Book Review: The Winner Effect by Ian Robertson
The Science of Success and How to Use It
Title: The Winner Effect. The Science of Success and how to use it
Author: Ian Robertson
Year: 2012
Winning is not something we are born into, but depends on life circumstances (e.g. rich parents might hamper your success) and beliefs (e.g. feeling in control of one's life versus (genetic) fatalism)
Power has potentially significant effects: aggressiveness (via testosterone), risk-taking (via dopamine)egocentricity, feeling in control (gambler's fallacy), goal-directed/less vigilant
Power itself can be used for good and bad purposes; its potentially negative effects become more likely in an environment where power is unconstrained and with individuals who have a high need for power; it also matters what type of power you seek: p power (for yourself) or mediated by some s power (for others)
Power audits should be considered to address the pitfalls of giving power to people
Summary
Chapter 1: The Mystery of Picasso's Son
Guiding question: Born into winning?
Whether you believe success is something you are endowed with or something you earn matters: it affects your motivation and mental health. Your beliefs about winning can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When children succeed their parents in leading the family company, business performance drops significantly, as a 2007 study by the University of Copenhagen showed. If children were born to win, you'd expect the same level of performance.
Children of rich parents may be unhappier, more depressed, and more anxious, than children from poorer families because their parents spend less time with them: richer parents earn more per hour so they are incentivized to delegate household tasks to strangers, miss an opportunity to spend time with their children.
The putamen is a part of the brain and a key element of the reward network. In a study, two groups were asked to solve a puzzle. The first group was incentivized with money, the second group was told it would be a measure of their IQ as visualized on a chart. The second group had activity in the putamen, not the first group, i.e. the second group was intrinsically motivated, and a key element of their reward network was switch edon.
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are usually mixed Parents (usually) need to throw in some extrinsic motivation so that their children get over the initial hurdles of developing a skill until their intrinsic motivation and sense of accomplishment kicks in. And here is another curse of those born into winning: having everything they want, their parents might not use these incentives for their children to become good at a skill.
Harvard psychologist David McLelland found that those who achieve most, the winners, are those who set themselves moderately ambitious targets, not too low, not too high, because either of these can be disabling, in the first you achieve little by default, in the latter, you fail and feel demotivated.
'Hidden ladder' of success: when those who succeed hide the ladder they needed to succeed (i.e. the effort put in, the mistakes), then it can have a daunting effect on those who want to emulate that success, because it feels out-of-reach.
Two different sets of beliefs: do you believe results to be independent of your effort or do you believe results are due to your effort, in your hands? Similarly, identifying as 'highly intelligent' can have the counterproductive effect of seeing feedback (i.e. 'failure') as a threat to their identity rather than as input that helps them become better.
"The curse of genetic fatalism undermines grit, and grit is one of the most important ingredients in life - not just in academic achievement, but in work, relationships and coping with stress and illness." p. 48
Chapter 2: The Puzzle of the Changeling Fish
Guiding question: Born to win?
Experiments with fish and mice show that there is a 'winner effect' linked to testosterone and the environment: higher testosterone leads to more aggressive, risk-taking behavior that can help them win, and winning increases testosterone leading to a reinforcing cycle; and their motivation to win/fight is increased when winning on their home turf.
Similar to environmental effects, power postures and acting as if, can increase testosterone and lower cortisol.
Chapter 3: The Enigma of Bill Clinton's Friend
Guiding question: What does power do to you?
Power-Distance Index by Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede:
Measures how unequally power is shared across different social ranks. This is a figure that quantifies the extent to which less powerful people in an organization or society accept that power is distributedunequally. p. 100
Exercise to see how power can affect egocentricity (Prof Adam Galinsky’s work at Northwestern University):
Do not tell participants that the exercise is about egocentricity
Have a water-soluble marker ready
Think of a time you experienced power over someone, relive that experience; and write a few lines about it
Snap your fingers
Then pick up the marker and write a capital E on your own forehead.
Did you draw the E from your perspective or from the perspective of someone facing you?
Professor Adam Galinsky and colleagues at Northwestern University found that this depended on the extent to which feelings of power had been activated in the participants' minds. Those who had thought about a time when they had power over someone tended to draw an E on their forehead which was correct from their point of view but appeared mirror-reversed from the point of view of someone standing opposite them. People who wrote about a time when they had been under someone else's power, on the other hand, tended to draw the E so that it was correct from others' viewpoints but mirror-reversed from their own.
