Producer: Okay. Welcome back to Full Prefrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. I am here as always with our host Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, my friend. Wow. I am looking forward to today’s conversation.
Sucheta: Me too. This is going to be a very special interview. I have waited a long time to talk this amazing young man, I will say. But before I get started with that, let me just quickly tell you all a story. So one day there was a earthquake and this story of course happened in a Zen monastery. There was a earthquake and that shook the entire Zen temple. Some parts collapsed and there was a big havoc. Many monks were terrified and they running around scattered. But the Zen master was there and he stopped everybody after the earthquake and gathered them together and said, “You now had a first-hand opportunity to see what a Zen master is all about. You saw a massive crisis unfold in front of us and you see how I didn’t panic? And you also saw that we very quietly gathered you all and I took you to this safe place which is a kitchen which is the strongest part of the temple and didn’t think much about it but I made a good decision. And because of my guidance and my mentorship, we all survived and we survived without any injuries. However, since I am a Zen master, as I reflect on this, I think about this, it just occurred to me that in spite of my composure, I lost it. When I was in the kitchen, I felt the tension and stress coming on to me so I just drank a glass of water.”
As soon as he said that, many monks in the crowd had a little smile on their face and so he was a little perturbed and said, “What are you smiling about?” And so one monk bravely said, “Sorry, Zen master. It wasn’t water. It was a glass of soy sauce.” So the idea there is as you can see in the story, the Zen master neither had mastery nor insight. And yes, we all hope to do better not just during crisis or setbacks and roadblocks, but we hope to do better even when we are even keel. But it certainly takes practice.
We are in search of personal evolution and we hope to reach that personal evolution by changing either our ways by doing less than usual, doing more than usual or doing something unusual or something that is completely a new way. That’s why on today’s podcast, we’re going to talk to somebody who’s a guru of self-change and who has talked a lot about self-discovery and has provided us with lots of opportunities to create a polished version of our better selves.
I call him a transformation master. It’s my total delight to introduce Daniel H. Pink. He is the author of six provocative books including his newest ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing’, which has spent four months at the New York Times bestseller list and has been named a best book of 2018 by Amazon, iBooks, Goodreads and several more outlets. His other books including long-running New York Times bestsellers ‘A Whole New Mind’ and the #1 New York Times bestseller ‘Drive’ and ‘To Sell is Human’ are very well-known to many in the audience but they are my personal favorite, all four of them.
His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into 39 languages. He lives in Washington D.C. with his family. One of the things I love about Dan, I’ve only met him once, not met him, I was in the audience. I call that as meeting Dan. But I am hoping that today I get to discuss the book ‘When’ which offers valuable science behind the world changing idea of timing. If taken seriously, it can offer insight into a better operating self. It’s a great delight. Welcome to the podcast, Dan.
Dan Pink: Thanks for having me.
Sucheta: This podcast is about executive function which entails self-knowledge, self-awareness, goal management, and directing self to become personal best. In short, executive function is the CEO of the brain that governs and gives orders to the rest of the brain.
Do you mind, before I start with your work, if we could talk a little bit about you as a learner and a thinker? What kind of student were you and how was your self-regulation as a child?
Dan: That itself is an interesting question. When I was a kid, I was a very “good student” but being a good student doesn’t necessarily make one a good learner. In many cases where — I’m an American. I went to a public school in Central Ohio in the 1970s and ‘80s. The essence of being a good student in so many ways was simply being compliant, being obedient, giving the authority figure what he/she wanted on time and neatly. And so in that sense, I was a good student. I don’t think that I became a good learner through school. I think I actually became a good learner through other experiences in my life.
Sucheta: So how did you become aware of that, that you were a good student but that doesn’t necessarily mean a learner? Was that something that came later?
Dan: Much, much later, yeah. No, I don’t think I had any idea about that when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I was actually focused on being a good student. I don’t think I was really focused on being a good learner. It wasn’t until well into my adulthood that I realized that those two things are not the same. I mean, well, well into my adulthood that I realized those two things were not the same. Now, I might have had an inkling of that at different points in my youth but I never fully put it together until probably my 30s.
