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8 - Being Human

The author suggests the last half of the book will be a shift from considering fear as a negative force to its value as an "energy source" and a stimulus for making positive changes. In essence, evolution motivated by fear of entropy, the sense that things will get worse if we fail to take action. And in practice, entropy does lead to the extinction of many species.

Fear is part of human nature, and human nature has both rational and irrational components. The irrational is not always bad: reason may tell us that we are wrong after we have acted, but reason can prevent us from taking action at all. We simply don't have time to ponder every option before making every decision, but act on shortcuts provided by habit and emotional reaction.

In this chapter, the author will take a more holistic look at human nature, as a means to understand our emotions (including fear) in the proper context.

What does it mean to be human?

The idea of being dehumanized in the workplace is as old as the workplace itself. During industrialization, men felt increasingly treated like machine parts - and before that, like beasts of burden. So the notion that work drains us of humanity is nothing new.

It also doesn't help that "being human" is often tendered as an excuse for our failings. By so doing we support the notion that the human being is inferior to mechanical devices, and would be better if they behaved more like machinery.

The question of what it means to be a human being becomes entirely philosophical. We do not know what a human being is meant to be, and there are a number of conflicting ideas. We feel that the workplaces is unnatural and robs us of our dignity, and we want to have autonomy and pride in the workplace. We want to feel that what we do with so much of our lives is both valuable and valued. But have things ever been thus?

The beginnings of humanistic psychology

The author considers the beginning of humanistic psychology to have been the mid-twentieth century and lists some of the thinkers she feels to have been influential, then focuses on two in specific: Rogers and Maslow.

Rogers is credited with the concept that mankind is "self-actualizing" - hard wired not merely to survive, but to excel by developing breadth and depth of skills. It is the concept that mankind has to apply effort to reach his full potential, and that his potential can always be increased. He also believed that environmental conditions could be helpful or inhibitive to self-actualization. Our work environment, in particular, can better enable us to fulfill our potential or prevent us from achieving what we have the potential to achieve.

Maslow considered human motivation, and is best known for a single diagram: his hierarchy of needs, which depicts human desires as hierarchical. The need to survive is at the base, and when (and only when) those needs are fulfilled can we move up to the next level to pursue other goals.

The author suggests these thinkers "sought to restore a sense of human values" in the dehumanized culture of post-industrialism, which increasingly decreases the value of human existence. The factory worker has less of a sense of his place in society, and less a sense of personal importance, than the craftsman. And even in the present day, people often feel like dehumanized machine parts, standardized and easily replaced.

In such an environment, it is difficult to define what it means merely to "be human" - so if the goal is for a person to feel like a human being, what is it they are striving for?

Using all our brain power

Next, the author describes the "three brains" model - which looks at the structure of the human brain as an organ, comparative to animals of various species. The brain stem (reptile), limbic system (mammal), and cerebral cortex (human).

There's a great deal of criticism for the more primitive parts of the brain, but they are necessary to survival in a hostile environment - fast action based on superficial information, without intelligence. In the settled and civilized world, there is no need to be constantly on guard against predators. Moreover our knee-jerk reactions are poor alternatives to well-thought-out decisions.

However, there is value in the primitive mind. It is believed that intuition is housed in this part of the brain - which gives us the ability to act quickly without extended deliberation. We are conscious of many things and often cannot verbalize why something "just doesn't seem right." And more often than not, our instincts are correct.

(EN: This seems a bit counterproductive to an author whose purpose is to reduce fear - as acting on instinct is often a fear reaction based on superficial evidence, and it is our cognitive mind that helps us overcome and retrain our instinctive reactions.)

In recent years, the notion of "emotional intelligence" has gained quite some attention. This field suggests that people who attempt to suppress their emotions are no better off than those who let their emotions hold sway. We are at our best when we seek to understand emotions - our own and those of others - as collaborating with others requires dealing with the emotional nature of human beings, not merely their functional roles.

Treating Men like Machines

The notion of trying to turn men into machines goes back to the Industrial Revolution - as machines were first used to automate some tasks and make life easier for the human workers, but soon grew to the point where machines were handling most of the work and human beings were simply performing tasks to keep the machines loaded and operational - and as such men were treated like machine parts, expected to keep pace with the industrial devices that performed most of the work.

The same metaphor is being used in the context of knowledge work. Primitive computers handled some of the mundane tasks (such as adding numbers) and slowly have crept into the decision making process, to the point where an accountant is no longer performing accounting tasks, just feeding data into a machine that does all the work. As such, the machines that originally relieved workers of the burden of tedious and mindless tasks have now left human beings with only tedious and mindless tasks to do.

As such, the knowledge-worker's knowledge is no longer necessary to do the job. He is constantly bored by the tedious work he has to do, frustrated at not being allowed to do things better, and afraid that he will be regarded as entirely unnecessary and replaced by machines.

The introduction of mass-production techniques is often blamed for the lack of quality and craftsmanship in products - everything is cheap and plentiful, but not particularly good. But it also means that there is little pride in workmanship. A carpenter who builds an item with his hands feels a great deal of pride and identity in the work he produces. A factory machinist who simply tends a device that builds the item has no sense of pride in his product - it takes little skill to load wood into a hopper and press a button.

