Susan Jacoby, the author of The Age of American Unreason, a polemic on anti-intellectualism in the U.S., has accused Americans of a lack of global awareness. There is indeed evidence to support her views: a geographic literacy study conducted by National Geographic in 2006 found that six in 10 Americans ages 18 to 24 cannot locate Iraq on a map of the Middle East.

Even more depressing is the news that “fewer than three in 10 of those surveyed think it is absolutely necessary to know where countries in the news are located. Only 14 percent believe speaking another language fluently is a necessary skill.”

In an effort to build global knowledge and increase geographic literacy among American youths, National Geographic has created My Wonderful World, with tools and resources for parents, educators, and students.

Interested in more sites and online tools for increasing global knowledge or improving your ability to interact with those of other cultures and countries? Check out these posts from the Mediation Channel vaults:

“New world (view) order: Web site promotes culturosity and intercultural awareness”

“Online game tests knowledge of world geography”

“Geography has made us neighbors: the importance of geographic literacy in the 21st century”

“Internet as mediator: web sites provide online resources for building community and conversation”

In a speech in March, U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama initiated a national conversation about race. He reminded Americans that “that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper”.

It’s a hard conversation to have. But one web site is pushing people to keep talking.

Exploring Race, a forum hosted by Chicago Tribune editor Dawn Turner Trice, gives Americans a chance to bring race out into the open. Trice writes,

We have a moment in history to have a national discussion about race. We should seize it and try to mine it for what it’s worth. I want this to be a safe place where people of all races can explore their views and biases, openly and honestly.

You can learn about race etiquette, use the prejudice compass to get your bearings on your own biases, or simply join the conversation.

Giving whole new meaning to the phrase “you be the judge”, People’s Court Raw invites anyone with a dispute and a video camera to upload their argument, notify the “defendant” by email, and then let the web-surfing masses vote on who’s right.

Boasting that People’s Court Raw “is the ultimate democratic tool”, spokesperson and media personality Harvey Levin (no relation) urges visitors to “let the world finally prove you right…” with this “ultimate argument ender”.

As of this posting, cases include a dispute over a boyfriend’s back hair; a workplace quarrel about a co-worker who belches; and a domestic spat that results when a husband can’t get to sleep because his wife snores.

Hat tip to Colin Rule.

We mediators play midwife to decision making. We patiently assist in an arduous and sometimes painful process while parties labor, struggling to make the right choices in difficult circumstances. We strive to ensure that those who weigh those choices are able to reach rational decisions based on accurate and complete information.

But just how rational are the decisions that people make, whether at the mediation table or anywhere else? How much control do any of us really exert over those choices?

A new book has some surprising answers and explains why it is that we are more susceptible than we realize to the vagaries of our own minds and vulnerable to the forces of emotions and social norms. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, written by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a visiting professor at Duke University.

As much fun as the book (and of course more interactive) is the Predictably Irrational web site. Don’t miss the Demonstrations page with cool optical illusions and games you can test yourself with.

In a punchy headline, the ABA Journal sums up the message a U.S. Supreme Court justice has for his critics in “I’m Conservative, But Not Biased, Scalia Says … So Get Over Bush v. Gore“, a story about Scalia’s recent interview with the TV news magazine 60 Minutes.

As I read the story, I thought back on other controversial cases in which those critics questioned Scalia’s ability to be impartial. For example, there’s the infamous duck hunting trip with Cheney, when a case involving the Vice President was pending before the Court. Despite Scalia’s insistence that “I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned”, folks who understood something about the subtle tools of persuasion weren’t so reassured. One of those tools, reciprocity, is what creates a powerful sense of obligation when we receive a gift from someone else.

What makes bias so pernicious is that all too often we are blissfully unaware of our own. I’m guessing that maybe all that certainty is simply evidence that Scalia has fallen victim to one of the most pervasive of cognitive errors, overconfidence bias, which explains why a large majority of us place ourselves in the statistically impossible top percentile when it comes to things like driving skills, intelligence, negotiating abilities, even humor. As two Cornell University researchers put it, most of us are unskilled and unaware of it (PDF).

Scalia is undoubtedly conservative. But unbiased? Given how blind we all are to our own biases, this makes a good case for settling before trial; it’s tough enough being at the mercy of our own cognitive errors. Why be at the mercy of those of the judge, too?

