A recent paper by Adam Grant and Francesca Gino on why gratitude motivates prosocial behavior – behaviour intended to benefit others – discusses three experiments that found that social worth was the mediator. Firstly, this is building on previous studies that found that being thanked does indeed promote prosocial behavior.
This has some fairly straightforward implications for how you live your life and what kind of policies you want to have at your company. Most jobs have something to do with helping other people either directly (e.g., life guards), indirectly (e.g., computer engineers), or within the company (e.g., training underlings). And most people do a lot of interacting with others throughout the day, so there are ample opportunities to both help and receive help. By thanking someone, they’ll be more inclined to help you or someone else.
This appears to happen because, when people are thanked, they feel more social worth. Grant and Gino also measured self-efficacy and emotions, and neither seemed to account for the prosocial behavior. Being socially valued is pretty close to the consensual definition of meaning – contributing beyond yourself. Gratitude seems like it might be the feedback that you are indeed contributing. Usually, feedback about doing well at something does increase self-efficacy. However, this seems particular to self-worth only. But, why wouldn’t feeling more socially valued increase positive emotions or decrease negative emotions? (In the studies, it seems like it did a little bit, but not significantly.)
This separation of meaning and happiness is consistent with other research (e.g., McGregor & Little, 1998). For instance, Baumeister (1991) has found that parents are, on average, slightly less “happy” than non-parents. However, this is measured by individual emotion and life satisfaction. Not meaning. It seems that parents might get more meaning, but they might also have more stress, leading their scores in subjective well-being to come out a little lower than non-parents.
This leads me to the question: what is meaning? Is it an emotion that we just aren’t measuring in the same bundle as other emotions? I might argue that this is the case, because it seems that it might be motivating. Emotions are originally conceived to be moving – literally to move you. They also may have distinct physiological patterns in the body; Negative emotions seem to have this, though positive emotions so far don’t seem to have such specific patterns. However, you feel something different with each emotion, so how are you feeling that if there isn’t something physically going on? There must be, and we just don’t know what it is yet. That’s my theory.
References:
Baumeister, R.F. (1991). Meanings of life. New York: Guilford Press.
Grant, A. M., & Gino, F. 2010. A little thanks goes a long way: Explaining why gratitude expressions motivate prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98: 946-955.
McGregor, I, & Little, B. R. (1998). Personal projects, happiness, and meaning: On doing well and being yourself. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 494–512.
Marc Hauser, evolutionary bioligist at Harvard has recently been found guilty of scientific misconduct. Ironically, he is the author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. A blog at nature.com says:
In the 2002 Cognition paper, Hauser and his colleagues reportedly trained cotton-top tamarins to recognize two different “grammars”. These grammars were patterns in the sequence of syllables, for instance “wi wi di” (AAB) vs. “le we we” (ABB). One group of monkeys was trained on the first pattern, and the other group trained on the second pattern.
The investigators then played these sounds on a hidden loudspeaker, and watched the monkeys to see if they turned to look in the direction of the sound more often when they heard a different “grammar” than the one to which they were accustomed. Hauser and his colleagues claimed that they did, suggesting that the monkeys were able to distinguish between two underlying grammars. But Altmann says that, according to the Harvard investigation, Hauser lacked the critical control data showing how often the monkeys turned toward the loudspeakers when hearing their familiar grammar. “Perhaps they would turn round as often if they heard anything coming from that speaker,” Altmann wrote. “The experiment as run did not allow any conclusions to be drawn regarding monkeys’ ability to distinguish between different grammatical patterns.”
As someone who has worked in a lab doing meticulous video tape coding myself, this is pretty crazy. I think they’re suggesting that Hauser didn’t code the videos at all, and that he just had the outcomes of the data without the actual data. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it highlights for me how important it is for employees to understand the connection of what they do to the bigger picture and, for my research-oriented readers, the importance of looking at operationalization. As a coder, you sit there staring at videos probably for hours straight. In this case, it sounds like you’d be watching for the chimps to look toward the speaker. You’d probably be recording the specific time that they looked over, how long they looked for maybe… I’m not sure what else. There would probably be several coders to make sure everyone is agreeing. But it’s these little details that everything else is built on. This is the operationalization of the hypothesis. If these details are wrong, then other research in the future that’s built on this is going to be flawed and probably useless. As a coder, you’ve really got to understand this, and you have to be aware of this as your blood shot eyes are trying to focus. Maybe you zoned out while you were watching. You have to rewind and watch it again.
