A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

PG Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally

Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you

The psychiatrist and paediatrician, Donald Woods Winnicott

 

A client, Zac, an actor and comedian, found it very hard to deal with criticism. He said that he would always try to ‘get in first’ to protect himself from adverse comments. If someone started talking about one of his performances, he would critique it himself, before they could do so, which somehow seemed to take the sting out of anything negative they were going to say. Telling himself ‘it’s OK that they didn’t think I was any good because I knew that anyway’ protected him against hearing and confronting the full force of the criticism and the bad feelings it would engender.

If he got a bad notice in the press, he would find it difficult to work for several days. And a series of such setbacks might precipitate a depression and stop him working for weeks.

I asked Zac where he thought these powerful reactions came from. He said immediately that he’d had a very difficult relationship with his father who was ambitious and highly critical of his children. He had wanted Zac to become a lawyer, and was very angry and disappointed when he chose a different career path. It was his father’s voice he heard when he got a bad review.

In my last article I looked at how, like Zac, we can acquire distorted models of ourselves in our childhood from parents whose love and care is not unconditional but contingent on our behaving in certain ways. We grow up with the conviction that we are lacking  – what the psychotherapist and neuroscientist Louis Cozolino calls ‘core shame’ and others insecurity or poor self-esteem - and that to be worthy of love and respect we must fulfil our parents’ blueprint for the perfect child.

In this article I will consider some of the most common ways in which the legacy of these early experiences may manifest in our working lives as adults and interfere with our performance, relationships and happiness. In the next article I will consider what we can do to loosen their grip on ourselves, and negotiate them more intelligently when we recognise them in our colleagues.

 

Many of us have these vulnerabilities

On the far left of the bell curve for psychological health are those lucky people who have the psychological solidity that good genes and very good parenting provide. On the far right are those whose genetic inheritance and/or disordered childhoods have left them with lifelong psychological damage that may take the form of clinical depression, impulsive anger, or a personality disorder, such as psychopathy. But most of us occupy the middle. We are functioning – indeed we may be very successful indeed - but we also suffer from varying degrees of insecurity.

If you have these emotional vulnerabilities, adverse events at work can trigger your childhood emotions of fear and shame. Your unconscious mind tells you, for example, that when someone critiques your work, it’s the same as when your parent criticised you as a child, and that the appropriate reaction is to feel deeply ashamed and afraid that the parent may reject or even abandon you. In the language of psychotherapy, you are ‘transferring’ an emotional reaction you had to someone crucial to your very survival in your childhood to a relationship which is completely different.

Zac is experiencing an extreme form of this transference. He tries at first to rationalise by telling himself he already knew his performance was flawed.  Rationalisation – seeking to convince ourselves that things are other than they are - is often our first form of defence against the emotionally unpalatable. But when the bad notices arrive, they evoke his flight reaction - he abandons the struggle - and eventually he withdraws into depression.

These deep emotional models of ourselves are very powerful: remember how much stronger Haidt’s elephant (your unconscious mind) is than the tiny mahout (your rational mind) perched on top (see Article 1). You’re largely unaware of them: you can’t really imagine any other way of understanding yourself or your world. But, like Picasso’s girl in the painting above, you’re seeing things in a distorting mirror. Your negative self-image has nothing to do with your professional competence – as we’ve seen, many of the most creative and high-achieving among us suffer from these deep insecurities. But it gets in the way: it’s a barrier that stops you applying your talents to your job. It makes you doubt your abilities, warps your relationships, and diverts your energy to self-protection.

 

 Fear of making mistakes, sensitivity to criticism and perfectionism

 Negative parental blueprints come in many forms. If you have one, it will be unique, the product of your particular nature and nurture. So this account is bound to be a generalisation. I hope, nevertheless, that it may alert you to the possibility that things may not be as they seem and that something malign may be going on under the surface - in you or a colleague – and that you should reflect further and proceed with caution.

I want to focus in particular on the adverse consequences, for the individual and the team, of some of the most common emotional imperatives among the high achievers I’ve worked with: the deep conviction that they must do everything perfectly, work as hard as is humanly possible, that it is vital that they succeed or ‘win’. Of course they find that, however well they do, the deep emotional void inside them is still there.

This cluster of issues stems from the unconscious fear that if your work is less than immaculate you will be exposed in your full unworthiness, and you will have to confront the pain of recognising it.

We met it in the last article in my insomniac client Louise, who was perpetually convinced that she had made a catastrophic error and that the sky would fall in if she didn’t correct it. Neither was true: her ‘errors’ turned out to be imaginary or trivial and easily corrected. And even if they had been more serious, it would have been possible to put things right. After all, people make mistakes all the time in their working lives.  But for Louise, a mistake would have unleashed unbearable negative feelings about herself.

Perfectionists are trying to eliminate the risk that they may make a mistake or be criticised. Like all anxious people they are trying to exert control over events. They believe that everything they do must be completely faultless, not just fit for purpose. They take enormous pains to ensure it is perfect, and suffer great mental anguish if something goes awry. They’re also prone to assuming responsibility for everything and believe at some level that they are to blame for anything that goes wrong. They are often micro-managers (‘control freaks’, if you like): they can’t trust their perfectly competent team members to do the job to their unnecessarily high specification, and take away their subordinates’ autonomy and motivation as a result.

Zac’s sensitivity to criticism is part of the same family of vulnerabilities. If you have this makeup, you may perceive any negative feedback, setback or rejection – even when it’s out of your control - as an indicator of your personal inadequacy. Like him, you may resort to denial as a first defence. You will tell yourself that the remit wasn’t clear, the interview panel biased, you didn’t have the resources to do a good job. Or you may adopt elaborate protective mechanisms, avoiding new challenges or even self-sabotaging: temporising about a piece of work until you have too little time to do it properly and using this as an excuse.

These are flight/freeze reactions. But some people carry with them a lot of buried anger about their childhood treatment, and criticism may trigger fight rather than flight reactions. You may become defensive and angry; refusing to acknowledge that there is anything wrong with what you’ve done, or blaming others. Anger is of course the most damaging response, since it destroys your relationships with your colleagues. But all these reactions are ‘maladaptive’; they’re not appropriate to this current reality. Apart from making you unhappy, they limit your capacity for growth and fulfilment, and that of your team. They mean that you’re unwilling to try new things which may be risky; you don’t learn from adverse feedback where it’s justified; and you don’t acquire the resilience which comes with understanding that chance plays a part in life and some things are beyond your control.

 

The need to achieve, workaholism and ‘winning’

Many people are dedicated to their jobs and we rely utterly on that dedication. I want my surgeon to have trained for years and to work very hard to the highest possible standard.  But if you feel that you must prove yourself by achievement you may be in thrall to a blueprint from your childhood.  It is of course also possible, and probably quite common, to be both dedicated to what you do and in thrall to a parental blueprint.

The compulsion to work hard may be directly traceable back to parental pressure, but it’s also a common response among able children whose emotional background was lacking in other ways. If we achieve a lot, others admire and respect us, soothing our worries about acceptance. And work  is intrinsically very absorbing; it stills our worrying and ruminating.

People who work compulsively may become addicted to the good feelings – the dopamine spike – which hard work gives them. But because the emotional insecurities are still there, they’re able to take very limited pleasure in any achievement before they feel impelled to take on the next challenge and prove themselves again.  So, they work more and more, rationalising this by convincing themselves that they are very important, as is the job, and have no choice but to fill every hour with work.  They risk burnout and their relationships suffer. As the saying goes, no-one ever said on their death bed, ‘I wish I’d spent more time in the office’. And, if they are a leader, they’re almost bound to pass on the bad effects to their team, who will have to work equally hard to keep up with them and sacrifice their health and private lives

The compulsion to ‘win’ is an altogether more damaging manifestation of emotional insecurity than those we’ve considered so far. Sufferers from it are fiercely competitive because they can't safely countenance the thought that they may be out-competed.  They may brood obsessively about their status, how they compare with their peers in ability and performance, or how they are rated by their seniors or powerful outsiders. They may routinely denigrate others to reassure themselves about their own position and they may adopt devious means to maintain it. When someone they see as a competitor wins out against them, they may find this so painful that they have to rationalise and persuade themselves that it was unfair or indeed didn’t really happen.  They then focus their negative energies on ‘getting even’.

