The Glade 4.0

http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickal ... ou-stupid/

Study Finds That Having Power Can Make You Stupid
SHARM EL SHEIKH/EGYPT, 19 MAY 2008 - Tony Hayw...

Exhibit A: Tony Hayward.

Do you ever get the sense that the more powerful people get, the more foolish they become? You’re not the only one. Four university professors thought the same thing, and they devised a test to find out if it’s really true. It is, they concluded.

That is, they found that power dependably breeds overconfidence, and overconfidence dependably leads to bad decisions. Nathanael Fast, of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, Niro Sivanathan, of London Business School, Nicole Mayer, of the University of Illinois, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, noticed two well-known instances of calamitous overconfidence among the powerful: Steve Case‘s blithe orchestration of the $350 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner in 2000, and BP‘s massive obliviousness to risks, under Tony Hayward, that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The four wanted to know, are such overconfident people drawn to power, or does power itself create their overconfidence?

They had subjects write detailed accounts of times when they had had or had lacked power. They then had them answer a series of factual questions and rate how confident they were about their answers. They found that the people who had been primed to think of themselves as more powerful had more confidence in their answers than the rest—and yet their answers were actually less accurate. Yes, “confidence in one’s answers was inversely correlated with accuracy.”

Four follow-up experiments confirmed and expanded the results. The researchers came to a disturbing conclusion:

Not only do overconfident people tend to acquire roles that afford power . . . but the subjective sense of power brought on by these roles causes people to become further overconfident. . . . Finding practical ways to soften and/or hold in check the causal relationship between power and overconfidence represents an important endeavor for future research. Helping the powerful safely escape this perilous aspect of power is not only in the interest of power holders, but is also in the interest of all who are daily impacted by their decisions.

What can you do? One answer, apparently, is to humiliate the powerful. The fifth and final experiment the four conducted found that the tie between power and overconfidence “was eliminated when the powerful were made to feel incompetent.”

The full study is being prepared for publication in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

You can dismiss this entirely, because one of their control cases is politically motivated, not factually so.

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University mathematics and science departments possess a preponderance of evidence in the form of midterm and final exams that demonstrate this is false.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Are you sure about that?

I'm certain of Corolinth's statement. Right to Wrong changes only account for about 20% of total answer alterations on multiple choice tests; Wrong to Right changes are nearly 60%. This indicates that accuracy is directly correlated to selection confidence. In fact, I'm willing to bet that in this study at least one procedural consideration in the effectiveness and confidence level of a decision is based entirely on event outcome metrics, not any actual policy or behavioral mechanism. The Deepwater Horizon event wasn't the result of bad decision making; it was the result of missing information -- information no one had.

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People who lack confidence in their solutions are people who do not understand the underlying principles, do not know what they are doing, and generally obtain incorrect solutions.

People who have confidence in their solutions are people who understand what's going on, know what they're doing, and generally obtain correct solutions.

Walk into an introductory chemistry classroom. Listen to people answer questions. The ones who answer questions with questions (i.e. "Helium is a noble gas?") are confused, and don't know what they're doing. They are your C and D students. They have low confidence in their answers because history has told them that their answers are often wrong. Meanwhile, your A and B students answer questions without any vocal tone to suggest they're looking for confirmation that they're correct. They don't need someone to verify that helium is a noble gas. They know they're correct. For them, being incorrect is a rarity.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Civil engineer.

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LOL you guys totally missed the snark.

Anyway, Khross - once again, I am not a civil engineer.

Yeah, you're an uncivil one

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Holy shitsnacks!

Eh. I feel confident after my OChem tests, seldom change my answers, and am a C-D student in that.

yes, I struggle with Chemistry.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

Someone needs better editors. This sentence is egregiously bad.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.