to the top
20. How to supercharge your influence
21. How to be a master of mental Aikido
22. Time to terminate HR?
23. Too busy or not too busy. Is that the question?
24. Who inspired you in 2017? My top ten!
25. The missing link of high performance
26. The future belongs to people with this skill
27. Lessons from loss
28. Good Grief
29. 20 reasons why corporate wellness programs get sick
30. Australia is still lucky... but for how long?
31. Change management has become a joke!
32. Are you ready for the third age?
33. What matters most in a post-truth world?
34. Never waste a good crisis
35. Your best bet yet for a year of success
36. What will your New Year's Evolution be?
37. Are you ready for the 'gig economy'?
38. Are you working with an energy vampire?
39. From counting people to making people count
40. Five novel tactics for better leadership
41. Mid year reviews: Ubiquitous but ridiculous
42. Talent pipelines are broken
43. Australia: The innovation immigration correlation
44. Time to reimagine HR
45. The secret to successful disruption: The innovation colony
46. How to survive and thrive in the supermatrix
47. The biggest predictor of career success is...
48. The secret to high performance is not what you think...
49. Where are you on the digital vortex?
50. Diversity does not equal inclusion
51. How to catch and hold the rebound expat
52. The e-factor is the new x: the ultimate growth multiplier
53. Are you working with a waste of space?
54. Iron Man needs you!
55. Collaboration: the new super skill
56. Leading innovation from the Australian subsidiary
57. Insurgent or incumbent: the key to a future every company wants is...
58. Why the talent war is over
59. How 'the other GDP' is causing a talent crunch