Anyway, maybe Marc just lost the data, but it is a good reminder of the connections from the little to the large.
I recently read this post by Paul Dix who discusses how job hoppers may make very good entrepreneurs. He was responding to this post by Mark Suster, a tech VC, about how job hoppers make terrible employees.
Essentially, Mark’s post suggests that you can look at someone’s resume, and, if he’s had more than six jobs before the age of 30, then he’s a job hopper and will not be loyal to a company, so you shouldn’t hire him or fund him as an entrepreneur.
Paul makes some great arguments in response: “Loyalty should be earned by building an environment that’s mutually beneficial;” “You can’t establish a pattern by looking at someone’s resume;” A major reason job hoppers leave is that they don’t feel a sense of ownership, like not being included on decisions. He also mentions that employees are in it for their own self-interest and it’s silly to expect someone to work at a company for the company’s benefit. I mostly agree with everything Paul is saying, but I have a few other thoughts to add. This isn’t really an argument for or against hiring job-hoppers, but more about what you should look for and how to retain employees.
Firstly, loyalty does not appear to exist on any personality tests. The Big Five personality test is the most validated personality assessment, and there’s really nothing that comes close to loyalty on it. Persistence is considered a trait or strength, and, unlike loyalty, persistence is centered around a goal, not a person or a company. Self-control is also probably related, and has been shown to be a robust predictor of many positive outcomes (Tangey et al., 2004). But loyalty as a personality trait doesn’t really seem to be studied, though just about everything exists as a state and trait. However, this is something that an employer wants, and there is a pile of literature about employee retention. This literature takes the employer’s perspective, asking the question of what they need to do in order to retain employees – not so much the other way around.
Secondly, a primary consideration involved in hiring employees should be value alignment. Values are guiding principles of life that are stable across time and situations (Kasser, 2002, p.123). Values influence whether we like something or not, what goals we choose, and thus the behaviors we exhibit (Kasser, 2002). Most people’s values relate to being and connecting with people (relatedness), having freedom and control over their situation (autonomy), and wanting to do things well and grow in their abilities (competence). These are basic psychological needs, and much of workplace research boils down to how these things affect performance. (This and impact or meaning. I’ll get to that later.)
Further, these psychological needs are major players in motivation. Motivation is the reason or reasons behind why you do what you do. Meeting these psychological needs supports a person being intrinsic (driven by interest). Yet, we often do things because they are valuable to us or because we have to do them, and not because they are interesting. A job is usually a mix of different motivations – most of us can’t always do what interests us every second of the day. Otherwise, the garbage would never be taken out. But we do have to realize that it’s important to take out the garbage. We gain this understanding as we grow. We form our values. The more we align with a value, the more we experience it as something we are freely choosing to do, rather than being controlled and forced to do it (Ryan & Deci, 2000).
Thus, it’s important to hire people whose values align with the company, and if the company supports autonomy, competence, and relatedness, most people’s values will likely align. Paul is quite right: “Loyalty should be earned by building an environment that’s mutually beneficial.” What this really means is that employers should genuinely care about the people who work for them, making sure their psychological needs are met. Companies that offer childcare, paternity leave, flexible work ours, growth opportunities, etc. show this – they respect that the employees are actually human beings, and without them, the company would not exist.
Paul mentions that many people leave a workplace because they didn’t feel a sense of ownership or weren’t involved in decisions. This not only keeps them from feeling autonomous, but also shows a lack of trust and respect for them (relatedness). This leads to a lack of reciprocity – why should someone respect a company or a boss that does not respect them? If they can’t make decisions, this also affects their ability to grow and may also make them feel less efficacious, ultimately leaving their need for competence unfulfilled.
