Disclosing Ain’t Bragging

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Two neuroscientists, Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, have just published an extraordinary article (Tamir-PNAS-2012) “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding,” which speaks to the power and joys of thinking and talking about oneself. According to an interview with US News, Tamir stated “the regions of the brain that are activated by talking about oneself are also responsible for the thrills of food, sex, money and drug addiction.”

Interestingly, the media are ever-so-slightly mocking about these findings (and that’s a subject for another post):

These headlines are off-base. They disserve the real importance of the research. Tamir’s article is entitled: “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding.” Disclosing information is quite different than “bragging” or “boasting“. Merriam Webster defines the verb to boast as “to puff oneself up in speech : speak vaingloriously.” A brag is “a pompous or boastful” statement. But when you look at the word disclose — either in dictionaries or in the actual source article itself — the meaning is distinct and does not carry a negative quality to it.

Apparently 30% – 40% of human every day speech  ”is used to relay information to others about one’s private experiences or personal relationships….” The purpose of Tamir’s research was to test the hypothesis that humans are motivated to share beliefs and knowledge about the world, and therefore “opportunities to disclose one’s thoughts should be experienced as a powerful form of subjective reward.” That is, there is we should feel really good when we do self-disclose to encourage us to do it more. Tamir and Mitchell sought to find empirical support — and they found it.

But the disclosure information they looked at did not even begin to fall within the definitions of boasting or bragging. Subjects were asked questions about “self” like “how much do you enjoy winter sports such as skiing?” (not “HOW GOOD ARE YOU at skiing?”). Brain functioning while responding to these “self” questions was compared to brain functioning while responding to questions about plain “fact” or “other”, e.g., “how much does Barack Obama enjoy winter sports such as skiing?” Apparently our brains really really prefer responding to the questions about “self” over “others” or “facts”. And, while merely thinking about one’s self is rewarding, sharing such information is additionally rewarding.
By sharing, we make ever more powerful connections with others. Think about falling in love ~ how we begin tentatively and then in a torrent sometimes to show our “real” and “full” selves. “She really ‘gets’ me.” “I feel whole with him.” “He understands me like nobody else.” “She’s knows how I think.”  Think about the intensity of talking with your best friend or colleague at work, even if it is just laughing about how your hair looked that day or how you felt about the boss. At work, at school and at play, we make friends and allies by sharing bits, pieces, chunks, shadows, shards and the ephemera of our inner worlds.
[T]he tendency to broadcast one’s thoughts and beliefs may confer an adaptive advantage in individuals in a number of ways: by engendering social bonds and social alliances between people; by eliciting feedback from others to attain self-knowledge; by taking advantage of performance advantages that result from sharing ones’ sensory experience; or by obviating the need to discover firsthand what others already know, thus expanding the amount of know-how any single person can acquire in a lifetime. As such, the proximate motivation to disclose our internal thoughts and knowledge to others around us may serve to sustain the behaviors that underlie the extreme sociality of our species. (Tamir and Mitchell, PNAS Early Edition, p. 5.)
Many intriguing questions remain on perusal of the article: did gender affect response? Life experiences? Geography? Nationality? Culture? Age? I’m going to followup and contact the authors. Stay tuned.

Monochromatic? Really?

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Article today caught my eye: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/10/an-obama-campaign-photo-that-looks-like-a-young-republican-rally.html
The writer refers to the picture as a “lily-white photo” and asks:
“How could a supposedly savvy political operation assemble such a monochromatic room?”

I looked closely at the picture, closely again and then enlarged it on my phone, looking again. The article captures, for me, part of the major problem with the present use of the term diversity. The author made clear that because it appears from this photo that there is no person who is “visibly” black, there are no “person of color” within this group. Troubling assumption, and troubling assumption within an assumption.

First, to my eye, at a minimum the room is not “lily-white” — as there appear to be at least two women of Asian ethnicity. Second, while race and ancestry are critically important concepts and realities in many contexts, temporal, political, socio-economic and narrative, diversity is about much more than the color of skin. A person can be “black” having paler skin than Marilyn Monroe. So to make a judgment of the “monochromism” of the people in that room is simply short-sighted and making judgments based purely on visuals alone — as we know, a risky business.

But even if each person in that room indeed descends from the whitest of white ancestors, the “diversityDNA” of that group will still be multiple, unique and far-ranging. It may be based on the recognized “protected categories” such as age, gender, sexual orientation, physical abilities, marital status, genetic makeup, race, religion, etc. — or it may be based on a host of other ways that people differ. How we see status, hierarchy, time; how we find meaning in the world; how we communicate; how we relate to the physical world around us; how we perceive destiny. Who among us could legitimately, by a single photo, determine that the campaigners for President Obama are “monochromatic”?

