Adam Alter

Adam Alter is an assistant professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business. His new book Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave explores the incredible (and vastly underestimated) power of context in our lives.

Adam and I spoke about the color that can make you appear sexy and powerful, what money means to your brain, and how the weather influences your ability to think.

My conversation with Adam was over an hour long, so for brevity’s sake I’m only going to post edited highlights here.

If you want the extended interview I’ll be sending it out with my weekly newsletter on Sunday.

Join here.

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The Power of Context – Little things can make a big difference

Adam Alter:

In “Drunk Tank Pink“, I open with an anecdote that I think is a good emblem for a lot of the things that I talk about in the book. And that’s the effect of this shade of pink, in the beginning it was on prisoners in a naval prison. And this shade of pink some psychologists realized actually calmed down the prisoners and made them much more well-behaved and tranquilized them. And even the most aggressive of them, when they came out of the holding cell that had been painted this bright bubblegum pink shade were calmer, more manageable, more malleable. And I think the reason that it’s a good emblem for the other effects is that it’s something that no one expected ahead of time.

Everyone knows that pink is different from blue is different from red; and we have a pretty good sense that colors matter in some way. But what we don’t realize is the extent to which they seem to matter. So, this shade of pink, the effects that it has on people I think are far greater than anyone would imagine. It’s just one case of many in the book showing how much greater the effects are of these contextual factors than we imagine them to be.

 

Money means possibilities

Adam Alter:

I talk about symbols and how symbols influence us. I think the most striking part of that chapter is probably the effect of money on us. And there is some evidence that when you see money being destroyed, that it’s metaphorically like watching possibilities being extinguished. The brain actually registers pain when you watch money being destroyed.

Also, seeing money makes us less likely to help people. If we’re keeping a count of money or we happened to see an image of money, we are less helpful. We’re also less willing to ask for help. We experience less physical pain. We are able to withstand physical pain more than we could if we hadn’t just been exposed to money. So it is an incredibly powerful symbol.

 

Red makes you appear sexy and powerful

Adam Alter:

I talk a lot about the color red, because it has fascinating effects for all sorts of biological reasons. The color red is associated most strongly with blood. And blood in different settings means very different things. In the context of romance, the rush of blood to someone’s face signals romantic interest. And if a woman puts up six photos of herself online, each where she’s wearing a different color shirt that are otherwise identical, she will have more hits very reliably, if she’s wearing a red shirt. It’s actually true for men as well; the color red stimulates sexual interest in people. It gives them the sense that you’re sexually interested. And so in an online dating context, red is very powerful.

Of course, the color red means different things in other settings. It can mean that you’re aggressive, and you’re ready to fight. A rush of blood to the face is no longer about sexual interest. In some contexts it means that you’re angry. There’s some pretty good evidence from Olympic events to suggest that when Olympic athletes who are in combat even like tae kwon do, wrestling or judo, when those athletes are randomly assigned to wear either red or blue for their bouts, it turns out that even when they’re evenly matched the ones who wear red tend to do better than the ones who wear blue. Their win rate goes up because they are wearing red. And that could be because they behave more aggressively when they see the color red on themselves, because their opponent sees them and feels that they are more aggressive and imposing. Or there’s actually good evidence to suggest that the referee sees a person who is wearing red as more dominant than the one wearing blue. And so if you give a referee the same bout, they are watching the same event that you Photoshop the uniforms, they will give the win to the person wearing red even if it’s a different person across different conditions. And so they really are swayed by this stuff.

 

The weather affects your ability to think

Adam Alter:

On sunny days we actually think a little bit less clearly. We think more clearly on cloudier days because that makes us a little bit less happy. It tempers our moods, and when our mood is tempered we automatically seek ways to improve our moods, and it makes us more thoughtful. So in one experiment people left a small shop in Sydney, Australia. And when they left that shop on cloudy days, they were more observant and did a better job of remembering the features of the shops, of the layout of the shops than they did on sunny days.

 

Nature is a painkiller

Adam Alter:

As a scientist who studies human functioning and the way we think and feel and behave, I was skeptical about the research on nature and how nature could make us feel happier and better and think more clearly and recover from illness more quickly. I always found that to be a little hard to believe, but in doing the research for the book I’m completely convinced by these effects. I’m not 100% sure exactly of the mechanisms in nature that lead to these effects, but I think there are some fascinating ideas. But the effects are striking. And one of them is that people who are recovering in hospital who happen to be looking out at a stand of trees rather than a brick wall recover a day more quickly, in this case from bladder surgery.

