Unless You’re Oprah, ‘Be Yourself’ Is Terrible Advice. – The New York Times

2016/06/06 Leave a comment

Good piece and advice by Adam Grant.

One of the more interesting articles, forget the reference, that I read in one of my management development programs, was about “managing authenticity,” which appears to ba a contradiction in terms, but makes sense as being more aware (“self-monitoring”) of your impact on others and how best to engage:

But for most people, “be yourself” is actually terrible advice.

If I can be authentic for a moment: Nobody wants to see your true self. We all have thoughts and feelings that we believe are fundamental to our lives, but that are better left unspoken.

A decade ago, the author A. J. Jacobs spent a few weeks trying to be totally authentic. He announced to an editor that he would try to sleep with her if he were single and informed his nanny that he would like to go on a date with her if his wife left him. He informed a friend’s 5-year-old daughter that the beetle in her hands was not napping but dead. He told his in-laws that their conversation was boring. You can imagine how his experiment worked out.

“Deceit makes our world go round,” he concluded. “Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.”

How much you aim for authenticity depends on a personality trait called self-monitoring. If you’re a high self-monitor, you’re constantly scanning your environment for social cues and adjusting accordingly. You hate social awkwardness and desperately want to avoid offending anyone.

But if you’re a low self-monitor, you’re guided more by your inner states, regardless of your circumstances. In one fascinating study, when a steak landed on their plates, high self-monitors tasted it before pouring salt, whereas low self-monitors salted it first. As the psychologist Brian Little explains, “It is as though low self-monitors know their salt personalities very well.”

Low self-monitors criticize high self-monitors as chameleons and phonies. They’re right that there’s a time and place for authenticity. Some preliminary research suggests that low self-monitors tend to have happier marriages and lower odds of divorce. With your romantic partner, being authentic might lead to a more genuine connection (unless your name is A. J. Jacobs).

But in the rest of our lives, we pay a price for being too authentic. High self-monitors advance faster and earn higher status, in part because they’re more concerned about their reputations. And while that would seem to reward self-promoting frauds, these high self-monitors spend more time finding out what others need and helping them. In a comprehensive analysis of 136 studies of more than 23,000 employees, high self-monitors received significantly higher evaluations and were more likely to be promoted into leadership positions.

Interestingly, women are more likely to be low self-monitors than men, perhaps because women face stronger cultural pressures to express their feelings. Sadly, that puts them at risk for being judged weak or unprofessional. When Cynthia Danaher was promoted to general manager of a group at Hewlett-Packard, she announced to her 5,300 employees that the job was “scary” and that “I need your help.” She was authentic, and her team lost confidence in her initially. Some researchers even suggest that low self-monitoring may have harmful effects on women’s progress.

But even high self-monitors can suffer from the belief in authenticity because it presupposes that there is a true self, a bedrock to our personalities that’s a combination of our convictions and abilities. As the psychologist Carol Dweck has long shown, merely believing that there’s a fixed self can interfere with growth.

Children who see abilities as fixed give up after failure; managers who believe talent is fixed fail to coach their employees. “As we strive to improve our game, a clear and firm sense of self is a compass that helps us navigate choices and progress toward our goals,” Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at the business school Insead,notes. “When we’re looking to change our game, a too rigid self-concept becomes an anchor that keeps us from sailing forth.”

If not our authentic selves, what should we be striving to reach? Decades ago, the literary critic Lionel Trilling gave us an answer that sounds very old-fashioned to our authentic ears: sincerity. Instead of searching for our inner selves and then making a concerted effort to express them, Trilling urged us to start with our outer selves. Pay attention to how we present ourselves to others, and then strive to be the people we claim to be.

Rather than changing from the inside out, you bring the outside in.

When Dr. Ibarra studied consultants and investment bankers, she found that high self-monitors were more likely than their authentic peers to experiment with different leadership styles. They watched senior leaders in the organization, borrowed their language and action, and practiced them until these became second nature. They were not authentic, but they were sincere. It made them more effective.

