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Malcolm Gladwell Explains Why Human Potential Is Being Squandered [PopTech Video]

Sociologist and best-selling author, Malcolm Gladwell, uses the term “Capitalization” to discuss

the abundance and scarcity as it applies to people.” More specifically, Gladwell sees “capitalization” as “the rate at which a given community capitalizes on the human potential… what percentage of those who are capable of achieving something actually achieve it.”

Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers: The Story of Success, investigates human potential, how it is squandered, how that trend can be reversed, and the reasons why some succeed so much more then others.

Through his research Gladwell discovered that,

Cap rates are really low. They are much lower then you think they are and that’s why I think this is such a worthy topic for investigation.”

Here is a clip with highlights from Gladwell’s talk at Pop Tech on this issue [11 min.]:

3 Conditions Which Constrain The Capitalization Of Human Potential

1. Poverty.

… is the obvious thing that limits the exploitation of human potential.”

2. Stupidity.

… where institutions get in the way of the development of human potential.”

3. Culture.

When we look at these different rates of capitalization, 20 and 30 years later, what we’re seeing is the consequence of those early ingrained cultural notions…”

Why Is This Important?

It is important because I think when we observe differences in how individuals succeed in the world our initial thought is always to say, to argue that that is the result of some kind of innate difference in ability.

And when we look at the different rates that groups succeed we think that that reflects some underlying innate trait in the characteristics of that group. And that is wrong… what capitalization rates say… is there’s another explanation and that has to do with poverty, with stupidity, and with culture.”

Low ‘Capitalization’ = Room For Improvement

We have a scarcity of achievement… not because we have a scarcity of talent. We have a scarcity of achievement because we’re squandering our talent. And that’s not bad news that’s good news; because it says that this scarcity is not something we have to live with. It’s something we can do something about.”

Here is Gladwell’s full talk at PopTech [19 min.]

Here is Gladwell’s description of his new book Outliers: The Story of Success

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The Recipe For A Better World: 21 Billion Hours Of Online Gaming Per Week [TED Talk]

If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global hunger, and obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week by the end of the next decade.”

Jane Mcgonigal, Ph.D., a game designer, has been making online games for over ten years, and she has a plan. Her goal for the next decade is to make it as easy to save the world in real life, as it is in online games.

Right now, we spend 3 billion hours a week playing online games, she says. But according to McGonigal’s research at The Institute for the Future, that’s not nearly enough to solve the world’s most urgent problems, because

gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real world work” and “games are a powerful platform for change.”

When I look forward to the next decade” she shares, “I know two things for sure: that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want. So I say, let the world changing games begin.”

Watch Jane McGonigal’s Ted talk [20 min.] about how gaming can make a better world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE1DuBesGYM

Why Are Games So Essential To The Future Of Humanity?

  • The first thing gamers get good at according to McGonigal is “urgent optimism,” extreme self motivation, the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with a belief that we have a reasonable hope of a success.
  • Secondly, gamers are virtuosos at “weaving a tight social fabric.” “It takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone, so playing a game together builds up bonds and trust and collaboration, and we build stronger social relationships as a result.”
  • Thirdly, gamers experience “blissful productivity.” According to Mcgonigal, we know when we’re playing a game, that we’re actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out. We know that we are optimized as human beings to do hard meaningful work and gamers are willing to work hard all the time if they’re given the right work.
  • Lastly, there is a sense of “epic meaning” in gaming: Gamers love to be attached to awe inspiring missions; to human, planetary scale stories.

In McGonigal’s view, 

These are four super powers that add up to one thing: gamers are people who believe they are capable of changing the world.”

McGonigal has created games that attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures. “This is a transformative experience. Nobody wants to change how they live just because it’s good for the world, or because we’re supposed to, but if you immerse them in an epic adventure, and tell them: 

We’ve run out of oil! This is an amazing story, an adventure to go on, challenge yourself to see how you would survive”…Most of our players have kept up the habits they learned in this game.”

Links:

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Stanford Prison Experiment Shows How The Abuses At Abu Ghraib Could Be Perpetrated By Otherwise Good People

Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, and who once conducted the now famous Stanford Prison Experiment, recently related the results of that 1971 experiment to the abuse discovered at Abu Ghraib. He said,

When the images of the abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib were revealed, immediately the military went on the defensive saying it’s a few bad apples. When we see people do bad things we assume they are bad people to begin with. But what we know in our study is: there are a set of social psychological variables that can make ordinary people do things they could never have imagined doing.”

