Unobtrusive Measures

Students at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois making their voices heard and demands seen. These students are voicing a common frustration that I've heard from students of color on several campuses. The school "wants their faces, but not their voices." In other words, the students feel that the campus wants to appear diverse without actually providing necessary resources for them, considering potential obstacles to their success, advocating for them, and valuing the unique perspective that these students bring. The last sign reads, "Don't put me in your diversity brochure." This is something that colleges need to think about. If you are going to have initiatives to attract a diverse student body, you better have even better programs to make them feel valued and welcomed once they arrive. This is true of universities and organizations alike.

The age old question...can moms have it all - career and family. The Mom Project thinks they've found a way by pairing skilled, professional moms with companies for short-term, part-time, remote projects. Several things frustrate me about this. 1) The question never has been and never will be "Can dads have it all?" 2) Apparently for a mom to have it all, it means doing it all simultaneously. If this article were written for working dads, I doubt they'd have him holding and feeding the baby while ostensibly reviewing a document. 3) Part-time, short-term, and remote options still remove women from the workplace and make them more likely to fall behind and be overlooked for opportunities. 4) The message of this and other "solutions" still puts the burden on moms to make it work rather than recognizing that there are ways that partners and organizations can contribute to the solution. Truly making the workplace work for moms is going to require 1) expecting dads/partners to play a more active parenting role in dual-career couples, 2) companies making accommodations to allow dads/partners to contribute to child and home care more, 3) and organizations offering child care on-site, nursing lounges, and other services that will remove obstacles to women returning to work after having children. These would be a good start at least.

Notice the lights above each car. In this parking garage, a red light should indicate that a spot is taken. A green light should indicate an empty spot. The light on the right has made a Type 2 error. It is telling us that there is nothing there, but we can clearly see that there is a car in the spot.

At first glance, this looks like a classic case of social loafing (people slacking off while working in a group because responsibility is distributed among all members making each feel less responsible for accomplishing the task) - one guy working while three stand around watching him. However, there’s another important productivity loss that occurs when people work together- coordination loss. These men’s jobs can’t be performed simultaneously so three are left waiting while the man operating the truck does his job. This occurs whenever people must share finite resources while performing a task.

While this campaign aimed at increasing cultural intelligence is unlikely to change someone’s mind who does not share these views, it does do several important things. 1) It raises awareness of these viewpoints, which in many areas may be minority opinions. 2) It causes people to confront these viewpoints and consider why they agree or disagree with them. 3) It makes these viewpoints seem more normative. 4) It provides social validation for those that share these views.

On March 6th, 2017, Google launched a brilliant piece of persuasive technology to nudge users in the direction of empathizing with the plight of refugees. Google Fortunetelling was supposedly a beta program where you could pose a question about your future and Google would attempt to predict the answer. However, upon typing a letter or two, the search bar would auto-complete several questions that a refugee may have regarding their own future, such as “Will I be reunited with my family?” The power of this PT appears to lie in the juxtaposition of the relatively trivial questions you were thinking of posing and the incredibly serious questions that refugees face when thinking about their own future. This forces users to engage in perspective taking that is likely to lead to an increase in empathy, at least for those users who do not hold strong prejudicial feelings against refugees.

While these town names likely reflect the surnames of early founding members of their respective communities, the juxtaposition of the names makes this image a nice one for discussing issues of race - particularly implicit versus explicit racism- during a class lecture.

Often we rely on other people’s behavior to guide our own. While this type of observational learning or use of heuristics can be an adaptive strategy, it can also lead you astray if your goals are different than those of others or if the information used by those others to guide their behavior does not apply to you. In such cases, a more effortful processing style is required.

The asymmetric pattern of wear on this door is an example of erosion, but there is a confound in this unobtrusive measure. The wear could indicate a higher frequency of right-handed people using the door. Or, consistent with the cultural norm of driving on the right side of the road and walking on the right side of the sidewalk, it could reflect people’s preference to use the door on the right rather than left side.

Garlic, horseshoe, and a saint.

Waiting for the bus in Chicago.