The shift from authenticity to sincerity might be especially important for millennials. Most generational differences are vastly exaggerated — they’re driven primarily by age and maturity, not birth cohort. But one robust finding is that younger generations tend to be less concerned about social approval. Authentic self-expression works beautifully, untilemployers start to look at social media profiles.

It worked. Next time people say, “just be yourself,” stop them in their tracks. No one wants to hear everything that’s in your head. They just want you to live up to what comes out of your mouth

As an introvert, I started my career terrified of public speaking so my authentic self wouldn’t have been giving a TED talk in the first place. But being passionate about sharing knowledge, I spent the next decade learning to do what Dr. Little, the psychologist, calls acting out of character. I decided to be the person I claimed to be, one who is comfortable in the spotlight.

Source: Unless You’re Oprah, ‘Be Yourself’ Is Terrible Advice. – The New York Times

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What do so-called ‘women’s jobs’ actually pay?

2016/06/01 Leave a comment

Interesting and provocative column by William Watson on gender differences in the workplace:

In a new working paper, two University of Toronto economists argue, rather courageously in the current climate in universities, that some occupational segregation of men and women may reflect choices based on gender advantages in the activities involved. They also find, counter-intuitively, that reducing existing job segregation might actually increase the male/female wage gap.

The economists, Michael Baker and Kirsten Cornelson, start by reviewing current scientific evidence about the differences between men and women. It turns out there really are systematic, verifiable differences between men and women. Women are better at perceiving colour and seeing distant things, men at seeing fine detail and objects moving rapidly. Women hear better, men mind noise less. There are also differences in taste, smell and touch, and in “perceptual speed, fine motor manipulations and tactile skills.” In all of these, women tend to do better. In the “processing of far space,” however, and a few other things, men excel. Whether these differences are genetic or learned is clearly open to debate and research.

Having identified these gender aptitudes, Baker and Cornelson then look at standard categorizations of almost 500 different jobs to find which ones require which kinds of skills. Examining gender segregation across all these jobs, they find that those where “female skills” are more important do tend to have higher ratios of women. That suggests some job segregation may be from men and women selecting work that favours their gender-specific skills. How big is this effect? If it weren’t there, the economists calculate, the Duncan Index would be 0.38 rather than 0.51. So it’s important but not dominant.

You might think the story is all about “STEM” jobs (science, technology, engineering and math). It isn’t. Too few people, male and female, work in these jobs for them to be decisive. Only 2.7 per cent of women work in them versus 8.0 per cent of men, so women are under-represented. But if the gender-advantage effect is eliminated the Duncan Index falls only slightly. So STEM isn’t to blame, though that’s no reason not to want more women to go into it, so long as they want to, that is.

The top occupations in terms of explaining gender segregation are in fact: secretary and administrative assistant, nurse, truck driver, elementary and middle school teacher, and home health aide. It’s natural to suppose that if there were gender balance in these areas, that would raise female wages compared to male.

But when they simulate a world in which people don’t respond to gender advantages in jobs, Baker and Cornelson find that the gap between women’s and men’s wages actually rises. How come? Several well-paid occupations – doctoring, accounting, nursing – favour female attributes. If you prevent women from taking advantage of their gender advantage by entering these occupations disproportionately, average female wages fall.

The most interesting question this study raises in my mind? Will our hyper-politically correct society be able to discuss it without an intellectual food fight?

Source: What do so-called ‘women’s jobs’ actually pay? | Ottawa Citizen

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ICYMI: The Choice Explosion – The New York Times

2016/05/25 Leave a comment

Interesting insights on decision-making in the book, Decisive, by  Chip and Dan Heath:

It’s becoming incredibly important to learn to decide well, to develop the techniques of self-distancing to counteract the flaws in our own mental machinery. The Heath book is a very good compilation of those techniques.