The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted over a six day period in a mock prison environment in the basement of one of the buildings at Stanford University. It demonstrated how ordinary people can perpetrate extraordinary abuses when placed in a cruel environment without clear rules, as shown in this short documenatry [13 min].

What Happens When You Put Good People In Evil Places?

Dr. Craig Haney, a social psychologist participating in the Stanford experiment said of it, 

We frankly didn’t anticipate what was going to happen. We tried to really test the power of the environment to change and transform otherwise normal people. Much as Milgram had changed or transformed otherwise normal people in an obedient situation, we wanted to do it in a prison-like situation.”

Experiment Participant Relates To The Guards At Abu Ghraib

Dave Eshelman, who played the role of a prison guard in the Stanford University mock prison experiment, said of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photos, 

What I first saw those photos, immediately a sense of familiarity struck me because I knew I had been there before. I’d been in this type of situation. I knew what was going on – in my mind.”

Source of images, video and quotes:  Youtube/The Stanford Prison Experiment

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A Roller Coaster Ride Through The Industrial Age And Our Dependence On Fossil Fuels

“It’s all hands on deck” is the clarion call of the Post Carbon Institute in this fast paced 5 min. video, which takes us on a wild ride through the industrial age and our dependence on fossil fuels – culminating in the need for some tough changes to be made:

If we do nothing we will still get to a post carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people, and ecosystems with millions of other species. One way or another, we’re in for a ride of a lifetime.”

What Is The Solution?

In short, the Post Carbon Institute recommends,

we need to live within Nature’s budget of renewable resources at rates of natural replenishment.”

They further suggest the following:

  • Learn to live without fossil fuels.”
  • “Adapt to the end of economic growth as we’ve known it.”
  • “Support 7 billion humans and stabilize population at a sustainable level.”
  • “Deal with our legacy of environmental destruction.”

Do We Have A Choice?

The Post Carbon Institute makes the following arguments:

  • Alternative energy sources are important, but none can fully replace fossil fuels in the time we have.”
  • “We’ve designed and built our infrastructure for transport of electricity and farming to suit oil, coal and gas. Changing to different energy sources will require us to redesign cities and manufacturing processes.”
  • “We’ll have to rethink some of our cultural values . None of our global problems can be tackled in isolation and many cannot be fully solved.”
  • “We have to prepare for business unusual.”

Source of quotes, image and video : Youtube/300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds

The Post Carbon Institute website

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Dan Ariely, Prof. of Behavioral Economics, Seeks To Account For Human Nature

From a rational perspective, we should make only decisions that are in our best interest (“should” is the operative word here)… and choose the option that maximizes our best interests… Unfortunately, we’re not.”

This is where behavioral economics enters the picture. In this field, we don’t assume that people are perfectly sensible, calculating machines. Instead, we observe how people actually behave, and quite often our observations lead us to the conclusion that human beings are irrational.”

The above and subsequent quotes are taken from Dan Ariely’s book, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home. Ariely is a Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and author of other works on behavioral economics.

Standard Economics Vs. Behavioral Economics: A Matter Of Perspective?

… there is a great deal to be learned from rational economics,” he says, “but some of its assumptions—that people always make the best decisions, that mistakes are less likely when the decisions involve a lot of money, and that the market is self correcting—can clearly lead to disastrous consequences.”

Social And Market Forces

The Financial Crisis

… think about the implosion of Wall Street in 2008 and its attendant impact on the economy. Given our human foibles, why on earth would we think we don’t need to take any external measures to try to prevent or deal with systematic errors of judgment in the man-made financial markets?”

This is where behavioral economics veers far from standard economics, because it seeks to look at human evolution and psychology in addition to standard economics, in order for social and market forces to be able to exist in balance:

Essentially the mechanisms we developed during our early evolutionary years might have made perfect sense in our distant past. But given the mismatch between the speed of technological development and human evolution, the same instincts and abilities that once helped us now often stand in our way. Bad decision-making behaviors that manifested themselves as mere nuisances in earlier centuries can now severely affect our lives in crucial ways.”

The Need To Address Human Nature

Ariely argues that this dichotomy between social and market forces, and some of our technological developments existing in discordance with our evolutionary development/nature, holds ramifications far beyond the credit industry:

When the designers of modern technologies don’t understand our fallibility, they design new and improved systems for stock markets, insurance, education, agriculture, or health care that don’t take our limitations into account (I like the term “human-incompatible technologies,” and they are everywhere).”

