If you liked the right brain/left brain optical illusion I shared with readers last month, then you’ll enjoy this one from the Brain Waves blog: “A Scary Illusion: Mr. Angry and Ms. Calm” which depicts two faces which switch positions with each other, depending upon how close you are to your computer screen as you’re viewing them.

A reminder that things always look different depending on how we’re looking at them.

(Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for the tip.)

For mediators, impartiality is our stock-in-trade. The integrity and fairness of the process depend upon our ability to conduct ourselves as “neutrals”, a term we often use to describe the role we serve.

Much ink, both real and virtual, has been spilled in exploring the meaning and significance of impartiality, together with its implications for mediation practice and the extent to which it defines the mediator’s role and limits the possible interventions a mediator may deploy. (Consider, for example, this article that asks “Impartiality v. Substantive Neutrality: Is the Mediator Authorized to Provide Legal Advice?“) In fact, googling together the words “mediator” and “impartiality” yields 617,000 hits, signaling that this is a topic of interest for both mediators and consumers of their services.

It’s a preoccupation that of course I share. If you do as well, then consider the following articles on bias.

From The Situationist: “I’m Objective, You’re Biased“, which looks at “bias blind spots”–the extent to which many of us readily spot bias in others while remaining blind to our own.

And from ScientificAmerican.com,”Not-so-deliberate: The decisive power of what you don’t know you know“, which looks at the ways in which “even seemingly rational, straightforward, conscious decisions about arbitrary matters can easily be biased by inputs coming in below our radar of awareness.”

Here’s a cool optical illusion that purportedly determines whether your left brain or right brain is dominant.

For more optical illusion fun, visit this post from the Online Guide to Mediation archives, “When seeing isn’t believing: optical illusions offer insight into conflict and perception“.

(Thanks to Kottke.org.)

Educators and parents have long accepted the notion that introducing children to art fosters creativity, builds cultural literacy, and makes for well-rounded human beings.

Art education however may in fact achieve far more than that: namely, help children develop important skills and habits necessary to the work they will ultimately do as adults, according to a recent study described in a Boston Globe article, “Art for our sake: School arts classes matter more than ever - but not for the reasons you think“. Two researchers with Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland, describe the surprising results of their study and the implications they hold for the future of education.

They discovered that art teaches children key “studio habits of mind”, including persistence, expression, and the ability to make clear connections “between schoolwork and the world outside the classroom”–in other words, to see real-world applications for the lessons learned in class.

Researchers noticed something important at the very beginning:

The first thing we noticed was that visual arts students are trained to look, a task far more complex than one might think. Seeing is framed by expectation, and expectation often gets in the way of perceiving the world accurately. To take a simple example: When asked to draw a human face, most people will set the eyes near the top of the head. But this isn’t how a face is really proportioned, as students learn: our eyes divide the head nearly at the center line. … Observational drawing requires breaking away from stereotypes and seeing accurately and directly…Seeing clearly by looking past one’s preconceptions is central to a variety of professions, from medicine to law [emphasis added]. Naturalists must be able to tell one species from another; climatologists need to see atmospheric patterns in data as well as in clouds. Writers need keen observational skills too, as do doctors.

The authors conclude:

For students living in a rapidly changing world, the arts teach vital modes of seeing, imagining, inventing, and thinking. If our primary demand of students is that they recall established facts, the children we educate today will find themselves ill-equipped to deal with problems like global warming, terrorism, and pandemics.Those who have learned the lessons of the arts, however - how to see new patterns, how to learn from mistakes, and how to envision solutions - are the ones likely to come up with the novel answers needed most for the future.

How well did your own education prepare you to master those habits?

(Photo credit: Carlos Paes.)

As a mediator, I see people behave under extraordinary pressure and in the face of difficult circumstances. They come with carefully constructed narratives of the past which often must be dismantled and considered anew. Their understanding and reactions may influenced by unanticipated forces. I watch as they struggle to expand the boundaries of perception–and reshape their understanding of themselves and each other.As a consequence of my work, the way people interpret the world around them fascinates me. I was therefore glad to be introduced to a blog that opens my eyes to the workings of the human mind. The Situationist

is a forum for scholars, students, lawyers, policymakers, and interested citizens to examine, discuss, and debate the effect of situational forces – that is, non-salient factors around and within us – on law, policy, politics, policy theory, and our social, political, and economic institutions.

What does a situationist do?

…[S]ituationists rely on the insights of scientific disciplines devoted to understanding how humans make sense of their world—including social psychology, social cognition, and related disciplines—and the practices of institutions devoted to understanding, predicting, and influencing people’s conduct…

A sampling of recent posts from The Situationist includes:

“Pervasive Developmental Disorders and the Formation of Stereotypes“, which describes how stereotypes are so easy to learn that they can develop even in the presence of “damage to the ’social brain’”.

“First Person or Third, How Would You Tell Your Story?“, discussing the ways in which people express memory as narrative.

“Slips, Falls, and the Situation of Tort Reform(ers)“, raising the possibility that tort reform advocate Robert Bork’s slip-and-fall suit against the Yale Club of New York is the result of a phenomenon known as “actor/observer difference” in which we see our own actions as the result of situational factors while seeing the actions of others as a result of their dispositions.

