In Search of Paradox

I'm reading the book, What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios that Keep Scientists Up at Night. It consists of 100 top scientists few-page explications of their fears.

One of those essays, Amanda Gefter's, made me stop reading to write this blog post. It raised an issue that will forever change the way I think about how to identify and solve problems.

She pointed out that Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein conterminously developed the theory of special relativity yet only Einstein is heralded. Why? Because only Einstein's approach led to an explanation of why that theory is valid.  He did that by looking for and then trying to resolve a paradox.

I know next to nothing about particle physics so I turned my attention to trying to find paradoxes in fields I do know something about: human behavior, especially as it pertains to education, career, and health.

Here are four such paradoxes and a proposed resolution for each. If these resolutions stand up to the logical test of time, they may warrant empirical study.

Praise doesn't always motivate more than does criticism

One of educational psychology's core principles is to emphasize praise over criticism. The theory is that praise simultaneously gives feedback and builds self-esteem and thus motivates the recipient to repeat the praised behavior and make further efforts at improvement.

Yet how often have we heard that a person took on a challenge only when told, "You can't do that." I recall, for example, a client who said that only when a high school counselor said, "You're not college material," did he decide to start working hard at school--he wanted to prove that counselor wrong.

A possible resolution of the paradox lies in there being a hierarchy of motivators: Yes, praise is a motivator but being told "You can't" is often stronger. Why? Because it's hard to accept that you're inadequate, a loser. In contrast, praise, while motivating, also engenders complacency. The recipient can't help but relax a bit: "Okay, I'm good enough at least for a while." Perhaps that partly explains why Asians, with a culture that emphasizes self-effacement more than praise, on average have the lowest self-esteem, even though their average achievement is the highest.

Better unemployed than a low-status job

Many unemployed people whose most recent job was white- or skilled blue-collar won't take a job that is "beneath them." Their behavior suggests they'd rather be unemployed than, for example, work as a hotel room cleaner. 

Perhaps that derives from their thinking that if they take such a job, they'''ll be permanently stuck at such a job: They'll come home tired from work and lack the energy to look for a better job. Besides, their resume will indicate that their most recent job is hotel room cleaner. That's unlikely to make their resume rise to the top of the stack for a middle-class job. The resistance may also derive from fear of embarrassment--having to tell spouse, family and friends that they've gone from white-or skilled blue-collar to manual labor.

A possible solution might be to first acknowledge to the person that such worries are understandable but that they may be sufficiently mitigatible to justify taking such a job:
1. Let your supervisor and the hotel general manager know you're eager to be promoted and ask what you need to do to make that likely.
2. Leave that low-level employment off your resume for a few weeks. Longer than that gets increasingly dishonest. Use that time pressure to make yourself devote a few hours a week toward finding a higher-level job: Contact everyone in your near and distant network, cold-contact employers that are at least one notch higher-level. For example, if you're a room cleaner at a crappy hotel, drop in on the manager at the Ritz-Carlton and ask for a good job but say you're willing even to be a room cleaner: better to be a room cleaner the Ritz-Carlton than at a flea-bag.
3. Reduce the embarrassment by not telling family and friends about the job or if necessary, explaining only that you've taken an interim job and are working hard to find something better.

Employers often knowingly hire a sub-optimal person

Corporations and nonprofits are ever more focused on cost-cutting: reducing training budgets, expense accounts, anything that doesn't directly build the bottom line. Yet when it comes to hiring, an enormous expense, they often throw cost-effectiveness out the window. The Internet makes it easy to do a worldwide search for the most cost-effective employee. Yet many employers cast a narrow net and worse, end up basing who they hire too much on looks, pleasant personality, etc.

The paradox may derive from the fact that, for many hirers, sexual attraction, the drive to feel superior, and/or be liked trumps their caring about the bottom line. The boss loses nothing by cutting expense account budgets but hiring the most cost-effective employee often means hiring someone less attractive and sycophantic and who is smarter and harder-working than s/he is.

A partial resolution may reside in making hiring decision-makers aware of this tendency. Of course, that won't work with hirers who, even if so aware, care more about personal gratification than the organization's profitability. At least a small percentage of that category of hirers might be helped by asking them the foundational and likely guilt-inducing question: Considering what's good for your career, your coworkers, your organization, and for society, how important is your pleasure versus the organization's products and services being better?"

Heart attack victims quickly return to their bad habits

Ninety percent of coronary bypass patients are, within two years, back to their old fat-, smoke-, and/or stress-filled ways within six months. 

Perhaps they're not convinced that retaining the changes will significantly-enough delay another coronary event. Or they believe their life is bad enough that even if reverting to their unhealthy behaviors shortens their life, the pleasures would be worth it.

A possible resolution may be for a counselor to ask the patient about each of the above. It's possible that consciously considering those would make some patients at least moderate their behavior. Perhaps even more potent, a counselor might try to help the patient find reasons to live: the joys of grandparenting, nature, music, work, whatever.

Is there a paradox in your field that you might try to resolve?