Behavioral economists want to understand human frailty and to find more compassionate, realistic, and effective ways for people to avoid temptation, exert more self-control, and ultimately reach their long-term goals. As a society, it’s extremely beneficial to understand how and when we fail and to design/invent/create new ways to overcome our mistakes.”

All quotes taken from Prof. Ariely’s book, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home.

Image of Prof. Ariely courtesy of his most recent Pop Tech Talk on Adaptive Responses [21 min.]

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Neuroscience Reveals: Your Consciousness Is Connected To Everyone Else’s [TED Talk]

All that’s separating you from another person is your skin. Remove it and you have removed the barrier between you and other beings. So there is no real independent self aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world and inspecting other people, you are in fact connected not just by facebook and internet, you are connected by your neurons.”

Neuroscientist Vilyanur S. Ramachandran, Ph.D., outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.

Ramachandran is director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. According to his research, we have whole chains of neurons which talk to each other, so 

there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else’s consciousness… And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy” he says, “it emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience.”

Watch Ramachandran’s TED Talk [7 min.] about the neurons that shaped civilization:


Ramachandran looks deep into the brain’s most basic mechanisms. 

[The human brain is] a lump of flesh of about 3 pounds… but it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity, ask questions about the meaning of its own existence… It’s the greatest mystery confronting human beings”

Also he notes that

there are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain. And each one makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts to other neurons in the brain… the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.”

By working with those who have specific mental disabilities caused by brain injury or stroke, he can map functions of the mind to physical structures of the brain.

So if you are a patient with a phantom limb, and you see another person’s arm being touched, you feel it in your phantom. And the astonishing part is, if you have pain in your phantom, and you squeeze and massage the other person’s hand, that relieves the pain in your phantom hand, almost as if the mirror neuron were obtaining relief from someone else being massaged.”

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Global Financial Crisis To Trigger Next Great Event In 2014 Says Cambridge Professor

Global Financial Crisis To Trigger Next Great Event In 2014 Says Cambridge Professor

Nicholas Boyle, a Professor of German history at Cambridge University, claims in his book, 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis, that his study of human history has led him to conclude that major defining events, for previous centuries, have occurred within the second decade of those centuries; and that these great events were to define the course those centuries took.

For instance, in 1914 World War I began and this, Boyle claims, set the course for

…international discord throughout the 20th century.”

He says,

If a century is going to have a character it is going to become apparent by the time it is approaching 20 years old, the same is true of human beings.”

Here is Boyle speaking on 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis [6 min.]

Boyle sees the global financial crisis as being the trigger for this next “Great Event” and the United States as the pullers of it; stating,

The U.S. will become the key player in a series of make-or-break decisions and either condemn us to a century of violence and poverty, or usher in a new age of global cooperation.”

He sees the U.S. as having this position due to the combination of their economic influence diminishing and their military power being unparalleled.

The answer? Boyle suggests that nations must today realize that the previous reign of nation states has ended and that global governance must now take its place.

It is a profoundly hopeful sign that we begin the 21st century with very many more international and intergovernmental organizations than we had at the start of the 20th,” he says, and getting back to America, “The only conceivably peaceful route to that goal is through a continuation of the pax Americana.

But both the world’s understanding of America, and America’s understanding of itself, will have to change fundamentally for that goal to be achieved.”

All quotes taken from the Daily Mail

Image of Prof. Boyle courtesy of Cambridge University

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The Asch Experiment: Can Social Influence Distort Your Perception?

We will conform to the group. We’re very social creatures. We’re very much aware of what people around us think. We want to be liked. We don’t want to be seen to rock the boat so we will go along with the group even if we don’t believe what people are saying, we still go along.” *

This is a conclusion from what is known as “The Asch Experiment,” an experiment originally conceived in the 1950’s by Social Psychologist Solomon Asch, demonstrated in the video below [2 min.]:

The 3 Levels of Distortion

As indicated in Martin Shepard’s video about conformity  [10 min.], “Asch proposed conformity could be explained by distortions occurring at any of three levels: perception, judgment and action.”

