Switching Gestalts

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

A gestalt switch is when we change the framework we use to organize our perceptions and it fundamentally changes the meaning of what we perceive. Probably the best example is the popular old woman/young woman illusion. Seen one way, the drawing looks like an old hag, but when seen another way, it appears as a beautiful young woman.

Studies have shown that what is currently in our minds determines how we interpret the drawing. If we’re thinking about the perils of growing old, we’ll on average see the old woman.  But if we’re focused on the joys of youth and beauty, it’s the young woman that will appear.

Switching gestalts isn’t just a curiosity. It illustrates a basic principle governing how our minds work. We see what we believe, attending to information that supports our view and ignoring any that is in conflict.

The game of college football is a great example of gestalts at work. A well-executed strategy is a thing of beauty. From a bird’s eye view, its choreography rivals ballet. The athletic ability of the individual players can be a marvel to behold. The team spirit is infectious.

But football is also a horribly brutal game. The players are coached to hit hard, so that they knock loose the ball or take a player out of the action. Every game is marked by injuries.  When a player is lying on the field and not moving, the frame shifts and the game is no longer fun to watch.

Yet every weekend, I tune in to watch my alma mater, the University of Michigan. When the team wins, as irrational as it sounds, it seems to affirm my identity. My years in Ann Arbor were transformational and have informed my life and work. My liberal arts education taught me to respect intelligence, and it taught me the importance of human values, none more basic than the imperative to treat people with respect.

This has been a controversial period for the team.  A new coach, Rich Rodriquez, was hired from the outside last year and there were some contractual issues that cast a pall on his departure from West Virginia. This year opened with the news that he was involved in a failed real estate deal with an accused felon. Then just before the first game, the coach was accused by six Michigan players of violating NCAA rules on the number of hours of practice allowed per week.

But Michigan played brilliantly in its opening game and the sportscasters calling the game suggested that the allegations were just sour grapes by a few disaffected players. As I watched my team win, it seemed a plausible explanation to me. And, of course, West Virginia would not be happy about losing its coach, and how could he be responsible for the actions of his business partner.

The team didn’t do as well against Iowa in the sixth week and the precocious quarterback Tate Forcier struggled. After a particularly difficult series of plays, Forcier was benched and the television cameras captured Rodriquez going up one side of him and down the other.  It was then that the gestalt switched.

When the Michigan coach bullied his quarterback, he offended those very values that I associate with my years at the school. As a result, the real estate deal looked even more questionable and the allegations of NCAA rules violations more credible. The coach, I concluded with newfound clarity, wasn’t a very nice person, so everything he was involved in became suspect.

But it goes beyond the issue of the coach’s values to his intelligence. Tate Forcier is an obviously skilled and dedicated quarterback. In what universe could it possibly make sense to bully him? Is he going to be more motivated as a result? Will his judgment improve?

Not according to brain science. The only thing that’s going to happen is that his amygdala will key the release of cortisol, slowing down Forcier’s brain, narrowing his vision, and making his judgment worse. The coach’s aggression will summon up aggression on Forcier’s part, creating precisely the opposite kind of relationship high performance depends on.

It seems that Rodriquez has a rather skewed perception of human relationships. It isn’t surprising that the gestalt that would lead him to bully a player would also lead to a business partnership with a man of questionable character, to a less than congenial departure from his former school, and to a broken relationship with half a dozen of his players.

He lives in a world where hitting hard is a virtue, even when it makes no sense.

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A Revolutionary Idea

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

What if we’ve been wrong all this time? What if one of our most fundamental beliefs about human nature, based on scientific evidence, turns out to be mistaken?

This past week, scientists released news of the discovery of a 4.4 million year old fossil of one of our ancestors. Ardipithecus ramidus, or “Ardi” for short, was perhaps the last common ancestor of apes and humans. What’s so striking about Ardi is the teeth. They are considerably smaller and blunter than those of our chimpanzee relatives, and more like our own.

This little detail has huge implications. The belief that nature is red in tooth and claw, and that human nature is as red as they come, was bolstered by observations of chimpanzees ripping both monkeys and other chimpanzees to shreds with their teeth. Jane Goodall has even described in detail two females with a taste for the infants of their rivals.

When we believed we evolved directly from the chimp, it could only be assumed that the same blood lust was deep inside us as well. Despite the wonders of civilization and the ample evidence of altruistic behavior, we were seen to be violently competitive at heart. And if that is the nature of our species, we could be excused for feeling the need to summon up those instincts in our defense from time to time.

This view justified war and all of its horrors, for it is just a natural expression of who we are, perhaps amplified a bit by technology. As Frans de Waal puts it in his recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, it became “hard to escape the notion that we are essentially ‘killer apes’ destined to wage war forever.”

This idea permeates all of our relationships, not just those of nation-states. Since our instinct is to be competitive, we must be constantly on our guard to ensure we’re not taken advantage of. When it comes to management, we’ve developed systems and practices to ensure that people do the right thing for the enterprise and not give into their instincts. We certainly cannot leave them to their own devices.

So cut throat competition becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. “If everyone is just out for themselves,” the thinking goes, “I must be too.”  All of the excesses of the corporate world can then be justified, from over the top executive compensation to shady mortgages. Caveat Emptor.

But the discovery of Ardi suggests a kinder and gentler human nature. Without those fangs, our ancestors couldn’t have been the blood thirsty creatures we’ve taken them for. Along with the more peaceful gorillas and bonobos, humans are now seen to be a cooperative species, and the violent chimpanzees as a mutation branching off the main trunk of evolution.

De Waal offers further evidence. In the Ultimatum Game, a staple of Behavioral Economics, human players display a preference for equity over financial gain. Neuroscientists have discovered mirror neurons that fire empathetically when we observe others feeling pain.

If we take the ramifications of Ardi’s discovery to heart, our idea of human nature has to be turned inside out, and very different behavior should follow.  We would have to start out trusting people and assuming they’re going to do the right thing. It would revolutionize the way we manage people.

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