This of course is the profile of Donald Trump, whose father’s regard was explicitly contingent on his being a ‘winner’, not a ‘loser’, as we saw in Article 2. Trump’s parental blueprint has engulfed him completely. He is widely believed to suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD): to have buried his negative image of himself deep in his unconscious by inventing the myth that he is uniquely talented and entitled. People with NPD devote enormous psychological energy to maintaining this myth because it defends them against emotions they can’t bear – the sense of their imperfection and fragility – and we see this in Trump’s grandiosity (apparently he is a ‘very stable genius’), continual lying and refusal to accept that he lost the last US Election.

Trump has created what the psychotherapist and paediatrician Donald Winnicott, working in the 1950s and 60s, describes as a ‘false’ or ‘adapted’ self. This false self is always in the way, preventing you from engaging fully with life, which only your true self can do – which brings me to some final reflections on how serious emotional vulnerabilities can interfere with the capacity to lead effectively.

 

False selves and leadership

 In his study of the best performing companies of the late twentieth century, the management theorist, Jim Collins, observes that the exceptional CEOs running them were known not for their charisma but for their personal humility combined with their exceptional determination. They are ambitious but their ambition is for the enterprise they lead, not for themselves. In other words, the defining characteristic of such leaders is their passion for what they do. They know what’s important to them and are highly motivated to pursue it. Collins calls this, ‘professional will’.

The former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has been described by his biographer, Anthony Seldon, as ‘the worst Prime Minister Britain ever had’. He fell spectacularly from grace after his mismanagement of the Covid epidemic and lies to Parliament came to light. He was exposed as leading a chaotic organisation at No 10, and described as a ‘shopping trolley’ by one of his closest advisers because of his lack of direction and inability to make consistent decisions.  Indeed, he is arguably largely responsible for the virtual wipeout of the Conservative party in the recent General Election.

Johnson had a very disordered childhood, with a largely absent father who was a serial adulterer, and a mother who admitted herself to a mental hospital for a prolonged stay when he was 10. His childhood fantasy, no doubt springing from the need to try and exert some control over his life, and which drove him to succeed in politics, was to be ‘world king’. People who know him well are clear that the extravert, jovial, even buffoonish, personality he presents to the world is a defensive shield. He desperately wants to be liked and respected.  His interest was in soothing his insecurities by holding the office of Prime Minister, rather than what he could achieve as PM. He lacked professional will.

In this piece I have considered how the anxiety and shame we bring from our childhood can manifest in dysfunctional behaviours in our working lives many years later. In the next one, I will look at what we can do to soothe our insecurities and escape from the imprint of our early life, and how we can best handle these issues when we encounter them in our colleagues.

 

Sources

Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror

PG Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally 1922

Louis Cozolino, Why Therapy Works, WW Norton and Company Inc, 2016

Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, William Heinemann, 2006

Jim Collins, Good to Great, Random House Business Books, 2001

Donald Winnicott, ‘Ego distortion in terms of true and false self’, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, International Universities Press, 1960

 

‘My mind is always at the highest DEF-CON level possible, but the truth is that I can’t control everything. I wish I could. Instead, I meticulously plan and worry, and imagine the worst case scenarios for everything …’

The comedian, Susan Calman in her autobiography, Cheer Up, Love: Adventures in Depression with the Crab of Hate

My client Louise, an MD, slept badly. She said that she frequently woke in the middle of the night with her heart pounding because she was convinced she’d made a potentially catastrophic mistake in the work she’d done that day. She would get up and go to her laptop, and spend the small hours sitting in her pyjamas retracing her steps and checking her calculations and emails. Once, in a complete panic, she couldn’t find a document she needed and went into the office, banging on the door demanding that the security guard let her in at 5 am.

She said that these abrupt awakenings had happened four times in the last year. But they had all been false alarms. On three occasions there was no mistake. On the fourth she found a trivial and easily-rectifiable error which could easily have been put right during the normal working day.

I said I was very concerned about her high levels of anxiety and we should try to address them. She thought about it for a bit and then said, “the thing is, it’s part of why I get so much done. I don’t want to lose my edge.”

I came to this topic via my consideration of creativity and the creative personality (Articles 6,7 and 8) and I’ll return to these subjects in due course. But in the next couple of articles I want to look in more depth at why some of us, not only the highly creative among us, worry more and find work more stressful than our more robust colleagues.

The elephant in the office

Susan Calman says that, as a depressed teenager, she found it impossible to talk to anybody about how awful she felt. It just wasn’t the sort of thing she could broach in her family. As a society we have a tendency (though it seems to be reducing as time passes, I’m glad to say) to recoil from strong negative emotions and a preference for ignoring them if at all possible. They frighten and baffle us, particularly in the work context, where we like to pretend perfect rationality rules.

But we don’t leave our emotional selves at home when we go to work. We know that we and our colleagues sometimes overreact to the normal setbacks of working life and become disproportionately angry or upset by what is really a relatively minor issue. The problem, when this happens, is that we don’t understand what’s going on. We don’t feel qualified, and it seems intrusive, to try to psychoanalyse our colleagues.

Yet, strong negative emotions are powerful and destructive forces, and the source of much friction and unhappiness at work just as they are at home. They’re also the cause of organisational underperformance and dysfunction. As a coach, I probably spent more time talking to my clients about these rampaging elephants in the office than any other topic. And, once again, a little psychological insight can be invaluable in dealing with these difficult issues

The wolf in the bushes

In our ancient ancestors, negative emotions - fear, anxiety, disgust, guilt, shame - evolved to protect us from harms – attack by predators, aggression from other groups, eating something toxic, offending the group and losing its protection. They trigger avoidance behaviours: fight, flight, freeze or, in the worst case, depression, the extreme version of freeze – disengaging with life and going to the back of the cave.

We tend to refer to ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ interchangeably in normal conversations. The neuroscientist, Professor Antonio Damasio, distinguishes them:  an emotion is a physical process, a cascade of physiological changes triggered by our brains in response to a stimulus, whereas a feeling is our conscious awareness of the stimulus and those changes. The emotion - the physiological effect - happens first. The feeling – the fear or anger or joy we consciously experience - happens half a second later. Your emotions tell you – ‘look, pay attention. This is important: it’s good/bad for you’.  If you see a bus bearing down on you as you’re crossing the road, your unconscious mind recognises danger and triggers a shot of adrenaline. Your heart rate increases, your blood vessels dilate to bring blood to your muscles, your mental focus narrows to assess the speed and trajectory of the bus, and you start to run a split second before you consciously register the bus or feel fear. Meanwhile your rational mind has gone offline.

Our negative emotion systems operate on a ‘fail safe’ principle; that is, they produce a lot of ‘false positive’ warnings, but few ‘false negatives’. The evolutionary reasons for this are obvious: the complacent ancestor who saw a shadow in the bushes but decided to ignore the possibility that it was a wolf, was much less likely to survive to reproduce than the one who erred on the side of caution. As the personality psychologist Daniel Nettle says, the uncomfortable consequence for us now, when the constant danger of being eaten on any given day has fortunately receded, is that most of us worry groundlessly much of the time.