American magazine columnist Marilyn vos Savant once posed the following question, submitted by a reader:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you, “Do you want to pick door #2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?

A large majority number of readers answered that question with “No”. Many assumed that the host’s action in opening one of the three doors changes the probability of the remaining choices, so that there was now a 1/2 chance that the door you selected is a winner, meaning you should probably stick with your original decision.

The answer, surprisingly though, is yes, it is to your advantage to change your mind:

Yes; you should switch. The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance…

The winning odds of 1/3 on the first choice can’t go up to 1/2 just because the host opens a losing door. To illustrate this, let’s say we play a shell game. You look away, and I put a pea under one of three shells. Then I ask you to put your finger on a shell. The odds that your choice contains a pea are 1/3, agreed? Then I simply lift up an empty shell from the remaining other two. As I can (and will) do this regardless of what you’ve chosen, we’ve learned nothing to allow us to revise the odds on the shell under your finger.

This answer provoked enraged responses, many from mathematicians who were certain vos Savant’s answer was wrong. Even in the face of proof that she was correct, people insisted that it could not be so.

It’s fascinating to observe cognitive error in action as people fiercely refuse to change their minds, despite evidence to the contrary.

For a discussion of why this is so, read “Are You Smart Enough to Change Your Mind?” from 7P Productions, which links to the vos Savant article and to a fun interactive version of the Monty Hall problem, goats included, which includes an explanation of how the game works.

From filmmaker Stefan Nadelman comes “Food Fight“, a stop-animation depiction of war using food as the actors:

Food Fight is an abridged history of American-centric war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression.

Although I’m a huge fan of animation, I have to say that viewing the film left me uneasy, as I watched the Holocaust reduced to shots of menacing pretzels blasting matzohs to smithereens, or Hiroshima rendered as a hamburger patty laying waste to rows of sushi. It was difficult not to conclude that the use of food as proxies for human beings to stage scenes of violence and death trivializes catastrophic human suffering, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth. The final scene though provokes reflection on the senseless waste of war, as toiling ants move in when the conflict ceases.

Click here to view Food Fight.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Andrea Schneider at ADR Profs Blog is wondering whether there’s a “Crisis in Dispute Resolution?”

This past weekend, the Graduate Program in Dispute Resolution here at Marquette hosted noted scholar Bernie Mayer. Bernie was mostly speaking about his book, Beyond Neutrality and, on Saturday, was invited in a point-counterpoint format to discuss his arguments with equally well-noted practitioner Howard Bellman. One point of the discussion was about Bernie’s argument, outlined in his book, that the dispute resolution field is marginalized in the most important disputes. In other words, in the biggest crises of the day and over the biggest problems (think war, state of the economy, etc.), the dispute resolution field does not generally have a seat at the table…

Andrea wants to know what the blogosphere makes of all of this:

Are we marginalized? Should dispute resolution professionals be called on more often in public policy and international disputes? Should we just get over ourselves–we are called on when we are needed? Let us know what you think!

Come join me in the discussion and tell Andrea what you think.

Joshua Correll, a member of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology faculty, in conjunction with his work with the Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory, has created The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a video game that tests the effect of racial bias on decisions to shoot.

When you launch the game, you are presented with a series of images of young men against various backgrounds. Some of the men hold guns, while others hold innocent items like cellphones or soda cans. Half of the men are black and half are white. You must shoot all armed men but holster your gun at the sight of those who are unarmed. The game tests whether the target’s race influences the decision to shoot. The results are chilling:

Participants shoot an armed target more quickly and more often when that target is Black, rather than White. However, participants decide not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly and more often when the target is White, rather than Black. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites).

To play the game, you can test yourself with the beta version. You may be shocked by the results.

(Via On the Ground.)

Women don’t ask.

That was the premise — and the title — of a book published in 2003 by Linda Babcock, James M. Walton Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, and successful writer and editor Sara Laschever.

Women Don’t Ask explored the uncomfortable truths about gender and negotiation and exposed the obstacles that keep women from negotiating effectively for themselves. While men seem to have no trouble negotiating and asking for what they need, women hesitate or fail to ask at all.

