Gina Umosella
Professor Berg
Motivation
August 6, 2019
The Influential Mind: Tali Sharot
General Overview
The Influential Mind is unlike any book I have ever read.
I tend to read books that involve a storyline and a plot. Tali’s book is more
of the understanding of how the brain operates in a person’s everyday thinking;
ranging from our beliefs- how they can be influenced, how our actions influence
others, and also how power influences our lives. Tali is a cognitive neuroscientist,
which she describes as, psychology and neuroscience grouped together. In her
book, she thoroughly explains many experiments that she has done which then
gives us a better understanding of how and why the brain operates the way it
does.
Favorite Part
My favorite part of this book was in chapter 3: Should
You Scare People into Action? Throughout this chapter, she gave very specific statistics
that were completely surprising and almost scary. At restaurants, it is quite
obviously the employee’s obligation to wash their hands after using the
bathroom. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) workers traveled
to hundreds of restaurants across the U.S, where they recorded the restaurants
employee’s hygiene practices. Turns out, 62% of the employees fail to wash
their hands. To make matters worse, medical centers are not much better; about
38.7% medical staff members wash their hands. Tali did an experiment and
learned that the brain operates differently when it comes to this issue. They
first did an experiment where they had cameras set up watching the employees, thinking
that this would encourage the employees to wash their hands because they knew
they were being, “watched.” It in fact, did not; only one in ten staff members
followed the hygiene rules. They tried a new experiment; they set up electronic
boards in each room which then provided immediate feedback on how they were
doing. When the staff followed the hygiene rules, the numbers on the board went
up, providing them positive feedback. This resulted in a 90% increase. Tali
learned from these experiments that the brain operates through positive
feedback; the staff knows the consequences of spreading disease by not
handwashing, so why wasn’t that enough to get them to? Positive emotion and
feedback are what motivate a person to do something. This experiment was very
interesting to me because the staff knows the risk of the damage they can do to
other people, but when they switch the roles to them to see how they are
performing on the job, their mindsets change drastically. This topic reminded
me of the lecture: Rewards=Reinforcers; by the staff receiving positive
feedback, reinforced their performance at work.
Relate
In the lecture slides, we discussed a lot about self-control.
One small thing that stuck out to me is the marshmallow experiment. In the very
beginning of class, we watched the clip of the children participating in the
marshmallow experiment, this stuck out to me because I thought it was adorable.
As I was reading the book, Tali gave an example of the same experiment. The
marshmallow experiment involves children, they are given a marshmallow and are
told that they can have a second marshmallow if they wait for the experimenter
to come back. Many of the children did wait but how they tried to distract
themselves from eating the marshmallow was super interesting. Tali goes more
into detail about the after facts of the experiment. When Tali did the experiment,
there was one boy who didn’t wait for the second marshmallow. She concluded
that the young boy may not have been so convinced that the researcher was
coming back with the second marshmallow, maybe the researcher was lying or what
if they forget. This resulted in him eating the marshmallow because he was
worried that there was a chance he may not get to eat the marshmallow at all. Another
example that related to self-control was a story Tali told about a girl named
Kate applying to business school for her MBA. She received a fraud e-mail that
completely ruined her chances of getting into business school, simply because
she could not wait for the results to come in, she had to know. In the first
lecture: Self-Control and Impulsivity, slide 13 it states, “Most personal
problems with self-control arise because people have difficulty delaying immediate
gratification for a better future reward.” Just like the little boy from Tali’s
marshmallow experiment, he did not wait for the reward in fear that he might
never receive it and the story about the girl Kate who did not get into
graduate school because of a fraud email that was sent out to her. Because of
the “not knowing” aspect of things, it can lead to people making impulse
decisions for immediate gratification which is where self-control comes into
place.
Creative
In Chapter 6: “What Happens to Minds Under Threat?” Tali
Sharot describes how just like animals who are running away from predators, the
stress hormones such as cortisol are secreted causing the heart to pump and
breath to shorten. She gives a story about how she was in New York City and a
man began running down the street who appeared to be in a panic. Suddenly,
crowds of people began following him without any idea of what was going on.
Even though no one knew what was happening, they all began to follow because of
the possible, “what if?” question arising in their own minds. I found a video
on YouTube of people pranking others with this exact scenario. It shows just
about every person following the person running, even though they have no idea
what is happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNgp9CrQNV0
Extension
There are many instances throughout this book that I had
related to myself while reading it. It really helped me have a better
understanding of the mind/brain and the way it works. Like in my favorite part
section, people are motivated by positive reinforcement. I feel this will help
me as a school social worker to overcome difficulties with struggling children.
Many people think disciplining by negative things such as, “time out” or
removing something from them that they are attached to, will help them become
better in a sense. This is not the case and does not always work. While taking
away negative disciplinary methods and replacing with positive ways to shape a
child up, can make great changes to them. If a child is struggling with their
school work, telling them what they can do and what they are good at versus
getting frustrated with a child for what they do not know can boost their
confidence and they will excel. There are so many instances that I related to
the book, but I felt that positive reinforcement related to me the most because
it is crucially important for the type of work I want to achieve. Overall, this
was a great book; Tali Sharot is a very smart and interesting individual and I
learned so much from her.
No comments:
Post a Comment