One example of a company that seems to be doing well and has a massive amount of autonomy is the democratically-run Alvarado Street Bakery. Their employees not only own the company, but they vote management into position. (They were featured in Michael Moore’s Capitalism and mention having very little turnover.)
I don’t entirely disagree with Mark, however. I agree that you shouldn’t hire someone that appears to be only looking for a paycheck (unless they are doing work that is not creative or complex). Vansteenkiste et al. (2007) found that extrinsic value orientation (orientation toward money, fame, or power) was associated with less satisfaction with, dedication to, and vitality on the job, as well as higher emotional exhaustion, short-lived satisfaction after achieving goals, and turn-over intention. Interestingly, they also found that raising their salary, even if they thought they wanted money, didn’t change these effects.
These researchers also found that holding extrinsic work values thwarted the satisfaction of basic needs. This makes sense – if your values are a façade over top of an intrinsic self that is being ignored, there will constantly be dissonance. You will constantly have value conflicts or choose to leave a basic need unfulfilled in favor of making money. For example, I know people who stay at jobs that force them to work overtime with bosses that badger and belittle them because they believe they can’t afford to leave. This is not what life should be. In this case, they are undermining their needs (and values) of being respected, spending time with their family, feeling successful and competent, and having freedom in order to fulfill a different value, thinking that they’re supposed to tough it out.
Maybe Mark values people who are willing to endure long lengths of misery, or be extrinsic in their motivations (e.g., doing something because someone else wants you to, or because you think you should, even though you don’t really value it). However, just because someone did a job for money once does not mean that they are doing it again. Maybe they left that job because they were looking for more meaningful work. Maybe they left because they had a controlling boss. (Mark comments on people who leave because they didn’t like their boss saying that this means to him that employee is hard to work with. Bosses play a big role in dictating whether employees experience autonomy, competence, and relatedness!) This brings me back to the question of filter.
So far, I’ve focused on the support of values is a primary method of retaining employees. Often separated from values is purpose, which I consider a highly prioritized value manifested as a far-reaching, long-term and relatively tangible goal. A company mission is basically the same thing. The mission of the bread company mentioned above is:
“to give superior service in providing the finest quality baked goods to its valued customers nationwide by utilizing a worker owned and managed cooperative business structure and to strive to use whole grain and organic ingredients, wherever possible, to support sustainable agricultural practices and healthy living.”
This is about something a little bit bigger than just bread. They are expressing several values in it: internally they’re promoting a co-op culture and all that is implied with that, and the far-reaching ones are to support health and the environment. And of course, a good product. In hiring employees, it’s probably useful to look for people who already care about these things. As Paul argues, an entrepreneur is pursuing a purpose that they decided on and will thusly have a lot of ownership in it. As a VC, I would think you need to look closely for an entrepreneur’s integrity behind the mission of the company. Why that product or service? Is that interest reflected in his past somehow?
I also mentioned meaning and impact. Meaning is argued to be an additional psychological need, and I basically agree with this (Andersen, Chen, & Carter, 2000). Seligman (2000) defines meaning as contributing beyond the self. This means that projects that do not ever come to fruition won’t provide much, if any, meaning. In other words, futility is a huge underminer of meaning and seeing impact is enormously important. Adam Grant, a professor at UPenn, has done several studies showing the importance of task significance. One finding comes from a university call center where employees were supposed to spend their time calling up donors, requesting funding. Grant and his colleagues had a scholarship recipient come in and chat with a group of the callers for five minutes. A month later, those callers were spending more than twice as much time on the phone and bringing in more than twice as much funding. This shows an increase in dedication, and likely indicates less future turnover. People need to know that what they do matters.
Lastly, I just want to comment on having any kind of so-called filter at all. When you make a rule like “don’t hire people who have more than six jobs in ten years on their resume,” you are allowing yourself to be mindless. For example, saying “ugh, you always say that” probably indicates that you are no longer really listening to what the other person says… you’re basing your assumptions on what you’ve heard before, and no growth can occur in this scenario. A resume has a person on the other end of it. Each job is a set of experiences for that person, and it is very difficult to make assumptions about them from a piece of paper that is codified to be a coldly-written summary of what they’ve done. It’s a little different than learning who they are.
