Remember! Paradoxically, forgetting can be good!

It was May, then early June. Helicopter parents were getting knots in their shorts as teachers — who already sported knotty undies — performed the annual ritual warning about how much kids would forget before school resumed in the fall. Now it’s August.  For the kids who didn’t cram more into their heads, it’s another wasted summer. Yadda, yadda, yadda — additional failure.

Those worrywart parents and teachers might have had a calmer summer had they known more about the paradoxical benefits of forgetting.

By summarizing of some of those benefits, Ulrich Boser gives evidence-based reassurance that all is not lost if we remember that "forgetting" can frequently be better understood as memory pruning. His column is a nice primer for students, parents and teachers who want to know more about how memory really works. For example,

• Most prominently, he reminds us that forgetting plays a crucial role in the development of wisdom! As we pass time to forget inconsequentials, we give ourselves a chance to develop a deeper understanding of the stuff we do remember.
• Since we’re hardwired to selectively forget certain types of things, it’s important for us to learn to creatively work with those forgetting operations rather than against them.

Can rats teach politicians lessons about kindness? The Empathy/Sympathy Problem (Training Tip)

Over the last few weeks I've been keeping my eyes open for news about empathy and cognition as I updated some seminar materials on that topic. Now, after reading the morning papers, I'm asking myself: Is it possible that students in the seminar could learn some empathy lessons from rats?

Psychologists have long recognized that empathic listening and interviewing skills are a critical ingredient of emotional intelligence in the workplace.

• It's safe to say that most people can improve their empathic skills through training and practice.
•  The more they learn and practice, the better they become in making accurate judgments about people and developing rapport.
• That said, we have to acknowledge that personality predispositions and individual differences in psychological development might place a ceiling on a person's final level of achievement. 

For efficiency in learning, students are urged to do something that is not common in everyday discourse or even in most technical discourse: Make a sharp distinction between sympathy and empathy!

In brief, sympathy occurs when the emotional state of one person triggers off a similar emotional state in the other so that they both might be said to share the same feelings and values. Empathy involves perspective-taking and is more of a cognitive state rather than an emotional one. Empathizing thus involves seeing things from someone else's frame of reference and sharing that frame of reference without necessarily experiencing the same emotions or values.

This sharp distinction between sympathy and empathy facilitates learning because it enables students to disentangle and consciously recognize their own mental operations as they sometimes experience emotional "contagion" and then carry on more explicitly cognitive activities like framing. A sharp distinction helps them master the interviewing skills faster.

It's okay if, after the seminar, they later learn that their distinction is more problematic than it might have first appeared. The emotional and cognitive roots of sympathy and empathy are subjects of continual investigation among cognitive scientists (see this short review of The Age of Empathy) but it's clear from this research that empathy training materials need to be updated to at least briefly incorporate reference to developments in neuroscience. Once the students master the sharp distinction, they can more easily refine their understanding  as needed.

Now, back to the rats mentioned in the first paragraph. William Mullen (Chicago Tribune) reports about a new study which expands knowledge of how empathy might be hard-wired into mammals. The story raises implicit questions about the relationship between empathy and morality and also illustrates how the distinction between empathy and sympathy fares in popular discourse:

As charges of greed and self-interest fly in these hyper-partisan political times, humans might do well to look to rats for lessons in kindness and caring.

A University of Chicago experiment to determine how much empathy rats have for each other had some surprising results, which are being published Friday in the research journal Science.

In laboratory studies, a rat was restrained in a small cage that could be opened only from the outside. A second rat, seeing the predicament of the trapped rat, immediately began tirelessly trying to find a way to free it.

Eventually, the second rat taught itself to open the cage door, freeing the restrained rat, leading to what strongly resembled a triumphal celebration between the two. Even when faced with an alternative choice of chocolate chips, the free rat would not be deterred from helping its caged fellow rat...

Previously, scientists thought that empathy and pro-social behavior to help others were unique to humans, said Jeffrey Mogil, a researcher at McGill University in Canada who has done similar studies on mice.

"This study shows the roots of human empathy didn't just appear, but evolved," said Mogil, who was not connected with the University of Chicago study. "It is very impressive, showing really robust and conclusive evidence that rats show pro-social (helping) behavior. You can argue why the rats are doing it, but you can't argue anymore that the rats are doing it."

The experiment is the work of U. of C. doctoral student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, her adviser, Jean Decety, a professor of psychology and psychiatry who studies human empathy, and Peggy Mason, a neurobiology professor who studies pain modulation and relief...

Mason said she thinks the tireless behavior the rats showed in helping out another rat in distress is something humans should pay attention to, showing that empathy is somewhat hard-wired into our mammalian brain.

"I would suggest that helping is what we are biologically programmed to do. You have to suppress that biological tendency to not help. If we owned up to our biological inheritance a little bit more than we do, we would be better off."

Well said!

Entrepreneurs: Different Personalities or Different Framing Skills?

Bad times in the economy fuel dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. Do you have the right stuff to follow those dreams? You might be surprised by Cardiff Garcia's summary of the latest research regarding the nature of the "right stuff".

Garcia summarizes important evidence-based knowledge about who becomes an entrepreneur:

1. Much "knowledge" about who becomes an entrepreneur is actually folk wisdom rooted in false stereotypes that pervade popular culture.
2. Before spouting off about what makes an entrepreneur, you need to define entrepreneurship very carefully.
3. Entrepreneurs come in a variety of personality types and with a variety of motivational patterns. Predicting entrepreneurship with personality variables is poorly supported except in regard to need for achievement. Shades of David McClelland!
4. Sunny optimists or dark pessimists are not typical entrepreneurs. Instead, entrepreneurs are realists who attack challenges with a sense of confidence. (See below)
   
5. When they embark on a task, they have a strong sense of self-efficacy: They expect to succeed. This kind of belief is rooted in framing techniques which can be learned by a broad range of personalities. (Is it time you learned about Bandler and Grinder?)
6. Entrepreneurs frame their intense work as a source of intense pleasure in life. They are willing to sacrifice other activities for the pleasures of working.

Before going to the article, test your beliefs about entrepreneurs by some T/F questions from it:

1. Entrepreneurs want financial success more than most people.  (T/F)
2. Entrepreneurs are more likely to think they control their fate.  (T/F)
3. Entrepreneurs want recognition for their work more than others.  (T/F)
4. Entrepreneurs care more about following family traditions (so if their parents built a business, they’re more likely to try building one too).  (T/F)
5. Entrepreneurs expect to succeed to a greater extent than employees.  (T/F)

The Take-Away:

Framing skills learned for self-management are more important than personality dispositions when it comes to predicting entrepreneurship.

The article [HIH]  Mortal Magnates: Research shows entrepreneurs are pretty much like the rest of us