I Could’ve Used DiversityDNA

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I love teaching! The best times are the ‘Ah-ha!’ moments of understanding and the ‘I didn’t think that was possible?’ revelations students experience a few times during the semester. Of course, I experience those moments too. My latest Ah-ha! moment was last semester when I began working with the DiversityDNA web app. After many discussions about the app and how different cultures relate to authority figures, it dawned on me why a former student had difficulty with my teaching style.
I like to encourage students to ‘question everything’ and frequently say ‘we’ll learn together as we discuss and work through classroom issues’. But last semester I quickly realized that one student wasn’t comfortable with that approach. Despite my request that students call me ‘Jeff’ (to encourage collegial and collaborative discussions of complex issues), she insisted on referring to me as ‘Dr. Klawsky’. I also noticed that during class discussions she rarely engaged with her classmates, even when they made excellent contributions to the discussion. Instead, she directed the vast majority of her comments and overall attention to me. And the papers she wrote consisted mostly of quotations of me and authors of assigned articles, despite my instructions that students include their own thoughts and ideas in their papers. Her behavior caught enough of my attention that I casually discussed it with other professors, after which it became clear that her behavior was consistent in all classes; in short, she put all of her professors on the proverbial ‘pedestal’.
So what was my ‘Ah-ha!’ moment? As you may have guessed, the student was from India where the culture stereotypically holds authority figures in high regard and there is significant deference to perceived status and hierarchy. But I also had another student from India who did not behave in a similar way. He easily accepted my collegial and collaborative approach.
So DiversityDNA taught me a couple of things. First, I need to be aware that my teaching style may be contrary to teaching styles of other cultures. In hindsight this seems obvious, but it was definitely not obvious to me when I was deeply involved in the content we were discussing in class, and not as much focused on the method of getting students to learn. Second, I need to recognize and treat each student as a diverse individual with a unique culture. Each student’s unique set of background and experiences will affect how willing each one is to participate in a collegial and collaborative learning process. Just being from India doesn’t mean that all students have the same cultural perspective; each has a different DiversityDNA.

The why of diversityDNA

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Simon Sinek gave a great speech at TED on how to inspire change. (Based on his book, Start with Why.) He said any organization can explain WHAT they do, and many HOW they do it. But what’s most important is to explain is WHY.

Here’s a 1 and 1/2 minute video on  WHY we’ve created diversityDNA software.

The old models for interaction and engagement and learning are not working well in our present, emerging age of information, connectivity and speed. People are tired of being categorized and compartmentalized. The standard categories often don’t actually help people communicate better with each other or work more collaboratively — in fact, they can divide.

We designed diversityDNA to allow you, as a user, to design yourself, to make your own choices about your identities and your values, assumptions and beliefs. And this process is transparent, meaning that no tricks are built in to “define” you . Then, by creating your own iceberg and comparing with others, you can make a swift leap from stranger to colleague, from impersonal to human being.

Listen up, cats: curiosity & “entrepreneurial learning”

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Fire up your podcast ears. Listen to Episode 2 of ReCivilization by the CBC, which “looks at the transformation of education and science, and how the sharing of knowledge is moving from the industrial-age model of a one-way broadcast from teacher to student to collaborative, discovery-driven learning, enabled by the web.” http://www.cbc.ca/recivilization/episode/2012/01/24/episode-two-open-source-knowledge/

The discussion with John Seely Brown about collaborative learning — designed to “amplify curiosity” — resonated deeply. It is, I think, at the heart of diversityDNA. We don’t provide prepackaged answers; we encourage people to ask questions and provide a way to obtain knowledge by collaboration. This is the future of learning.

I teach communication skills to first year college students at Iona College. The sheer excitement of this course is based on its necessarily collaborative nature. Students can’t learn to speak in public and communicate better unless they actually practice and (horrors) speak in public. So my challenge has been to move away from the traditional “delivery” system of knowledge to inspiring, or at least amplifying, my students’ engagement.

We start out very small. The first week of class, when I call roll, each student must reply with their name and a small, sometimes rather squeaky, “here!” By the second week, I require each student to choose a “tag” — the first line of a favorite book, poem, song, even a movie — which describes them. Then, eek, they must say that line at the beginning of each class. The following week, they must say their tag with different intonation, pitch, stress, amplification. This is the slow immersion approach. By the fourth week, I hear the tags said with gusto & enthusiasm, or at the very least without a whine.

I also assign, the first week, each student a partner, whom they must interview. Easy enough, eh? Then they must each report back something to the class about their partner. Oh the things they find — fantastic, who knew so many points of commonality? Greg and Lila both are dog-lovers, Sammy and Luis come from huge families, Jenna and Joe both love shopping and Taylor Swift.