(Thanks to Steve Hicks for the link.)

Yesterday’s Boston Globe carried a story captioned “The mistakes doctors make: Errors in thinking too often lead to wrong diagnoses“. It described three cognitive errors that doctors make: attribution error, anchoring error, and confirmation bias.

Of course these errors are not only made by physicians but by just about anyone (yes, even mediators) who is attempting to diagnose and treat almost any kind of problem–especially the interpersonal kind.

Attribution errors occur when we attribute behavior or some other quality to a person’s character or disposition rather than to situation or environment–in other words, stereotyping. Our assumptions can blind us to the real causes or triggers of behavior.

Anchoring errors occur when we make our final diagnosis based on the direction our original diagnosis steered us in, closing our minds to other possibilities–which means our final diagnosis may be wildly inaccurate.

Confirmation bias, well known to mediators, is the very human tendency to seek out data that supports our assumptions and discount data that contradicts them. (For those of you who teach, a classroom exercise in confirmation bias can be found at the DevPsy.org web site).

Anyone can make mistakes–the hard part is not only owning up to our errors but making ourselves aware of how they occur in the first place.

If you’re fascinated by the way human beings think–and I don’t know a mediator who isn’t–you should pay a visit to Cognitive Daily. Each day this blog posts an article that explores some aspect of cognitive psychology–the study of internal mental processes such as problem solving, decision making, information processing, language, and memory.

Recent posts include “Casual Fridays: Test your knowledge of world accents!“, “We can judge the emotional content of pictures in as little as 13 milliseconds” and “Amazing demo of what we remember visually and why“.

You’ll also find links to articles like “Waiting For The Pay Off: Psychologists Show That ‘Money Changes Everything” which explores weaknesses in decision-making when it comes to the choices people make.

If you’d like to find out what makes your clients (and your colleagues) tick, pay a visit to Cognitive Daily.

In a joint study that may ultimately teach us much about the prejudices humans harbor regarding class and privilege, Harvard and Stanford psychologists have discovered that children as young as 5 prefer lucky people over the unlucky:

“Our experiments show the difficulties that confront youngsters as they make judgments of those touched by luck or misfortune… Young children express stronger liking for the beneficiaries of good luck compared to the victims of bad luck and generalize this preference to those who share membership in a group. Because the disadvantaged are more likely to experience negative events beyond their control - such as the tendency for the poor to be most impacted by natural disasters - this innocuous preference for the privileged may eventually grow more harmful, further increasing negativity toward the disadvantaged. Such preferences may, in turn, help explain the persistence of social inequality.”

(Via Boing Boing.)

As the saying goes, there is no “I” in “team”. But that may be more the result of our cerebral hardwiring than formative years spent playing Little League.

According to a study published in the journal Science, scientists have discovered a region of the brain that overrides selfishness and helps humans behave more collaboratively.

From HealthDay:

Experiments involving a “fairness” game show that the right side of this region — called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — helps people suppress selfish urges in obviously unjust situations, even at their own expense.

When researchers used a mild electric current to temporarily short-circuit this area, the law of the jungle quickly reasserted itself…

The Swiss and American team behind this research noted that, despite a long history of crime, wars and rapaciousness, human beings are innately cooperative. In fact, Homo sapiens is the only species to exhibit “reciprocal fairness” — the punishment of others’ unfair behaviors, even in situations where doing so hurts the punisher…

Why might this be so? Humans are highly socially evolved, and punishing unfairness “helps sustain cooperation in groups,” said study lead researcher Ernst Fehr, director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of
Zurich.

Because more cohesive groups tend to have better survival prospects, humans who suppress their immediate urges end up on the “winning team,” evolutionarily speaking.

If you can’t get enough about studies on human behavior, you may like to check out the following posts:

• Decisions, decisions: study shows unconscious mind handles tough decisions better.
• Tunnel vision: studies show there’s plenty we don’t see.
• Accentuate the positive: studies reveal human propensity for reframing to see good in outcomes.
• Caught napping: the benefits of napping include enhanced ability to problem solve.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Social scientists, hoping to explore the uncharted terrain of human behavior in cyberspace, are mapping online interactions by studying blogs, according to “Human Trails In Cyberspace“, an article in this week’s edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education (although it doesn’t right now, this article may soon require a subscription to access).

Among the researchers are Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who created a map of ties among political bloggers, and Matthew Hurst, director of science and innovation for Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a company that helps businesses track and analyze trends in consumer-generated media (i.e., blogs, online forums, and newsgroups).

You can download the article Adamic co-authored, “Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments” (in PDF), on her web site. To see Hurst’s project, visit his blog, Data Mining, for more information and to see his visual representations of the complex strands of connection among blogs.

Several weeks ago I posted about Appreciative Intelligence and Appreciative Inquiry, methods for problem solving that reframe problems into possibilities and mentioned that Stephanie West Allen, who introduced me to Appreciative Intelligence, was at that time working on an interview with Carol Metzker, author of Appreciative Intelligence: Seeing the Mighty Oak in the Acorn.