Why some of us worry more than others

The Big 5 psychometric measures individual differences in our propensity to worry, feel fear and anxiety and adopt defensive behaviours. In effect it’s measuring the sensitivity of our negative emotion systems, the degree of emotional upset we experience per unit of stress. The Big 5 calls this trait, ‘Neuroticism/Emotional Instability’, and it is normally distributed in the population, ie most of us are somewhere in the middle of the bell curve.  Low Neuroticism scorers are calm, stable and secure and take setbacks in their stride.  But high Neuroticism scorers find both the big challenges and the small hassles of life very upsetting. The personality psychologist, Daniel Nettle, suggests that if the person at the centre of the normal distribution 'is worrying groundlessly 80% of the time that they worry, then the poor old high Neuroticism scorer is probably worrying needlessly 99% of the time that they worry’.

Our personalities are the product of the interaction between the physiology of our brains, which we’re born with, and our early experience. Studies of twins suggest the contribution of nature and nurture to an individual’s Neuroticism score is around 50:50.

There is an organ in the brain called the amygdala, which is thought to be crucial in emotional memory and in triggering our fight/flight reaction, and this is more active in high Neuroticism scorers; indeed, it may even be physically bigger and denser in such people. Nettle suggests that the neurotransmitter serotonin may be important to the functioning of the amygdala and the regulation of negative emotions.  Modern antidepressants, such as Prozac, (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs)) work  by regulating levels of serotonin in the brain. Studies have shown that people with a particular form of the serotonin transporter gene are more susceptible to depression than others after experiencing stress.

The time when you are most vulnerable to such stresses is early childhood. That is when your emotional brain is growing much faster than your cognitive brain, and your amygdala is storing the emotional models which will determine how you relate to other people and how you see and feel about yourself in later life.

How you develop your sense of self

‘If I was to ask myself the standard happiness question – ‘is this glass half full or half empty?’ I’d say ‘there is no glass, I don’t deserve a glass…’

Susan Calman, ‘Cheer Up, Love: Adventures in Depression with the Crab of Hate’

The therapist and neuroscientist, Louis Cozolino, describes the effect of childhood experiences on our personalities in a particularly arresting way. He uses the term, ‘core shame’.

When we are young children the adults caring for us are the dominant influence on us. We need the person caring for us to provide unconditional love, to respect us as a separate person with our own emotional life, be attuned to our needs, and to soothe us when we are upset. In many cases this works well: the parenting is ‘good enough’ for the child to be confident that it will be looked after, to grow up calm and secure. But it can go wrong. If the child doesn’t get what it needs from its caregivers, it internalises distorted emotional models of itself and its relationships with others.

A baby is the centre of its own universe, and is very sensitive to the thoughts and emotions of its carer. If its parent is absent, ill, depressed (maybe she has, and has passed on, that gene), absorbed in their own problems, or simply not psychologically attuned to it, the baby  may assume at a deep emotional level that this is its own fault. It imagines what its mother is thinking and feeling about it, and concludes (though of course not in words, as it has none) ‘If I were loveable, my parent would love me/ would not have gone away/ would not ignore me/ would not criticise me/would understand my needs. I am therefore not loveable.’ The child who does not get the love and attention it needs develops a deep conviction that there is something wrong with it. This is what Cozolino means by ‘core shame’; others call it a conviction that one is ‘unworthy’, insecurity, or lack of self-esteem.

In extreme cases, this sort of deprivation in childhood can lead to serious lifelong psychological problems that prevent the individual from functioning, such as clinical depression, or a personality disorder such as psychopathy. More often a parent’s love for a child may be sufficient to avoid these crippling levels of core shame, but nevertheless be conditional. They may be loving if the child is quiet and obedient but angry if it cries, or proud of a child if it does well at school, but critical if its performance is mediocre; or if the parent has unmet emotional needs themselves, because of their own background, they may expect the child to soothe and care for them. These flawed ways of parenting are frequently passed down the generations, each generation internalising them as the only/normal way to be.

In these cases, the child will adopt the model that gets them the approval they need: they will become compliant, or work very hard at school, or assume it is up to them to care for everyone, or sort out family problems. And it is these models which many anxious people carry into their working lives. The desire to ‘atone’ for their deficiencies makes them strive to do things perfectly, to believe that they must work as hard as is humanly possible, to be hypervigilant about risks and mistakes (because it’s their responsibility to make sure nothing goes wrong), because at a very deep, emotional level, hidden from them and those round them, they believe they will only be ‘worthy’ people if they do all these things.

The downside can have an upside

‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.’ 

Variously attributed

Having this sort of emotional makeup – a sense of unworthiness driven by anxiety - is extremely uncomfortable for the person involved. They worry, mostly unnecessarily, all the time, and catastrophise – assume the worst possible outcome in any scenario-  which is psychologically and physically very draining.  They are susceptible to low mood, anxiety disorders, panic attacks, clinical depression, and even suicide. They suffer from insomnia, digestive problems and low immune response because of the suppressant effect of the stress hormone, cortisol on the immune system. They may even be more at risk of serious illness.  It makes you wonder why evolution should have selected for this characteristic.

The answer is, of course, that just as it was of benefit to our early ancestors to have some conscientious, hardworking people around who were vigilant and responsible, and they were highly values, and so it has continued to the present day. Provided they are able to function, and haven’t sunk into chaos or depression, Neurotic people have a more realistic view of the world than their more cheerful counterparts who are captured by the optimism bias. They are good at identifying risks and obstacles. Because they have a tendency to catastrophise, they take great care to plan to avoid problems. They try desperately to control the level of risk. Susan Calman has described how if she has to go to a meeting which involves an unfamiliar journey, she does a dry run the day before to make sure she can avoid possible transport pitfalls.

Many high functioning Neurotics have absorbed the message that they will only be worthy people if they work as hard as is humanly possible. They also find work soothing; they can lose themselves in it; it stills the rumination about their deficiencies; it gives them a sense of achievement and self-worth.  So, they’re driven to succeed and are often workaholics and perfectionists; they get a lot done.  Indeed, there is a weak positive correlation between Neuroticism and success in professional occupations, where these traits have clear benefits. They are discontented with themselves and world as it is, and feel a responsibility, a compulsion, to make both better – the root of creativity. And as we’ve seen, if they are artistically creative, their emotional depth, the fact that they have survived mental suffering, enables them to communicate meaning and enlightenment to the rest of us.

So, if you are one of us (yes, reader, I’m definitely on the right of the bell curve) try to take a bit of comfort in the upside of your (challenging) personality trait.

In my next articles I will look at some of the less benign effects of Neuroticism on its more extreme sufferers and in the workplace, and consider ways in which we can mitigate its effects in ourselves and other people.

Sources

Albrecht Durer Melencholia 1514

Daniel Nettle: Personality – What makes you the way you are, OUP, 2007

Louis Cozolino: Why Therapy Works – Using our minds to change our brains, WW Norton & Company, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Me who am as a nerve o’er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth…

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Julian and Maddalo

Fiver: ‘There isn’t any danger here at the moment. But it’s coming – it’s coming. Oh, Hazel, look! The field! It’s covered with blood!’

Richard Adams: Watership Down

The trouble with a 2000-word article, which is the most you can really expect someone to read in passing, is that you have to miss stuff out. There’s been some interest in my piece on the creative personality, and it’s been preying on my mind that there is so much more to say.

The ‘Highly Sensitive Person’

So, do any of these statements resonate with you?

I seem to be aware of subtleties in my environment

Other people’s moods affect me

I am easily overwhelmed by things like bright lights, strong smells, coarse fabrics or sirens close by

I have a rich, complex inner life

I startle easily

I become unpleasantly aroused when a lot is going on round me

I notice and enjoy delicate or fine scents, tastes, sounds, works of art

I get rattled when I have a lot to do in a short amount of time

I make it a point to avoid violent movies and tv shows

Changes in my life shake me up

When I was a child, my parents or teachers seemed to see me as sensitive or shy

These are extracts from a questionnaire to establish whether you are a ‘Highly Sensitive Person’ (HSP), a construct put forward by the psychologists Elaine and Eric Aron in the 1990s, and developed in Elaine Aron’s book, The Highly Sensitive Person. You will see that there’s a lot of overlap with the description of the creative personality in my last article and the traits of Openness, Introversion and Emotional Instability. We also saw that creative people find it more difficult to screen out distractions. If you are creative, or you work with creatives, you or they may well be HSPs.

