Class discussion

1. Class discussion Benito Arruñada

3. Outline: Our mind & our institutions

5. Applications to projects? • Ideas & beliefs • Career • Expectations • Women & men • Contracting financial services • Reforming public services • Reputation of business • Online universities • Institutional reform

6. Which sport is tougher? • Psychologically? • In which is more painful to lose? • Chess, why? • Because there are not referees • What’s the moral?

7. Are smarter, better-educated individuals better at avoiding the traps of unreasonable beliefs? • The power of rationalization • Individual examples: perhaps the most prominent, on our own performance: examples? E.g., next slide? • The power of socialization • Social examples: collective killings (Nazi Germany) and suicides (from Numantia to Jonestwon) • How do we react when friends who stop believing / start thinking differently? • Big risk: we all suffer it… in different areas • How to cure or prevent? I.e., how to grow up from beliefs into ideas? • Diverse socialization: How homogenous are our groups? • Dilute stereotypes by knowing different persons, groups

8. Example • How to calibrate accusations that a teacher • “constantly despites students”? (E.g., “crosses the line of critique into scorn, jibe, sarcasm”) • Hypotheses—how to test, verify? • Teacher does despise students • Students in denial rationalize their own failures • What are the effects of soft versus clear criticism? Do we prefer to be told we do well even we do not? Have we? • ***** Application to course projects *****

9. Deflecting hard questions • Proposal: • “Identify the particular challenges of men and women in pursuing their professional careers” • Project: • Emphasis on how the environment must or can be changed • Triple deflection: • Only women • Changed to make our lives easier • Avoid hard personal questions • Risk: work hard  self-justifyng

10. Deflecting hard questions • Proposal: • “think strategically about professional career development”, “identify challenges from the environment, assets and possible deficits in emotional intelligence or technical competencies” • Project: • “How firms must adapt to young grads’ emotions” • Example: “Puppies’ rebellion” (ES) http://ow.ly/kXRdH —any changes since 2007?

11. Trained to deflect criticism? • The “best educated generation” ever: • myth or reality? • Averages and statistical distributions • Quantity and quality: intangibles  • Education = aptitude + “attitude” • Aptitude: knowledge, general abilities, etc. • “Attitude”—crucially: ability to productively accept criticism

12. How do we react to criticism? • Defensively: taking it as personal attack • Rationalization: producing excuses • Why do brilliant people often under-perform? Use their higher mental power to produce better excuses • Advice: • No excuses: your default should be “the critique is right, in some way”, and you must discover that way • Take critiques as signals of failure, not as solutions: • e.g., in correcting texts, teachers shouldn’t provide alternatives but just mark mistakes. When seen that the alternative is worse, students tempted to think there was no problem • Distance yourself from your work  you do not like it

13. Do some beliefs provide an excuse for failure? • Discrimination? • By sex, race, etc. • The best educated generation ever? • Socialism? • Any other?