Guilt can make you a better mother

Guilt is an emotion I don't have much time for. I'm all for people behaving well, but most of the time guilt serves no purpose except to lower your self-esteem, and more often than not, its provenance is some ridiculous social stereotype that you're not quite managing to live up to, or some idealised image you have in your mind of what you think other people expect.

But in the latest edition of the Journal of Vocational Behavior (which is mostly devoted to issues of work-life conflict and has loads of great articles), Cho and Allen have written a really interesting paper which suggests that guilt can lead to better parenting. In this study, the researchers looked at a group of over-worked, over-stressed parents and found (surprise surprise) that they spent less time actively playing with their children at the weekends than parents whose lives were stress free. But this effect was moderated by the parents' pre-dispostions to guilt. We each of us have a certain degree to which we are pre-disposed to feelings of guilt - some people become wracked with guilt at the mere sight of a piece of chocolate cake, or a forgotten birthday, whereas for others, it takes something pretty serious to get those guilty feelings started. The research suggested that although over-work normally leads to you playing less with your kids at the weekend, the guilt-ridden, stress-out parents still manage a good dose of what the researchers call "recreational and educational games".

Quite how that leaves time to put your feet up and read the paper, I don't know, but at least it's one less thing to feel guilty about.

Too much information?

Following on from my recent obsession with decision making, I've shifted a bit now to look at the bit before the decision - the bit where we try to make sense of all the information that we know.

The information we get about careers is huge, complex and quite daunting when you stop to think about it. We are fed information about different jobs, occupations, industries, and the economy at large from all different quarters a hundred times a day. Each time we contact a call centre, buy stamps from the post office or book an appointment with our GP we are feeding, confusing and expanding our knowledge of the world of work. So how do we start to make sense of it all?

We've developed quite a few clever tricks to help us cope. Some of them useful, and some of them perhaps less so.

We have developed a few unconscious strategies for dealing with the sheer volume of information. One strategy is  to focus in on a subset of occupations, making  a swift, ill-informed decision to look at jobs in, say, the media and then starting to do some more in depth research to decide between TV production and advertising. Alternatively we go for a single factor, and research that widely, for example, jobs with high starting salaries which could lead us to a choice between law and banking. We can become overwhelmed with choices, and as information increases, our awareness goes down. When the information goes beyond what we can manage we will restrict the processing that we do, to avoid cognitive stress.

We don’t always evaluate the information that we get with the cold, critical eye of an MI5 agent. ‘Hot’ information is much more appealing to us than ‘cold’ information. This is traditionally something that has been particularly associated with people from working class backgrounds, but it now seems clear that this effect is shown across all groups. Hot information is stuff you hear from people you know. Cold information comes from more formal sources such as government websites and career books. In career terms, we’re much more likely to base our view of how easy it is to make a success of a new business venture based on Uncle Bob’s thriving business, than on BIS’s website which states that 90% of new businesses fold within two years.

Occupational information tends to be gleaned from different sources, which will often provide different information, presented in different ways. When comparing occupations (or indeed other options), therefore you will often not have comparable information. You may, for example, know the starting salaries for all occupations you’re looking into, but only the levels of autonomy for one, and the typical hours worked for another. Factors which you can compare directly are given more weight in your mental calculations than others, regardless of how important the factors are to you. So in this case, even though autonomy might be the single most important factor to you, the conclusions you would draw from your research would be based principally on the starting salaries, because that is the one that you can compare directly.

I'm sure there are lots of other heuristics and short cuts that we take and I'll report back as I find out more. I think this is all really useful for us as coaches to know. The more that we understand about the way our minds work, the more we can work with our clients to help them to identify what information they should highlight and what to play down.

Back on track...

So I think I've got over my momentary lapse, my brief flirtation with the gut instinct. I'm back on track with my beloved and dependable rational logic.

I've been reading about all the biases that our gut instinct is prone to, and the experiments are in some way no surprise at all, and in another, really quite shocking.

One big issue, as far as researching career information is concerned, is tha halo effect, motivated reasoning and the idea of post-hoc rationalisation. These theories (I'm not entirely sure if they're slightly different concepts, or just different ways of looking at the same thing), all concern the idea that our gut instinct makes an early decision and then persuades us to look for rational explanations for it. We make an instinctinve decision, for example, that advertising is a job that we would like to do, and then when we're researching the career area, we are selective about the information that we attend to, highlighting perhaps the creativity of the role and dynamic environment, and ignoring the competitive entry, and long hours that you would have to work. This, together with our biased self-characterisation (which makes us rate ourselves more highly on characteristics that we've been told are desirable) leaves us with a very inaccurate picture of how suited we are to this particular job.

Gut instinct is also very, very susceptible to priming and suggestion. One experiment that highlights what a profound effect suggestion can have, asked some participants to wait in a room that had a computer in the corner with a screensaver that had a dollar sign on it, and compared their subsequent behaviour with a control group whose computer had no screensaver. The participants who had seen the dollar sign exhibited more individualistic behaviour that the control group - placing their chairs further away from others, and picking up fewer items to help a stranger who had dropped a pencil case, than those from the control group.

Another experiment showed that participants who had been asked to read some words that might be associated with age (such as "wrinkled", "faded") walked more slowly down a corridor after the experiments than participants who had been asked to read other words.

The list of experiments goes on and on. Another one asked participants to lie, either via email or on the phone, and then asked them to rate the desirability of various grocery products. Participants who had been asked to lie by email reported that they thought that soap was a more desirable product, and those who had lied by phone, prefered mouthwash.

The implications for career decisions aren't quite clear to me yet, but clearly with such clear, widespread and unconscious effects, our gut instinct is clearly not to be trusted. At least, not always, and not with such important issues as our career planning. Of course it is never quite as clear cut as writers would like you to think. There are problems with conscious logic, in particular, within the careers arena, with our brains ability to process the vast amounts of data involved in making a career decision (more on that another time...).

But for me, for now at least, I'm sticking with my view that, like democracy, relying on conscious, rational, analytical processesing is the least worst option.