Organisations, Systems and People
Psychology
Interesting Reading
- Richard Bentall
Personality: The Big 5
The "big five" personality traits are:
- extraversion (response to positive stimuli)
- neuroticism (reponse to negative stimuli)
- conscientiousness (impulse control)
- agreeableness (acting on empathy)
- openness (breadth of activation)
In terms of where the traits come from, the mainstream of research indicates:
- 40-50% of the variation is set via inheritance
- of the remaining 50-60% of variance, some will be due to random brain wiring and some to random environmental influences
- parental influence has no detectable effect
The last point, in particular, is somewhat counter-intuitive. There's a natural association in most people's minds between types of family atmosphere and the character of the adults who result from growing up in it. But as far as people can tell from studies designed to tease out the effects of genes vs environment (twin studies, adoption studies, etc), the effect is from inherited tendency rather than how a child is bought up. Extraverted parents have extraverted children because the child has a natural tendency, not because the child is growing up in an extraverted household. And so on.
Does this make any difference to how one should act as a parent? Perhaps. One might draw the conclusion that you should pay attention to how your child seems to be as an individual, rather than viewing it as a blank template on which behaviour must be imposed and molded. You won't change what they are like, but they will likely be happier as a consequence.
In terms of what one might wish for one's child, most of the traits are pretty neutral. What you want is for people to find a path that is in sympathy with their personality.
For example - personally, I test very high on agreeableness and openness, high on extraversion and conscientiousness, and average on neuroticism. This means I'm well-suited to solving ill-defined problems that need wide co-operation across a number of people to tackle, and where attention to detail is important. It also means I'm not so well-suited to carrying out someone else's plan, where it's going to cause a lot of people pain, and lots of things will go wrong in the execution that I can't do anything to prevent.
My current job involves a lot of analytics-related trouble-shooting and feels like a good match. But maybe I should put off joining the army for a while longer.
Cooperation
Prisoner's Dilemma
The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a nice compact way to think about the guts of cooperation.
But there's more to life than game theory.
Consider the scorpion and the frog.
The "Helpful Model"
I've worked in a number of investment banks, and the people there are very keen to "monetize their skills" as a hedge fund manager once put it to me.
In an environment where everyone's chasing the year-end bonus, it's easy for a self-reinforcing negative dynamic to develop. Team A views team B as out to get them. They act to defend themselves againt team B's (real or imagined) actions. Team B sees the actions of team A, and takes a corresponding action. Everyone ends up with an entrenched negative view of each other.
One alternative, referenced in Gerald Weinberg's Quality Software Management books, is called the "helpful model". The default assumption is that even if appearances might lead you to suspect otherwise, everyone is trying to be helpful. Of course, someone might reveal themselves to be out to stitch you up. But you start by assuming that everyone is trying to do the right thing, at least according to their definition of what "the right thing" is, and analyse things from that viewpoint.
A lot of people think that the "helpful model" is still unrealistic hippy nonsense. If that's your reaction, then try a quick thought experiment: figure out what your default way of analyzing people's actions and motives is, and then work out what is going to happen in your organisation if everyone thinks like you.
If you want to get all game-theoretic about it, you could view the "helpful model" as corresponding to "nice strategies" such as tit-for-tat in iterated prisoner's dilemma simulations. A "nice strategy" is one that starts off by being cooperative. What you do when it's clear that your game partner is not cooperating is a different question. "Nice" strategies co-operate well. Strategies that start by not cooperating ("defecting" in the terms of the prisoner's dilemma) don't interact so positively.