These temporary manipulations of power in psychology experiments are a long way from the vast power that Napoleon and Hitler held while making decisions about their armies, but what this research does show is that, when our brains are primed by even small amounts of remembered power, this changes us psychologically: power makes us more egocentric, disinclining us to take on other pointsof view. If small fluctuations in power in ordinary people can make them more or less able to take on other perspectives, what are the consequences of holding infinitely greater power for years, as Napoleon and Hitler did?
Very likely, holding extreme real-life power will cause long-term corrosion of the ability to detach from one's own point of view - a potentially fatal shortcoming.
p. 108-109
Another effect of power: the gambler's fallacy. The idea that you think you have more control over something than you actually do. Experiments show that people feel more in control over something random or as complex and uncontrollable as the economy, even after just having recalled a time when they were powerful.
Margaret Hermann, the political psychologist, has developed a method that allows one to determine the belief of control a person has over events by looking at their speech patterns. Using this method, researchers found a significantly higher score for Tony Blair than for Bill Clinton. Dyson. Foreign policy analysis. 2 2006
Power puts attentional blinkers on a person, it activates the left pre-frontal cortex which gets you ready for taking action focusing you on the goal, whereas a feeling of low power activates the right pre-frontal cortex that favors the neurochemical noradrenaline which is linked to vigilance, monitoring and responding to the threat
Power itself is not bad but it depends on the context: is power constrained? How much power does the person need?
problems arise when a brain primed with a high need for power is over-exposed to actual power in thereal world. p. 133
Chapter 4: The Mystery of the Oscars
Guiding question: Why do we want to win so badly?
Oscar winners live 4 years longer on average than otherwise successful Oscar nominees.
The belief of having control (more than actually having control) leads to reduced levels of stress (asdetermined by cortisol in the blood).
Feeling in control is also a key determinant for those who endure torture, as the US SERE program hasfound.
The belief that you have control, then, is like an antidote to stress (...) Over a lifetime, our brains and bodies will therefore be spared repeated overdoses of a potent hormone that in high doses shrinks brain cells and their connections, particularly in the brain's highly sensitive memory centers." p. 161
More fundamentally, the feeling of control is important in a world where the individual self is alone, or felt to be so, not anymore fixed part of a collective but an individual self in the world.
The great sociologist Max Weber talked about the 'unprecedented inner loneliness of the individual self ' that the growth of Protestant Christianity caused. (...) This inner loneliness makes feeling in control important for my mind and body. If that 'me' is threatened, my body will spew out more stress hormones and rust up my immune system more than it would for almost any other stress. And in most extremesituations, such threats can be fatal. p. 176
An Oscar is a powerful signal to an actor that their sense of self as an actor is under control, and is safe.
Chapter 5: The Riddle of the Flying CEOs
Guiding question: Does winning have a downside?
Winning can increase testosterone which is linked to higher dopamine. Dopamine invigorates and motivates to take risks.
Money, or thinking about it, boosts a sense of self-sufficiency, and a feeling of control. This, in turn, makes one focus more on personal goals at the expense of thinking altruistically.
The cookie experiment (where 3 participants, 1 of whom is the 'boss' are given 5 cookies to eat) shows that even limited power differentials make the more powerful person more egocentric, and care less about what others think.
If brief memories of low-grade power in artificial experiments can make people more egocentric and socially uninhibited and incline them to see other people as objects, what effects does long-term, large-scale power over thousands of people have on the human mind? p. 209
Power induced rule-based morality towards others, while inducing outcome-based morality towards oneself. Experiments show that those primed with power, are more likely to cheat while at the same time disapproving of cheating when others do it. Power gives rise to hypocrisy.
There are two types of power need: 'p power' is needing power for personal reasons, while power' is needing power for societal reasons while critically examining themselves and exerting self-control. A measure s power is activity inhibition, the monitoring/control of one's own behavior.
Women tend to have the same level of p power compared to men, but they do have more s power than men.
S power not only tames p power - it also dissolves p power's physiological linkage to testosterone and the competitive aggression that goes with it. S power acts as a sort of coolant on the potent but sometimes destructive effects of unmitigated p power, and women's minds have more of this coolant. p.234
Chapter 6: The Winning Mind
Guiding question: What makes a winner?
The explanation for the collapse of Enron and the flying CEOs:
The combination of money-primed individualism, judgment skewed by testosterone-triggered dopamine, and risk perception dulled by the biological consequences of the winner effect meant that their attention was focused on narrow goals [...] Their moral judgment was dulled by power, which also made them more vulnerable to applying different standards of conduct to themselves than they did to others. [...] the neurological effects of considerable power may have made them less able to see things from otherpeople's point of view.
Check out my podcast episode with Prof Ian Robertson on his work on confidence:
