Sharp Talks is a Pikant & Naumof project which aims at bringing a behavioral science perspective to sensitive issues such as poverty, corruption, human rights, discrimination, crime etc.
Each episode is hosted by Nicolae NAUMOF and a guest specialized in a different field is invited. We discuss sensitive issues and bring two (scientific) perspectives on the topic in the hope that we will bring some light on it.
The Second Episode of Sharp Talks is focused on the topic of Gender Pay Gapparticularly on the causes that underlie the difference in payment between women and men. The guest of the second edition is Lorraine Villageoiswho is specialized in Law & Human Rights.
Enjoy the show and let us know what you think of it.(Take into account that we are not professional film-makers or TV specialists and the show is done on a very low budget… so focus on the talk :) )
Note: This content is not addressed to people who are under the age of 18.
Here are links and references to some of the materials we mentioned during the talk.
Here's the recording of the Webinar on Constructed Preferences - Why We Want What We Want - I gave on November 12.
Here is
what Bjarke
Schlechter, Msc in Psychology, said about the webinar:
Nicolae Naumof managed to give an inspirational and
educational webinar, into the world of human choice. The presentation was very
precise and Nicolae was able to make key points come alive, with great examples
from the real world.
This is
an introduction to Designing Decisions - Training in Choice Architecture.
I ask of you to make an exercise
of imagination and think that you are a medical doctor in the city of Vienna at
one of the world’s best hospitals. You are a true gentleman, member of an elite
profession with outstanding education and highly respected by the entire
society. You have spent many years learning medicine and you exercise your
profession in good faith, doing what you know is best for your patients. You
strive to fulfill your duties to the best of your capabilities. Your goal is to
make people healthy again and, if the case, save their lives. Despite of your
best efforts, some of your patients die. You think that this is the way of nature and even God’s will. After all, not everyone can
be saved even if you apply the best of your knowledge in medicine.
The year is 1849 and Vienna is the
capital of one of the world’s most powerful empires. Naturally, the hospital in
Vienna has the best physicians in (central) Europe. Many smart and highly
educated people are practicing the noble science of medicine. However, there
are some diseases that can’t be cured and one of them is childbed fever which kills many women very soon after they gave
birth. Despite the fact that the women who gave birth in this world-class
hospital benefited from the care of some of the best doctors of the time, many
of them (up to one third) die soon after their children were born. This must be
the will of God or just nature’s way, since even the best
doctors in the empire can’t help the new mothers. Certainly this condition - childbed fever – is caused by something
that is beyond human understanding. It must have some cosmic origins.
If you detect something that is
not quite as it should be, do not forget that it is the year 1849.
One of your colleagues, a fellow
doctor, who works in one of the maternity units of the hospital, has a wacky
idea that childbed fever can be
prevented. This is a bit awkward since the condition is known to be the way of nature,
the price that nature sometimes asks
for bringing a new life into the world. This weird doctor is Ignaz Philipp
Semmelweis. He made the students and trainee doctors who are under his
supervision to perform an unusual activity in the middle of their daily
routine. Usually, doctors, students and trainee doctors would work on the cadavers
in the basement of the hospital. (Cadavers were, and still are, used for
teaching and research purposes). Afterwards they would perform their work with
(living) patients. The wacky doctor Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis asked his students
and trainee doctors to do something very unusual and that made absolutely no sense exactly after finishing the work with the
cadavers and just before starting their patient duties. He asked them to wash their
hands (with chlorinated lime solutions). The students and trainee doctors were
surprised by the unusual request. They couldn’t understand why doctor Semmelweis
would ask them to do this since it made
absolutely no sense. (Remember, the year is 1849). Some of the trainee
doctors complained to the hospital’s management and an investigation was
launched since the wacky doctor has created a new protocol and established new
rules without the express approval of the management.
Doctor Semmelweis told the
hospital’s management board that he noticed that when he washed his hands
before working with the women in the maternity, the number of women who got childbed fever decreased dramatically
from about 30% to about 1%. He also said that he asked his students and trainee
doctors to do the same and that this rule of washing hands before working with
patients should be introduced to the entire hospital.
The board wasn’t very happy with
this outrageous suggestion and asked doctor Semmelweis to give an explanation.
