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.

Jam

I'm still on my quest to find out more about how we make career decisions, and to this end I'm reading a lot about decision making theory, and trying to work out how or whether it can be applied to career decisions.
I've read a couple of papers recently that have focused on jam!
The first one (Iyengar and Lepper 2000) questions the widespread acceptance of the idea that more choice is better. There have been plenty of studies that show the benefits of choice, improving one's perception of control, life satisfaction, task performance and intrinsic motivation. But these researchers point out that the studies compare having no choice, with having around 6 choices, and we just extrapolate from this that the more choice the better. Iyengar and Lepper asked people to consider buying expensive jam. In one context they had 6 different brands of jam to choose from, and in the other they had up to 30. They found that those with only 6 options were more likely to decide to buy something and were happier with their purchases than those who had more options.
So, the link to careers is in the number of different occupational choices available. Young people have around 3000 options to choose between in year 11. If people struggle to choose a jam to buy when they have more than 6 options to choose from, how on earth do we expect them to navigate through that number of potential routes?

The second jam experiment (Wilson and Schooler 1991) I came across looked at whether thinking and analysing decisions helps in the decision making process. Again it is generally thought that analysing a decision is a good way to help ensure that it's the right decision, but this experiment provides some contradictory evidence. In this experiment one group of participants were asked to taste 5 different strawberry jams, and to rank them in order of taste. The other group was asked to rank them in order of taste but also to write down their reasoning - which factors they considered and what their thoughts were. Those who make the instant and non-analysed decisions tended to reflect the jam-experts' views, suggesting that their decisions about the jam were pretty good. Those who had to stop and analyse their decisions ended up with views that were far less similar to the experts' views, suggesting that thinking about the process led to worse decisions.

Now this kind of information disturbs me. I have spent a lot of time trying to get clients to consider a wider range of options, and to really think about the decisions they're making. Is it possible that these two approaches actually make it harder for people to make good decisions?

Shoes and boyfriends

I'm coming up with a new theory. It might not yet be sufficiently fully formed to grace the pages of the Journal of Vocational Behavior, but I'm sure it has potential.

There is a huge gap in our understanding of how exactly people choose their careers. There are certain things that we know about some bits of our career decision making processes, such as the impact of our nearest and dearest, and we also know that there is far too much information about careers for our little brains to be able to process. What we don't quite know is how exactly we make the leap from these kinds of processes to an actual decision.

Brower and Nurius proposed the idea of schemas and niches for different occupations. The schema is your brain's own personal shorthand for everything it knows about a particular occupation, and the niche is the equivalent short hand for the lifestyle, choices and values that go along with that role. In one tiny spot, your brain wraps up a whole load of information relating to a particular job. The schema and niche are individual stereotypes which are based on social learning and continue to change as your experience of the world changes.

It seems to be easier for people to come up with detailed niches than detailed schemas for occupations: whilst many of us could picture a PR exec in our mind's eye (female, 28, polished, trendy, lives in London, travels by taxi, enjoys skiing, reads Grazia, studied English, quite posh), which of us could build up such a detailed picture of what this fabled woman actually does during the day at work?

My theory proposes that this niche is quite influential in people's career decision making. When considering different career options, people conjure up the niche of a PR exec and imagine themselves in that role, they try it on in their imagination, and see if they want to live that life. And whilst they do spend some time thinking about the day job that keeps this PR exec in Jimmy Choos, this is only one part of the possible self that they are playing with, and they find it harder to really drill down to the detail of the 9 - 5 than they do the weekend activities. So my suggestion is that the sorts of factors that really make the difference are things like what shoes they'd wear and what kind of boyfriend they'd come home to at the end of the day. If they feel that this lifestyle is the one that they aspire to and could really see themselves living, then they're more likely to give the job some serious consideration.

Now that's all a bit flippant, but I think there's something in it. What do you think?