For example, they mention the maxim, assume positive intent. When in the midst of some conflict, start with the belief that others are well-intentioned. It makes it easier to absorb information from people you’d rather not listen to.

They highlight Suzy Welch’s 10-10-10 rule. When you’re about to make a decision, ask yourself how you will feel about it 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now and 10 years from now. People are overly biased by the immediate pain of some choice, but they can put the short-term pain in long-term perspective by asking these questions.

The Heaths recommend making deliberate mistakes. A survey of new brides found that 20 percent were not initially attracted to the man they ended up marrying. Sometimes it’s useful to make a deliberate “mistake” — agreeing to dinner with a guy who is not your normal type. Sometimes you don’t really know what you want and the filters you apply are hurting you.

They mention our tendency to narrow-frame, to see every decision as a binary “whether or not” alternative. Whenever you find yourself asking “whether or not,” it’s best to step back and ask, “How can I widen my options?” In other words, before you ask, “Should I fire this person?” Ask, “Is there any way I can shift this employee’s role to take advantage of his strengths and avoid his weaknesses?”

The explosion of choice means we all need more help understanding the anatomy of decision-making. It makes you think that we should have explicit decision-making curriculums in all schools. Maybe there should be a common course publicizing the work of Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, Dan Ariely and others who study the way we mess up and the techniques we can adopt to prevent error.

Source: The Choice Explosion – The New York Times

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Feds face human rights complaint over SIN gender info

2016/05/18 Leave a comment

Expect that part of the issue is ensuring consistency with the provincial and territorial vital statistics agencies (births, deaths etc) and SIN for integrity issues, along with other identity documents.

There is also value in collection for gender-based analysis, although this will likely be broadened in the future to include transgender:

The federal government is staring down the possibility of being ordered to stop collecting gender information on Canadians as part of their social insurance number record.

The outcome is one possibility in an ongoing dispute in front of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal over a piece of information that internal documents show isn’t central to identifying the owner of a social insurance number, or critical for preventing fraud.

A ruling from the tribunal would have a precedent-setting effect for the federal government, even as it takes steps to extend human rights protections to transgender Canadians in the form of legislation to be tabled Tuesday in the House of Commons.

The bill would be the latest attempt to make it illegal to discriminate against someone because of their gender identity and extend hate speech laws to include transgender persons.

But even on the eve of its introduction, the government appears no closer to making it easier to change the gender attached to a social insurance number without requiring the holder to go through a bureaucratic paperwork process.

Christin Milloy, the Toronto-based trans rights activist at the centre of the tribunal case, said there is no need for the federal government to collect and store information on sex and gender.

“It’s not necessary to identify an individual,” Milloy said of the gender field.

“Name and birthdate and mother’s maiden name – these things are enough and storing (gender) creates opportunities for discrimination and oppression of all transgender people and women.”

It has been almost five years since Milloy first downloaded a government form needed to make changes to a social insurance number record. The changes were simple: her address, legal name and an update to the gender field to female.

The sex or gender category on a social insurance number record is set at birth when a number is issued.

The department refused Milloy’s request, barring production of a new Ontario birth certificate.

Milloy launched a human rights complaint, saying that the department’s policy of using the sex designation at birth discriminated against transgender persons. She also noted that the information was not necessary to identify a number’s holder.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission agreed with Milloy, and sent the matter to the human rights tribunal for a hearing.

She and the department remain in mediation at the tribunal, although that process has been going on for more than a year. Milloy said she is confident there will be a resolution, but isn’t sure when that will happen.

“This is not just about me and my ID. This is about changing the system to be fair to everybody,” she said.

Confidentiality rules at the tribunal prevent her from discussing the details of the mediation.

Last year, Employment and Social Development Canada conducted a sweeping review of what would happen if it just dropped the “sex” requirement from the social insurance registry, consulting with at least a dozen other government departments, including Health Canada, the RCMP, and the Canada Revenue Agency.

The department has yet to respond to questions about the review.

Documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act show the sex field in the social insurance registry is “used for gender-based analysis and data analysis, not for integrity purposes.”

The notes – dated June 2, 2015, and prepared for a meeting with counterparts at Citizenship and Immigration Canada – said some provincial governments are moving towards allowing identity documents like health cards and birth certificates to reflect gender identity, meaning the data in the sex field “could more accurately be referred to as ‘gender.”’ That information then makes it into the social insurance registry.

Source: Feds face human rights complaint over SIN gender info – Macleans.ca

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Facebook’s Bias Is Built-In, and Bears Watching – The New York Times

2016/05/13 Leave a comment

One of the more perceptive articles I have seen on the recent Facebook controversy and the overall issues regarding the lack of neutrality in algorithms:

The question isn’t whether Facebook has outsize power to shape the world — of course it does, and of course you should worry about that power. If it wanted to, Facebook could try to sway elections, favor certain policies, or just make you feel a certain way about the world, as it once proved it could do in an experiment devised to measure how emotions spread online.

There is no evidence Facebook is doing anything so alarming now. The danger is nevertheless real. The biggest worry is that Facebook doesn’t seem to recognize its own power, and doesn’t think of itself as a news organization with a well-developed sense of institutional ethics and responsibility, or even a potential for bias. Neither does its audience, which might believe that Facebook is immune to bias because it is run by computers.

That myth should die. It’s true that beyond the Trending box, most of the stories Facebook presents to you are selected by its algorithms, but those algorithms are as infused with bias as any other human editorial decision.

“Algorithms equal editors,” said Robyn Caplan, a research analyst at Data & Society, a research group that studies digital communications systems. “With Facebook, humans are never not involved. Humans are in every step of the process — in terms of what we’re clicking on, who’s shifting the algorithms behind the scenes, what kind of user testing is being done, and the initial training data provided by humans.”

Everything you see on Facebook is therefore the product of these people’sexpertise and considered judgment, as well as their conscious and unconscious biases apart from possible malfeasance or potential corruption. It’s often hard to know which, because Facebook’s editorial sensibilities are secret. So are its personalities: Most of the engineers, designers and others who decide what people see on Facebook will remain forever unknown to its audience.

Stuart Goldenberg 

Facebook also has an unmistakable corporate ethos and point of view. The company is staffed mostly by wealthy coastal Americans who tend to support Democrats, and it is wholly controlled by a young billionaire who has expressed policy preferences that many people find objectionable. Mr. Zuckerberg is for free trade, more open immigration and for a certain controversial brand of education reform. Instead of “building walls,” he supports a “connected world and a global community.”

You could argue that none of this is unusual. Many large media outlets are powerful, somewhat opaque, operated for profit, and controlled by wealthy people who aren’t shy about their policy agendas — Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, Fox News and The New York Times, to name a few.

But there are some reasons to be even more wary of Facebook’s bias. One is institutional. Many mainstream outlets have a rigorous set of rules and norms about what’s acceptable and what’s not in the news business.

“The New York Times contains within it a long history of ethics and the role that media is supposed to be playing in democracies and the public,” Ms. Caplan said. “These technology companies have not been engaged in that conversation.”

According to a statement from Tom Stocky, who is in charge of the trending topics list, Facebook has policies “for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality” of the items that appear in the trending list.

But Facebook declined to discuss whether any editorial guidelines governed its algorithms, including the system that determines what people see in News Feed. Those algorithms could have profound implications for society. For instance, one persistent worry about algorithmic-selected news is that it might reinforce people’s previously held points of view. If News Feed shows news that we’re each likely to Like, it could trap us into echo chambers and contribute to rising political polarization. In a study last year, Facebook’s scientists asserted the echo chamber effect was muted.

But when Facebook changes its algorithm — which it does routinely — does it have guidelines to make sure the changes aren’t furthering an echo chamber? Or that the changes aren’t inadvertently favoring one candidate or ideology over another? In other words, are Facebook’s engineering decisions subject to ethical review? Nobody knows.