The phenomenon was first noticed in children by the psychologist, Jerome Kagan, who found that 20% of his sample of four-month-olds reacted much more strongly – by moving their bodies and crying – to unexpected or unfamiliar events. ‘High reactives’, as he called this group, displayed cautious and avoidant behaviour when faced with these stimuli, while ‘low reactives’ were more spontaneous and ready to interact with them. Kagan concluded that the differences were due to neurophysiological differences in perceptual processing, and in the excitability of the amygdala, the organ in the brain which triggers our fight or flight response.

Elaine Aron reframed ‘high reactivity’ as ‘Sensory Processing Sensitivity’. She conducted a study of people who self- reported that they were HSPs which produced some new insights. HSPs often describe themselves as creative or intuitive, and love the arts and nature. They process information about their environments, physical and emotional, unusually deeply. Their intuition is highly honed because of their propensity to notice subtleties others do not; this combined with the active amygdala makes them particularly alert to future hazards. And many of the cues they notice relate to their own and other people’s emotions. They are empaths. They are also conscientious and scrupulous about their own behaviour.

Aron suggests that the difference in sensitivity is largely inherited (we’ll come on to the relationship between nature and nurture in determining personality in future articles) and has also been observed in other mammals, again at a level of about 20% of the sample. One of my maine coon cats – normally a rugged and outgoing breed - definitely falls into this group. Though he has lived with us in perfect peace for twelve years, he still takes cover under the table if my husband, who is tall, approaches him too quickly. Aron also suggests that it is of evolutionary advantage to have a proportion of any group who are hyper-alert to the environment because they can warn the others (often unnecessarily of course) of possible risks. The relevant cat showed these traits even as a tiny kitten. We called him Fiver because that is the role of the timid but visionary rabbit in Watership Down, quoted above.

Though being an HSP has the advantages described, it’s clear that working life is likely be particularly challenging for them. They find bright lights, noisy environments, lots of social interaction, multi-tasking, tight deadlines and sudden changes of direction – this could almost be a definition of organisational life - draining to the point of frazzling. If, therefore, you are one, or work with them, and I have encountered many among my creative clients, it is as well to try to provide the conditions in which your or their talents can flourish, allowing them the downtime to process and recharge and being sensitive to their inability to work in over-stimulating conditions. If they have not been ‘diagnosed’ they can often feel that they are lacking in some way, because they find it difficult to tolerate the conditions and pressures which their more robust colleagues take in their stride.

My favourite anecdote about a creative HSP, doesn’t, however relate to the office but to the budget hotels in which we often have to stay on business. She said she always had to take her own sheets with her because she couldn’t bear the harsh texture of the ones provided.

A short digression on psychometrics

I’m conscious that I’ve mentioned three different models of personality, psychometrics, in these articles: the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, the ‘Big 5’, and now the HSP. It seems appropriate therefore to pause for a moment to focus on them (I will look at them in much more detail in later articles). I’ve found psychometrics extremely useful in my coaching practice, where I’ve used the MBTI extensively, and also in wider life.

Having access to a simple model of the differences between individuals, and a common language to describe them, enables us to understand, and hence accept, ourselves and others. I vividly remember discovering my MBTI Type for the first time (INTJ, for those who speak MBTI) and the comforting realisation that I wasn’t as weird as I thought– or was at least weird in the same way as a lot of other people. The same applies even more strongly to people with apparently disabling quirks like HSPs (I’m also one of these; people comment that I seem to live at home in semi-darkness). Doing a psychometric as a team can be invaluable in helping the members work together - extravert with introvert, visionary with engineer – and provides a language to talk about difference in a constructive, non-confrontational way.

The MBTI and the Big 5 have been extensively tested and found reliably to measure what they say they measure, and to predict occupational choice, cognitive and communication style. They are derived in completely different ways but measure roughly the same things (though only the Big 5 ventures into the realm of emotional stability). So, I am a real fan of them. But they are still quite crude, and that is why we have this welter of overlapping but slightly different concepts to wrestle with. The neuroscience of personality is in its infancy, and we won’t have a definitive way of measuring individual differences until we know more about how the physiology of the brain determines personality and how nurture interacts with it – which of course we may never fully understand.

Empathy

‘ The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours’

Alan Bennett: The History Boys

‘ [The author] held my hand all the way. She stretched and tugged at my heart and soul, for sure – but she pulled them into a better shape……….I was different by the end. More than that, I was better. I understood more and it pulled me on the way to empathy.’

Lucy Mangan on reading Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian, in Bookworm – a memoir of childhood reading

One of the attributes of HSPs is a high capacity for empathy, and indeed this is true of artistically creative people in general. Empathy is a form of unconscious, intuitive pattern recognition. It involves picking up subtle cues which trigger in you an unconscious simulation of how another person is thinking and feeling, so that you feel their feelings yourself in an attenuated way; you ‘walk in their shoes’. And neuroscientists think that the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) - where we reflect about ourselves and may be where the germs of creative ideas come together (see articles 6 and 7)- also plays a part in empathetic simulation.

Artistically creative people want to express something of their experience of life, a truth about the human condition, and to share it with an audience. One of my producer clients said that she wanted to make TV dramas because she ‘always, from childhood, wanted to step into the story’. Another, who ran an independent cinema, said her motivation when programming was ‘to share transformative experiences’ with her audience.

As the quotation from Alan Bennett suggests, works of art and imagination engage us because they resonate with our experience, often at an unconscious emotional level. The recent drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, about the scandalous treatment of sub-postmasters is a case in point. It resonated powerfully with the audience’s own experiences of injustices and powerlessness and the resultant outcry galvanised the Government into action after many years of inertia.

The quotation from the writer and journalist, Lucy Mangan, illustrates how works of imagination not only resonate with us emotionally but can extend our emotional understanding and range. Empathy is hugely important in forging relationships and reaching collaborative solutions, and this is a very cheering feature of it. Your capacity for empathy is not fixed by nature or early nurture; it can increase over your lifetime. Certain events, such as becoming a parent, act as physiological triggers for such growth. But you can also set out deliberately, thorough experiencing the arts, personal reflection and practice, to hone your empathetic response.

Given the centrality of empathy to much artistic endeavour, there is a possible paradox. The personality psychologist, Daniel Nettle, cites a study showing that success in the creative arts is correlated with a low score on the Big 5 trait of Agreeableness (high scorers are co-operative, trusting, and empathetic). Artists need to be very single minded to succeed; they are often self-absorbed; and, of course, they may suffer from various forms of emotional instability, which can play out in combative ways in the workplace.

And that is the subject of my next article…

Sources

Elaine N Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person – how to thrive when the world overwhelms you, Thorsons 2017

Isabel Briggs Myers & Peter B Myers Gifts Differing – understanding personality type, Davies-Black Publishing 1995

Daniel Nettle, Personality – what makes you the way you are, OUP, 2007

I recently went to an exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s paintings at Tate Britain. Sargent was a portraitist famous not only for his ability to capture the essence of his sitters but also of the lavish Edwardian silks and velvets they wore. When you look at a Sargent close up you see a simple abstract pattern created by bold brush strokes and thick oil paint, sometimes even impasto. But, when you step back, these marks translate into the light and shade of folds in diaphanous voile and shining taffeta, so realistic you want to touch them.

Sargent chose the garments his subjects wore and posed them to show off the play of light to best effect. Some of them are still in existence and they are displayed in the exhibition alongside the relevant works. What immediately struck me is how much less interesting these dresses are than the painted ones. The painted ones seem somehow more real, and looking at them gives you an intense feeling of pleasure and reward you simply don’t get from the actual costumes.

Sargent is painting what he sees, not what he knows to be there – not the filtered and condensed version his – and your and my - brain has created for the practical purpose of navigating the physical world. And in doing this, he has enabled us to to see the subject afresh, to notice the different shades of cream and brown, the shadows produced by the intricate pleats in the fine fabric of a white dress. He has changed the way we see things – given us a new perceptual model.

Vision

‘To see a world in a grain of sand                                                                              ‘I like to have a martini
And heaven in a wild flower                                                                                       Two at the very most.
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand                                                                   After three I’m under the table,
And Eternity in an hour’                                                                                            After four I’m under my host’

          William Blake                                                                                                                Dorothy Parker

This ability to step outside the orthodox way of seeing and thinking about things is the key characteristic of creative people. They trust their unconscious minds to take them outside the tramlines of conscious thought. Not only are they the masters of intuitive pattern recognition, they see links and correspondences the rest of us do not.

The ability to make such ‘creative leaps’ correlates with the characteristic that the personality psychometric, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, designates Intuition and the psychometric known as ‘the Big 5’, Openness to Experience. (I will explain more about the similarities, differences and uses of these models in a later article.)

The personality psychologist, Daniel Nettle, calls people high in Openness ‘poets’. He is thinking of poets’ fondness for metaphor, for illuminating one object by describing it as another, the abstract in terms of the concrete: a colleague as warm or cold, a life in terms of a journey with crossroads and wrong turns. Indeed, a study which asked participants to make a list of the associations that came to mind when they heard a certain word and mapped them by conceptual domain (the area of thought to which they normally applied} found that the associations made by the creative people in the sample ranged far wider. Nettle says:

‘It is as if the filters or membranes surrounding different areas of cognition are a little more permeable than normal, and the associations made consequently broader’.

Creative people notice things which the rest of us dismiss because they seem irrelevant to our usual ways of thinking. EEG observations of the brains of creatives show that when they are in a resting state the perceptual parts of their brains are much more active that those of their colleagues. This prompts their unconscious minds to construct new, more accurate and illuminating models of the world which accommodate these new factors, links and correspondences. (The downside of this is that they are easily distracted, and find it more difficult than other people to filter out the hubbub of a noisy office.)

It is this model-building process which produces the paradigm changes of science and the advances of technology: for example, the nineteenth century physician Dr John Snow’s realisation that cholera could not be caused by miasma because it is a digestive disease and his hypothesis that it was the result of ingesting contaminated water; or Sir Tim Berners Lee’s insight that the internal system of hyperlinks he had designed to allow CERN scientists to access each other’s electronic data was a model that could be scaled up to global level, and form a World Wide Web.

As we’ve seen, it’s also at work in the arts. New juxtapositions of ideas enable writers and playwrights to engage our attention and emotions, and enlarge our understanding and empathy. Like the visual arts, literature and drama can provide us with new perspectives often in a metaphorical way – by using a story to tell us something deeper. At a superficial level Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a romcom with elements of fantasy and farce about human interactions with fairies. But the story is a vehicle for insights into the unconscious mind and in particular the arbitrariness of erotic attraction. We laugh at the Dorothy Parker verse I quoted at the beginning of this article because it makes unexpected links which expose, in this case uncomfortable, truths – the essence of much wit.

I’m talking here of creative genius, but the creative people we work with every day share this ability to think afresh. They exhibit clear characteristics in the workplace – apart from the many ideas they produce. They relish complexity and seek it out. They trust their unconscious processes and find it easy to tolerate ambiguity – they see things not in black and white but in shades of grey. They are happy to play with ideas, but when they have identified what they believe is a good one, become highly invested in it, disciplined, single minded, tenacious in pursuing it, and unwilling to compromise it. And they take care to steep themselves in their raw materials, the vocabulary of their trade (one film producer I worked with had identified and watched every single romcom ever made before she embarked on her own.)

This particular cognitive style marks them out, but they also frequently have other characteristics in common. They are often Introverts and, in the arts though not the sciences, they frequently display some degree of Emotional Instability. You may remember the brain’s Default Mode – ‘Imagination’ network (DMN) – that we met in Article 6 on the creative process, and which flip flops with the Executive Network and comes on when the brain is resting and not concentrating on a task. This network is likely to be where new ideas are formed and studies have found that it is more efficient and better connected with the conscious mind in creative people.

This is also the case in people suffering from depressive disorders. Creativity is about imagining alternatives to the current way of seeing things – what one commentator calls ‘the adjacent possible’. The rumination which is associated with depression involves imagining the worst – about oneself and the future. If you are creative but also emotionally vulnerable then you are likely to be very good at imagining bad scenarios. And of course introverts live inside their heads anyway so are in close touch with the products of their unconscious minds.

Introversion

‘Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me – they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the best of them are artists. And artists work best alone…'
Steve Wozniak, the co-founder with Steve Jobs of Apple

Susan Cain’s book, Quiet, (perhaps top of my list of books I wish I had written) has revolutionised our collective view of Introverts. She points out that we live in a world designed for Extraverts. Though the numbers of Introverts and Extraverts in the population are roughly equal (certainly in the UK) our working conventions – meetings, presentations, brainstorms, lots of team interaction, open plan offices – are much more congenial to Extraverts.

Introverts, particularly Visionaries, are easily swamped by too much external stimulation. They need time to process things – to relate them to their rich internal landscapes - and don’t like being asked to react instantly in meetings. There may be quite a long pause before an Introvert answers your question (indeed, it’s probably best to email it and wait 24 hours for a response.)

They are also bad at sharing their thoughts. The MBTI literature contains a telling metaphor. When you talk to an Extravert, it suggests, you’re dealing directly with the CEO. But when you talk to an Introvert, you’re only communicating with the CEO’s PA: you don’t have access to all the important stuff going on in the inner office. The Introvert may believe that they have communicated the full richness of their inner vision when they’ve only given the bare bones, or they may feel reluctant to share it, and expose it to others who may not fully understand it or criticise it.

This is a real issue for creative people and those who work for them, and I’ve come across it a lot in my coaching practice. Sadiq, a screenwriter, said that if he was pitching an idea to an executive and they didn’t ‘get’ it, he just wanted to give up and leave and indeed had, on occasion, done so. Why should he expose something so precious to somebody who was obviously incapable of appreciating it? India graphically expressed how hostile she found the commercial environment when she said that pitching an idea she’d been working on to an executive felt like exposing something organic and soft and living (her pet kitten, perhaps) to something hard and sharp and angular, like a cheese grater. Something wonderful which she really cared about was being shredded and reduced to furry shards. These problems are exacerbated by the final characteristic which many creative people share.

A Degree of Emotional instability

'…He said: ‘Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.’
Percy Bysshe Shelley

A number of contemporary writers, actors, comedians and musicians have been frank about their struggles with mental illness: the author and actor Stephen Fry, the actor and comedian Billy Connolly, the actor and writer, John Cleese, the actor and comedian, the late Robin Williams; musicians, the late George Michael and Robbie Williams; and there are many others.

In her book, Touched with Fire, the psychiatrist, Kay Redfield Jamison, herself a sufferer from bipolar disorder, examines the links between artistic creativity and all forms of mental illness from mild mood disorders to bipolar disorder, clinical depression and suicide. She analyses the diaries and life stories of writers and artists throughout history – Blake, Tennyson, Plath, Dickens, Woolf, Berlioz, Mahler, Van Gogh, Rothko are just a few - identifying the psychiatric disorders from which many of them suffered and the findings of current research on living writers and artists. Her conclusion is that, compared with the general population, artists are more than 10 times more likely than the general population to suffer from mild to serious depressive disorders.

Jamison’s work antedated recent research on the Default Mode Network, but she also suggests that psychiatric problems and creativity may be linked both through cognitive style and emotional makeup. It may be that the ‘manic’ phase of bipolar disorder facilitates the wide, flexible, rapid processing across boundaries which gives rise to novel ideas. Many artists have periods when they are full of creative energy and produce a stream of new work at great speed. The trance-like state of transient hypofrontality may also produce states of altered consciousness and transcendent experiences; the visions of William Blake are only one example of many.

Jamison suggests that depression gives creatives a rich perspective on life, and some creatives, like Shelley, have said explicitly that the mental pain they have experienced drives their need to create. Artists who have been to very dark places psychologically have something to say which resonates with us: they are equipped to take us to those places by proxy, enlarge our experience of life, help us to become more compassionate, or, if we too have been suffering, show us how to find some comfort. When they write about suffering, they’re also engaging in self -therapy. It’s cathartic: it gets the emotions ‘out’, and breathes in a bit of distance and objectivity. And work can be very soothing. The focus and discipline required still the rumination and weaken the grip of negative emotions. Creating something is redemptive; it satisfies the unconscious need for meaning: something good has come out of the suffering.

Research on the personality of comedians provides a fascinating insight into a specific instance of the soothing and redemptive power of work. A study of the personalities of actors and comedians found that comedians scored highly on two apparently contradictory dimensions, ‘introverted anhedonia’’ (unsociable depressive traits), and ‘impulsive non conformity’ (extraverted manic traits). The researchers suggest that this profile represents the personality equivalent of bipolar disorder, with the opposite traits being exhibited simultaneously rather than serially. They suggest that comedians may use their performances as a way to cope with their depressive thoughts.
The reasons why some of us have this emotional makeup – and many of us do to some extent – are a complex mix of nature and nurture, and I will examine them in more detail in my next article. But if you do have it, the challenges of working life are all the more difficult to deal with, both for you and your colleagues. You have a vulnerable ego which you must protect. Issues at work arouse anxiety and fear which trigger your fight or flight reaction, or, in the modern world, sensitivity to criticism, anger, defensiveness, inability to work, and at worst, depression, the ultimate protective withdrawal.

How to get the best from talented people who exhibit this trait, and how to survive if you are one, have been major themes of my coaching practice, and again I will return to these issues next time.

So, what lessons can we draw from this analysis?

If you work with creatives:

- Be aware that they may find it very difficult to share the full richness of their vision, and give them time and encouragement to do so: one of my producer clients saw herself as a midwife to a very talented scriptwriter, who would frequently produce a host of half-formed ideas, quite close to the start of filming.

- Because they are so invested in their work and emotionally vulnerable, creatives need affirmation and are acutely sensitivity to criticism – show how much you value them, and be careful how you frame your notes.

- As one of my producer clients said ‘as far as you can you need to protect your creative from everything else. You need to make a little bubble of encouragement and support and keep your creative in it’.

If you are a creative:

- Remember that your work has to be out there to be appreciated. Try to communicate your vision fully, be ready for some compromise, and try not to see feedback as a personal attack but an opportunity to learn and improve the work.

Sources

John Singer Sargent Lady Agnew of Lochnaw 1892

Daniel Nettle, Personality – what makes you the way you are, OUP, 2007

Roger E Beaty and Yoed N Kennett, Associative Thinking at the Core of Creativity, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, July 2023, Vol 27, No 7

Roger E Beaty, Matthias Benedek et al, Creativity and the Default Mode Network: a functional connectivity analysis of the creative brain at rest, Neuropsychologia, 2014.09.019

Roger E Beaty, Scott Barry Kaufman, Matias Benedek et al, Personality and Complex Brain Networks: the role of Openness to Experience in Default Network Efficiency

John Kounios and Mark Beeman, The Eureka Factor: Creative Insights and the Brain, Windmill Books, 2016

Adam M Perkins, Danilo Arnone et al, Thinking too much: self-generated thought as the engine of neuroticism, Trends in Cognitive Sciences xx (2015) 1-7

J Paul Hamilton, Madison Farmer et al, Depressive Rumination, The Default Mode Network, and the Dark Matter of Clinical Neuroscience, Biol Psychiatry 2015 Aug 15: 78(4): 224-230

Tina Chou et al, The Default Mode Network and rumination in individuals at risk for depression, Social and Cognitive Neuroscience, 2023, June 12

Steve Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, Allen Lane 2010

Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire – Manic depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Simon and Schuster, 1993

Victoria Ando, Gordon Claridge, and Ken Clark, Psychotic Traits in Comedians British Journal of Psychiatry, published online 16 January 2014

‘I don’t know if I actually said Eureka, but that Eureka moment really did happen……I suddenly realised that there was a door in front of me that I didn’t even know existed that had suddenly swung open’

Sir Alec Jeffries on DNA-based identification

The unconscious intuitive, ‘Visionary’, mind is at its most magical when it produces new ideas and insights, leaping across subject domains, making new and unexpected links, and constructing richer, more illuminating models of the world. These aerobatics are its unique talent; the conscious analytical ‘Engineer’ mind works on earthbound tramlines which it cannot leave.

There are hundreds of books seeking to teach us how to be more creative. They draw on the advice of highly creative people and the practical tips they contain are useful, but often presented without much underlying argument to connect them. In these articles I want to start from an analysis of the psychology of creativity - what happens our minds and brains when we have a new idea – and draw out from this the ways in which we can facilitate that process in ourselves and our colleagues. This is of course particularly challenging amidst the many competing demands of running any organisation which relies on the ability of its people to produce new ideas.

What are new ideas and where do they come from?

‘[The detective Strike] mentally backed away from his new theory to examine it in its entirety, and from every angle he surveyed it, saw it to be smooth, balanced and complete. The extraneous and the irrelevant were now lying discarded to one side.’

Robert Galbraith, ‘The Running Grave’, 2023

Let’s go back to your unconscious simulation of reality, stocked with simplified models of everything you’ve encountered, which enables you to navigate the world without engaging your conscious mind, as I explained in my earlier articles. All new ideas share the same psychological structure. They’re new models of the world, and if they are good ideas, they increase your understanding of it because they take in more information and link it in a more coherent way. If you like, they are ‘meta’-models which reorganise the components available to you in a more coherent and economical way. This applies regardless of the importance or scale of the idea: whether it’s a scientific discovery or innovation, a work of imagination, an occasion when you ‘think outside the box’ at work, or one of those personal insights which can set us off in a new direction. Whichever it is, you have made new links and disabled old ones, and reorganised your unconscious architecture, so that it illuminates things in a new way.

Your unconscious mind ‘thinks’ associatively. Your brain is what chaos theorists call a ‘self-organising system’, a system in which a series of local interactions produce greater order in the whole. When it’s stimulated by something new, activation spreads outwards through its networks of neurons, like ripples on a pond, as it seeks to relate the new stimulus to its existing architecture, to find links, matching patterns and resonances. Sometimes it can only incorporate the new stimulus if it reorganises, and on occasions that reorganisation may be large scale and widespread, severing many existing links and making new ones – making ‘creative leaps’, and triggering a cascade of changes in different areas. It may need to try out many different options before it has a configuration which encompasses all the relevant components.

There has been a lot of interest in the last decade in a relatively newly discovered network in the brain, the Default Mode Network (DMN), which neuroscientists believe may have a role in forging these new connections. The DMN, sometimes called the ‘daydreaming’ or ‘imagination’ network - we might call it the Visionary network - clicks in when you’re at rest. It’s responsible for simulating experience in a variety of contexts, including times when we remember events in the past, imagine the future or any other hypothetical state, take on another person’s perspective or ruminate about ourselves. It’s more active in general in creative people – a point to which we will come in the next article.

The resting DMN flip flops with the Executive Network (EN), which is engaged when you’re consciously focusing on a task, and responsible for organising information in your working memory, and conscious problem-solving and decision-making. We might think of it as the Engineer network. The DMN is more active when the EN is less so, and vice versa. It’s busiest when you are in a sustained state of what neuroscientists call ‘transient hypofrontality’ (the EN involves the frontal parts of your brain): when you’re drifting off to sleep, out for a walk, in the shower, doing a mundane task like cleaning the house.
When your brain is idling like this the DMN can look for matching patterns and try out multiple different ways of tidying and reorganising – making new links, resolving contradictions and accommodating new information - and send any promising new configurations to your conscious mind. It’s thought that it recognises such patterns by their speed and ease of processing: the reorganisation is more coherent - both comprehensive and economical like an elegant mathematical proof, which provides a complete, self-explanatory answer in the minimum number of steps. And when a new model like this reaches your consciousness, you experience an ‘aha moment’ – a sense certainty that the perspective you now have is the true one, that you can’t go back to your previous way of thinking about things - and a feeling of release, even elation. Your brain has released the reward chemical, dopamine, and this ensures that the new model is saved with a positive emotional tag. It also provides an incentive for you to seek out further new insights and their accompanying rewards.

The dual process (again)

Graham Wallas, whom we met in the articles on decision-making (Articles 3-5), describes the process of idea generation thus. You focus – consciously - on something which needs attention (Wallas calls this ‘priming the mind’) ; you disengage from it and do something else to allow your unconscious mind to work ( ‘incubation’); an idea arrives in your conscious mind (‘illumination’); you evaluate that idea to see whether it works by analysing it consciously (‘verification’); if it does you proceed to develop it; if it doesn’t you remit the matter back to your unconscious mind for further incubation
If you have engaged in a sustained piece of creative work – developing a theory or technology, designing a government intervention, writing a book, producing a film, conceiving a work of art - you will know that this will involve countless iterations of the process as you negotiate the many creative challenges along the way: false starts, blind alleys which don’t survive the verification stage and involve the jettisoning of a lot of previous work, uncertain periods where you feel you’re not making any progress. It took Einstein 10 years to formulate the special theory of relativity, during which he felt confused and frustrated.

Incubation and illumination: coaxing ideas into the light

‘I can’t sit down with a script. I need to be distracted and busy myself – play cards, go for a swim, anything, in order to do the work. I need to leave it to my subconscious and trust that the internal engine is making adjustments and processing everything.’

Dame Judi Dench on immersing herself in a new part.

The neuroscientist Arne Dietrich puts forward a convincing explanation of what happens in the brain when we think hard about a problem and then disengage from it. When we’re working on a problem, he suggests, our brains organise themselves to focus on that task, activating the networks usually associated with that task (he calls this a ‘task set configuration’). But this won’t work if the problem requires a reorganisation, a new configuration. Indeed the current configuration acts as a constraint on new thinking because it inhibits access to new networks which aren’t part of it.

When you stop focusing and enter a state of ‘transient hypofrontality’ the problem remains on the fringe of your consciousness in the form of a much-weakened task set configuration, prompting your unconscious mind to keep working on it. But, because the configuration is weaker, it’s no longer a constraint so the Default Mode Network can make new associations and try out new links which were previously blocked off. The brain can also notice new stimuli which would previously have been classified as irrelevant – it’s sensitised to these because the weakened task set configuration is still there. The quote from the Robert Galbraith thriller, which I was reading when I should have been working, is a minor example of just this. I had been thinking about creativity and insight, and it struck me as a perfect example of the nature of a new idea that works.

As I said earlier, transient hypofrontality occurs when we relax, stop thinking about anything challenging, and are absorbed in the moment. R.E.M sleep, with its vivid dreams, is the gold standard for incubation: memories are consolidated during sleep, bringing out their implications and associations and connecting them to the existing networks in your brain. There is a myriad of stories of new ideas appearing in their creators’ minds when they are sleeping, dozing, or in an otherwise altered state of consciousness, and creative people become adept at inducing these states and capturing what they produce. In one famous instance, Paul McCartney, woke one morning in 1964 with a soulful melody playing in his head. ‘The tune itself came just complete, came just out of a dream’, he explained. He immediately got up and went to the piano - next to his bed for just this reason - and played through it. He added words later to create the song, ‘Yesterday’, one of the greatest pop songs of the twentieth century.

Baths and showers involve a period of sensory deprivation – nothing much to see or hear– providing the perfect conditions for transient hypofrontality, and there are many accounts of their beneficial effects on the creative process. The late Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, was reported to have as many as six baths a day when he was suffering from writer’s block (which was often; he is also famous for his complete inability to meet deadlines). The screenwriter, Mark Gatiss (‘Dr Who’, ‘Sherlock’) uses baths in a similar way: he calls them ‘think baths’. Bathing is of course also relaxing and pleasurable. A number of lab studies have shown that we have more ideas when we’re in a good mood. And a study in real life settings produced a similar finding: a strong correlation between the subjects’ reports of increased happiness on certain days and important breakthroughs at work in the following day or two. Broad associative thinking requires relaxation. In contrast, a sense of threat and anxiety narrow your focus and trigger the involvement of your conscious mind to deal with the problem.

Sometimes you can sense that you’re on the verge of a breakthrough. Illumination may be preceded by what Wallas calls intimation, a sense that your unconscious mind is about to produce an insight. It’s a common trope of detective fiction – the detective knows that his unconscious mind has found a crucial link but can’t quite grasp it. The function of this message is to tell us to focus inwards, to block out external stimulation and provide the right conditions for the insight to reach the conscious mind.

Verification

‘And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name’

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act V Scene 1

As we know, the unconscious mind looks for patterns and correspondences - it doesn’t ‘think’ analytically like the conscious mind. Einstein said,
‘These thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterward.’
The conscious task of verification is essentially one of translation from the unconscious vision into a series of propositions expressed in words or numbers a drawing or design or a thought-through course of action, to see whether the idea can survive in the concrete world of the conscious mind, whether it can be implemented or delivered.

This encounter with reality is a vital stage of the process. As Wallas says,

‘There are thousands of idle ‘geniuses’ who require to learn that, without a degree of industry in Preparation and Verification, of which many of them have no conception, no great intellectual work can be done….’

But there is a risk. If you attempt to do this too soon, before the unconscious process is complete, the half-formed idea will evaporate and may be impossible to recapture. And, of course, there is always pressure to keep checking progress in an organisational setting where tasks have to be completed to deadlines.

So, what lessons can we draw from this analysis?

In brief:

New ideas are formed from the components already available to the unconscious mind of the creator, so it’s important to spend time stocking your unconscious library and learning the language of your craft by absorbing the work of other people, and broadening your experience in any way you can

New stimuli will spark new thoughts: this is why we are often at our most productive after a holiday

Incubation and illumination require time and quiet: they take place in an individual mind, not in meetings. They won’t happen in presenteeist cultures, whether in person or digital, and can’t take place to order to tight deadlines

Solving a complex problem may take weeks, months, or years and involve many iterations of the creative process. If you keep the problem in the back of your mind and return to it every so often you may find you’ve made progress in the interim. Try not to get frustrated. Record your thoughts and return to the issue in due course

People will be more creative if they are relaxed and not anxious

You risk strangling new ideas at birth if you try to evaluate them too soon

And finally, creative people tend to have certain personality characteristics. You need to understand these if you are to survive as a creative, especially in a commercial context, and/or get the best from the creative people you work with. This is the subject of my next article.

Sources
Timothy A Allen and Colin G DeYoung, Personality Neuroscience and the Five-Factor Model, The Oxford Handbook of the Five Factor Model of Personality, Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016
Marcus E Raichle, Creativity and the Brain’s Default Mode Network, Secrets of Creativity (eds Suzanne Nalbantian, and Paul M Matthews, OUP 2019
Roger E Beaty, Mathias Benedek et al, Creativity and the Default Mode Network, Neuropsychologia, 2014; Nov 64: 92-98
Arne Dietrich, How Creativity Happens in the Brain, Palgrave Macmillan 2015
Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought, Solis Press 2014 (first published 1926)
Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep, Penguin 2017
John Kounios and Mark Beeman, The Eureka Factor, Penguin 2015
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, Penguin 2011

‘Were there things we should have done differently? Unquestionably. But, you know, I would struggle to itemise them all before you now in a hierarchy, I’m afraid.’
Boris Johnson at the Covid Inquiry, 6 December 2023

As we saw in the first article of this series on decision-making, many problems require a classical approach: that we consciously gather all the facts and evidence and grind through them in a systematic way, setting out and evaluating the options, and often using sophisticated theoretical and analytical tools.