Sucheta: I love that you distinguished between the two and in fact, what’s so amazing as a reader and person who trains executive function, that your writing comes from someone who has great insight into the value of that process that can allow people to exfoliate their minds, so to speak.
Dan: Yeah. And I think it’s a really interesting question and it’s something that has become more important to me. I don’t give you that account with pride. I wish that when I was younger, I had focused a lot more on learning and just dealt with whatever the consequences would have been for how I performed as a student. But one of the things that has helped me figure this out and part of this simply growing and maturing but part of it also is if you look at, say, the work of Carol Dweck and the difference between learning goals and performance goals, learning goals are if you want to master a material. Do you want to actually build a new skill? Performance goals are do you want to get a good grade on the tests? Do you want to have some kind of outward measure or some kind of metric go up?
And for me, the classic example of that is French. I took French for six years in high school and in college. I got straight As in French. I can’t speak French. And the reason for that is that I was focused entirely on being a good student, not on being a good learner. I was focused entirely on the performance goals rather than on the learning goals. In a given moment in 1983, I probably had memorized all of the irregular conjugations of the major verbs in French and could recite those on a quiz. But if you had plunked me into the middle of France and had me try to find a train or a croissant or a bathroom, I might have been in difficult circumstances.
So I think this distinction is extraordinarily important. Now, the good news here is that I think that over time, I have become a much, much better learner, a much better learner. I think that there were some seeds earlier in my life that sprouted, that actually helped me do that. And I think the interesting thing is that the experiences were not in the classroom. They were in other realms of my life.
Sucheta: So that brings me to this question that I think you said that maybe you are referring to being a good student actually kind of shows that you had great learning habits and you were a very cooperative learner. That means you kind of trusted the teachers or trusted the education to offer you the tools and methods that may add value to you.
For such a student, I’m wondering now what kind of weaknesses did you have as a learner and were you attuned with your strengths and weaknesses as globally?
Dan: Well, it’s interesting because I don’t know whether I really thought about it that deeply. I mean again, not to keep always coming back to Carol Dweck but I think as a kid, I had – and I think it’s partly the era as well. I had very much a fixed mindset. You’re either good at something or you weren’t good at something. You were either smart or you weren’t smart. You were either capable at a particular subject or you weren’t. And so I think I fell into that.
I don’t think I was super aware of any kinds of strengths or weaknesses. I think on the weaknesses probably in retrospect, I would say probably gave up on things too early. But that’s probably having a fixed mindset.
In terms of strengths, I was always reasonably good with language or at least the English language. That’s probably a fairly consistent through line in my childhood and formal elementary and secondary education.
Sucheta: I noticed your love for linguistics and you minored, I guess, in linguistics —
Dan: I majored in linguistics.
Sucheta: Oh, you majored in linguistics. Okay. I have masters in linguistics and one my favorite things and I’m also multilingual and languages came easy but sounds like you probably also had great memories like Velcro memory, I like to call it, where information kind of loop to your brain very fast without having to do an intentional processing. And then what I see in your work, you are tremendous at making meaning which is why you are able to tell these incredible stories from all walks of life by weaving them which is what adds value to all of us who read your books.
So my last question about your own style and your own insight into self as a learner is were you strategic when it came learning but sounds like a lot of things came to you quite intuitively. I don’t know if you needed intentionality in learning hard stuff because maybe lot of stuff was hard.
Dan: It’s another great question. I guess it depends. I guess I would go back to this idea that it was – I got pretty good at being compliant and I got pretty good at giving authority figures what they wanted. I’m not sure that that is learning and I think that when it came to things that were a little more difficult, I don’t think I had quite the growth mindset or the persistence to surmount that when I was younger. I don’t feel that way today. I guess some of that is certainly maturity. Some of that also is in the era in which I grew up. We didn’t talk about fixed and growth mindsets. We didn’t talk about grit. We didn’t talk about strengths. In education psychology and social psychology and personality psychology, those are relatively recent developments.