Paul says that you should hire the best. Hire people who could leave anytime they wanted because they are that good. I definitely agree here. If you are hiring people that could leave anytime and know this, then they are staying for autonomous reasons. Their well-being will be higher for it (swaths of research on autonomous regulation and well-being). Paul mentions in his hiring criteria, he checks to see if people are pursuing their craft outside of being paid for it. This indicates that they probably do what they do because they either find it interesting or care about it. Though, it’s still possible that they do it because they like to compete or want to be the cool guy in a particular community. The best way to know why someone does what they do is to ask them, and to ask them in a way that makes them feel safe and understood. If you want honest answers out of people at interviews, and if you want to see how they will act once they are at the company for a while, you want to make them feel supported and not judged.
PS – I just wanted to address my absence. I know, I said I would post stuff as I synthesized my coursework. I only did that once, and I wasn’t thrilled with my synthesis. However, now I’m all done. I handed in my thesis on Sunday (!#%!) and am prepared to write here slightly more often.
As I go through my coursework, I’ll post assimilations of my reading material. Here comes one now!
From Adria.Richards' Flickr Photostream
One of the books I’m reading is Spark which is about exercise and its effects on the brain. Exercise does some amazing stuff for the old noodle, but I’m going to focus on just the aspect of learning for now.
Big stuff appears to happen in the hippocampus, known to play a major role in long-term memory and learning. Basically, exercise causes your body to produce everything necessary to prepare you to learn something.
Learning happens via a mechanism called long-term potentiation (LTP). One neuron fires, sending glutamate (the most common activating neurotransmitter) across the synapse where it clicks into receptors on a dendrite (the receiving side of a neuron). If the neuron fires again, the genes of the receiving cell will start producing more building materials to prepare for locking in the memory. (Hence, firing and wiring together.)
Four Factors
Exercise causes more production of a particular protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF causes your neurons to branch out, creating more dendrites and synapses (places for other cells to connect to). It also binds with receptors at the synapse, increasing the flow of ions, allowing for a stronger signal.
BDNF also helps increase the uptake of IGF-1 (insulin growth factor), which helps glucose (fuel) get to cells. It also activates neurons to produce signaling neurotransmitters (serotonin and glutamate) and spurs more production of BDNF to strengthen the structure of neuronal connections.
Your cells also need oxygen, which gets mixed with the glucose to create energy (or ATP). During exercise, when oxygen can be depleted, your body produces vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) to produce new capillaries in the body and brain.
Fibroblast growth factor (FGF-2) helps tissue grow, and in the brain, it’s important to LTP (the process of solidifying connections).
Basically, these factors play roles in getting fuel to neurons and help them strengthen and grow.
Neurogenesis
There are also some studies that indicate that exercising causes production of spanking new neurons. Fred Gage of the Salk Instite, along with Peter Eriksson of Sweden showed that rodents who ran on a wheel saw an increase in the number of cells that were born. In studies of chickadees that learned new songs in the spring, a significant number of new cells in the hippocampus, showing a relationship between cell growth and learning. Henrieeta van Praag showed a direct link in learning through a study in which active mice and non-active mice were shown their escape route in an opaque pool of water, then put in a second time. Both groups swam at the same rate, but the active mice more quickly found their way out, indicating that they had more effectively learned where their exit was from the previous swim.
So exercise helps to make new cells as well as shore-up and grow the old ones. However, cells have about 28 days to find something to do by joining a network, or they die off (use it or lose it). It’s a good thing that BDNF caused more dendrites to sprout – this offers more opportunity for the new cells to connect.
One other interesting tid bit is that the more complex the motor skills involved, the more BDNF in the cerebellum (involved in motor activity). Even though these circuits are created through movement, they can be used for thinking as well – which may be why learning the piano is makes it easier to learn math.
“If we’re not moving, there’s no reason to learn anything”(p. 53).
Ratey, J. R., & Hagerman, E. (2008) Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. New York, NY: Little, Brown & Company.
Srikumar Rao discusses many of the basic ideas of positive psychology in his book, although he has found these ideas in philosophy and in various religions, and doesn’t cite research.
One important nugget of wisdom he offers is that stress comes from wanting – either wanting something or wanting the absence of something. (Rao suggests that all stress comes from this, although I’m not entirely sure about the all part.) But his point is that anxiety and upset come from not being okay with things as they are. If you stop and think about this for a moment, I think you’ll agree that it seems true. If you can feel like there’s nothing you want, this allows a calm contentment to surface.
But what is life without wanting something? Goals are an important aspect of life. Generally, we’re sizing up our lives and ourselves based on goals: Are we achieving them? Are we behind? Are we excited that we did well? Goals help us to feel like life is meaningful. We have to have some reason to get up in the morning.
There is quite a bit of research on goal orientation and pursuit, which indicates that certain types of goals are healthier than others. Some goals are downright bad for you. Essentially, goals associated with intimacy, spirituality, and generativity are correlated with higher subjective well-being (SWB). Extrinsic, materialistic goals, like power, financial success, social recognition, and good-looks, are negatively correlated with SWB (Emmons, 1991; Kasser and Ryan, 1996). On top of this, high levels of avoidance goals, such as “not getting into trouble,” (as opposed to something like “being as helpful as possible”) also negatively predicted SWB (King and Emmons, 1991). Overall, goals relating to helping others seem to be the most worthwhile.
Another tidbit that seems useful is the idea of goal concordance – that goals are aligned with the growing virtues and interests of the self. I think this is where possible stress from goals could come in, causing other wants (for instance, “I don’t want to do this assignment,” in the case of pursuing a degree that doesn’t interest you, or “I want to smack him” in the case of a relationship that isn’t serving you.)
Is a goal the same as a want?
A want is the present feeling of wishing something were different and being unhappy with the way things are. A goal is a direction to move in, something to move towards. The word “motivation” is highly related, stemming from a root that means ” a moving cause.” So, a want is a feeling in the present moment, and a goal is a future-oriented metric by which to make motion in our lives.
I’d like to end by proposing that gratitude is the antidote for wanting. When you concentrate on feeling sincerely grateful for something, wanting disappears. You feel content for the moment, and as Barbara Fredrickson has shown, this feeling of gratitude builds. You tend to feel more gratitude, and theoretically less want. This certainly needs a lot more research and thought. More on this in the future.
The question of why it’s important to commit to someone through marriage is certainly a difficult one. I don’t have an answer, but here are some thoughts as to why we do what we do at the wedding.
The actual ceremony makes some sense because you’re basically telling someone else that they matter to you and that you appreciate them. Gratitude appears to be a key strengthener in relationships (McCullough et al., 2001) so you’re starting off a commitment with this recognition, and it seems that from there, because you both want to keep reciprocating, things escalate. (Hopefully, you’ll reaffirm this heartfelt gratitude often – gratitude in general correlates with high subjective well-being. [McCullough et al., 2002])
You’re doing it in front of a big audience, creating a “shared reality“, which strengthens your perception of the validity of what you’re saying. (Tory Higgin’s research on “tuning” remarks – saying something either positively or negatively about someone to a mutual acquaintance. If they agree with you, or believe you, your remark is a shared reality and you’ll remember that person the way you discussed them, and not the way they actually are.) Anyway, shared realities are necessary in a relationship – you have to agree about what you’re talking about to make stuff work!
Yet another benefit of making your commitment publicly is that your heart rate is up. You’ll experience the emotion that you’re feeling (and that feeling will likely be love because it’s the dominant response created by that environment) more intensely than you would normally (Shachter and Singer, 1962). You’ll also experience subsequent events more intensely. This is compounded by the novelty of the situation. I’m sure you gathered that. You’ll tend to remember this experience pretty darn well because it’s probably an emotional highlight in your life.
Your family is definitely getting something out of it – more family and positive affect (at least momentarily). They’re watching something morally good, probably feeling a sense of “elevation” which causes you to produce oxytocin (Silvers and Haidt, 2008) and to be more open to bonding with the people around you. It makes you want to be love-y and it makes you tend to trust (which helps explain lots of dirty bridesmaids). So this is beneficial for these new family relations who are just meeting each other. They’ll likely be more accepting and open. And the booze helps. They’re also getting an opportunity to create one big in-group, as opposed to an in-group and an out-group. (Which happens a lot with in-laws. And country warfare.)
The actual commitment? It’s an agreement that you’ve both stopped looking around. You’re not being grass-is-greener anymore, and you’re gonna build a life together – intertwine. Yeah, you can have this without marriage. But the identity is muddled. (This is my own theory, here.) You’re a wife or a husband when you’re married. Identity is a pretty important thing, and it usually needs to be clear – it helps you understand your contributions. You can still have this without marriage, but it’s a little less clear. You’re a boyfriend or girlfriend without marriage, which is a label implying a youthful and ephemeral nature. And since language affects the way we think (we often think in words, especially when assimilating), it’s important to be able to think about your identity. What you do in your job relates you to society, you’re a son and a brother and friend and this all relates you specifically to other people, and tends to lend significance. I think the commitment is also a promise that you’ll maintain that gratitude for one another throughout, which sets you up for some mentally healthy kids – and you’ll also probably live longer.
And if it helps, the top 10% of most reportedly satisfied people are married but it looks like it tends to go down a bit after the wedding. Still, companionship grows.
I finally realized why learning the play the piano is important. Most kids probably won’t become concert pianists, so why do we bother putting them in lessons for something that they’ll probably never really use much?
It’s pretty clear that when we’re taking piano lessons, we’re learning to control our hands – how to do one thing with one hand and something else with the other hand.
But what we’re actually learning is awareness. We’re learning to pay attention, and to control our attention. And the more you develop as a pianist, the more awareness you’re developing. You start out learning to control each hand separately, like playing chords in one hand and a simple melody in the other hand. Then you begin to learn finger independence – fingers each playing different melodies, for example. Then you learn to weight the fingers differently, lending different dynamic nuances to the different melodies. It takes intense focus to realize that the weight can be much more relaxed if it comes from your arm, and your fingers just guide it. You’re also learning to understand the emotional content of the music, and how it’s structure fits together in the piece as a whole. You may even begin to notice that your breathing affects how you play.
All of this is development of awareness – development of the ability to notice. Our experience is shaped by where we choose to put our limited amount of attention. The better we can control our attention, the better we can control our experience. It is through experience – interaction with the environment – that we develop our identity. I’ll get to that in a second.
Experience is the medium of perception. The better we can control our experience, the better we can control our perception. And, the better we can control our perception, the better we can control our experience. We may have emotion that we don’t initially control – frustration for instance – but as soon as we recognize it, as soon as we have an awareness of it, we can choose to perceive the situation differently, which changes our experience. We can choose to have more positive emotion versus negative emotion. When we develop a deep awareness, we can maneuver ourselves away from a depression. We can create more happiness – joy, appreciation, hope… – even if we are already happy.
Identity. This is how you perceive your relationship with the world. It’s a step on the way of having a life that we consider worthwhile. Identity gives you a framework from which you can contribute to the world.
If you develop a deep awareness through playing the piano, and you become a pianist, this is your identity, and you may find that your contribution is creating music that allows other people to focus and develop their awareness.
I noticed on Urlesque today there was an article about a new State Farm commercial. What interested me was how the author described his reaction:
Those tricksters at State Farm premiered their campaign featuring people helping people … and it will pretty much make you want to hug everyone within a five mile radius.
Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia has done research on the feeling of “elevation,” which indicates that oxytocin is released when people see a virtuous act. Oxytocin is a hormone known to cause bonding, feelings of trust, and calmness. That seems to fit pretty well with what this author is describing.
Elevation is one of a few experiences associated with inspiration. (Perhaps this writer got up and did something virtuous after seeing this commercial – though it’s unlikely because of oxytocin’s calming effects. I’m sure State Farm hopes he bought insurance.) Admiration (associated with skill) and awe (associated with vastness) are two others experiences that might be involved in inspiration. What inspires you to actually get up and do something?