Spilling my guts

I’m not at all sure about gut feeling. Perhaps this is because I’m not a very intuitive person: I don’t have feelings about things, can’t sense atmospheres and I’m not even sure that I’m a very good judge of character at first meeting. But this has never bothered me much as gut feeling isn’t something that I’ve rated terribly highly. My view (or perhaps my gut feeling…) is that our instincts are firmly grounded in logic, but conducted so fast that we don’t have access to the different logical steps in the process. There are good reasons for a feeling, it’s just that we can’t easily identify and analyse them. And as such, they are far more susceptible to the worst flaws of any other decision making style: prejudices, a bias towards the familiar, a failure to process all the information, a bias towards recent or surprising information etc etc.. As a career practitioner, I have spent some considerable time trying to bring clients back to the straight and narrow of rational decision making, and have always felt quite confident that I was doing them a great favour. I’ve been interested in their gut feelings, but have always tried to get them to analyse them and address the issues objectively.

But I’m gradually changing my views. Amundson wrote a great paper on the way that people actually make decisions, showing that 94% of us rely on the views of others in one form or other to make our career decisions. Now of course, just because we do make decisions this way, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the best way to do it, but the evidence seems to be clear that people at least perceive that their decisions are better if they’ve consulted widely.

And now I’m reading a book called “Gut Feeling” by Gerd Gigerenzer. I’m not utterly convinced by his style – he’s very enthusiastic about a whole range of metaphors to clarify (or perhaps cloud) his explanations, and also seems to be rather too full of anecdotes (“I once had a good feeling about something and it turned out to be right” Astounding!). But in between these rhetorical devices, there is some really interesting evidence about how and why gut feelings work. The message (I’m only a third of the way through, so I’ll come back with more at a later date) seems to be that gut feelings are based on logic, but it’s logic that is specially calculated to work both quickly and effectively. For example, gut instinct might focus on one element, rather than taking everything into account, but it’s usually the single most important element, and so the decision made by gut instinct stands up well when compared to that made through thorough logic. Gut instinct, this book argues, is particularly helpful in making decisions where it’s not possible to thoroughly process all the information (like, for example, job choices perhaps?) and for decisions that will inevitably be around shades of grey, rather than those with a definitive right answer (like, for example, job choices).

I remain skeptical but am beginning to accept the slimmest possibility that I need to reconsider…

Decisions, decisions

I think that the area of career decision making is, in general, much neglected. Interviews, careers ed programmes and professional training programmes tend to focus a lot on identifying strengths and values, working out what you want from a job, and generating options that might fit the bill, but the actual process of making the decision tends to be glossed over. There has been quite a lot written about the sorts of factors that are at play when people make decisions (rational, relational and post-rational), but I'm struggling to find anything that says which kinds of decision making processes lead to the best outcomes. Do please let me know if you know of any research in this arena.

My view is that this is quite a flaw in our collective knowledge. Actually making the decision is one of the hardest and more crucial parts of the process, and one where clients often get stuck, and surely we ought to have a bigger and better body of knowledge to help us help them?

Yesterday though, I stumbled on a really interesting paper (Iyengar, Wells and Schwartz, "Doing Better but Feeling Worse"). This paper looked a two different kinds of decision makers and the correlations between the decision making processes, and how good your decisions turned out to be. The two types of decision makers were the maximisers (who will put a lot of effort into making sure that they've found the best possible option) and the satisficers (who put less effort and thought in to the process, and are more likely to accept a less than perfect job). The measures of how "good" the decision turned out to be were objective success (based on how much they earned - I know, I know, that's a very flawed measure...) and how happy they were both with their decision making process and with their job.

The found that the maximisers i.e. those that we might think went through a "better" decision making process ended up earning more money, BUT found the decision making process less satisfactory and were less happy with their final decision than the satisficers.
The other group, who were less rigorous in their process, ended up on less money, but happier with their choice.

The researchers suggest that one of the problems for the maximisers is that because they considered so many suitable options, they ended up having to reject lots of really quite attractive job ideas, and the effort that they put into making a decision raised their exepctations - they felt that after all that deciding, they ought to have found the perfect job.

I think this is really interesting for us as professionals. The received wisdom is that clients should really think hard about choices, and should put in some effort to generating suitable options and researching ideas. But perhaps this isn't the right way? Perhaps we should be downplaying the significance of the choice, and encouraging them to give things a go? What do you think?