Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril - Rilegato

Heffernan, Margaret

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0385669003 ISBN 13: 9780385669009

Casa editrice: Doubleday Canada, 2011

Riassunto

A book that will open eyes to the most serious problem of our times.

In the case of the US Government versus Enron, the presiding judge chose to employ the legal concept of willful blindness: you are responsible if you could have known, and should have known, something which instead you strove not to see. The guilty verdict sent shivers down the spine of the corporate world. In this book, Margaret Heffernan draws on psychological studies, social statistics, interviews with relevant protagonists, and her own experience to throw light on willful blindness and why whistleblowers and Cassandras are so rare. Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to the family, this engaging and anecdotal book will explain why willful blindness is so dangerous in a globalized, interconnected world, before suggesting ways in which institutions and individuals can start to combat it. Margaret Heffernan's thought-provoking book will force us to open our eyes.

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Informazioni sull?autore

MARGARET HEFFERNAN was born in Texas, raised in Holland and educated at Cambridge University. Her monthly column for Reader's Digest is read by over 8 million readers. She writes articles that are syndicated internationally, and blogs for The Huffington Post. Margaret is a popular speaker and panelist, addressing corporations, industry groups and business schools. A former producer for BBC radio in the UK, she continues to develop programs for the BBC. As an entrepreneur she has built up two businesses: one advising public affair campaigns in Massachusetts and another advising software companies trying to break into multimedia. Her work in interactive multimedia led to her leadership of several businesses that were part of the Internet giant CMGI. Over the period that she worked for CMGI, its stock increased over 700%.Her books are The Naked Truth, an expose of the environment for working women, and Women on Top, about female CEOs. She is a Visiting Professor at the Simmons School of Management and at the University of Bath and is Executive in Residence at Babson College. She has homes in the UK and in New Hampshire.

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groups were asked to assess how much they thought they would like the people whose faces they’d seen if they were to meet them in the future. They were also asked how far they believed those people to be similar to themselves.
 
The students who had seen the same face for four weeks believed more strongly that these were people they would like in real life. They also believed (on no evidence except the photograph) that those faces belonged to people who were similar to themselves. In other words, the familiar faces— with no supporting evidence— felt nicer. Women responded to the experiment in exactly the same way as men. A similar experiment, using irregular octagons, generated the same pattern of responses. The familiar makes us feel secure and comfortable.
 
This even pertains when we go looking for emotional experiences, as when we listen to music. It can be hard fully to enjoy a new piece the first time you listen to it; only after repeated hearings does it become a favorite. Part of that may be because if you’re trying out, say, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony for the first time, there is a lot to take in: two orchestras, two choirs, and eight soloists over eighty minutes won’t create an instant impression. And listening to music is a hugely complex cognitive exercise. Even the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” can take some getting used to. But once we’ve heard it a few times, we’re used to it and like it. And then we don’t want something different. We want more of the same.
 
“We score hundreds of attributes of every song,” says Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora Internet Radio. “And then we find the matches between those songs— and then that’s what we recommend to you. Because we know that if you liked one piece of music, you are very, very likely to like another one that shares the same characteristics.” Westergren’s business does for music what eHarmony does for dating. Each song is scored manually by musicians for some four hundred attributes; there are thirty for the voice alone, capturing everything from timbre to layers of the voice to vibrato. Then that “score” is matched to other songs that have scores that are as closely similar as possible. Pandora software is doing to music what we do when we meet people: looking for matches. And, when it finds them, people feel very happy. “God, I love Pandora!” said Joe Clayton, a music fan in Boston. “I love it. I’m always finding new bands, new stuff that I just couldn’t find otherwise— certainly not in any music store. And it’s kinda creepy— but in a good way— because they almost never give me something I don’t like. Almost never.”
 
More than fifty million people use Pandora, and many are avid evangelists. But what Pandora can’t do is come up with that serendipitous suggestion that introduces you to something completely different from anything you’ve ever heard before. I like Bruce Springsteen, Frank Zappa, and the White Stripes— but I also adore Handel. And given my first three preferences, Pandora wouldn’t ever offer me Handel. Westergren acknowledges that limitation. “We’re never going to take you from rock and roll to baroque music. Pandora is about broadening your selection— but narrowing your taste. If you like jazz, you like more jazz. If you like hip- hop, you like more hip- hop. But Pandora is never going to take you from Springsteen to Handel.”
 
