When you are afraid, you start going into fight or flight mode. Your body starts prioritising what is needed for immediate survival - screw routine body functions, if you don't make it past the next few moments there won't be a routine to return to. You stop digesting food. Cell repair slows or stops. You stop producing saliva, which is why your mouth goes dry when you're nervous just before making a speech or going into a difficult conversation. Your heart rate and breathing increase to ensure better blood flow. A cocktail of hormones like epinephrine and oxytocin are cued up and produced, which amplifies your body's ability to act (and remarkably, in the case of oxytocin, reminds you to seek help).
Don't be mistaken about what happens when you feel fear. Your body is readying itself to help you face what you fear in the way it knows how.
What causes us to feel fear?
1) Fear occurs to us unconsciously. Do you pause to think, hey, very angry looking snake! Maybe I should be scared. Of course not, it would be too late! Fear becomes much clearer when we examine what happens inside your brain. When you are afraid, the fear/anger/aggression/anxiety centre of your brain - the amygdalas (get used to this name, it's gonna keep popping up) lights up. And we've covered all the changes that happen in your body: your blood pressure, your hormones, your heart-rate. But remember how amygdala is like a train interchange with direct routes to different parts of your brain? There is a direct neural link between our amygdala and your pre-frontal cortex, the rational thinking part of your brain. And if we look closely enough or we think things through, sometimes we realise, argh! it's not an angry snake, it's just a prank toy that your annoying friend had thrown at you. Or if you've handled angry snakes enough times, your amygdala does not light as much. Your blood pressure and your heart rate do not increase as much, you realise what you need to do is to stay calm and slowly back away.
Finally, notice how fear, anger, aggression, and anxiety are processed by the same part of the brain, the amygdala. This is no coincidence. These 4 emotions are closely tied to one another; aggression maybe triggered because one is nervous, angry, or fearful. Being fearful may cause one to react angrily, as a self-defense mechanism. Fear, like all our emotions, happens to us. Mostly, we can't control how it originates. But we can control how it develops by understanding what exactly is causing fear and by choosing the response that dispels it
2) We fear what we are unconfident or uncertain about. Think back on your ancestors doing something they weren't confident or certain off - hunting a massive animal without a weapon, or eating a berry they've never seen before. Doing so would mean a very high chance of seriously harming themselves. Today, after many cycles of evolution, we have been wired based on these experiences.
Think about it. Are you ever fearful of something you've done before, and are good? Brushing your teeth, putting on your clothes, indulging in your favourite hobby (whatever it is)? Of course not. You know you can perform these functions easily. You are confident.
But many of us would have felt fearful and anxious the first time we ventured into something new: using a pair of chopsticks, riding a bicycle, swimming, going on a first date. We were uncertain about these functions, and we were not confident about performing them. However, once we have demonstrated to ourselves that we are able to perform these tasks, we are no longer afraid. The same applies to more challenging tasks. Some of us struggle with: public speaking, starting a business, having a very difficult conversation with the CEO... You are uncertain and unconfident if you can succeed. But once you have proven to yourself you are able to do it, even for the more challenging tasks, you are no longer afraid. People might start off feeling scared about public speaking, but after speech 3797, you're pro The catch, of course, is that sometimes, we are too scared to start.
Even if we were certain of something OR confident about something, many of us will still feel some amount of fear. We might be theoretically certain how we should use a pair of chopsticks, but if we have never succeeded in using them properly, we remain unconfident and will still feel nervous if we had to use them, especially when others are observing. You might also be confident about
3) we fear what is painful. Boxer. climbing 100 flights of stairs or doing 100 burpees. But pain is not just physical but mental. Failure is painful. Being judged is painful.
This is why you procrastinate. You either fear what you have to do bevause you don't know how to do it (you don't fear brushing your teeth for example), or you fear doing something becaue you know it will be effortful
4) we fear what we cannot control
Learn more about your amygdala, the amygdala hijack, the thalamus, the pre-frontal cortex, and how your brain works here.
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Summary:
- Fear and anxiety (and anger + aggression) are always
Pizza, Praise, or Money - what raises productivity most?
What is it that motivates workers to do better work? Well, Dan Ariely (you should be familiar with Dan if you've read some of the other pages) aimed to find out.
Ariely worked with Intel (Israel) to test out the effect of different rewards on employee productivity.
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He carried out the test at a semiconductor factory, where productivity can be tangibly measured (i.e. the number of computer chips produced per day. This is as compared to other types of work, where outcomes are difficult to measure) At this factory, workers worked in shifts - the standard work cycle lasted eight days - each workweek was composed of four days of twelve-hour shifts, followed by four days off.
Ariely set up different reward systems:
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Monetary bonus: On the first day of the work cycle, employees in this condition were greeted by the following message from their boss: “Good morning! If you reach or exceed X chips today, you’ll receive US$30 in cash. Good luck!”
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Pizza voucher: If you reach or exceed X chips today, you’ll receive a voucher for pizza. Good luck!”