Source: Facebook’s Bias Is Built-In, and Bears Watching – The New York Times

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Giving a Name, and Dignity, to a Disability – The New York Times

2016/05/09 Leave a comment

Interesting account of the evolution of terms for those with intellectual disabilities:

OTHER organizations and state agencies have done the same, most of them joining the medical and scientific communities in adopting the term now in favor: intellectual disability.

Dr. Wehmeyer said the change made an important break from the connotations of past terminology. “It’s the first term that doesn’t refer to the condition as a defective mental process — slow, weak, feeble,” he said. “Intellectual disability conveys that it is not a problem within a person, but a lack of fit between that person’s capacities and the demands of the environment in which the person is functioning.”

But even Dr. Wehmeyer did not immediately care for the term (“I would have gone with cognitive disability,” he said). And not everyone embraces what is called people-first language — as in “people with intellectual disability.” Advocates in the blind and deaf communities, for example, argue that such constructions are unnecessarily defensive and hinting of shame.

The question now is whether “intellectual disability” will remain the preference, or, like its predecessors, devolve into a derogatory taunt. The answer seems to hinge on society’s ability to shed its prejudices and move past that stigmatizing sense of otherness.

One of the men I wrote about, Keith Brown, lived for many years in Texas institutions before working for more than three decades in that turkey-processing plant in Iowa. His job was to “pull crop” — that is, to yank out part of the digestive systems of dead birds swinging past on shackles.

When he and the other men were finally removed from their squalid schoolhouse dormitory in 2009, after repeated failures of government officials to heed warnings, Mr. Brown was found to have suffered significant physical and emotional consequences, including post-traumatic stress.

Today he is the sole resident of an apartment in Arkansas. He is a commuter, a palette-jack operator, a pet owner, a Dr Pepper drinker, a brother, an uncle. He is many things, he says, “but I am not retarded.”

Source: Giving a Name, and Dignity, to a Disability – The New York Times

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How Asimina Arvanitaki will explain the universe: The case for open-ended research

2016/05/03 Leave a comment

Interesting interview with Arvanitaki, the recently appointed chair at the Perimeter Institute – liked her response to the last question particularly:

Q: …. the last federal government had a real focus on scientific research that had a direct industry-based application. And they structured funding based on things that they thought would bring money in…

A: Can I say something? I’m Greek and I’m allowed to say this, I think. The model of ancient Greece, right, take Socrates, all these great people, no one asked them to invent the next quantum computer. They were allowed to think about whatever they wanted to, and this is how a great civilization came about. I think leaving people to think, and that doesn’t go just for physicists. I think it applies to everything. It applies to art, literature. I think this is the part that basically makes us human, so I don’t think this is a waste no matter what the outcome. I don’t think this can be a waste.

Source: How Asimina Arvanitaki will explain the universe

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How a comedian, a rap group and a separatist critic are slaying a sacred cow: Quebec’s language rules

2016/03/19 Leave a comment

Graeme Hamilton on one of the latest twists in the Quebec culture debates:

In Mauvaise Langue, Cassivi mocks University of Ottawa language professor Jean Delisle for an article Delisle wrote complaining about the rampant English in Xavier Dolan’s film Mommy. In an interview, Delisle said he expects the acceptance of English preached by Cassivi will go the same way as the joual slang Quebec authors incorporated into their work in the 1970s.

“Nobody reads those novels any more,” he said. “So in a few years, the Dead Obies will really be dead. It’s a fad.”

The danger of English terms becoming fashionable among French-speakers is that over time the language becomes eroded, he said. “If it continues, if these anglicisms persist, the French words will be forgotten. That’s a step toward the hybridization of the language.”

Ruel has no time for doomsayers nostalgic for the days when Quebec chansonniers were a driving force behind the nationalist project. He sees the Quebec cultural establishment’s conservatism, which shuts Dead Obies out of grants and awards galas because they use too much English, as the biggest threat.