Social conditioning and cultural expectations are among the causes of these gendered differences. Tragically these differences produce well-documented economic costs for women, haunting them over the course of a lifetime. For example, according to the Women Don’t Ask web site, “By not negotiating a first salary, an individual stands to lose more than $500,000 by age 60 — and men are more than four times as likely as women to negotiate a first salary.”

This book touched a raw nerve for the many women who read it; indeed, so overwhelming was the response to Women Don’t Ask that Babcock and Laschever went to work on a sequel.

The result is Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want, a book filled with practical advice; real-world negotiation stories from the authors, the women who have contacted them as a result of their work, and Babcock’s students; and a detailed four-phase program with exercises for preparing for and succeeding in life’s negotiations.

Phase One teaches women to recognize that “Everything Is Negotiable”. As anyone knows, the toughest negotiation can be with yourself, and the authors help readers begin by asking questions of themselves to identify and clarify their professional and personal goals. Phase Two teaches readers how to “Lay the Groundwork”, reviewing the skills and concepts of basic negotiation strategy. Among the most important lessons? Information is power — and the authors explain how and where to get it to strengthen your bargaining position.

Phase Three, “Get Ready”, pushes women to aim high when it comes to negotiating. It covers cooperative bargaining; ascertaining your worth; using logrolling or trade-offs to get past jams and build value; and how to make the first offer. Best of all, it even comes equipped with a “Negotiation Gym” — a six-week program of increasingly difficult negotiation exercises that will help women build negotiation muscles and develop stamina and strength in preparation for tougher negotiation challenges. No one will ever kick sand in your face again.

Phase Four shows how women can “Put It All Together” — to practice in advance by role playing with a friend, to avoid making concessions prematurely, to create the right impression to influence your counterpart at the table, and, finally, to close the deal.

An appendix helpfully provides a detailed worksheet to help women prepare for negotiations, along with a link to the web site where readers can download a PDF version.

Ask for It recounts numerous stories of women facing negotiations at work and in their lives, across a range of industries and professions, which bring the lessons to memorable life. However, as convincing as these anecdotes may be, I would have welcomed more examples of negotiations in blue-collar settings, my one quibble with an otherwise excellent book.

What makes this book a must-read for men, too, and not just for women are its unpleasant revelations about the realities of hidden bias against women at the negotiation table. The authors exhort readers to take responsibility themselves for combating gender bias, not just that of others but particularly their own. They remind readers that all of us regardless of gender possess assumptions and unexamined beliefs about women in negotiation. They point to studies that indicate that while aggression earns men points at the negotiation table, it punishes women with backlash and disapproval. And, while the authors fiercely advocate for women at the negotiation table, the chapter on “Likability” with its insistence that women avoid aggressive tactics and “be nice” while bargaining, will no doubt leave some readers bristling. However, until the world changes how it views women in negotiation, it’s hard to argue with the studies the authors cite.

There is much to admire about this gutsy book with its commitment to helping women really succeed at negotiating. Even the title itself serves as a defiant call to action. Babcock and Laschever explain in the forward that the title represents a deliberate effort to reclaim a phrase weighted with negative meaning for women and instead assert it as an emblem of power:

For centuries the phrase “asking for it” has been used as an accusing finger to point at women. A woman who’d been sexually assault was “asking for it”. A woman who’d been the victim of spousal abuse must have provoked her partner — she “asked for it”.

Our goal is to help women ask for and get the things they — we — really want, to claim the phrase “asking for it” as our own and transform it into a dynamic tool for increasing our happiness and pursuing our dreams.

This is not simply a book about changing the way women negotiate. Instead, Babcock and Laschever have ambitiously set out to change women’s lives.

Any of us can join the revolution — all we have to do is ask.

Two years ago I introduced readers to the web site ChangeThis, which I described as

a web site born of a radical and hopeful idealism: to virally transmit ideas through a culture medium of community, respect, and dialogue.

Recognizing that “the best discussions in science, medicine, business and politics have always been the civil ones”, ChangeThis publishes what it calls manifestos — proposals for change which serve as “a reasoned, rational call to action, supported by logic and facts”. The goal is to provide a forum for “the rational and thoughtful arguments that help people change their minds to a more productive point of view.” In the egalitarian spirit with which ChangeThis was founded, anyone is welcome to submit ideas for a manifesto.

This online experiment in changing minds has thrived, amassing in the past two years a considerable inventory of innovative thinking, and consequently I continue to stop by in search of ideas to invigorate my work.