All personalization software, whether eHarmony, Pandora, Amazon’s book recommendations, or MyShape .com’s clothing suggestions, does the same thing: makes our lives easier by reducing overwhelming choice. And software is doing it the same way that our brain does, by searching for matches. It’s as though, online and off - line, our life is one gigantic game of Snap! This is immensely efficient: It means that the brain can take shortcuts because it is working with what it already knows, not having to start from scratch. When we find what we like, part of our plea sure is the joy of recognition.
 
But the flip side of that satisfaction is that we are rejecting a lot along the way. As Westergren says, we are narrowing our taste, reducing the music or books or clothes or people that might widen our horizons. Our brains aren’t designed to draw us into experiences that are wild and different; there would be no advantage in doing something so risky. And so, by focusing in one direction and excluding others, we become blind to the experiences that don’t match.
 
This is not to say that strange, serendipitous things never flow into our lives. Of course they do. You meet someone at work who introduces you to Handel and you develop a love of baroque music. Or— more likely— your son introduces you to Rammstein. But these encounters are random and risky. Remember Robert’s problem with Albanian women.
 
There’s a circle here: We like ourselves, not least because we are known and familiar to ourselves. So we like people similar to us— or that we just imagine might have some attributes in common with us. They feel familiar too, and safe. And those feelings of familiarity and security make us like ourselves more because we aren’t anxious. We belong. Our self- esteem rises. We feel happy. Human beings want to feel good about themselves and to feel safe, and being surrounded by familiarity and similarity satisfies those needs very efficiently. The problem with this is that everything outside that warm, safe circle is our blind spot.
 
Because not only are we rejecting music that doesn’t match; we use these same processes to make important decisions in our everyday lives. When I had my first opportunity, as a producer at the BBC, to choose my own team, I hoped to hire people who would challenge me and each other and who would invest the entire project with intellectual richness and vigor. With all that firmly in mind, I selected liberal arts graduates who were all female, spoke several languages, and had birthdays within the same week in June. In other words, they were all like me.
 
Did I consciously intend to do that? Of course not. Like hiring managers the world over, I intended to hire only the best and the brightest and that’s what I thought I was looking for. But did I also want people I’d feel comfortable working with, enjoy spending late hours with, people who shared the values of the project? Well, yes. I was biased, in favor of those just like me. Everyone is biased. But just as we are affronted when told that we’re likely to marry and associate with those very similar to ourselves, so most people vehemently reject the idea that they are biased: others may be, but not us. “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” is how the Bible puts it. Of course we consider the people who disagree with us to be the most biased of all.
 
It’s recently become easier to identify and mea sure biases with a suite of tests called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short. Designed by three psychologists, the computer- based tests examine thoughts and feelings that exist outside of our conscious awareness or control.9 These may pertain to gender, age, race, or religion. In the test, participants are given two sets of images and two lists of words— one positive, one negative. Images and words appear randomly on the screen and you have to associate them with positives or negatives. You may link “male” with “intelligent” or “old” with “stupid.” When making a link that isn’t comfortable for us, we take longer. And that delay, say the researchers, is telling: it takes more time to overcome bias. The longer we take to accept a match, the greater our bias.
 
Since 1998, more than 4.5 million people have taken these tests and the researchers have found that bias is pervasive among all of us, whether we think we’re biased or not. White physicians are friendlier toward anonymous white patients than toward black ones. Seventy percent of citizens in thirty- four countries associate science more with men than with women. More than 80 percent of us have a bias against the elderly. Ordinary people (including the researchers who direct the project) harbor negative associations in relation to various social groups even though they say they don’t and often wish, quite earnestly, not to. We see this play out in daily life everywhere. Go into any major corporation and look around. Despite de cades of diversity campaigns and millions of dollars invested in programs to make recruitment and retention less biased and more equitable, the homogeneity of most companies is overwhelming. Look at the lists of where the graduates of Harvard Business School or Wharton go and you will see the same phenomenon: armies marching into banks, financial institutions, consulting firms, year after year.
 
This is one reason why, despite a great deal of goodwill and commitment and even, in some countries, equality legislation, it has proved so hard to shift women into top roles, shovel venture capital into ethnic businesses, or train a lot of male midwives. It isn’t the only reason, of course, but the fact that we like people like ourselves, are unconsciously biased in their favor, makes a big impact. Ste reo types are energy-saving devices; they let us make shortcuts that feel just fine. That’s why they’re so persistent.
 
The famous development of blind auditions for new symphony members provided graphic illustration of this point. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin and Prince ton’s Cecilia Rouse found that when musicians were allowed to audition behind screens, where their gender could not influence the evaluation of their...

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Doubleday Canada
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0385669003
• ISBN 13: 9780385669009
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 304
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile