by Annie Duke
The group ideally exposes us to a diversity of viewpoints: The Dissent Channel is codified in the Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Manual, 2 FAM 071-075.1, https://fam.state.gov/fam/02fam/02fam0070.html. Its history and origins were described in several news stories about uses of the Dissent Channel in the Obama and Trump administrations. See Joseph Cassidy, “The Syria Dissent Channel Message Means the System Is Working,” Foreign Policy, June 19, 2016; Jeffrey Gettleman, “State Dept. Dissent Cable on Trump’s Ban Draws 1,000 Signatures,” New York Times, January 31, 2017; Stephen Goldsmith, “Why Dissenting Viewpoints Are Good for Efficiency,” Government Technology, July 26, 2016; Neal Katyal, “Washington Needs More Dissent Channels,” New York Times, July 1, 2016; and Josh Rogin, “State Department Dissent Memo: ‘We Are Better Than This Ban’ ,” Washington Post, January 30, 2017. For a list of the four awards for constructive dissent, see “Constructive Dissent Awards,” AFSA.org, http://www.afsa.org/constructive-dissent-awards.
The CIA’s acknowledgment of the red-team approach in the raid on Osama bin Laden was also mentioned in Neal Katyal’s New York Times op-ed, above.
Federal judges: drift happens: The details of the growing homogeneity in the chambers of Supreme Court justices comes from Adam Liptak’s September 6, 2010, New York Times article, “A Sign of the Court’s Polarization: Choice of Clerks.” Justice Thomas’s hiring practices are described in the same article. The measure of his ideological distance from the other justices can be found in Oliver Roeder’s January 30, 2017, FiveThirtyEight.com article, “How Trump’s Nominee Will Alter the Supreme Court.” Roeder’s article introduced me to the data from a paper Lee Epstein and colleagues wrote in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. Justice Thomas’s remark about his hiring practices, including his adaptation of the famous line often attributed to Mark Twain about teaching a pig to sing, has been widely reported, including in David Savage’s profile, “Clarence Thomas Is His Own Man,” in the Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2011.
Wanna bet (on science)?: Several studies about corporate prediction markets mention the companies studied or those known to be testing prediction markets. See Cowgill, Wolfers, and Zitzewitz, “Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows.” Some studies also refer to some of the companies anonymously. For an example of a study doing both, see Cowgill and Zitzewitz, “Corporate Prediction Markets, Evidence from Google, Ford, and Firm X.” Both citations appear in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading.
CHAPTER 5: DISSENT TO WIN
CUDOS to a magician: I wish I had the space or the excuse to share more details from Robert K. Merton’s remarkable life. See the following stories celebrating his fascinating life: Jason Hollander, “Renowned Columbia Sociologist and National Medal of Science Winner Robert K. Merton Dies at 92,” Columbia News, February 25, 2003, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/03/02/robertKMerton.html; and Michael Kaufman, “Robert K. Merton, Versatile Sociologist and Father of the Focus Group, Dies at 92,” New York Times, February 24, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/nyregion/robert-k-merton-versatile-sociologist-and-father-of-the-focus-group-dies-at-92.html.
Mertonian communism: more is more: For an account of John Madden’s attendance at Vince Lombardi’s eight-hour seminar on one play, see Dan Oswald’s HR Hero blog post, “Learn Important Lessons from Lombardi’s Eight-Hour Session,” March 10, 2014. The documentary Lombardi was produced by NFL Films and HBO and initially appeared for broadcast on HBO on December 11, 2010.
Communicating with the world beyond our group: “Yes, and . . .” is so fundamental to group improvisation that it might be easier to list improv texts that don’t start with this rule. If you don’t have any improv texts handy, an excellent, practical description of “yes, and . . .” appears in Tina Fey’s autobiography, Bossypants.
CHAPTER 6: ADVENTURES IN MENTAL TIME TRAVEL
Night Jerry: I learned a great deal about the neural pathways involved in imagining the future and remembering the past from a conversation with Joe Kable, psychology professor at Penn and primary investigator at the Kable Lab at the university. One of Joe’s studies is cited in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading, though you should consider it just an introduction to his body of work. In addition to his work, I recommend, as a good overview for readers trying to learn more about the subject, the Neuron paper by Schacter and colleagues, cited in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading.
Our collective retirement-savings shortfall has been widely reported. For some excellent overviews of the behavioral issues involved in retirement planning and the size of the shortfall, see Dale Griffin, “Planning for the Future: On the Behavioral Economics of Living Longer,” Slate.com, August 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/prudential/2013/08/_planning_for_the_future_is_scary_but_why_is_that.html; Mary Josephs, “How to Solve America’s Retirement Savings Crisis,” Forbes, February 6, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryjosephs/2017/02/06/how-to-solve-americas-retirement-savings-crisis/#163d6e9015ae; and Gillian White, “The Danger of Borrowing Money from Your Future Self,” Atlantic, April 21, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/the-danger-of-borrowing-money-from-your-future-self/391077.
For a description of the Merrill Edge app, see Bank of America’s February 26, 2014, news release, “New Merrill Edge Mobile App Uses 3D Technology to Put Retirement Planning in Your Hands,” http://newsroom.bankofamerica.com/press-releases/consumer-banking/new-merrill-edge-mobile-app-uses-3d-technology-put-retirement-planni.
A flat tire, the ticker, and a zoom lens: For an interview with Professor Howard, including his fascination with flat-tire stories, see his conversation with Somik Raha, “A Conversation with Professor Ron Howard: Waking Up,” Conversations.org, October 17, 2013.
For an examination of Warren Buffett’s market prowess and Berkshire Hathaway’s stock performance over the last fifty years, see Andy Kiersz, “Here’s How Badly Warren Buffett Has Beaten the Market,” Business Insider, February 26, 2016. The graph of Berkshire’s long-term price compared with the S&P 500 was re-created from stock data from Yahoo! Finance and a study in Financial Analysts Journal by Meir Statman and Jonathan Scheid, “Buffett in Foresight and Hindsight.”
Tilt: A list of basic surfing terms can be found on http://www.surfing-waves.com/surf_talk.htm and https://www.swimoutlet.com/guides/different-wave-types-for-surfing. For an overview of all the different kinds of nails, go to any hardware store, or see http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/skills-and-know-how/tools/all-about-the-different-types-of-nails. The number of types of brain tumors was reported on http://braintumor.org/brain-tumor-information/understanding-brain-tumors/tumor-types.
Reconnaissance: mapping the future: There are innumerable descriptions of the planning and execution of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, so you can look practically anywhere to see this monumental example of scenario planning in practice. One such introduction to the subject is an interview that appeared in the Daily Beast with naval historian Craig Symonds, in connection with the release of his 2014 book on the subject. See Marc Wortman, “D-Day Historian Craig Symonds Talks about History’s Most Amazing Invasion,” TheDailyBeast.com, June 5, 2014, and, of course, Symonds’s book, Neptune: Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings.
Also, see Nate Silver, “14 Versions of Trump’s Presidency, from #MAGA to Impeachment,” FiveThirtyEight.com, February 3, 2017.
Backcasting: working backward from a positive future: For stories describing Olmsted’s genius in the design of Central Park and his use of backcasting, see David Allan, “Backcasting to the Future,” CNN.com, December 16, 2015, and Nathaniel Rich, “When Parks Were Radical,” Atlantic, September 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/better-than-nature/492716.
Premortems: working backward from a negative future: In addition to Gabriele Oettingen’s books and published work with her husba
nd Peter Gollwitzer (see citations in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading), I recommend that you look at her website based on an application of mental contrasting known by the acronym WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan), WoopMyLife.org. WOOP provides numerous practical ways to implement mental contrasting.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Allan, David. “Backcasting to the Future.” CNN.com, December 16, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/22/health/backcasting-to-the-future.
Arbesman, Samuel. The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date. New York: Current, 2012.
Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Rev. exp. ed. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.
Babcock, Linda, and George Loewenstein. “Explaining Bargaining Impasse: The Role of Self-Serving Biases.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 11, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 109–26.
Bailenson, Jeremy, and Laura Carstensen. “Connecting to the Future Self: Using Web-Based Virtual Reality to Increase Retirement Saving.” Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, 2009–2011. http://fsi.stanford.edu/research/connecting_to_the_future_self_using_webbased_virtual_reality_to_increase_retirement_saving.
Baumeister, Roy, Jennifer Campbell, Joachim Krueger, and Kathleen Vohs. “Does High Self-Esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles?” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4, no. 1 (May 2003): 1–44.
Berra, Yogi, and David Kaplan. You Can Observe a Lot by Watching: What I’ve Learned about Teamwork from the Yankees and Life. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008.
Bi, Chongzeng, and Daphna Oyserman. “Left Behind or Moving Forward? Effects of Possible Selves and Strategies to Attain Them among Rural Chinese Children.” Journal of Adolescence 44 (2015): 245–58.
Boston Public Library. “The 100 Most Influential Books of the Century.” TheGreatestBooks.org. http://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/42.
Boyer, Pascal. “Evolutionary Economics of Mental Time Travel?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, no. 6 (June 30, 2008): 219–24.
Brockman, John, ed. Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013.
Bronowski, Jacob. The Ascent of Man. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1973.
Cabane, Olivia Fox. The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2012.
Cabane, Olivia Fox, and Judah Pollack. The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2017.
Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012.
Camerer, Colin. “Neuroscience, Game Theory, Monkeys.” Filmed January 2013, posted on TED.com. https://www.ted.com/talks/colin_camerer_neuroscience_game_theory_monkeys#t-1912.
Campbell, W. Keith, and Constantine Sedikides. “Self-Threat Magnifies the Self-Serving Bias: A Meta-Analytic Integration.” Review of General Psychology 3, no. 1 (1999): 23–43.
Cassidy, Joseph. “The Syria Dissent Channel Message Means the System Is Working.” Foreign Policy, June 19, 2016. http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/19/syria-obama-assad-state-department.
Cavagnaro, Daniel, Gabriel Aranovich, Samuel McClure, Mark Pitt, and Jay Myung. “On the Functional Form of Temporal Discounting: An Optimized Adaptive Test.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 52, no. 3 (June 2016): 233–54.
Chen, M. Keith, Venkat Vakshminarayanan, and Laurie Santos. “How Basic Are Behavioral Biases: Evidence from Capuchin Monkey Trading Behavior.” Journal of Political Economy 114, no. 3 (June 2006): 517–37.
Cherones, Tom, dir. Seinfeld. Season 5, Episode 3, “The Glasses.” Written by Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Tom Gammill, and Max Pross. Aired September 30, 1993, on NBC.
Cialdini, Robert. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Rev. ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Cowgill, Bo, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitzewitz. “Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google,” January 2009. http://users.nber.org/~jwolfers/papers/GooglePredictionMarketPaper.pdf.
Cowgill, Bo, and Eric Zitzewitz. “Corporate Prediction Markets: Evidence from Google, Ford, and Firm X.” Review of Economic Studies 82, no. 4 (April 2, 2015): 1309–41.
Dalio, Ray. Principles: Life and Work. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.
Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. New York: Free Press, 2010.
Dawkins, Richard, “Replicators and Vehicles.” In Current Problems in Sociobiology, edited by King’s College Sociobiology Group, 45–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 40th anniv. ed. Oxford: Oxford Landmark Science, 2016. First published 1976 by Oxford University Press (Oxford).
Ditto, Peter, Brittany Liu, Cory Clark, Sean Wojcik, Eric Chen, Rebecca Grady, and Joanne Zinger. “At Least Bias Is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives.” April 13, 2017. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2952510.