It's also mentioned that men are managed like machines, regarded as organic components in a mechanized process that are the blame (or scapegoat) when anything goes wrong. A machine is assumed to be perfect, a man to be flawed. So there's little respect for the human worker, who is simply a replaceable part with no special skills and no intrinsic value.

Developing attitudes, beliefs and habits

The author mentions the psychological phenomena of priming and framing. Both affect the manner in which things are perceived. A person is "primed" by previous experience - having once been bitten by a dog, they tend to feel fear of the next dog they encounter, even if it is benign. "Framing" meanwhile is often done to other people (or sometimes to oneself) by providing a context that influences the response. Many salesmen will state a price as "Only ten dollars" rather than just "ten dollars" because the word "only" implies that the price is a bargain - preempting the other person from making an objective evaluation.

Priming and framing are not always external - a person's experience causes them to have expectations of similar encounters in future. Sometimes, perception without experience functions the same way (a person reads an article about a shipwreck feels anxious about taking a cruise).

There is also the notion of the self-fulfilling prophecy, in which our expectations tend to shape our behavior. A person going to a country club may feel in advance that he will be shunned by the existing members, and so when he shows up he acts in ways that avoid contact or sends nonverbal signals to others that he doesn't want to be approached. In effect, he acts in ways that make his fears come true. Or in a positive sense, a candidate who feels he is highly qualified will attend and interview and project a level of self-confidence that causes the interviewers to perceive him as being competent.

Our priming/framing mechanisms influence our interactions with others, which includes our relationships in both personal and professional life. When people frame issues negatively, they are prone to specific emotional reactions, negative attitudes, and the behaviors that result.

Sometimes, people form attitudes on their own - but in many instances their experience the behaviors of others within an organization (particularly management and executives) shapes their attitudes toward the organization. The boss who speaks negatively of employees and expects them to work hard to prove him wrong often finds that they accept his judgment and prove him right. The manager who constantly threatens employees to get results finds that they approach the workplace with an attitude of fear.

Emotions in a Professional Context

The Victorian standard of professionalism is exceedingly disingenuous: it upholds the notion that people should lose their individual character when they enter the workplace and develop a cold and detached attitude toward others. But in the modern era, it is believed that emotions are functional as support systems - that emotions serve a purpose, and that suppressing them is more harmful than expressing them. To deny a problem is not to solve it.

In more recent years, the notion that man can set aside his emotions and be completely rational has been challenged. Emotions are no longer considered to be something foreign, but shortcuts created by the mind to be able to react quickly and conserve deliberation for instances in which a fast decision is not necessary or desirable. And even in deliberation, our emotional reactions are often a starting point, and one to which we cling until we are convinced to change (and sometimes, nothing can convince us to change, and we continue to rationalize emotional decisions in spite of the evidence).

To effectively address the influence of emotion on decision-making (and it is an influence, not necessarily a problem), we must seek to understand what emotion is and how it works. Antonio Damasio's work in neuroscience is specifically mentioned: his perspective is that emotions are based on experience, reinforcing or discouraging activities that have achieved success in the past. He acknowledges that a mental "frame" is very difficult to change - but it is not impossible.

Groupthink

The author speaks to the phenomenon of crowds - how many people who participate in riots "get caught up" in the wave of emotion and do things they know to be wrong. (EN: Better resources exist on group psychology, so I will skip much of the detail here.)

In the same way, a standing organization is like a standing crowd, in which there is pressure to conform to the group culture rather than thinking as an individual. When this pressure overwhelms reason and common sense, it is called "groupthink."

While it is generally recognized that groupthink results in bad decisions, it is also highly supportive as a means of control. When people conform, there is less need to control them as individuals - those with formal authority in a culture can count on obedience because people are scared to disagree with what they believe to be the majority opinion. (EN: an interesting phenomenon is that those without power attempt to leverage it as well - low-ranking employees attempt to leverage policies and procedures, and vague threats that doing something might offend someone else.)

It's mentioned that groupthink works best in isolation - which is why religious cults will have "lock-ins" and "retreats" to isolate a group of people from external influences so that they can be programmed to the culture of the group (deprogramming uses the same tactis). Oddly, jury sequestration also uses isolation - though the intention is to enable the jurors to be free of external influences, they tend to form into a group and develop their own "groupthink" practices.

The authors shift a bit to speak about "emotional contagion." As social animals, human beings mirror the emotions of others to form a bond with a group - and this often happens unconsciously. It's seen in awkward social situations, in which a person who didn't hear a joke will laugh along with the group, or a person who didn't see a danger will be startled by the fact that others are startled. Because emotional reactions are faster than rational ones, we react before we are able to determine whether there is a valid reason for doing so.

In an organization, this can become prolonged: we mirror the emotional reactions of others, but then attempt to rationalize having done so to avoid admitting having been superficial. An individual attempts to save face by fabricating a logical justification for an irrational decision - and others who also reacted irrationally quickly agree.