Mob Moods

I’ve been really interested recently in the herd mentality of people. It’s been impressing me how herd driven we are; how we so easily pick up on signals from our environment and let them influence us; most of the time without us even knowing. It isn’t really surprising once you think about, seeing as we’re social creatures, which move in flocks very similar to other herd animals, but I don’t think many people actually sit down and think about it. Which is a shame, because it means that you’re even less in control of your actions than you think you are.

To give you a couple of examples. In the café I work in you can really see the herd mentality of people – you can sense the energy changing around the room as different things happen and different moods grip the crowd. For example, people never leave one table at a time. It is almost always several tables that leave at once. The more tables that leave, the more other tables that suddenly decide to leave as well. Sometimes the whole café will empty in the space of a few minutes. All of these people believe, of course, that they are independent and exercising free will. In many ways they are. It just happens to be the case that their free will is heavily influenced by the will of the people around them.

The same thing can be said for drinks and food and such. Often there will be waves of specific drinks being ordered. We’ll have cappuccino rounds, for example, or suddenly everybody starts ordering orange juice (which is really annoying, because you only have so much fresh orange juice at any one time).

Tipping is another one of these wave things. When one or two tables walk away without tipping, suddenly others seem to tip less or not at all. If a group of people walk up to pay, however, and the first person obviously gives a tip then suddenly you’ll find the whole group doing it. And if the first person is so nice as to say that your service was spectacular and fantastic (you might be surprised, but it does happen!) then suddenly everybody’s tip goes up! That person’s experience is completely different from everybody else’s, after all they were at a different table, but nonetheless their opinion influences the opinions of others.

Mood is another one of those amazingly contagious things. Sometimes I have to take over the terrace from somebody who isn’t really all that ‘on the ball’ or service oriented. Often, when that happens, there’s a negative energy over all the tables. The thing is, this negative energy infects newcomers – even though they don’t realise it. They directly act more critical, tip less and generally hang around for shorter. It normally takes me about an hour or even an hour and a half to change that mood around; then, when that mood is changed, suddenly everybody that arrives new takes on the mood of the rest of the terrace and is far more accepting, generous and friendly. I’m not making this up. Admittedly it’s anecdotal evidence, but it something I have experienced time and again.

The people subconsciously take in the mood cues of others and seriously let them influence their own. The thing is, they aren’t even aware of it happening. In my opinion, this gives their environment an immense amount of power over them. Or, to put it another way, it gives the people an immense amount of power over you. You can’t change it, but you can certainly try to be aware of it happening.

The first step towards being honest and objective is to be aware of your own self-deceit and subjectivity.

Power or the lack of it

Let’s talk about some research they’ve done in social psychology, so that you can get an idea what I’ve been learning. It turns out that the amount of power we have directly influences our mental capacities. People with power and people without power think differently. With that I don’t mean that they think about different things, we all already knew that, but rather that they way their brains work actually changes as their levels of power change.

Research has revealed that when people do not have power, their ability to plan is affected. They find it harder to make long term plans and to keep their minds concentrated on the task at hand. Instead, it seems, that a great deal of their mental activity is occupied with taking in their surroundings and observing what is happening around them. This actually manifests as the same person doing markedly worse on an IQ test when they feel they have little power, then when they feel the have a great deal.

There’s more.

Powerful people are less able to take on other’s perspective and instead they are much more likely to think from their own. This extends to being able to take into consideration other people’s emotions and their ways of thinking. People with little power, on the other hand, are much better at putting themselves in somebody else’s shoes. In other words, empathy goes down as power goes up.

The reasoning for all this is that more powerful people need to be able to plan better, seeing as probably others depend on them and they can’t depend on others. On the other hand, they do not need to worry about their surroundings as much as people without power, after all, the powerless are the most likely to be the first to fall prey if the group is attacked.

The empathy too is relatively easy to explain. After all, the powerful really don’t need to care as much about other people’s feelings. Instead it is the people without power who take care that others like them, since they can’t use their power to get what they want.

The interesting thing is, that this both fits our stereotypes (the uncaring boss, the less bright worker) and shows that it isn’t really that person’s fault. His or her mind is actually being effected by the world around them. It also means that something can be done about these things. People are much more a product of their environment than we realise.

What’s more, it can be used to make our lives better. You want your kid to learn better and plan more for the future? Give him more of say. Do you want to be more empathic to the people around you? Let go of the reigns a bit and let other people take charge.

