In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people to lie inside an MRI and watch a slot machine spin around and around. Half of the participants in Habib's experiment were “pathological gamblers” — people who had lied to their families about their gambling, missed work to gamble, or had bounced checks at a casino — while the other half were people who gambled socially but didn’t exhibit any problematic behaviors. Everyone was placed on their backs inside a narrow tube and told to watch wheels of lucky 7s, apples, and gold bars spin across a video screen. The slot machine was programmed to deliver three outcomes: a win, a loss, and a “near miss,” in which the slots almost matched up but, at the last moment, failed to align. None of the participants won or lost any money. All they had to do was watch the screen as the MRI recorded their neurological activity.
“We were particularly interested in looking at the brain systems involved in habits and addictions,” Habib told me. “What we found was that, neurologically speaking, pathological gamblers got more excited about winning. When the symbols lined up, even though they didn’t actually win any money, the areas in their brains related to emotion and reward were much more active than in nonpathological gamblers.
“But what was really interesting were the near misses. To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means you still lose.”
Two groups saw the exact same event, but from a neurological perspective, they viewed it differently. People with gambling problems got a mental high from the near misses— which, Habib hypothesizes, is probably why they gamble for so much longer than everyone else: because the near miss triggers those habits that prompt them to put down another bet. The nonproblem gamblers, when they saw a near miss, got a dose of apprehension that triggered a different habit, the one that says I should quit before it gets worse.
The mindset that makes the problem gambling problematic sounds an awful lot like positive thinking, doesn't it?
11 comments:
A crucial difference, though, is that in some non-gambling situations, near misses are often significantly better than flat-out losses.
If you are trying to get a book published or get a job or pass a test, a near miss often means you are on the right track, but need minor refinements - tweak your resume, work on your interviewing skills, study one section more, re-write a chapter.
In my experience, the positive thinker is more likely to use the near miss as incentive to keep trying. They learn what they can and get another opportunity to succeed. The negative thinker is more likely to see every rejection as 100% bad and stop trying.
That's based only on personal experience - obviously YMMV.
The gambling story sounds to me not like positive thinking, but like magical thinking.
See, that makes them sound even more alike to me. As a pessimist, being on the right track but not having succeed still feels exactly like failure. I'm still unpublished and unemployed and flunking out, and since I'm already doing the best I can I see no reason to feel like things would ever change.
And if you see the near miss as incentive to keep trying, that's the kind of sentiment that leads people to put another coin in the slot machine.
But there is no such thing as a near miss in a slot machine. There actually is such a thing as a near miss in a job interview or a publisher's rejection.
No matter what you get in a slot machine, a miss is a miss. No losing combination is any closer to winning than any other.
OTOH, I recently had feedback on an unsuccessful job interview, learned that I was a strong candidate at 85%, and learned what I could say and do to get closer to 95%. If pessimism led me to not explore this, I would be unlikely to ever move beyond the 85%.
A near miss in a job interview, if used as an opportunity to learn and modify your interview techniques, does actually bring you closer to getting a job. A miss in a slot machine is always the same.
I agree that these are related, but my point is that positive thinking is actually helpful in some situations, and in others it is nonsense, i.e. magical thinking.
What is this world you inhabit where they respond to unsuccessful job interviews by trying to help you be more successful next time??? Every unsuccessful job interview I've had was tinged with a soupcon of resentment that I was even there. (Which caused me to wonder why they asked me for an interview in the first place.) Every interview where they've had interest in helping me forward my career path, they've done so by hiring me. (And, as I've blogged about before, I haven't been hired that many times.)
I'm also curious (although I understand if you choose not to disclose this) what you can say or do to improve your chances.
I'm also kind of...put off, I suppose...by the idea that you can say or do things to improve your chances, and by the idea that they'll teach you what to say and to improve your chances next time. Either you're qualified for the job or you're not; either you're the best candidate or you're not. If you can manipulate their perception of this by performance, that means the interview process is not sufficiently good at identifying the best candidates. And if they create a flawed interview process and teach you how to game it...well, that just takes me back to middle school.
In the library system where I'm working, people are always applying and interviewing for internal job postings. Any time you are an "unsuccessful candidate" (in the HRspeak), you are entitled to feedback about why you didn't get the job. I've had several feedback sessions that were extremely enlightening.
Things I did to improve my chances: re-did my resume, find examples in my work experience that spoke to the kinds of things they want to see, learn how to construct a narrative that illustrates that (the STAR method - very corny but super effective), practice telling these stories out loud, to learn how to make them detailed yet concise. I researched certain aspects of libraries online so I would have ideas for how to improve our libary. And so on.
Your last point about the interview system, I both agree and disagree. I can see how it looks like a flawed system and someone teaches you how to game it. If you have a certain experience and you don't talk about it in the interview, it's as if the experience never existed.
On the other hand they're trying to make the system objective. Everyone gets the same questions and is scored numerically by more than one interviewer, then the scores are added up independently.
Because employment and promotions are not based on seniority, and because everyone has very similar qualifications, some kind of system is needed so it's not just based on cliques and friendships.
Oh yeah, in my earlier comment I forgot to say one of the tips I learned in my feedback sessions is that I am allowed to bring in notes. I was VERY stressed trying to remember stories from decades of employment plus library school stuff plus etc. etc. Now I go in with a sheet of bullet points. Not having to hold all of it in my head is a huge game-changer for me.
Although these internal job postings are in a closed world, you can ask for feedback in other situations, too. If someone says, I'm sorry, you were a strong candidate, but we decided to go in a different direction (or words to that effect), you can flat-out ask them, "Would you mind telling me a little bit about your decision in my case? It might be helpful for me in the future."
From what I've seen, attempts to make interviews objective, especially by quantifying them, create a system that people with more knowledge or experience with the system can game. It reminds me of how, after you've taken an IQ test the first couple of times, you know what kinds of things they're likely to be looking for on the pattern section or the memory section. Or like how I got an A in my first year Russian class despite my complete and total failure to learn Russian because I'm very good at appropriating grammatical structures from the test questions and examples and reusing them elsewhere in the test.
I agree. In this case, the longer you work in the system, and the more people you speak to, the more you know how to do these interviews.
However, none of the alternatives are better. I don't want to see a strict seniority system and I don't want to see a wholly subjective system where people are hired based on the hunches and whims of the interviewer. I don't know what else they could do.
I guess if a quantifying system can be gamed, then it isn't designed properly. Because the purpose is (or should be) to evaluate candidates' ability to do the job. Your ability to do the job is the same regardless of whether you can impose a satisfying narrative on your work experience, so if you could get a better result with better storytelling, the process isn't doing its job. (Unless, like, you're applying for a job as a storyteller.)
So maybe the interviewers need to be able to interview better, so they can extract the necessary information even from candidates who don't know the dance or don't have a list of planned anecdotes like a celebrity appearing on a talk show.
Or maybe some things would be better evaluated in some format other than an interview.
I just remembered this thread. And I have to say, yeah, you're right.
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