On a recent visit to the site I was struck by the premise of a newly published manifesto, “Questionating“, by business consultant Corinne Miller. Miller celebrates the power of the question and its role in creativity and fresh thinking:

Questions have been the enablers of innovation for centuries. As Albert Einstein said, “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science”…

Questions use verbs and words that activate key areas of the brain that, in turn, increase the volume and variety of questions. The more questions, the more creativity and innovation. We like to say that questions open the innovation pipeline.

Despite the role of the question in stimulating discoveries and advancements, Miller observes that people seem to lose the willingness to ask questions as they grow older:

As we age, we disengage… from asking questions. Questions decrease as aging increases. Think about it. Why does the typical 5-year old ask about 65 questions a day, while the typical 40-something asks only about 6 questions a day? Why is it that the older we get, the fewer questions we ask? We’ve found that the most popular answers to this question have been: asking a question makes one look stupid; asking a question is a sign of weakness; and people think they know the answer so they don’t feel the need to ask.

What a sad state that we have created a business culture where asking questions is seen as a weakness. Shouldn’t it be the opposite, where not asking questions is a weakness?

How can we change this?

Indeed. How can we change this? What can any of us do to challenge the notion that asking questions displays weakness or even disrespect? What can we do to make it safe to ask questions of our institutions, of our leaders, of each other? Questions reflect, reveal, resolve; they shine light into the dark corners. Most importantly, questions give us the ability to see the world afresh. As Bertrand Russell once said, “In many affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”

In poignant tribute to the U.S. service members who have lost their lives in the Iraq war, the New York Times has created a graphic that literally puts a face to the numbers who have perished.

Each face that appears is made up of many small squares, each representing another face. Click on any square to see another face appear, with information about that person displayed to the right. The squares are ordered by date of death, the most recent deaths appearing in the upper left corner of the image. You can also search by last name, home state, or home town.

(With thanks to ICT4Peace. Please read Sanjana Hattotuwa’s observations, including his thoughts on those who are missing from this moving depiction of the human cost of war.)

On television, on the glossy pages of magazines, on the billboards we speed past, images fill our visual landscape.

But what effect do the images that appear in the media have on us? How do they influence our judgments, our economic choices, and our assumptions about ourselves and each other? To what extent do they hold up a mirror to cultural values about gender, race, authority, sex, or violence? How do we decode their messages to separate what’s false from what’s not? And how can we immunize ourselves against their effects?

These are questions that media critics, sociologists, psychologists, journalists, teachers, parents, and others have struggled with. But it is up to all of us to confront and examine these images for ourselves. One blog, Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing, provides images for discussion in sociology and other classes — or for anyone interested in coming face to face with the images that bombard us daily. Visitors can browse the categories of images this blog has collected, which include violence, education, gender, race/ethnicity, and many more. A word of caution — not all images are workplace safe and some may give offense.

Seeing Is Believing offers a fascinating — and at times disturbing — foray into the world of media images. Presented with minimal text, these images at once provoke and invite us to decipher their messages about society and ourselves.

Far be it from me, a mediator, to encourage conflict, but this sounds like good, clean, wacky fun.

On Saturday, March 22, people will be gathering in cities all around the world (including my own, Boston, in Copley Square) to take part in a pillow fight in honor of International Pillow Fight Day. Instructions and rules of engagement are available for starting your own public pillow fight.

What are the benefits? According to the Pillow Fight Day web site,

people will make new friends, re-unite with old ones, meet future lovers, and revel in the blissful one-ness of a free, fun, social gathering.

And who knows? If this a sign of things to come, perhaps in the not-too-distant future there’ll be an International Food Fight Day. In anticipation, you can order yourself one of these spring-loaded catapult spoons.

(Photo credit: Gabriella Fabbri.)

(Hat tip to the Atlantic Review.)

Straight from the folks who got me wondering what would be on your mediator’s playlist comes another question suitable for a Friday: “Besides ‘Animal House’, What Pop Culture References Inspire You?”

I’d like to ask the same thing of mediators and negotiators: what pop culture references inspire you?

The haggling scene from “Life of Brian”?

The conflict resolution episode of “The Office”?

“The Wedding Crashers”? (Please, God, not that.)

To get your creative juices flowing, there are a couple of lists, one here and another here with some ideas.