“Some kids are starting to get bored with Quebec, and that’s how you kill a culture,” he said. “If everything is safe and everything is whitewashed, then people will be bored.”

Instead of an attack on Quebec culture, why not view Dead Obies as saviours? “You can see the glass half full or half empty,” Ruel said.

“Is it English culture that is invading ours? Or is it French Quebecers who are weaving French into rap culture, and suddenly you have French rap that gets played in bars alongside Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West because it has that same feel and authenticity?”

Source: How a comedian, a rap group and a separatist critic are slaying a sacred cow: Quebec’s language rules | National Post

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CMHC hits roadblocks in review of foreign owners

2016/03/16 Leave a comment

Suggests legislation might be needed given resistance of the realtors (too good a business line for them to be forthcoming on a voluntary basis?):

Canada’s national housing agency is focusing efforts to collect data on foreign real estate investors by studying temporary residents, including international students studying in Canada, as well as Canadian citizens who live abroad. But it has run into resistance in its attempt to ask real estate agents, developers and lawyers to voluntarily provide information on international clients.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s struggle to collect reliable data about foreign real estate investors is detailed in hundreds of pages of documents originally released to Bloomberg under Access to Information and subsequently provided to The Globe and Mail.

The agency’s first challenge was to settle on a definition of foreign investor. Its “final definition,” according to minutes of a January meeting, includes Canadian citizens whose permanent residence is in another country, along with what it calls “non-permanent residents.” They include temporary foreign workers, visitors to Canada and those with no legal ties to the country. They also include the more than 200,000 international students who are in Canada on study visas.

The inclusion of students as foreign investors was controversial even within the federal agency, with minutes of the meeting noting that “there was no unanimous agreement on whether foreign student buyers should be counted as foreign buyers or not.” CMHC is proposing to flag international students separately from other non-permanent residents.

The number of international students in Canada increased 36 per cent between 2010 and 2014, to nearly 212,000, according to Citizenship and Immigration data included in the CMHC documents. While the number who eventually apply for postgraduate work permits has risen from 10.9 per cent in 2010 to 17.6 per cent in 2014, “the large majority of students actually do not become permanent residents,” CMHC wrote. “This would justify classifying ‘student buyers’ as foreign buyers.”

There is no hard data on how many international students buy housing while studying in Canada, but real estate agents in Vancouver and Toronto often point to the fact that many foreign buyers, particularly those from China, buy housing here so that their children can go to school. “We feel some people, like students, are buying properties instead of renting with money mainly coming from outside Canada,” a CMHC analyst wrote in an internal exchange from early December.

The federal housing agency also drafted a proposal for a separate research project that would measure “the effects of non-permanent residents on housing demand.” It held discussions with HSBC Bank late last year about ways to collect data that would “allow identification of foreign mortgage applications,” along with Canada Revenue Agency, which requires non-resident homeowners to pay withholding taxes on rent and real estate sales.

One of the ways CMHC is proposing to collect data on foreign investors is a pilot project to survey real estate agents and developers about clients who might be considered foreign buyers, starting with Vancouver. The federal agency is also looking to include questions about the residency status of buyers and owners to its survey on condo owners and housing starts and hopes to work with provincial land registries to add data about foreign owners, starting in Ontario.

But it has run up against resistance from the real estate industry, with internal documents laying out that meetings with developers to discuss adding foreign residency questions to CMHC regular surveys of condo sales yielded “mixed results.”

“Some [condo] developers are willing to provide the information while others are not willing to provide it,” the agency wrote.

One real estate industry organization in B.C., the name of which was redacted in the CMHC documents, told the housing agency that it didn’t think its “members would be forthcoming with the information requested, despite knowing the background of their buyers.”