And that’s just ideas off the top of my head. No doubt there’s a whole bunch of other applications for this research.

Man/ Machine interface

Sunday was the end of my grandfather’s birthday party and the town he’s from made quite a feast of it. He’s quite the celebrity there, you see. His music (he’s a composer) is actually performed in quite a few countries, it seems, especially out in the former East Bloc. My mother, my sister and I decided to go for a few hours (my studies didn’t permit me to go longer). Because we were so late in making that decision, there really weren’t any tickets left, not even for family. Still, we ended up sitting outside of a large tent where inside they were playing one of his earlier works, quite beautifully.

I fell asleep lying in the grass. I guess I really was completely exhausted. So I didn’t catch much of the concert at all. Still, the little bits I did hear were quite nice. I’m not sure if it was worth driving an hour there and an hour back, but hey – there were other reasons to go.

Like seeing my mother, who I really don’t get to see very much of. She came down last Wednesday and left yesterday. In total I only managed to spend about four hours with her. That’s about how long she needs to drive one way to get here. Of course I’m not the only reason she comes down. She’s got quite an active social life (more active then mine, at the moment) and I’m sure she wasn’t bored for a moment. It’s just another symptom of the underlying problem of too much to do and to few hours to do it in.

I still try to motivate myself to put in all the hours by saying ‘yeah, but I just spent eight months doing nothing in India’. Of course it wasn’t ‘just’. It was six months ago. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to use that, before I’ll start telling myself ‘that no longer counts, that’s ancient history’.

Fortunately, yesterday there was suddenly some time left over and today class got cancelled, which gives me a short reprieve. In true me fashion, I directly started wasting time. Buy furniture for my room, read ahead for class, or get new sport shoes that actually fit in my bag? Why? Let’s instead download a really old game and spend the next hour and a half playing it.

What to do? What else is there to do but try and work harder and hope that I can survive these moments of wasted time. Truth be told, where formerly it used to be easy for me to waste days and even weeks doing what was entertaining but ultimately useless, now it has been restricted to a few hours at most. Maybe one day I’ll be able to avoid wasting time. Maybe that’s when I’ve finally rejected all of my humanity.

I wonder what I would look like in chrome steel.

No, I don’t really know what I’m talking about either.

The plot

I guess I’m starting to show the strain. Yesterday I wasn’t the nicest of people to work with. I was in a foul mood, snappy and generally hard to be around. The causes were numerous. First and foremost, I felt that it wasn’t going well. I was standing at the bar, which is definitely the hardest working position, but – according to me – not the most essential position. It’s basically all about producing the drinks; which yesterday meant producing cappuccinos (for those of you unaware, cappuccinos require just a bit more precision and work than other coffees, making them fun to make when it’s not pounding, but a pain when the shit hits the fan.)

The problem is, from there you don’t have any oversight. You’re tucked away in a little corner, with barely any idea what is going on outside. All you see is the tickets coming out of the machine and the other staff coming back to pick up the drinks. You can try to infer how busy it is from there – but generally you’ll be wrong. Often, the bartender will be slamming drinks out and the waiters will think it’s relatively quiet.

I’m better in service, because I know I’m good at keeping the people happy. After doing this for five months nearly continuously I can feel what’s going on on the terrace. I have the oversight to know which tables are new, which are content and which are ready for another drink, often without them even needing to signal. It’s all about reading their moods.

Recently we got a whole host of new employees who don’t have this ability to sense the mood yet. They are where I was, down in the nitty-gritty trying to cope with the information overload that initially comes your way. They are still reactive (rather than proactive, obviously). The problem is, I can’t put them behind the bar either, because the drinks were coming way too hard and fast. I couldn’t do it all and I felt the service was suffering as a result.

And that pissed me off; especially since I worked so hard over the summer to improve our service.

Normally I can put myself past that. I can get positive, happy and content relatively quickly and this is where the other things are paying a factor. I’m once again learning to cope with a new environment and a way of thinking that I haven’t employed in a long time, indeed. My brain once again has to be re-tooled and that always takes energy, concentration and time. In a few weeks time I’ll be able to take the strain of working and studying at the same time, but right now I’m mentally strained and it seems that then I can’t completely control my anger nor my annoyance.

