Last week I talked about the three traps of diagnosis (or decision making). Just to recap the three traps,
Trap 1: Ignoring Objective Data
Trap 2: Giving Credit To Irrelevant Information
Trap 3: The ‘Chameleon Effect’
Earlier this week I gave you examples of the first and second traps in real life. The examples included the NBA, with how the draft pick order affects players’ careers, and the standard job interview procedure, which produces a lot of irrelevant and useless information about prospects future performance. Today I want to give you a more detailed example of the third trap of the diagnosis bias. This example, much like the other ones, comes from the book Sway, and it is about the Israeli army and a cool psychological experiment performed by Dov Eden.
The third trap is known as the ‘Chameleon Effect’. The ‘Chameleon Effect’ takes place when a person, or people, get influenced and change their behaviour based on how another person, or people, label them. This is counter-intuitive, but we are not talking about rational behaviour, are we? We are exploring irrational behaviour after-all. Now, let’s talk about this awesome experiment.
Don Eden approached the training officers who would soon be instructing a leadership development course for junior officers – pretty much grooming the leaders of tomorrow for the Israeli military. Mr. Eden informed these training officers, that based on the accumulated data on all the trainees, which included “psychological test scores, sociometric data from the previous course, and ratings by previous commanders”, each trainee was put into one of three ‘command potential’ categories: ‘high’, ‘regular’, and ‘unknown’ (for trainees with insufficient data). The training officers were told that they had to learn the names of their trainees and the associated ‘command potential’ profiles.
Now, since you know that this is an experiment, you probably figured out by now that the trainees had no idea that this was going on and that all the ‘command potential’ scores were assigned at random based on completely bogus data.
But here is the fun part. Fifteen weeks later, at the end of the course, all the trainees were taking a written test based on the materials they learned during the program. Dov Eden analysed the results of the tests and found that the trainees “whom the training officers thought had a high CP [command potential] score performed much better on the test (scoring an average of 79.98) than their ‘unknown’ and ‘regular’ counterparts (who scored 72.43 and 65.18, respectively). Simply being labeled, however arbitrarily, as having high leadership potential translated directly into actual improved ability – improved by a staggering 22.7 percent… Without realizing it, the trainees had taken on the characteristics of the diagnoses ascribed to them.” The ‘Chameleon Effect’!
Pretty cool, isn’t it?
I am sure you have heard of a similar experiment conducted in a school with ‘excellent’ teachers assigned ‘gifted’ students and achieving much better results with them than ‘average’ teachers teaching ‘troublesome’ students. Of course, like in the Mr. Eden’s experiment, teachers and students had their labels assigned at random.
So labeling is dangerous and can really affect performance. What experiences do you have with labeling? Have you labeled others based on your initial impression or some bogus statistics? Or maybe, have you been labeled in the past by someone else and suffered, or excelled, as a result?
Tomorrow I will talk about another fascinating example of the the third trap at work; this time it is about men and women!
Until next time,
V
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Tags: Chameleon Effect, Human Behavior, Irrational Behavior, Sway, Three Traps Of Diagnosis