Sucheta: Yeah. So that brings me to the second part from – and maybe as a parent of three children, you talk about your children but I’m just curious, what kind of classroom environment did you grow up and how different do you think it is for the children now in terms of is that conducive to learning? Does that exfoliate the mind about their own mindset what goes into learning?
Dan: I actually don’t think there is, in general, a massive difference. I went to a public high school but not in a poor area at all. We sat in rows and we did our homework and we sat there and the teacher talked. Maybe we took notes. And then in science, maybe we did some very directed experiments. And maybe in English, we wrote a tiny little bit.
I think what’s interesting is that if someone were to go back in time, let’s say that we were to take a student, let’s take 11-year-old me, alright. So 11-year-old, I would have been 5th grader. Let’s say we take a 5th grader — I live in Washington D.C. — somewhere in the metropolitan Washington D.C. area. We’re going to take that 5th grader and put her into a time machine and take her back to when I was in 5th grade which was 1975, and take her into my 5th grade classroom. I think that she would be perfectly at home. I dint think that he’d be surprised at all. I don’t think that he would look at it as archaic. I think it would be absolutely recognizable.
Meantime, I think if you were to take me as an 11-year-old and put me in a time machine, transport me to a 5th grader class in 2019, I think I might be confused by the computers a couple people might have and by the phones and things like that. But beyond that, I don’t think I’d be – I think the classroom would look pretty much the same way my classroom looked. I think many of the – the approach to learning would be relatively simple and straightforward. I don’t think I would have a massive adjustment. I think that’s a little bit troubling because if we think about —
Sucheta: It’s [00:13:27]
Dan: We think about the experience of going in for surgery was different in 1975 versus today. Other kinds of experiences are different and education experience is less different than some of these others.
Sucheta: Yeah. And I do have a point in asking all that because it’s so fascinating to me that all the books that you have written, you explained and provide insights so that people will be charged to make change and you have a very specific and intense focus on self-directed change. To me, self-directed change is a extremely executive function process and people are not used to. They don’t get any training. Even our education doesn’t afford that.
Dan: Yeah. It’s true. I think that people come to that with different levels of innate capacity but also different kinds of social experience. I was, as a kid, especially for a boy was reasonably good at things like impulse control and maybe was a little bit slightly less of a knucklehead than some other boys. But it’s not anything that anybody explicitly taught. You just have your assignments and did what you had to do. And if you didn’t have the executive function, you didn’t do well. And if you did have some modest executive function, you are compliant and revered authority then you would do well.
Sucheta: This is the 21st century gap that I find that people really need to pay attention to even in the whole new mind that you talk about, this entire different approach to preparing the new generation. But in order to prepare the generation, the most important skillset that you need to teach is how do I know me. What kind of information on a daily basis is the student getting self and the parents themselves don’t know themselves and the teachers don’t know themselves. And so when it comes to self-change, for example, the sub-directed change, I am highly motivated. I’m highly self-governed and I have tremendous influence on me changing me and I will do better with self-help book because I completely understand your message and I have the process to inculcate that and inhabit that new world by saying, “Uh-uh. No more. Because Dan said that on page 57 to implement this. Drink more water.” Even take a simple method of drinking more water as soon as you get up, that’s a new technique I’m trying that requires incredible not checking your phone, not stopping myself from doing anything but drinking water. So regulation is required.
Anyway, I’m hoping to tie that in so let’s get started with amazing, amazing book ‘When.’ In that book, I quote, you say that “we are smarter, faster, dimmer, slower, more creative, and less creative in some parts of the day than others.” And so you tackle or take on this wonderful idea about cognitive fluctuation and this daily cognitive roller coaster and I would love for you to talk about that. One quick comment about that I was going to say is, in my work, I came into this field of brain injury and I talked about energy management and cognitive resource management for 20 years and it’s so wonderful that it’s now hitting the mainstream through somebody like you. Even the neuroscientists have not managed to say that. Tell us a little bit about this idea and how you have conceptualized this.