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Compliment: In this condition, workers were greeted by a message that informed them that if they reached or exceeded their production target, they would get a text message from their boss telling them “Well done!”
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Control: In this case, chip makers received no note and were offered no bonus.
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Ok great. So which reward do you think enhanced productivity the most? Have a guess.
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1. US$30 bonus
2. Praise from boss
3. Pizza voucher
4. Control group - no reward
And the results?
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First, let's see what the HR managers in Intel predicted would have the greatest effect. They thought that the rewards would rank as below, in order of effectiveness:
1) the monetary bonus
2) Pizza voucher
3) compliment
4) control group
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And the actual results?
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On day 1,
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Pizza Voucher increased productivity by 6.7%
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Compliment: 6.6%
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Money: 4.9%
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Control: as per normal (it's a control group!)
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But remember the workweek is 4 days long. Were there any changes to performance after the first day? Yes, you bet.
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Over the next 3 workdays, the productivity of those who received the compliment and the pizza voucher slowly dropped each day until it hit the base productivity rate of the control group by the end of the workweek.
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Between the 2, the compliment had higher productivity rates over the next 3 workdays.
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What about the monetary bonus?
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On the second day of the workweek (the day after the bonus was given), those who received a monetary bonus performed 13.2% worse than those in the control!
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On day 3, it was 6.2% worse than the control; and on day 4, 2.9%.
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Overall for the week, the monetary bonus resulted in a 6.5% decrease in performance, compared with the control (not to mention the compliment and the pizza voucher conditions)
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In other words, the company would have paid more money for poorer performance.
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There are a few lessons from this experiment.
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The design of the experiment is worth noting. The monetary bonus was paid on the first day of the workweek. What this led to was that after the day of bonus, workers lost motivation on days 2, 3, and 4, when they couldn't get a bonus. What if the experiment paid out the bonus on the last day of the workweek?
Well, we don't know - that's an experimental limitation. However, the results give some grounds for us to assume that even if the experiment was changed where the bonus is paid out on the last day of the workweek, the worker might simply work less hard on the first 3 days, (ie, the results of this experiment, but reversed). What if a bonus was paid only if the worker hit a certain target for the entire workweek rather than for a single day? Again we can't tell - although that might no longer feel like a bonus per se, but rather a tiering of the basic salary structure.
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We often assume people would be motivated by more pay, but the opposite turned out to be true. In the point above, we covered that if the experimental design was tweaked, perhaps the monetary bonus might have been more effective. However, we should not forget that on day 1 of the workweek, in an even contest between the different rewards, the monetary bonus was the least effective of the rewards. It is worth considering if our intuitions about money are really accurate.
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What's the difference between the pizza voucher (I must qualify that the exprimenters really wanted to give out physical pizzas - which would very likely have been even more effective, but the logistics was just too difficult) and the monetary bonus? How can the pizza voucher produce better performance, when the monetary bonus can also be used to buy pizza, or other types of food if you don't like pizza?
At a simpler level, pizza is visible and sharable. Imagine the worker using the voucher to bring a pizza home for his family, who would ask him, wow you brought pizza back today, why? And the worker is able to tell his family - "I got this pizza as a bonus for good work." It allows his family to share in his good work and acknowledgement, even to look up to him
Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivtion
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Ok, we can see the appeal of bringing a pizza home, but this still doesn't answer our question - why does a pizza (or pizza voucher) work better than more money, which you can use to buy a pizza (or something else)?
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At a deeper level, it is how the reward is perceived. Here we introduce the concepts of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation:
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The answer comes with the desire of most people to seek think broadly about these findings, it seems that we don’t experience our work in day-to-day transactional terms. We don’t measure our lives out in coffee spoons, as T. S. Eliot wrote, even in the most quotidian work. Instead, we think and behave on a longer time scale, which means that managers need to take into account (and measure) not only the direct effect of different incentives but also their delayed and enduring outcomes. e more a company can offer employees opportunities for meaning and connection, the harder those employees are likely to work and the more enduring their loyalty is likely to be
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these findings suggest that when we are in the midst of a task, we focus on the inherent joy of the task, but when we think about the same task in advance, we overfocus on the extrinsic motivators, such as payment and bonuses. is is why we are not good predictors of what will motivate us and what will crush our motivation. is inability to intuit what will make us happy at work is sad. If you are a new college graduate considering your options, you might go for the high-paying job at a bank instead of pursuing your dream career as a jazz musician. Certainly, you will be able to afford more stuff and a nicer apartment if you take the bank job, but as you mull over these two options, are you overestimating the extrinsic motivators and underestimating the intrinsic joy of work?
Now this might not make complete ratioanl sense be getting a bonus, You ended up paying a bonus and getting worse performance. Clearly, your intuitions about bonuses are not exactly on target. Why not let us test the effect of monetary bonuses throughout the company, including the bonuses for top management?” As you might have guessed, the executives had no interest in this research path.
These results suggest that there is a lot more to work than merely the opportunity to earn money in exchange for labor.