DO YOU JUDGE OTHERS? Do you also try to understand their situation? In this episode, Andrew Webb, member of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, joins Tyler to discuss history, presentism, and the Fundamental Attribution Error. Check out Andrew’s excellent podcast at: https://mymicrobehaviors.com/the-pod/
“I believe that we are far more able and competent than we're willing to give ourselves credit for. We are so much more capable if we're willing to dig in, create some self-awareness and then create tools that are for your own advantage and you are using it as opposed to being used by it.”
Tyler Small: Hello today we have Andrew Webb, a behavioral designer from Stanford University. Andrew and I have known each other for a few years. It's very exciting to have him on. And he's actually been working in the Behavior Design Lab with the famous BJ Fogg, who is a behavioral researcher, wrote Tiny Habits Andrew also holds a position working for this super cool company - everybody knows "Weave" here in Utah; there's a big building along the freeway. And he's the Director of Learning and Development for them.
I'm super excited to talk with Andrew today. He also has a podcast that recently launched and has just exploded, called MicroBehaviors. And so there's a ton of overlap here between micro-behaviors and hacking emotional intelligence because the micro-behaviors, often, that's the purpose of it... and so we'll be talking about that a little bit today.
Andrew. Welcome.
Andrew Webb: This is a treat just to be with you. We are going to geek out and enjoy it. I already know it.
Tyler Small: We are. We are. I've been anticipating this. As soon as I had the thought, I should do a podcast about emotional intelligence , one of the very next thoughts that I had was who should I invite to be on it? Andrew Webb. I should invite Andrew Webb to be on - that would be super cool.
Andrew Webb: Tyler, see you butter me up just to give me all sorts of confidence going into this. That's a beautiful move.
Tyler Small: It's true. It's very genuine. It's very genuine, I can assure you.
This is going to be a very exciting conversation today. So Andrew uses behavior design in order to help people hack their own emotional intelligence and accomplish other things that are sometimes not socially oriented tasks.
But Andrew, you have this podcast going and you're researching behavior design at Stanford. Tell us what, what got you into this? Why did you choose this line of work? And for those who don't know what behavior design is, because it can sound like a strange thing if you've never heard of before. Tell us about that, too.
Andrew Webb: Sure. Yeah. So I'm an entrepreneur by probably nature a little bit, but mostly by just context; my dad had the disease as well. And so after I got my undergrad, I started to work for a lot of small companies and a lot of them revolved around training and development and creating learning content - customized learning for organizations. And years ago, maybe seven or eight years ago, I was at a conference and I had about 150, 200 teachers that I was helping to identify their strengths and ways to use them as leaders in their own classrooms and how they could use them in a way that would help their students.
And honestly, I felt like we were killing it. It was not only an emotional experience, but they were motivated. And I remember it was the closest I had felt to Tony Robbins. And I walked away thinking I was pretty good. I thought, I think we made some real good here. I've done some real good.
But then I remember as well, a couple of weeks later doing my post check, I wanted to follow up on all the commitments they'd made, their accountability partners... Everything that I really wanted for them and that they had totally, all of them, raised their hands and said, I'm going to change.
What do you think happened?
Tyler Small: We know it, we know what happened.
Andrew Webb: We know exactly what happened. Nothing happened! Their habits were intractable. And that is when it hit me. I realized something had to shift and all this work and training and development, and even informational design - I just recognized there needed to be more.
And so I got steeped in the research. I read as much as I could - and still do. Trying to identify ways that we can change behavior, especially when we're talking about our aspirational behaviors, which is what your show's about.
And so that's kinda how I got into it. And from there. I've just been doing research with a number of different professionals. I have loved it. I eat, sleep and drink it. I think about it at every meeting about how do we shift behaviors.
And behavior design is... The best way to explain it is the methods and models that we can use to simplify behavior change. And a lot of those come from, like you mentioned, BJ Fogg, but there's also some other researchers that are really instrumental out there. And a lot of them have, have found ways to crack a part of the code. I think this is an ongoing battle that will forever be something we're trying to achieve. It's a code that we just keep chinking away at and that's what fascinates me.
Tyler Small: Very cool. So I have to ask you at this point - I hadn't thought of this question before but it comes up sometimes in, uh, marketing strategy theory and ethics and stuff like that. There's a lot of work out there on designing behavior change for other people. People think about IKEA. Like, you're going to walk through the store and you're going to spend this much money per foot as you navigate through the store. So we're going to get you to cover as much ground as possible, and we're going to give you these cues. And I listened to the definition you gave for behavior design: the methods and models we use to modify behavior. Is that right?
Andrew Webb: Yeah. And I would say, I would add with the caveat that the focus that I'm working on is that aspirational behavior change. The areas that you're referring to have totally been documented, not only at IKEA, but especially on our digital devices. And the methods that people use to create addicting products, or keep people engaged in social media, which is called the bottomless barrel. All of that has been well-documented and is starting to rise to the surface as a major concern. Where is the ethical boundary for digital wellness? What is the responsibility people have versus these organizations?
Here's where I stand on that spectrum: I believe that we are far more able and competent than we're willing to give ourselves credit for. These tools are just that: tools. Now, have they come to define us or rule our lives often? Yes. But we are so much more capable if we're willing to dig in, learn a little bit more about ourselves, create some self-awareness and then apply these methods of behavior design, where you create tools that are for your own advantage and you are using it as opposed to being used by it.
Tyler Small: I love it. I love it. I just wanted to ask you that question to help frame this conversation, lest our audience believe that we're just merely trying to manipulate.
Andrew Webb: And that's true. And there are a lot of people who are out there doing that for nefarious reasons or even just for financial gain. And that's absolutely not the world that I'm operating in. This is about self-improvement development and changing one tiny step at a time.
Tyler Small: Yeah! Your podcast, MicroBehaviors - I can't believe, I didn't know you're doing it - but it's just, it just launched two and a half months ago and it's blown up. So you're getting thousands of downloads per episode. Tell us, if you will, about that first episode.
Andrew Webb: Okay. It relates really well to, I think, the things that you guys are very interested in. In micro-behaviors we bring in history. And we believe - and I think it's true and everyone will nod their head in agreement - that history shows us how to behave. And if we're willing to listen to and understand as much as we can from history, then as a result we can start to learn from, we often hear the cliche, the mistakes of the past. Well, that gets a little complicated because sometimes the history is not so clean. Sometimes history has nuances and colors and palettes, that isn't great. And there are lessons that perhaps we don't understand; and historians like to refer to this as a concept where we start to judge the past and the people in the past with our own rules and our own beliefs and our own context.
And I think that was a really great segment for me to introduce a character. His name was Carl Akeley.
Tyler Small: What was his name?
Andrew Webb: Carl Akeley. Just the turn of the century. Carl Akeley was a hunter. And if you read his journals -and I love bringing in these primary resources and have actors act it out - but you read his journals. He went on a huge hunt in Africa with Theodore Roosevelt once. And he talks about killing, five gorillas, six giraffes, over a hundred birds, a couple of rhinos. A couple of these animals are on the extremely endangered list, right? You hear about the blood and savagery. He talks about killing these baby gorillas... It's just, you hear about this guy, you think, this guy is evil. Cannot stand this guy, right?
But as a result, you're learning very quickly, some of the judgments you're making about somebody, that you don't know their story. Turns out that Carl Akeley at the time was one of the heroes of natural sciences. Because they believed at the time that if you did not preserve these animals, if you did not take them, bring them back to these museums; and then and taxidermy create exhibits - because he was also the best tax taxidermists. Side note: he actually was the one who created the taxidermy exhibit for the elephants in the Barnum and Bailey Museum.
Anyway... They revered him because he was preserving what they believed was the last best efforts to create a momentum to save the animals. And when you hear that story, all of a sudden you start to recognize, maybe I went too far. And it's a great catalyst for us to understand how quickly we are to judge others, which, in the scientific sense, is what Lee Ross calls the Fundamental Attribution Error - our willingness to put a premium on a person's personality and discount their situation.
And it's the very core of what we do with people. All. The. Time. It's not for just people in the past, like Carly Akeley. It's for people we deal with around us. We put a premium on what we believe is their personality. As we interact with them: they speak louder, we think they're a jerk. They speak for us fast, or they say things in a funny way, or they are too demanding... We always, it's almost an always situation where we say that's who that person is, as opposed to taking a step back and saying, this is the situation they're in. So that's what we got talking about in our first episode.
Tyler Small: So, just to back up a step. I was right there. I was like, Oh wow, he's killing these baby gorillas. This is terrible. Like how could one bring themselves to just kill these baby gorillas and stuff? And why so many, and then I'm imagining what that would do for individuals for hundreds of thousands of individuals, maybe millions who saw them who saw them taxidermied and saw, Oh my goodness, these gorillas, it's not just this angry... Like he's actually breaking down that bias by doing that probably by having these very adorable creatures and showing us a different side to maybe the wild, crazy kind of perspective that we had before.
Andrew Webb: That's what presentism is. Historians are trying always to avoid presentism. The idea that I'm going to impose my current modern day beliefs on the person. We do the same thing with just people around us. I'm going to impose my code of conduct, the values, the beliefs windows that I have, on other people. Therefore they should behave according to how I see the world.
Tyler Small: Wow. Can you give us a few more examples of presentism? I feel like it's this huge thing that we could... you mentioned before you could spend days and I'm sure I could be right there with you for days, but... Can you give us just maybe two or three more quick examples of presentism so that we can start to...
Andrew Webb: Oh, sure. Presentism exists all the time... We look back at our founding fathers here in the nation. They'll never live up to the standards we have. The Greeks had slavery; that tells us far more about them than we are probably willing to admit. But at the same time, we are imposing certain elements. Now, is it wrong? Yes! It goes back to the point that you made earlier. Is there a moral judgment that can, that should be made at times? Yes. However, that doesn't discount the opportunity that is there for us to learn from that. And that's what presentism is about. You create, as much as you can, an objective assessment of those people of the past.
And I loved learning about this when I got my undergraduate training, cause if you could do that for people in the past, who, it is so - it feels so good to judge them. It feels so good! But then if you could learn how to do that with people in the past, how come I can't try and do that with people that I'm surrounded by every day who are living, breathing, humans that have hopes, dreams, and fears as well - that are different than my own.
Tyler Small: Can you give us a couple of examples of how we like... You gave us examples of the Greeks, the Founding Fathers. Can you tell us a couple of vivid vivid stories with more examples? Like how I'm in my daily life and somebody I work with, for example - how would presentism possibly occur there?
Andrew Webb: I would say presentism is a good context. What really occurs is what I would go back to is this research by Lee Ross, who is another professor at Stanford - still, I think he is one of the longest tenured professors there now. And Lee Ross, years ago when he was getting his PhD, he was going up for his big defense. And he was nervous just like any candidate would be. And he was so amazed at how smug these people on his council were, and how they were responding. And they're asking him questions that had nothing to do with this research. And Lee Ross was blown away by just the kinds of erudite, smug, ego-driven questions that had nothing to do about showing you what you learned, but instead of showing off what they already knew.
It turns out, a week later, Lee Ross was asked to be on somebody else's defense committee just by happenstance. And when he does it, guess what happens? He starts to ask questions that have nothing to do with the candidate's research. He starts to ask questions that show off what he already knows. And it hit him: how easily a situation can alter a person's behavior. That's what he learned.
And from there it created a catalyst, a cascade where now people's professions are built upon this context or this research, which is the "fundamental attribution error." Situational research, and how situations will absolutely alter people's behavior. And if you understand that - and by the way, this is, these are some of the best researchers out there - when they would do research on these participants, after a study, whether it be the marshmallow study or whether there would be some of our most revered studies on conformity, like Solomon Asch... We believe, and even the smartest researchers believe after the study, they had found something out about the person.
What Lee Ross is saying is no. No, no. You just found something out about the situation. And so that's what this entire first episode is about: we're learning how to avoid this fundamental attribution error - which is a scientific term for judging people too quickly, I would say.
Tyler Small: So the fundamental attribution error... We just have one more minute, but it seems like I've read something about that with The Nazis in World War II. Can you, can you help us understand? Because I think a lot of us, we say, Oh my goodness. If I had been in that context, then I would certainly, uh, certainly done differently.
Andrew Webb: Oh, that's a great example. And literally I'm holding in my hand, something I'm reading called, "Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Circumstances: Historians, Social Psychology, and the Holocaust." Talks just about that. How do we dive into - without condoning the actions of Nazis - dive into these people's of course, behavior and understand that because we are, we're afraid that if we do that will condone their actions, which is absolutely not true. What we're trying to do is understand the wild circumstances and situations that led them to do abhorrent things. And if you read the research, one of the things that they learned is that it created, or often some of the best manipulators - the people who did create or foster behavior change in nefarious ways - they created situations which were called escalating commitments in which they give people small doses escalated behavior of perhaps treating a person poorly this time. We’re not gonna throw you in and say, you've got to go now massacre a whole group of people; but instead it's, we want you to take away their passport. And then the next day, you're not just taking away their passport, but you're taking a piece of their jewelry.
Those incremental escalating commitments is how some of the most abhorrent acts took place, because these were normal people who did abhorrent things,
Tyler Small: "Fundamental attribution error." Wow.
Unfortunately we've used up the time for this episode, but we're going to have another one. We're going to have Part II. We're going to get really practical and give you three specific ways that you can use behavior design to hack your emotional intelligence. So we'll see you in the next episode.
This has been Andrew Webb and Tyler Small on Hacking Emotional Intelligence.