Stephanie has let me know that she has completed and posted her “Interview of Carol Metzker” on her blog, Idealawg, where you can read more about this innovative approach to tackling difficult problems.

Gustave Flaubert once wisely observed, “There is no truth. There is only perception.”

Dispute resolution professionals know only too well how much perception contributes to conflict. We see what we want to see and tune out the rest, or become so focused that we lose sight of what lies in our peripheral vision. Our senses can mislead or fool us, while our assumptions lead us to see what was never there at all or blind us to what is right before our eyes.

Over the years numerous studies have been done of perception and its implications for human behavior and cognition. For example, recent studies demonstrate that we have a propensity to see only the good in outcomes.

One of my favorite studies, hands down, is this one described here in this article from the Daily Telegraph, which reveals just how much we utterly fail to see. Researchers showed subjects a video of two teams of people playing basketball, one in white shirts and the other in black, and instructed the subjects to count the number of times the ball bounces. A person in a gorilla costume walks through the players, stops in front of the camera to thump its chest, and then walks off.

Incredibly, half of all subjects failed to see the gorilla, so intent were they on following the movement of the ball.

(Incidentally, I recently worked with a colleague who showed this video to a class she and I were teaching together. In a group of about 60 people, only 20 of them saw the gorilla. When we went back and replayed the video to prove to them that the gorilla in fact was there, no one could believe their eyes.)

To test your own powers of observation, visit this link for a whole range of video demonstrations. Or, to see the gorilla yourself, click here. (The gorilla video takes time to load, so you may not want to attempt this with a dial-up connection.)

Trainers and educators can order online “Surprising Studies of Visual Awareness“, a DVD that collects the videos used in this study.

Technorati tags: Culture and Society, conflict resolution, mediation

One of the functions that mediators serve is to assist people in making decisions. Our obligation is to ensure that people reach decisions that are fully informed and that as part of that process they have full opportunity to gather the data, the guidance, and the criteria necessary to make those decisions.

Making decisions of course is never easy, and some decisions are harder to make than others, no matter how much information there may be to guide us. Sometimes, in fact, you just need to sleep on it.

As it turns out, “just sleep on it” may be good advice, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Amsterdam Department of Psychology and reported today in Science, as well as by the BBC and the Boston Globe.

This study suggests that while a rational approach may work well with simple decisions–gathering all the facts and data and carefully weighing the pros and cons–more complex decisions are best left to the unconscious mind.

Since these research results remain controversial, you may want to play it safe when it comes to making your own decisions. To aid the indecisive, MindTools offers a variety of useful decision-making techniques.

For a less scientific approach, you can try using this Universal Decision Maker. Or, better yet, you can simply flip a coin.

Today’s Boston Globe, my hometown rag, features a story on behavioral economics, a field of study which seeks to understand the psychology of economics—why do people behave the way they do in the marketplace?

This article describes studies of primate behavior which seem to indicate we humans possess an evolutionary tendency to prefer avoiding loss over acquiring gain. In a study conducted by two Yale professors, Keith Chen, an economist (who also teaches a course on negotiating strategy), and Laurie Santos, a psychologist, capuchin monkeys were taught how to use money—in this case, metal tokens which could be used as a medium of exchange.

In one experiment, monkeys were given the option to buy one grape, with a 50/50 chance of receiving a second grape. For the same amount of money, monkeys were given another option of buying two grapes, but would face a 50/50 chance of losing one of them. The odds and cost were identical for each option, but most monkeys went with the first option, not the second, demonstrating that they were much more interested in avoiding loss than maximizing gain.

This perhaps bears out what mediators see often in their practice—that a powerful motivation to settle can be the strong desire to minimize or avoid loss. The certainty that a negotiated settlement affords is often far more attractive than the risk of litigation.

But mediation provides more than the opportunity to avoid loss. What is compelling about mediation is its potential to enable disputants to maximize gain as well. If we are hard-wired, as these studies suggest, to prefer loss avoidance over the maximization of returns, to what extent does this propensity blind disputants to opportunities to maximize mutual gain? And what can mediators do to help disputants overcome these deeply ingrained tendencies to ensure that not only do disputants successfully minimize risk but at the same time, too, pull out all the stops on achieving the greatest gain possible?

To learn more about Chen’s and Santos’s studies (which records what is probably the first scientifically documented case of monkey sex for hire), read this hilarious article from Freakonomics.com, which describes not only the research on risk aversion, but also an experiment on cooperation which reveals how monkeys deal with their uncooperative peers.

As I have observed before—here and, more recently, here—optical illusions are of interest to mediators, particularly because of the way in which optical illusions, like mediation, challenge us to see things differently.

Optical illusions also pointedly remind us of the unreliability of our own senses and the degree to which human perception can be manipulated or altered.

For those of you who can’t get enough of optical illusions, Matthew Homann, president and founder of LexThink, an innovative law practice consultancy, and the author of the excellent the [non]billable hour, has a link on his blog to an especially mesmerizing one.