That's excellent to hear. I've repeatedly seen organizations of intelligent people get into trouble because of internal conflict, and I don't want that to happen to SIAI. My main goal in posting this was to try to arrange that these ideas got enough exposure inside SIAI for them to be used if they work.
What did you get out of them?
I just read Leadership and Self-Deception and while I'm not in total agreement (if people were that good at reading each others' intentions, Bernie Madoff couldn't have stolen so much money), I think there's a lot of truth in the ideas, especially about the process of grudge formation.
In particular, I think that if you (or I) are looking for the situations where the other party has fucked up, and reveling in it, something has gone very wrong in the grudge-bearer's view of the situation. The book's take is that grudge bearing always starts with a failure of taking good will into action on the grudge bearer's part. This is at least a good place to start looking.
I think part (maybe a whole lot) of my problem with akrasia/motivation is playing out the grudge pattern internally ("You fucking piece of shit! Can't you get anything right?" "I just can't make myself do anything. What's wrong with me? Normal people get things done." And repeat.). The book doesn't seem specifically all that helpful for the internal version, but I suspect it's a place to start.
Because it seems like the book is novel-like, and it's well reviewed elsewhere, I'm avoiding reading this discussion, but thank you for the recommendation and enjoy my upvote :)
I have not tried propagating these ideas much. In one attempt, the learner felt threatened by the ideas when presented directly and defended herself against them, but understood them and valued them highly when she later read them in the nonthreatening novel-like format. If that's the normal case, they had to present the information in a novel-like format.
I've now read the book. The storytelling seems perverted at times, like an infomercial script.
However, I think it's quite valuable to people like me, who often fail in the way it describes.
I think the selling tactic used is: we can easily call the protagonist on his self-deceptions and defenses against accepting the premise, in a way that we'd hesitate to take ourselves to task over. Because his reasons are so transparently bad, we distance ourselves from his position and accept the authors'. Nice trick.
In the child example, the child will sometimes just want interaction with the mother, and use this as the method of getting interaction - rather than it being a battle for status per se, though it strikes me as well as obvious that's a factor (it approximately never isn't).
For example, imagine a young child ("X") who often demands help from his mother ("Y") for tasks he could probably do himself. When Y says X should do it himself, X often says "I can't" and then offers rationalizations for that statement. Note that X knows he can probably do it, and Y knows he can probably do it. X's intuitive calculation is: if I attempt to do it myself, I might fail, which would decrease my social status, or I might succeed, which leaves my social status unchanged. If I get Mommy to help me, then I'm controlling Mommy's behavior, which increases my social status. I can get Mommy to help me by claiming I can't do it, so I'll try to justify the assertion "I can't do it".
The situation might have other factors-- the child might not want to do the task, or might be willing to do it once, but might not want it as an ongoing obligation.
Considered as a status transaction, the mother might see it as the child having a lower status if obligated to do the task.
The account of self-deception still seems very plausible-- not only is it more convenient for the child to say "I can't" rather than "I won't", but the child may well come to believe that they can't.
Leaving that sort of thing out reminds me of what I didn't like about Who Moved My Cheese? -- the mouse would have starved long before they found the cheese. There's more to life than motivation, even though motivation is a huge factor.
This sounds like it might be useful. Two questions for you:
What benefits have you gotten out of reading the book?
How long has it been since you've read the book? (I often have an overinflated view of the usefulness of something that I've read for a short time after I read it. If it hasn't been long since you've read the book, do you think that there's a significant chance that you may be the victim of a similar trend?)
Thanks!
I highly recommend reading Leadership and Self Deception (Henceforth "L&SD") by the Arbinger Institute (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Books, Arbinger Institute Home Page). The sequel, Anatomy of Peace, is also good, but this article is based on a reading of L&SD.
They give a simple model of one cause of some or most everyday subtle neurotic behavior, and have practical suggestions for dealing with it. They present this indirectly, as a first-person narrative from a new executive at a fictional company is being taught this by his managers. The book has its good and bad points, with the good points hugely outweighing the bad. This post contains:
A prominent problem with many groups of highly intelligent people is that high intelligence makes it possible to deceive oneself more effectively, so they have pointless social conflict. I hope this model is good enough to help intelligent people identify the tendency to self decieve in social contexts and at least partially compensate for it.