Dan: The idea is rooted in science and we think about our days or just think about a given day, we make all kinds of decisions about when to do things and we tend to make those decision based on intuition, based on guesswork. We sometimes make them based on default and it turns out that’s the wrong way to do it, that there is this rich body of science out there across multiple disciplines that gives us real evidence on how to make these decisions better, make smarter, better evidence-based decisions. The starting point in some ways is making decisions over the course of a day.
One of the things that science tells us exactly as you said, Sucheta, is that our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of the day. They change. They change the material ways. They change in fairly predictable ways. The best time to do something depends on what it is that you do. If we just factor those things into our decision-making over the course of a day, we’re going to learn more. We’re going to perform better. We’re probably going to be a little bit happier.
Sucheta: I would love to reveal some strategies that you have introduced. One idea is that slum into a spark, how to convert that dip into experience. You offer a lot of strategies to maximize personal cognitive reserve. One such idea that you talk about is that restructuring either your day or taking naps or doing some things like including drinking a glass of water when you wake up, avoiding coffee immediately after you wake up, or soaking more morning sun, scheduling talk therapy.
Can you just give us some tips and what science shows with our listeners and what’s remarkable for you in terms of your personal experience that you were not doing yourself?
Dan: Well, again, it goes back to recognizing that our cognitive function is different at different times of the day. One way to begin analyzing that is to begin with what chronobiology is a field, chrono time biology, study of life, a field of science that looks at our biological rhythms at large.
One of the things that chrono biologists have discovered is that each of us has a chronotype, that is, we have a propensity. So some of us go to sleep early and wake up early. Naturally, some of us go to sleep late and wake up late. Others of us are in the middle. What we know is that about 15% of us are very strong morning people, larks. About 20-25% of us are very strong evening people, owls, and about 2/3 of us are in the middle. What I’d like to call “third birds.” That becomes the starting point into figuring out the right time in the day to do something.
So here’s what we know: most of us move through the day in three stages. They’re broad stages: a peak, a trough, a recovery. Peak, a trough, a recovery. Most of us, I’d say 75-80% of us move through the day in that order. Peak early in the day, trough in the middle of the day, recovery later in the day. Now, owls, people who have evening chronotypes are much more complicated. They tend to hit their peak late afternoon, early evening, well into the evening.
But what we know is that each of these three stages, our cognitive abilities change. So during the peak which for most of us is the morning but for owls it’s much later in the day. That’s when we are most vigilant. Vigilance means we are able to bat away distractions. Batting away distractions, this concept of vigilance is the key attribute of this peak period. So during the peak period, we do better and should be doing work that requires heads down, focus attention and energy, writing a report, analyzing data. At some level, and I’m speaking a little bit out of school here, I think we can analogize that our executive function is better, that executive function is in some ways at least analogous to vigilance. Executive function means that you are harder to distract. And that changes over the course of the day. For 3/4 of us that were less distractible in the morning, during the trough which is the early afternoon to mid-afternoon for almost everybody, that’s a very low-performing time of day for almost everybody. There’s a whole array of evidence across many, may domains showing performance drops considerably during that period. You see it in test scores among students. You see it in certain measure of the corporate performance. You see it in jury and judicial decision-making. You see it big time in healthcare. And so that period, that early to mid-afternoon period is when we are actually at our worst cognitively. So that’s a better period for doing administrative work. Work that doesn’t require massive brainpower or creativity.
Now, the recovery period for 75-80% of us is late afternoon and early evening. That’s a very interesting time of day because we are less vigilant during that period. Again, if we’re in the middle or we’re larks, we’re less vigilant during that period but our mood is actually pretty high. And so that combination of reduced lower vigilance and high mood makes it a good time for certain cognitive tasks that require a form of mental looseness, iterating new ideas, coming up with nonobvious solutions, brainstorming.
And so what the research tells us fairly clearly is this: where possible, we should try to do our analytic work during your peak or administrative work during the trough, and our insight creative work during the recovery. One of the things that we see and it goes through a lot of what you were talking about, Sucheta, is that when we try to explain variants in performance on cognitive things, why are some people better at cognitive task than others? There are all kinds of explanations for that. Some of it is obviously going to be native intelligence. That’s a part, not the whole thing but it’s pretty clear that’s a part of it. Some of it is executive function, whether that’s innate or whether that’s learned. A big part of it is social advantage. People don’t start life in equal footings. But what this research is telling us is that we can explain about 20% of the variants based on time of day. That’s a big deal. That doesn’t mean the timing is everything but it means it’s a big thing. If we can just take small steps to do the right work at the right time as I said before, we’re going to perform at a higher level.
Sucheta: I mean you have organized this in such a wonderful way that it clearly makes these connections understandable but also the importance of implementing them in your life. One of the research that was very striking to me that I have read and you also have talked about is that particularly the way judges give sentencing and how close or far away they are from the lunchbreak and I think that’s devastating.
Dan: It’s terrifying. Decision-making differs every different times of day. What that research showed, which is a study of judges in the Israeli parole system done by one of the researchers, a guy named Jonathan [00:23:44], Stanford University, what it showed is that judges were more likely to grant parole early in the day and immediately after breaks. And so there was the difference between seeing a judge immediately before her break and seeing a judge immediately after her break was massive. That should alarm us about the integrity of the judicial decision-making process.
But you see other things. I mentioned juries. There’s some interesting experimental evidence with jurors showing that jurors who deliberate in the morning are less likely to resort to racial stereotypes than jurors who deliver it in the afternoon. So over and over again, somehow we have come to the belief – it’s not even a belief because it’s less affirmative than that. It’s an assumption. We assume that all times of day are created equal and they’re not. They’re fundamentally not. All times of day are not created equal. There are significant differences in our cognitive abilities based on time of day. Simply folding that in to the way we make decisions on a daily basis is going to help us out.
Sucheta: Two thoughts come to my mind. One is, I think Dan, [00:24:57] work about predictably irrational. I think we truly believe that we are neutral, we are under control, we have great control over our decision-making, and all the work that you are quoting just shows how clueless we are.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. That’s a great point. We are far less capable decision-makers and we believe that we are and we are far more susceptible to diurnal rhythms than we believe that we are.
Sucheta: And the second thought comes to – I had Carol Tavers, whose main area of study is cognitive dissonance and the second thought comes to my mind is I think when we are not performing well, we have incredible amount of justifications to give.
Dan: Oh yeah.
Sucheta: And say, “No, I’m fine” and externalize the blame and call things outside you to have caused you to not perform well. I see that all the time in my breakfast.
Dan: Of course. I mean, that’s a big part. Another big factor is many people don’t know how they’re performing. They don’t even have a good way of measuring, of knowing whether they’re performing well or performing poorly. And as you know, many people have an inflated opinion of how effective they are, how able they are. As we also know from Dunning and Kruger, that the people who know the least, who are the least expert are more likely to believe they’re awesome.
Sucheta: Yes. Meta cognitive insight. And in fact, I’m about to bring this software, I’ve designed a software that trains the self-awareness in learners and thinkers to help them not so much improve cognitive ability but to develop understanding of self by giving them – so in a daily basis, what is the mirror that we look into that allows us to fix ourselves? So there are two ways, right? Somebody tells us that you made a mistake or something didn’t go per our desire or even we notice it. And second is if we have unfavorable outcomes or something that is against the goal. But those can be very insidious or invisible feedback. So there’s nothing looking in the mirror to fix me kind of process. And so I feel that we need to have a specialized way of introducing this understanding of self so that (1) we can become a little bit appropriately judging ourselves and have some respectable acceptance that maybe I’m not perfect but at the same time not feel crushed by recognizing that I’m not perfect.
Dan: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, in a sense, what you’re talking about – not exactly what you’re talking about but you’re talking about all of us could use something akin to a coach. Someone who cares about us, who is helping us get better but who can take an outsider’s view.
Sucheta: Exactly.
Dan: And who’s dedicated to our improvement, not to invigorating us, not to validating us but to helping us improve.
Sucheta: That’s why in this particular software, it’s called EXQ, we have virtual coach which walks the learner through learning from mistakes of other. And if the mistakes are not that grave, then you are looking at your own mistakes. This having a externalized process of looking at mistakes and judging and evaluating that from a third-person’s point of view is extremely critical to develop insight and understanding of self, which brings me to this point that you talked about a lot in your book is that taking a meaningful perspective, the situational condition you are in and picturing the other person who benefits from your effort or action. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that informs our — ungluing ourselves, so to speak, unstick, getting unstuck.
Dan: Well, right. I mean, that’s a technique, as you say for getting unstuck. That is, what we know from a lot of research, let’s take the work of [00:28:48] Harvard Business School which she has found is that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress and meaningful work. So the days where we’re making progress, we feel pretty motivated. The days where we’re not making progress, when we’re thwarted, we feel far less motivated. And so progress depends in part on getting information and feedback in how you’re doing which is not always the case but it also requires some strategies for when you’re not making progress. What do you do to reboot, to reroute, to redirect yourself? Some of the things that you can do are various kinds of mental exercises. So things like imagining how someone is going to benefit from your work. If I say writing, I mean I happen to be writing a very, very short proposal for a new book this morning. So if I got stuck on that which I always do, I might think, Okay. Let me try to picture someone who might read this book and benefit from it, someone who might read this book and make different decisions about her own life. That might be a way to help me get unstuck.
Another thing very powerful is some form of self-distancing. There’s a lot of research on self-distancing showing that we do better at solving other people’s problems than we do our own problems. Let’s say that we’re stuck. One technique that I think is really effective is asking ourselves what would you tell your best friend to do? I use that technique all the time. I think I got it originally from [00:30:12] book ‘Decisive.’ But if somebody comes to me for advice, sometimes I will say to them, “Okay. So you let it all out. What would you tell your best friend to do?” What I find is that in many cases, they know immediately what they tell their best friend to do which is probably what they should do.
Sucheta: Yeah. Are you familiar with the Batman effect?
Dan: Absolutely. There is the idea of coming up with – well, yeah, exactly. What would Batman do in this situation? That’s an interesting alter ego aspect to it. And what’s interesting is that what we need to do is we need to toggle. We need to be self-aware but we also need to be self-distant. How you toggle between those two is in one ways is one of the dials of high performance.
Sucheta: Yeah. I think from executive function point of view, we have cool executive functions and we have hot executive function. Those emotionally-laden, emotionally-charged decision-making routes that circumvents some of the higher order thinking skills, and so to activate the calm collective way of thinking can be achieved through that self-distancing. What would Bob do or what would the Batman do?
Dan: Right. Exactly.
Sucheta: And the second thing about that advantage is creating new ideas requires you to have a perspective that is not just yours because we have a limited perspective and we are bound to our ideas being final and amazing that we will really allow ourselves to shift. Because that will require us to somewhat accept that maybe that idea was not that great. So that also can happen, stimulate, so to speak, the creativity a little bit by thinking from somebody else’s point of view.
That brings me to this last question which is what you are calling – you’ve always had this calling for all of us to think about making a cultural shift or you’re asking maybe the culture to shift. Every decision that we take to manage ourselves better using these insights that we are gathering from anthropology, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience is telling us that the beliefs that we have harbored may not have been the most accurate ones and the new information is telling us to change the way we lead our daily lives. But that requires intentionality and getting cooperation from systems or organizations or culture. I’m thinking about like we know naps are effective. Places like high-end, places like Google may even have pods where you can take a nap. But can you imagine in middle America corporation, when people are in cubicles, they will slap somebody silly if they are taking a nap.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sucheta: How do you envision that we as a culture move in that direction where we are closer to self-actualization?
Dan: I think it’s a tough one because I think you identified the interplay that makes it challenging which is that it’s partly about individual volition but it’s partly about the systems that somebody is in. And so if I have any guidance on that, it’s to start small. It’s very hard to change a system. It’s very hard to change any kind of entrenched system. Very, very hard. And so you go in with the aspiration to change the system at its root, you’re probably going to be disappointed. But at some level, I think that it gives us a false model of houses to change in many cases. Not all but in many cases, system is changed by people starting with smaller ambitions. They decide to do one thing in their own realm to make things better and then someone else does the same thing and someone else does the same thing and suddenly you have this cascade where things actually do change.
Inertia is such a powerful force, whether the individual and institutional level that my best advice is starting small and being consistent. Starting small and being consistent. I’m not saying that’s going to work every time but it does give you a fighting chance.
Sucheta: I think it’s a great, great advice and so palatable. Inviting people to change in a small quantity is totally acceptable.
Dan: Right.
Sucheta: Now, how can we apply this to parenting? Running a household is itself has systemic problems the way I see it. Parents also need to change the way they raise their children, prepare their children to tackle and become self-regulated and also get their children ready for 21st century. But they themselves may not be skilled and they are bringing a lot of notions that are self-limiting. What are your thoughts about that?
Dan: I think it’s a really complex question because some of it is rooted in class so parents who are struggling to pay the rent, who don’t know whether their job is secure, whose living in an environment where there is physical insecurity, that’s qualitatively different than a parent living in a middle-class domain of relative physical safety and sufficient resources and all that. I think that we don’t like talking about that in this country but that is a major factor.
I guess the other thing is that there are different value systems as well. Some of the things that I’ve come to understand, there is a set of values that says that the most important values are things like purity and sanctity and authority, and there is another set of values that says what’s really important is just tolerance and individuality and freedom. Those are very different value systems and one is not better than the other. So you have different class, outlooks. Yu have different basically the deep structure of people’s moral views are different.
But I think at some level, so much of it depends on as a parent, as a boss, as anything when you’re starting assumption about other people. If you’re starting assumption about other people that they’re lazy, they’re [00:36:14], they’re lazy, they can’t be trusted, then I think that’s going to lead you down one path, a very controlling path. If your starting premise is that people want to do good work, are generally trustworthy, are generally good people, that’s going to lead you down another path.
My view is that let’s start with that positive assumption and let people disprove it. I think what happens now in too many circumstances is that we start with a negative assumption and so we build in mechanisms of control whether in schools, whether in our households, whether in companies, and when you have people who don’t need to be controlled. I mean, I just see certain kinds of workplace policy – workplace policies are designed for the 4% or 5% of people who are jerks rather than the 95% of people who are decent human beings.
I think one thing to do, one step is to assume that people are like you. Most people believe themselves that they are honorable, that they want to contribute, that they care. I assume the same thing about other people and let them disprove that.
Sucheta: As we end, Dan, answer this for me: as you look into the future, what are you most hopeful about and what keeps you up at night?
Dan: I guess what I’m most hopeful about is that in general, that that arrow of history generally points to progress. If we think about our lives today versus our lives 200 years ago, it’s generally better. There’s very few people who would want to live 200 years ago versus today. I think where the arrow of history points is generally, not always, pretty positive.
I guess what concerns me is that some of the challenges we face, the scopes seem well beyond the scope of our institutions to deal with them. If you think about climate change. I don’t think we have the institutional mechanisms to deal with that. If you think about some of the breakdown in our democratic function, I’m not sure whether our institutions are strong enough to deal with that. If you think about this, to some extent, inequality is not something that our institutions are really well-equipped to deal with. The complexity of the problem, the complexity, scope and force of the problem exceeds the complexity, force, and competence of our institutions. That’s what worries me.
Sucheta: Wow. Well, I cannot tell you how wonderful this conversation has been for me and I’m sure all our listeners are going to thoroughly enjoy it. I hope you had a chance to tell some parts of your personal journey as a learner that I don’t think many people often ask you. So I’m really, really grateful for your time today. Thank you so much, Dan.
Dan: Thanks for having me, Sucheta.
Producer: Alright. That is all the time we have for today. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath, our guest Daniel Pink, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for tuning in and listening. We look forward to seeing you again next week on Full PreFrontal.