  • At the action level: subjects believe the majority are wrong, but go along with them anyway.
  • At the level of judgment: subjects perceive there is a conflict but reject their own judgment, concluding the majority are right.
  • At the level of perception: subjects’ perceptions are genuinely distorted by the majority’s answers”.
  • “If it’s true that the subjects’ perceptions are genuinely distorted, that means that group opinion has the potential to affect an individual’s information processing on a very profound level.” **

* Source: YouTube/The Asch Experiment

** Source: YouTube/Conformity 

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The Bystander Effect: Old Experiments Still Relative To Today’s Social Influences

And there you have a group of (effectively) strangers who were exerting the pressure not to intervene, not to help; and it’s very difficult to rebel!”

This Bystander Effect is demonstrated in the following video [3 min.]:

Using Other People’s Behavior As Clues To Reality

There are, in fact, many reasons why bystanders in groups fail to act in emergency situations, but social psychologists have focused most of their attention on two major factors. According to a basic principle of social influence, bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in an emergency situation to see if others think that it is necessary to intervene. Each person uses others’ behavior as clues to reality. Since everyone is doing exactly the same thing (nothing), they all conclude from the inaction of others that help is not needed. This is an example of pluralistic ignorance or social proof.

The other major obstacle to intervention is known as diffusion of responsibility. This occurs when observers all assume that someone else is going to intervene and so each individual feels less responsible and refrains from doing anything.”

Bystander Effect Extends To Cyberspace

The bystander effect also extends beyond reality and into cyberspace. Specifically, in a study performed by Markey (2000), the experiment focused on the amount of time it took a bystander to provide assistance. The researchers examined the effects of the gender of an individual seeking help by measuring participant response time (dependent variable). The perceived gender was manipulated by the usage of a male or female screen name in an Internet chat room (independent variable). The treatment conditions examined the number of people present in the chat (two to nineteen), and then asked the stimulus question: ‘Can anyone tell me how to look at someone’s profile?’

The findings reflect a correlation between the number of people present in a computer-mediated chat group and the amount of time it took for an individual to receive help. The higher the number of participants, the longer it took for someone to help. This research reveals that bystander interventions in Internet chat groups reflect the same patterns as interaction in non-computer based environments.”

The Bystander Effect was first demonstrated in the laboratory by John Darley and Bibb Latane in 1968. These researchers launched a series of experiments that resulted in one of the strongest and most replicable effects in social psychology.” 

1st quote source: YouTube Video: Bystander Effect
2nd & last quote source: Wikipedia/Bystander Effect
Other quote sources: http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Bystander_Effect 
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New Twitter Study Shows Global Happiness On The Decline

In case you didn’t know, or have yet to receive a tweet about it, twitter is now being used for research. For instance at Cornell University a study was conducted which looked through over 500 million tweets to gauge users moods throughout the day: It turns out that we start our days positively (positive tweets), then our moods begin to decline throughout the day (at around midnight they pick back up again).

A more recent study at the University of Vermont has also been conducted in which, “… more then 46 billion words written in Twitter tweets by 63 million Twitters users around the globe…” were analyzed.

From this the researchers immersed themselves in a new perspective,

In these billions of words is not a view of any individual’s state of mind. Instead, like billions of moving atoms add up to the overall temperature of a room, billions of words used to express what people are feeling resolve into a view of the relative mood of large groups.”

Like in the Cornell study,

The Vermont team then took these scores and applied them to the huge pool of words they collected from Twitter. Because these tweets each have a date and time, and, sometimes, other demographic information—like location—they show changing patterns of word use that provides insights in the way groups of people are feeling.”

The implications of such research?

The new approach lets the researchers measure happiness at different scales of time and geography… and stretched out over the last three years, these patterns of word use show a drop in average happiness.”

So, the Cornell study measured mood shifts of Twitter users throughout the day and now the Vermont study shows that happiness has been declining amongst Twitter users over the past 3 years.

The researchers stress that it isn’t only “… younger people… with smartphones,” either because, “Twitter is nearly universal now… Every demographic is represented.”

One added benefit:

“… measuring happiness has been exceedingly difficult by traditional means, like self reporting in social science surveys. Some of the problems with this approach are that people often don’t tell the truth in surveys and the sample sizes are small.”

The Vermont study does not show a specific reason for why happiness is globally declining but does pose the question, 

Why does happiness seem to be declining?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w

Quotes and graph image taken from the University of Vermont. For more information about the study: http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=12986&category=uvmhome

For more information on the Cornell Study:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6051/1878.abstract

Sad Twitter Bird image courtesy of Full Stop.