The doctor could only say that cadaveric
particles on the doctors’ hands would cause blood poisoning to the women in the maternity. This made no sense
to the doctors in the hospital management, since doctors by their very nature
could not have dirty hands as factory workers and farmers had. They were true
gentlemen. How could they be the cause of a disease which is due to cosmic
influences? Clearly doctor Semmelweis is not in his right mind anymore.
Let’s leave the mid-nineteenth
century Vienna and come back to today.
For you it makes no sense that for the doctors in the board of the hospital
it made no sense to wash their hands
before working with (live) patients. This is because you know that bacteria
exist. You have the notion of bacteria and of micro-biology. The doctors in
those days didn’t have these notions. For them such things simply didn’t exist
and naturally since they didn’t exist they can’t cause childbed fever or any other disease.
This was true also for doctor Ignaz
Philipp Semmelweis. He had no notion of bacteria or micro-biology; he used the
term of cadaveric particles. 1849 was
twenty years before the recognition of Louis Pasteur’s work on micro-biology
and its applications in medicine.
The doctors in the board of the
Vienna Hospital were acting to the best
of their knowledge. Can you blame them for not knowing something that wasn’t
known by anyone? For them, it actually
made no sense to wash their hands since they did not know that bacteria (on
their hands) existed. The (only) reasonable explanation was that Ignaz Philipp
Semmelweis has gone crazy.
In fact, Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis
was fired from the hospital in Vienna and soon after was committed into a mental
asylum where, fourteen days later he was beaten to death by the guards. Ignaz
Philipp Semmelweis died being considered mad, with shame instead of glory. Only
twenty years after his death his work received the proper merit.
Earlier I said that the doctors
on the board of the Vienna Hospital can’t be blamed for not knowing something
that was not known by anyone. What they can be blamed for is: not knowing that
there are things they don’t know. They can be blamed for holding too firmly to
their existing beliefs and giving too much credit to the mystic explanation.
They can be blamed for not accepting that they are not omniscient, that they
didn’t accept that they can make mistakes or simply hold invalid opinions. They
can be blamed for Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis dyeing in disgrace, but most
importantly they are to be blamed for all the women who died from childbed fever in between the time that
they rejected Semmelweis’s proposition and the time it was finally accepted
that washing hands before working with patients makes sense.
The story of Ignaz Philipp
Semmelweis is a sad and bitter one. His story tells us that we should know that
there are many things we don’t know. His story tells us that it may very well
be the case that what we think makes no
sense, in fact, makes all the sense
in the world once you add a bit of (missing) knowledge.
Sharp Talks is a Pikant & Naumof project which aims at
bringing a behavioral science perspective to sensitive issues such as poverty,
corruption, human rights, discrimination, crime etc.
Each episode is hosted by Nicolae NAUMOF and a guest
specialized in a different field is invited.
We discuss sensitive issues and bring
two (scientific) perspectives on the topic in the hope that we will bring some
light on it.
The First Episode of Sharp Talks is focused on the topic of
Poverty, particularly on Self-Enforced Poverty. The guest of the first edition
is Fred Sepp who is specialized in sociology and political science.
Enjoy the show and let us know what you think of it. (Take
into account that we are not professional film-makers or TV specialists and the
show is done on a very low budget… so focus on the talk :) )
Note: This content is not addressed to people who are under
the age of 18.
Here are links and references to some of the materials we
mentioned during the talk.
On October 9th I, Nicolae Naumof, gave a half a
day workshop on the topic of choice architecture at MediaLAB Amsterdam, part of
Hogeschool Amsterdam (University of Applied Sciences Amsterdam).
Sixteen students attended the workshop and they have been acquainted
with some basic elements of choice architecture and with some real-life
examples of how choice architecture is used. In the second part of the
workshop, the students solved two case studies on analyzing and respectively
constructing a choice set.
Here’s what Marco van
Hout - Program and research coordinator MediaLAB Amsterdam said about the
workshop:
Pikant & Naumof recently facilitated
the workshop 'Choice Architecture' for the MediaLAB Amsterdam students. These
students follow a high-paced design program and work for 20 weeks in
multicultural and interdisciplinary teams on challenges from industry.