That was the experiment done. And they required fewer painkillers. They complained to the nurses much less often. And the patients were identical to patients in other rooms with brick wall views. This view of nature is enough to make them feel better and to hasten their recovery. And the same is true about children in the long run. Children who happen to have experienced great stress as young kids do much better when they have a buffer in nature. So if they happen to live in a natural setting or their parents happen to have potted plants in the home or they just generally play outdoors in a natural setting, they like to play games that take place outdoors like soccer on a green field. All of that has major effects in buffering them against stress, against the negative effects of stress. So to me, that was the single biggest takeaway. And as someone who lives in New York City, I’m trying to bring in potted plants into my home because that’s really my only option here, unfortunately. I’m going to be running in Central Park more than I do right now.

 

How does context affect who you are?

Adam Alter:

As people move to different locations they become different versions of themselves. And the most extreme version of social psychology suggests we are always at the mercy of situations, of contexts, and that obviously resonates for you because you talked about it a lot on your blog. I think what the book suggests is that there is no single version of who we are, that we are malleable. We are different people in different contexts. We are more likely to leave litter on the ground when we happen to be in a dirty place. We are more likely to be honest when we see ourselves in the mirror or when there is a blue light shining that reminds us of the police, or when there’s a pair of eyes nearby that makes us feel like we’re being watched — even if it’s just an image on a billboard. What’s important about all of this is that we have this sense that there is a thread that runs through us, through time and who we are that ties us together from moment to moment. And I do think there is to some extent a thread and that people are different. Some people are going to be different in enduring ways and in chronic ways. But at the same time I think there’s far more within a person’s variance than we think or that we recognize. So I would say that’s the main striking point through all of this study. There are different versions of us. There is no single version of us.

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If you want the extended interview (where Adam discusses how your name can dramatically affect your life and the ways in which context can make us hate or like murderers) I’ll be sending it out with my weekly newsletter on Sunday.

Join here.

Join 45K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

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Great creative teams — what do they all have in common? What can we learn from them?

Keith Sawyer got his PhD studying under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the researcher who coined the idea of Flow. Sawyer looked at how creativity came about in collaborations vs. individuals. He analyzed jazz ensembles, improv comedy groups and other great creative teams to see what worked.

What did he find?

Via Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:

1. Innovation Emerges over Time

No single actor comes up with the big picture, the whole plot. The play emerges bit by bit. Each actor, in each line of dialogue, contributes a small idea. In theater, we can see this process on stage; but with an innovative team, outsiders never see the long chain of small, incremental ideas that lead to the final innovation. Without scientific analysis, the collaboration remains invisible. Successful innovations happen when organizations combine just the right ideas in just the right structure.

 

2. Successful Collaborative Teams Practice Deep Listening

Trained improv actors listen for the new ideas that the other actors offer in their improvised lines, at the same time that they’re coming up with their own ideas. This difficult balancing act is essential to group genius. Most people spend too much time planning their own actions and not enough time listening and observing others.

 

3. Team Members Build on Their Collaborators’ Ideas

When teams practice deep listening, each new idea is an extension of the ideas that have come before. The Wright brothers couldn’t have thought of a moving vertical tail until after they discovered adverse yaw, and that discovery emerged from their experiments with wing warping. Although a single person may get credit for a specific idea, it’s hard to imagine that person having that idea apart from the hard work, in close quarters, of a dedicated team of like-minded individuals. Russ Mahon— one of the Morrow Dirt Club bikers from Cupertino— usually gets credit for putting the first derailleur on a fat-tired bike, but all ten members of the club played a role.

 

4. Only Afterwards Does the Meaning of Each Idea Become Clear

Even a single idea can’t be attributed to one person because ideas don’t take on their full importance until they’re taken up, reinterpreted, and applied by others. At the beginning of Jazz Freddy’s performance, we don’t know what John is doing: Is he studying for a test? Is he balancing the books of a criminal organization? Although he was the first actor to think of “studying,” the others decided that he would be a struggling umpire, a man stubbornly refusing to admit that he needed glasses. Individual creative actions take on meaning only later, after they are woven into other ideas, created by other actors. In a creative collaboration, each person acts without knowing what his or her action means. Participants are willing to allow other people to give their action meaning by building on it later.