Then, I partition the class into groups. Each team must meet, determine points of similarity and difference for each individual. For each difference, the team must identify the strength it brings to the group. The team must also identify 5 values held by them all, and choose a logo and name to represent those values. This information goes into a powerpoint or prezi, which the team then presents to the class. By that point, I find the teams easily get up, laughing, comfortable and able to share identities in front of 23 people who last month were strangers. Team Tiger, Team Silent Ladies, Team Keep on Truckin’. This is collaborative learning, from my point of view. It is designed to amplify curiosity, engage the students in learning, by discussion, owning their communication, contributing to their unique creation. They learn far more from their participation than I could ever teach by lecture.

In our age of information and globalization, the teaching & learning models have undergone a deep shift. The academic model used to be based on “delivery” of knowledge. Students sat and took extensive notes from the experts. Now, the concept of learning has shifted to a proactive “pull” model — anybody with access to the internet can reach out and grab information. My 6th-grade daughter wanted to know how fish communicate….just type it into Google and voila! (Answers deeply interesting to an 11-year old, too.)

Curiosity drives the proactive “entrepreneurial learning” recognized as success-critical in our new age of information and globalized communication. (Great reads:  Learning in the Digital Age, John Seely Brown; The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation, George Loewenstein; ” Managing the Curiosity Gap Does Matter: What Do We Need to Do About It? James W. Gentry, Alvin C. Burns.)

Diversity and information security, Part 1

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I’ve been thinking recently about diversity and information security, and ways in which diversityDNA™ can be applied to security analysis and security training. I suppose I could add another tag line for our concept—”Human Diversity: Strength or Threat?”

Many of the aspects we examine in our approach to diversity are also important in social engineering methods for breaching security. In social engineering the object is to take advantage of people to subvert or bypass security measures, and the human characteristics that can be employed in his way can be just about anything.

The traits most commonly exploited are: desire to be helpful; deference to authority; unwillingness to seem ignorant or foolish; fear; and curiosity. Our app gives individual and organizational perspectives on these traits that I think would help an analyst in mapping the social attack surface.

More on this latter….

Let me tell you a story.

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1961. Oakland, California. When I was 5, my mother announced we were moving to Ghana, Africa. “We” were my mum, myself and my 6-year old sister. Assuming it meant someplace possibly as far as Oregon, where I’d driven once with my dad, I ran downstairs to tell my neighbor friend, the older and wiser 7-year old Dennis. “Africa,” he said, eyes getting really big, “wow, that means when you come back, you’ll be black.”

I ran right back upstairs to announce this startling news to my mother. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she dismissed me with no further discussion, except “Dennis doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”  And the next month, off we flew, all dressed up in special party clothes ~ that’s how people traveled on planes then. New York, London, then Accra, the capital of Ghana, newly independent from the United Kingdom.

Stepping off the plane onto the tarmac and into the richly fragrant and humid air, I looked all around as we walked to the arrival area. There, I saw my first Ghanaian. A well-endowed woman, in a closely fitted, vividly yellow dress. With short, close-cropped curly hair. And in my loudest, most piercing 5-year old voice, I asked my mother, “Mommy, WHY IS THAT MAN WEARING A DRESS?”

“Shhh, that’s not a man, pumpkin, that’s a lady.” “BUT HE HAS SHORT HAIR!”

Of course, I thought she must be a man because in 1961, every African-American woman that I knew ~ in my 5 year-old California-centered world ~ wore their hair straightened and long. In my 5-year old categories, length of hair trumped everything else. All of the visual evidence that she was a woman, the dress, the curves, were irrelevant. It was the SHORT HAIR. Obviously a man!

Within days and weeks, I began to understand and recognize the different & unspoken codes and rules of our new home.  Six years living in Ghana, and more around the world, it became clear that Dennis, our presumptuous and bumptious little neighbor in Oakland, was sort of right. My skin didn’t turn black (despite many hours in the sun). But I was forever changed inside ~ my diversityDNA changed, my internal operating system, how I categorized, how I saw the world, and other people.

These days, even though I still have my “yellow dress moments” — that person MUST be x, y or z, I’m more likely to pause and think about what rules I’m applying, what assumptions I’m making. And I still feel like I’m 5 in those moments.

Those yellow dress moments wake us up, windows and doors into other ways of seeing things. I hope you might share one of your YDMs with us here at diversityDNA.

Welcome to the diversitydna blog

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We intend this to be a place where you can ask questions of us and give us your perspective on diversity issues, broadly defined.

Strong viewpoints are welcome, including controversial views. Personal attacks will not be tolerated and will be deleted as soon as we notice them.

Deb, Jeff, Nadir and Joe will all be posting from time to time; check the about page on the site to learn more about us.