Source: CMHC hits roadblocks in review of foreign owners – The Globe and Mail

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Public servants flock to PCO’s first-ever behavioural economics briefing

2016/03/15 Leave a comment

I am a fan of nudges and Kirkman captures the reality that current politics already incorporate nudges, and so the question is more what kind of nudge is more effective as part of policy and program design, rather than more existential questioning.

As readers already know, I am also a fan of behavioural economics, and found the insights in Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow particularly relevant to policy makers who may not be as aware of their thinking processes as needed:

Elspeth Kirkman, North American head of the Behavioural Insights Team’s head of North American operations, was asked during a presentation how she responds to criticism that she’s involved in “social engineering.” She said governments cannot get away from the fact they have to encourage certain kinds of behaviour from people, so it might as well be done effectively.

“Departments and governments are already nudging people in terms of how they present information to them, how they ask them to do things, how they structure their defaults, and all we’re doing really is being mindful about that,” she said. “We’re saying, actually, let’s just understand what the implication in the way that we’re structuring that choice is.”

Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, told the audience that sometimes more than a “nudge” is needed when it comes to public policy.

“I’m a big fan of nudges … but nudges are a very modest attempt to interfere minimally, often at a very low cost, when you’re politically somewhat helpless, in ways that that help people,” he said.

“But there’s a lot more than that. And if you think about what policy does throughout, whether it’s the design of emergency rooms or what it takes to make a nation healthy and happy, there are profound psychological questions that lie at the core of what we do.”

When asked to elaborate in what qualifies as a nudge and what’s seen as more, Mr. Shafir noted how buildings are often designed—in terms of where stairs, elevators, and parking lots are placed—to promote physical activity, and he feels buildings that are constructed in ways to encourage certain behaviours represent the kind of policy that goes beyond nudges.

Ms. Kirkman talked about an EAST model—which stands for easy, attractive, social, and timely—for creating conditions for public compliance with government policies.

She talked about using plain language and less “legalese” to make it easier for people to understand government communications. She used an example of a U.S. city that had an unfortunate practice of sending out very technically worded letters to homeowners whose properties did not meet municipal standards.

“The letter actually starts with: ‘According to Chapter 156 and/or Chapter 155 and/or Chapter 37 in the [municipal] ordinances process, we have found your property to be in violation of inspection.’ And it kind of just goes on and on and on like this, and it doesn’t actually say, ‘Hey, you need to fix your property and here’s what’s wrong with it.’ ”

In terms of making things attractive, Ms. Kirkman used an example how different styles of texting unemployed people from a job centre in the Britain to inform them about a new supermarket that was holding a job fair. She said 10 per cent of the people notified would typically attend such a non-mandatory event. However, when people’s individual names were used in the message, that increased to 15 per cent. When the message appeared to come from the unemployed people’s employment advisers, it increased to 17 per cent. Finally, that rate increased to 26 per cent when the individuals were told their advisers had booked them a time-slot at this event.

The social aspect of encouraging certain actions is shown by Mr. Treusch’s example of publicizing how most people pay their taxes, Ms. Kirkman said.

Another factor is who conveys the message, she said. She recalled how the British government once sent letters signed by the chief medical officer that advised certain physicians to prescribe antibiotics less often, and the campaign was a success. She said the message would have been less effective with this particular audience if it came from the health minister. These physicians were also told how the majority of their peers were prescribing fewer antibiotics, she added.

An example of timeliness focused on a police force Britain that was found to be much less ethnically diverse than the community it serves. Research ultimately uncovered that most applicants of minority ethnicities were failing an online test in which they were asked how they would react, as a police officer, to certain situations.

Ms. Kirkman said it’s believed the effect of “stereotype threat” was at work, where people who are part of groups that have negative stereotypes tend to perform worse in certain instances if reminded of those stereotypes just before the task.

She said when the wording of the email asking applicants to take this test was changed to be “warmer” and contain a preamble asking them to think about what it would mean to their community if they became a police officer, the gap in success in the test between white applicants and others was closed.

Source: Public servants flock to PCO’s first-ever behavioural economics briefing |

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