Nicolae's workshop proved vital for their knowledge of human behavior, and in
particular in how to design for and optimize choice architectures.
Besides being very
informative, the workshop was full of fun facts and engaging examples/
exercises. I highly recommend this workshop to anyone interested in optimizing
their product, interface or business model through clear guidelines in how to
persuade, convince and nudge people's decisions.
For me, giving this workshop was a pleasure. For some time I
had not worked with young people and it was a great pleasure to see the energy,
enthusiasm and willingness to learn the students at MediaLAB Amsterdam.
The main idea behind the framing
of outcomes effect is that we perceive outcomes as gains or losses and what
represents a gain or a loss depends on a reference that can be manipulated. The
change in decision and in behavior is due to loss aversion – losses loom larger
than gains.
There is, however, a different
type of framing – Emotional Framing – which doesn't rely only on loss aversion.
The main psychological mechanism that powers emotional framing is the affect
heuristic.
The very nature of negative
emotions is to keep us from harm. Obvious examples are fear and disgust which
are negative basic emotions and play an important role in keeping us safe from
things that might kill us. Of course this was more the case with our very
distant ancestors, but even nowadays it is wise to not stay too close to something
that smells disgusting.
Naturally we tend to avoid things
that have a negative emotion attached to it.
For example, in the recent wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expression of friendly
fire was used extensively in reports about soldiers who died. The term friendly fire sounds benign and has a
low load of negative emotion. Unfortunately the reality is that his very
smartly chosen expression stands for we
killed our own which you have to admit has a much larger negative emotions
baggage.
In the year 2013 another
term became very popular at least in the US and Europe: Monetary easing also known as Quantitative
easing. This sounds really nice and at first glance I think we could all
use some ease on our monetary affairs. Despite its benign sound, this
expression stands for Printing Money.
Of course, these days’ central banks are not actually printing extra money, but
the outcome is exactly the same (e.g. inflation)…
Another area where emotional
framing is present is in supermarket promotions, at least the ones in Albert
Heijn (the main supermarket chain in The Netherlands). It is quite common to
have promotions such as: 2 + 1 (Free)
or the second identical item is half
price.
If shoppers would actually give
some thought to what the underlying message is, they would probably buy fewer
items.
2 + 1 (Free) actually means that you get 33.33% discount if and only if you buy three items.
The second one is half price actually means that you get 25%
discount if and only if you buy two identical items.
If we would actually think like
computers it should make no difference how the message is framed, but we are
not reasoning machines.
The essence of marketing is that
a company should best adapt its offering (product / service, pricing,
distribution etc.) to the target group’s needs and preferences.
This is based on the assumption
that (all) preferences are pre-existent and stable. The classical example for
this is: if you prefer apples over
oranges and you prefer oranges over peaches then for sure you will NOT prefer
peaches over apples.
Is this assumption solid?
Both real life and academic research
say that it is not. We do not always have clear pre-existing preferences. Think
about buying a washing machine… do you really know which one you want before
starting to look for one?
Quite often, our preferences are
constructed while choosing and what we prefer is significantly influenced by
the choice environment. The constructive nature of (some of) our preferences
leads to the instability of preferences. In simpler words, our preferences can
change depending on which choice environment we are in while making the
decision.
During the Why We Want What We Want - Webinar we will challenge the assumption
of stable pre-existing preferences and take a look at how they are constructed.
You will be introduced to the concept
of constructed preferences and you will be acquainted with examples of how
factors other than individual preferences influence choice.
You will be acquainted with the
preconditions for construction of preferences and
You’ll see how we get to like
what we have chosen through post-rationalization.
Join me on
November 12 for the Why We Want What We
Want – Webinar from Pikant &
Naumof
15:00 Central
European Time (Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Budapest,
Bern, Prague Stockholm, Copenhagen etc.)
14:00 GMT (British Time)
16:00 Eastern European Time
Duration: 50
minutes
Registration
for Why We Want What We Wantwebinar
There are 80
Fully Subsidized seats.
Registration beyond this quota will be charged, the price
being 19Euros / attendee (VAT applicable for clients in The Netherlands)
Sign up early and get
an unpaid seat for the Pikant &
Naumof webinar on the November 12.