What can I say? I am human. I have my limits and I will continue to try to transcend them. Since I can’t get out my own way, hopefully people will be smart enough to get out of the way when I fail to be more than I am.

Arcane Mutterings

A few hours ago I sent in my first assignment for my master’s program. It was a short essay. In fact, it could be compared in length to one of my blog entries. In many ways that’s where the comparison ends; for the simple reason that the university essay is a completely different animal from the blog entry.

Psychology claims to be a science (is it? I’m not sure) and therefore requires a great deal of precision. The problem with precision, however, is that it means that terms and expressions should vary as little as possible. This can make the average university essay a rather dull affair.

This point is being rather admirably driven home by the reading I’m being asked to do. I will immediately say, in the readings defence, that the more recent articles seem much more interesting; though whether this is because they actually are more interesting, or because I’m getting used to the format is not clear.

The danger I see now is that my writing here will be influenced by my reading there. I’m hoping I can separate the two; because quite frankly I abhor the tendency to try to write so cleverly that your writing becomes almost unintelligible and this is something that I’ve long accused scientists of. Of course, there are a number of reasons why they might do this. The first is that they aren’t very good writers (which is very possible, since writing is only one of the skills that a scientists should possess and not one of the most vital ones at that). The second is that they write the way they do because they think it is actually perfectly clear. A third reason I have only just discovered is that they do it because they don’t see writing like I do. Perhaps they see it more as mathematical prose.

I’ve realised (largely through an article that I just read) that I’m going to have to learn an entirely new set of skills and – possibly more importantly – a new set of values. Entertainment, for example, is not very high at all on the list of important things to consider when writing scientifically.

I think that’s a shame, but I can understand why. If you want to be entertained, you don’t read science, you read science when you want to be enlightened.

So once I’ve learned to write to enlighten (or maybe just convince) can I still write to entertain? Well, the thing is – I think that a piece of writing is far more enlightening (or should I say convincing?) when it is also entertaining. For one thing, you manage to keep your audience far more present and attentive. After all, you need your audience to be attentive in order for them to be convinced of anything you propose.

So in my quest to learn how to write enlighteningly (oooh… five syllables – university’s working!) I should never lose sight of my attempts to entertain. Losing the latter will negatively affect my ability to do the former.

Or, in plain English, if nobody’s going to read what I write, who cares what I’ve got to say?

What I want

I’m in the middle of my first week of university. So far I’ve been assigned about 15 articles and two essays to write, all to be finished either during this week or by Monday or Tuesday next week. It’s obviously going to be a piece of cake.

The first thing I’m going to have to get used to is being forced to read. I mean, the reading that I’ve been assigned (and the essay writing as well) is not something I haven’t done in my own time before. I’ve easily consumed as many pages in written text and filled as many empty pages as they’re asking from me now. The only difference between then and now is ‘want to’ and ‘have to’.

My first lesson in psychology is the fact that ‘have to’ and ‘want to’ are often inversely correlated (or, in layman’s English, when one goes up the other goes down). I’ve now got the material, I’ve got the reason, all that is partially missing is the desire. I have to finish this article because I still have to read three others before tomorrow. I have to write this essay because tomorrow I’ll have to be working on the other one. I have to understand what I’m reading because tomorrow I might have to answer questions about it.

I have to learn to want to.

And I will, I’m sure. It will all become easier. After all, I haven’t worked like this in a long time (well, for ever. I never did all my assigned reading when I was last in uni.) so I’m sure that in a few weeks time I’ll adjust. After all, I adjusted to my job managing a café. In the beginning I nearly approached a burn out and now I can manage it quite easily. I’m sure the same will happen with this new stage.

Still, it’s quite a system shock. I hope I can live up to my own demands. I’ll have to. After all, I worked way to bloody hard to get into this damned program to now fail while I’m in there. Besides, the professors pretty much already admitted that I’d already completed the hardest part; namely actually getting into the program.

Of course, the hardest part for me isn’t that I want to finish the program, its that I want to finish the program with the highest honours. I’m making rather high demands of myself. But, as they say, if you don’t aim for the stars you’ll never reach very high.

I don’t just want to get very high (I’ve done that often enough in my life) I actually want to get to the burning bastards in the sky. I want to etch my name across the sky and burn my initials into the moon.

Originally I wanted to be God, but then I realised I should aim for something slightly more attainable; so I’ve set my sights on complete world domination.

Completing my Research Masters Cum Laude will be a good start.