 

5. Surprising Questions Emerge

The most transformative creativity results when a group either thinks of a new way to frame a problem or finds a new problem that no one had noticed before. When teams work this way, ideas are often transformed into questions and problems. That’s critical, because creativity researchers have discovered that the most creative groups are good at finding new problems rather than simply solving old ones.

 

6. Innovation Is Inefficient

In improvisation, actors have no time to evaluate new ideas before they speak. But without evaluation, how can they make sure it’ll be good? Improvised innovation makes more mistakes, and has as many misses as hits. But the hits can be phenomenal; they’ll make up for the inefficiency and the failures. After the full hourlong Jazz Freddy performance, we never do learn why Bill and Mary are making copies for John— that idea doesn’t go anywhere. In the second act, a brief subplot in which two actors are in the witness protection program also is never developed. Some ideas are just bad ideas; some of them are good in themselves, but the other ideas that would be necessary to turn them into an innovation just haven’t happened yet. In a sixty-minute improvisation, many ideas are proposed that are never used. When we look at an innovation after the fact, all we remember is the chain of good ideas that made it into the innovation; we don’t notice the many dead ends.

 

7. Innovation Emerges from the Bottom Up

Improvisational performances are self-organizing. With no director and no script, the performance emerges from the joint actions of the actors. In the same way, the most innovative teams are those that can restructure themselves in response to unexpected shifts in the environment; they don’t need a strong leader to tell them what to do. Moreover, they tend to form spontaneously; when like-minded people find each other, a group emerges. The improvisational collaboration of the entire group translates moments of individual creativity into group innovation. Allowing the space for this self-organizing emergence to occur is difficult for many managers because the outcome is not controlled by the management team’s agenda and is therefore less predictable. Most business executives like to start with the big picture and then work out the details. In improvisational innovation, teams start with the details and then work up to the big picture. It’s riskier and less efficient, but when a successful innovation emerges, it’s often so surprising and imaginative that no single individual could have thought of it.

Join 45K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

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Michael Norton

Michael Norton is an associate professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. He is co-author of the new book, Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, which explains how the latest social science research can help you spend your money in ways that improve your happiness. (More on the book here.)

Mike and I spoke about how time affects happiness, why money is so motivating and how Netflix might just be making us less happy.

My conversation with Mike was over an hour long, so for brevity’s sake I’m only going to post edited highlights here.

If you want the extended interview I’ll be sending it out with my weekly newsletter on Sunday.

Join here.

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Why are we so obsessed with money?

Mike:

It’s one of the most fascinating things that humans do: we can know something and yet it doesn’t influence our behavior at all. It’s amazing how good we are at that. I know I should exercise and I don’t. I know I should eat healthy and I don’t. I know I should spend time with my kids and I don’t. I know that, yes, money isn’t going to make me happy and I still keep trying to make money. It’s an amazing thing about humans that we have these mistakes that we make all the time and it’s not lack of information.

So, one of the things that we want to feel about ourselves is that we’re getting better over time. My life is getting better or I’m making progress or I’m growing or learning. It would stink if you felt every year was worse than the year before.

Eric:

So money is a metric?

Mike:

Yes. Exactly. We’re looking around for, “Am I better off than I was last year?” Some things are hard to measure. So, “Am I a better dad than I was last year?” Well, there’s no objective scale where I can look back and someone says, “Last year you were a 71 dad. This year, you’re a 74 dad.” Or spouse or whatever it might be, it’s very, very hard to know. The things that we can know are things we can count, and one thing that is really, really easy to count is money. So, if I want to know if I’m better off this year than last year, one of the first things I can do is say, “Do I have more money?” I think that alone makes it very, very motivating.

It works with things like the size of your TV, the square footage in your house, all of these things that we can . . . The number of cars you have. “Am I better than I was five years ago? Well, I have five cars. I had no cars. I guess I’m better.” We’re just unable to correct for it because the other things that are important are hard to count and counting is great. It feels like math and math feels like science and we feel like we’re better off because there’s a confidence that I’m doing better, and it also works better with other people: “Am I better off than you? I don’t know, but if I have a bigger house than you, I beat you.“

 

“Is life nasty, brutish and short?”

Eric:

So, in a very Hobbesian turn, you did a study on “Is life nasty, brutish and short?” Can you talk about that?

Mike:

We started with the Hobbesian “Is life nasty, brutish and short?” and we tested it in a very simple way, which is we just asked people two questions and you can answer them yourself. One is, “Is life short or long?” The second question is, “Is life easy or hard?” Of course Hobbes said life is “nasty, brutish and short.”

It turns out that a massive majority of people agree with him that life is short and hard, something usually 50, 60, 70% of people agree, life is short and hard. Only 5% think the opposite, long and easy. So, very, very few people, if we ask them, say, “Life is long and easy,” including people for whom life is long and easy.

If we ask, for example, MBAs, who are a group of people who have extraordinary life outcomes. In human history, very few classes of people in the world have better average outcomes than people getting their MBA, because they all end up doing something interesting and they have enough money and things like that. Even they say life is short and hard. So, it’s not about, really, your life experience. It’s about what you bring to the table, and people seem to mainly have this theory that life is going to be short and hard. What’s sad about it is that’s associated with being unhappy, with being not civically engaged, with not volunteering, that when you have this view of life as short and hard, you tend to sort of ogre down and be sad. And this little tiny group of people, the 5% to say “Life is long and easy,” are incredibly happy people, totally engaged, tons of friends. There are huge fascinating differences on the basis of whether you think life is short and hard or long and easy.

 

Stop counting

Mike:

We talked earlier about the curse of counting things, which is fundamental, I think, to what we’re trying to say in the book, which is, “Knock it off. Knock off counting how much money you have and start thinking about what you’re doing with it. What you’re doing with your money and time is a lot more important than how much money and time you have,” and that has really changed my life.

“Knock it off, because it’s not good for your happiness and you’re probably focusing on the wrong dimensions for what will really make you happy.” It’s very hard to apply, but that’s something that I actually try to apply in my life, really, every day.

 

Which books do you recommend?

Mike:

Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational

Danny Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow

Adam Grant’s Give and Take

The books of Malcolm Gladwell

Don Campbell’s Unobtrusive Measures

 

Think about time

Mike:

One of the chapters in Happy Money is all about buying time. So, everything you buy, think about how it’s going to affect your time. Not the product itself, but what you’re going to do with it later and that massively changes your decision-making. So, not to come back to TVs, but buying a TV, you think, “Oh. This is going to be great. I’m going to have friends over and we’re going to watch TV and the kids will be there. We’ll have family movie night.” It turns out, when you buy a TV, what you do is you watch it by yourself in a dark room. It’s not good for you. If you think about, “Wait. How am I actually going to use this TV? How will it actually change my time?” you might say, “Maybe I don’t want to get a TV.“

Those kinds of decisions, alone, are very important to think about, not your fantasy of what it’s going to do, but “How will this actually change the time I spend in the weeks going forward?” and a TV commits you to thousands of hours by yourself, and that is not good for our happiness. I use this in my own life.

Really think about everything you buy. If you want to buy a huge house, that’s great. If it’s adding a two-hour commute, that’s not great, and think about not just, “Oh. Commute’s fine. I can do a commute.“ Think about two hours every day for the rest of your life. Do you really want to add that to your time or do you want to stay in the house that you’re in? It’s really an important thing to think about.

 

“Make it a treat”

Mike:

The idea is that the things that you really like a lot, stop. Stop it. So, if you love, every day, having the same coffee, don’t have it for a few days and, when you wait, and then you have it again, it’s going to be way more amazing than all of the ones that you would have had in the meantime.

The problem with that is, on any given day, it’s better to have a coffee than not, but if you wait three days and don’t have it, it’s going to be way better once you finally do. Interrupting our consumption is free. It actually saves you money and gets you more happiness out of the money spent. It’s like the best of all worlds, but we’re completely unable to do it, because we always want to watch the thing or eat the thing right now. It’s not “give it up forever.” It’s “give it up for short periods of time, and I promise you you’re going to love it even more when you come back to it.”

Eric:

Dammit, Netflix, stop giving me the whole season in one drop. You’re reducing my happiness.

Mike:

Exactly.

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If you want the extended interview (where Mike discusses how to increase free time, as well as a simple trick that can boost the enjoyment you get from life’s little pleasures) I’ll be sending it out with my weekly newsletter on Sunday.

Join here.

Join 45K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

What 10 things should you do every day to improve your life?

Here are the things that are proven to make you happier 

Can money buy happiness? 5 smart ways to spend it