One good point is that, after understanding the material, you can look around you and see the self-deception happening, you can stop doing it yourself somewhat, and you can have ideas about what to do about it when you see it in others.
Another good point is that the indirect approach seems to be useful. Presenting the material directly doesn't always work. Sometimes a direct presentation leads to people responding from within the self deception without seeing it.
A bad point is that they don't say why this happens. You'd expect that something many people appear to do instinctively to have some function, rather than to be broken. I think I do understand why, and in the text after the break below I expand slightly upon their model. This added information explains what sort of self-deceptions people tend to adopt, and what sorts of systematic errors people make they're in the self-deceived mode.
Another bad point is that they don't support their conclusion with research. It seems like the sort of thing that could be supported with research. Perhaps they chose not to cite research because footnotes would interfere with their indirect approach and might make it less effective. They could solve this problem by publishing another book that presents the same material directly and cites psychology research, but they apparently have not done that.
They are making a statement that seems to be obviously true, once you've understood it. The statement concerns everyday experience, so maybe research is redundant. For example, it is obvious that there were some apples in my refrigerator last night, even though there are no peer-reviewed double-blind research studies published in reputable journals about the apples in my refrigerator. I'd like to see someone do or cite relevant research for the assertions in the book, but maybe we don't have to wait. Caveat emptor.
The text below presents some of their material directly. I don't have enough experience to know how often it works to get the material directly. I recommend that if you trust me, go read "Leadership and Self Deception" now before continuing reading this text. If you don't trust me enough for that, perhaps you should continue reading below and take your chances.
(Whitespace so people's eyes don't read more than they intend.)
Here's a brief summary of some of the claims in Leadership and Self Deception. The book fleshes them out and gives lots of examples, but perhaps this bare outline will suffice for this discussion:
For example, imagine a young child ("X") who often demands help from his mother ("Y") for tasks he could probably do himself. When Y says X should do it himself, X often says "I can't" and then offers rationalizations for that statement. Note that X knows he can probably do it, and Y knows he can probably do it. X's intuitive calculation is: if I attempt to do it myself, I might fail, which would decrease my social status, or I might succeed, which leaves my social status unchanged. If I get Mommy to help me, then I'm controlling Mommy's behavior, which increases my social status. I can get Mommy to help me by claiming I can't do it, so I'll try to justify the assertion "I can't do it".
If you don't see this happening a large fraction of the time in both yourself and other people, something is wrong. Either you're denying it because you're operating from inside the self-deception and trying to justify some statement about yourself that conflicts with the main claims, or I'm asserting that it's true because I'm seriously confused. If you think I'm seriously confused, please comment and try to straighten me out.
It's important to keep in mind that the fix proposed in L&SD is not to carefully analyze people's behavior and root out the self-justification. Instead, L&SD suggests being sure to regard oneself and others as people with legitimate desires.
In any case, the analysis below assumes that the main claims are true. If you don't believe that, you might as well stop reading now.
The unanswered questions I had when I finished reading the book were:
I propose the following more detailed model that predicts answers to these questions.
The likely goals a person X will have when interacting with a person Y fall into a few broad categories:
There are several ways X's peers might acquire a belief about X and Y:
In general, more than one of these will happen.
There are a few reasonable assertions not present in L&SD that allow us to make more predictions here:
This gives us answers to the questions listed above:
For example, the difference between X trying to work effectively for his employer and X trying to justify "I am working effectively for my employer" is that in the latter case, X will take action to benefit his employer only when those actions can be observed by third parties, those actions are interesting enough for the third parties to remember them, and the actions will be understood by third parties as benefiting his employer.
Keep in mind that a simple belief is different from a simple plan. A belief is a statement about the present situation in the world that is true or false; a plan is a statement about your future behavior. Simple plans are useful because they can be made into habits. Habits can be useful because habits make it possible to do useful things with expending willpower, and each person has a limited supply of willpower.