Dreber, Anna, Thomas Pfeiffer, Johan Almenberg, Siri Isaksson, Brad Wilson, Yiling Chen, Brian Nosek, and Magnus Johannesson. “Using Prediction Markets to Estimate the Reproducibility of Scientific Research.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 50 (December 2015): 15343–47.
Duarte, Jose, Jarret Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim, and Philip Tetlock. “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38 (January 2015): 1–58.
Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Ed. with new afterword. New York: Random House, 2014.
Duhigg, Charles. Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2016.
Dyson, George. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. New York: Pantheon, 2012.
Easterbook, Frank, Circuit Judge. Jentz v. ConAgra Foods, Inc., 767 F.3d 688 (7th Cir. 2014).
Ellenberg, Jordan. How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. New York: Penguin, 2014.
Epstein, Lee, Andrew Martin, Jeffrey Segal, and Chad Westerland. “The Judicial Common Space.” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 23, no. 2 (May 2007): 303–25.
Ersner-Hershfield, Hal, G. Elliott Wimmer, and Brian Knutson. “Saving for the Future Self: Neural Measures of Future Self-Continuity Predict Temporal Discounting.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 4, no. 1 (2009): 85–92.
Fey, Tina. Bossypants. New York: Reagan Arthur Books, 2011.
Feynman, Richard. “Cargo Cult Science.” Engineering and Science 37, no. 7 (June 1974): 10–13.
Feynman, Richard. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. New York: Perseus Publishing, 1999.
Firestein, Stuart. Ignorance: How It Drives Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Firestein, Stuart. “The Pursuit of Ignorance.” Filmed February 2013, posted on TED.com. https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_firestein_the_pursuit_of_ignorance/transcript.
Fischhoff, Baruch. “Hindsight ≠ Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment under Uncertainty.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1, no. 3 (August 1975): 288–99.
Frederick, Shane, George Loewenstein, and Ted O’Donoghue. “Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review.” Journal of Economic Literature 40, no. 2 (June 2002): 351–401.
Gibney, Alex, dir. Catching Hell. Written by Alex Gibney, produced by Alison Ellwood, Libby Geist, and Matt McDonald. Aired on February 20, 2014, on ESPN. http://www.espn.com/video/clip?id=13883887.
Gilbert, Daniel. “How Mental Systems Believe.” American Psyc
hologist 46, no. 2 (February 1991): 107–19.
Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Gilbert, Daniel, Romin Tafarodi, and Patrick Malone. “You Can’t Not Believe Everything You Read.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65, no. 2 (August 1993): 221–33.
Gino, Francesca. “What We Miss When We Judge a Decision by the Outcome.” Harvard Business Review, September 2, 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/09/what-we-miss-when-we-judge-a-decision-by-the-outcome.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown, 2008.
Goldman, William. Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting. New York: Warner Books, 1983.
Goldman, William. The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure—The Good Parts. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973.
Goldsmith, Stephen. “Why Dissenting Viewpoints Are Good for Efficiency.” Government Technology, July 26, 2016. http://www.govtech.com/opinion/why-dissenting-viewpoints-are-good-for-efficiency.html.
Golman, Russell, David Hagmann, and George Loewenstein. “Information Avoidance.” Journal of Economic Literature 55, no. 1 (March 2017): 96–135.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.
Harford, Tim. “A Beautiful Theory.” Forbes, December 10, 2006. http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/10/business-game-theory-tech-cx_th_games06_1212harford.html.
Hastorf, Albert, and Hadley Cantril. “They Saw a Game: A Case Study.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49, no. 1 (January 1954): 129–34.
Haynes, Tara, Raymond Perry, Robert Stupnisky, and Lia Daniels. “A Review of Attributional Retraining Treatments: Fostering Engagement and Persistence in Vulnerable College Students.” In Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research 24, edited by John Smart, 227–72, Springer Netherlands, 2009.