But many of the decisions we take at work are simply not susceptible to the classical approach. We often have to start by imposing a structure on a multi-faceted, ill-defined problem; we may not have access to all the necessary facts or the time to analyse them; or the relevant evidence simply may not exist, because it involves predicting the future – particularly how people will react to a certain intervention. Then we have to rely on our intuition, our ability to draw on our unconscious store of knowledge and experience, and to perceive deep generic similarities between the situation we currently face and problems we have solved in the past.

In Article 4, I touched on some of the ways in which our unconscious minds can systematically mislead us because of their tendency to jump to conclusions and the way in which they have evolved to protect us emotionally from the chaos of the world. You can find a fuller account of these ‘heuristics and biases’ in Daniel Kahneman’s masterwork, Thinking Fast and Slow, where he also suggests some measures to counter them.

In this third article in the series on decision-making, I want to provide advice on some other ways in which you can improve your intuitive judgment in practice.

1 Listen to your intuition and give it time to work

Our unconscious minds communicate with us by means of subtle emotional and physical feelings. Learn to recognise when yours is trying to get in touch with you, and what it’s telling you.

Often it is saying ‘something’s wrong here. Things are not developing according to my stored patterns. Engage your conscious mind and examine further’. I get this feeling very powerfully when an account of a situation or the answer to a problem doesn’t seem to ‘hang together’ (your unconscious mind works in such metaphors, which are about generic similarities). It’s a feeling of unease, almost frustration, and I know to trust it and interrogate the facts. Or, if the feeling is positive, the signal may mean that your unconscious has recognised a deep correspondence between the current situation and one you’ve encountered before, and is trying to guide you towards a solution which worked in the past.

Lab experiments have demonstrated this effect using simple word puzzles. If you show people a sentence with an incongruous ending – eg the apples were psychological - they immediately experience a jolt and engage their conscious minds to try and work out what it could possibly mean. If you ask people to find the link between three words and then show them linked words – eg salt, deep, foam (link sea) - they experience a positive feeling even before they’ve consciously realised what the link is: their gut is telling them that the triad is indeed linked.

To generate an intuitive hypothesis, your unconscious mind needs to spend some time sorting and matching and then send its most promising conclusions to your conscious mind. And it needs to do this without interference from conscious stimuli. This is why if you ‘sleep on’ a problem, the key issue and its probable solution often seems clearer in the morning. If you can’t see where the nub lies, or the problem just seems insoluble, leave it and do something else, and give your unconscious mind the time to do its work.

Think about an occasion when you had a strong intuition about something. How would you describe the feeling?

2 Train your intuition

Reflective practice

Intuition depends on pattern-recognition, and that will only be reliable if your unconscious library of models is comprehensive and your models are accurate representations of reality. This is a matter of experience, and indeed research shows that more experienced professionals – pilots and doctors, for example – are better at unconsciously sizing up a problem and identifying a possible solution than less experienced ones.

Much of the fine tuning of our models takes place unconsciously without our awareness. But you can accelerate the process if you consciously adopt the practice of reviewing past decisions to see whether your intuitions were right or wrong and, if wrong, why. This is reflective practice, and there is a wonderful – if fictional – example of it in one episode of the multi award-winning American TV series ‘The West Wing’.

Like real leaders, the fictional hero, President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, has to make complex judgment calls under pressure and where the result will be catastrophic if he’s wrong. Bartlet decides to intervene to support Taiwan in a stand-off with China about whether Taiwan should be allowed to test its defensive weapons. He resolves to send several aircraft carriers into the Taiwan strait, thus risking provoking a global war - as his advisers readily point out. After a tense few days China backs down as Bartlet felt sure they would. His young aide Sam wants to understand how he could have been so certain. In dialogue with Bartlet, he explores each of the assumptions the President made about how China would react to a series of threats and incentives put forward by the US. This is how reflective practice works: by retrospectively unpicking the intuitive element of each stage of the decision-making process and consciously reviewing it.

Real life is complex. There is often a lack of direct feedback about the soundness of individual decisions: there may be many influences on final outcomes and it’s very difficult to isolate and evaluate the effect of a single judgment. But you can still take measures to train your intuition by acquiring the habit of reflection: thinking about why things turned out as they did and adjusting your unconscious models accordingly.

Reflecting on your judgments requires a surprising amount of self-discipline. We’re all inclined to go on to the next pressing problem without pausing to consider whether we were right about the last one. It also requires a certain psychological robustness to admit to ourselves that we may have been wrong because it is both uncomfortable and a blow to our self-esteem. As we can see from Johnson’s reply to the Covid Inquiry, which I quoted at the beginning of this article, despite the huge amounts at stake, he didn’t seem to have thought it necessary to engage with this challenge.

Cultivate your powers of empathy

The British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, was forced to resign after 44 days in office in 2022. She was in thrall to economic doctrine and blind to the practical and human consequences of her decisions. She failed to communicate or take people with her. She lacked empathy.
Many judgments in complexity involve making assumptions about how people will react, and this ability to read them is a vital skill. We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the pointy-headed intellectual in their ivory tower, whose intuitions are invariably off beam because they aren’t grounded in an understanding of practical reality, and human nature in particular.

Empathy is a good in itself, crucial to getting people on side and brokering agreements, and a crucial component of good judgment. How much we have depends on both our genes and our childhood experiences, but we can grow our empathetic capacity – a point to which I will return in later articles.

Think of a decision you made recently. Was your intuition about the answer/solution right? Did things turn out how you believed they would? If not, where did you go wrong? Which of the assumptions you made were right and which were wrong and why? Were you right about how the people involved or affected would respond?

3 Check your intuitions

Be systematic: use checklists and algorithms

It can be very helpful to have checklists and algorithms to hand for checking your intuitive take on a problem. Many professions have them. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence, for example, provides a comprehensive set of diagnostic tools (called ‘clinical pathways’) for medical practitioners. These are based on evidence (research and expert judgment) and take the form of a huge edifice of interlocking decision trees to enable practitioners to identify and treat medical conditions. They are designed to be used as an adjunct, not a substitute, for the doctor’s professional judgment.

But checklists/algorithms don’t have to be as complex as this to be useful. The firefighter Sabrina Cohen-Hatton has a Doctorate in psychology. She was concerned that the guidance for incident commanders instructed them to use the classical model of decision-making - to identify and weigh up all the options for action. She knew that this just wasn’t feasible in emergencies, and she wanted to legitimise the use of intuition but also to improve it. She suggested a protocol asking commanders to pause and use their conscious minds to check that their intuitive conclusion is the right one before acting on it: in effect formalising the conscious verification stage of the dual process by asking: ‘what am I trying to achieve?; what do I expect to happen as a result of this decision?; and do the benefits outweigh the risks?’

I suggested two other approaches in Article 4: triangulation (gathering perspectives from a number of sources), and Gary Klein’s ‘pre-mortem’ (attempting to overcome our natural bias towards over-optimism). One of the simplest is of course to surface from the problem periodically and ask yourself, as Cohen Hatton proposes, ‘What is our objective? What are we actually trying to achieve here?’

But it’s also important to remember that intuition can do things which analysis can’t, and not get t0o wedded to your checklists. In my Whitehall career, I was frequently involved in interviewing candidates for important posts in Government bodies. We were always meticulous in analysing the qualities and skills needed to chair a particular organisation, and carefully evaluating each candidate against these criteria on the basis of their application and interview performance.

But this only took us so far. We often found at interview that a particular candidate was way ahead of the field. He or she scored similarly to the others on the criteria, but they had some other relevant quality or expertise that became obvious when meeting them. The criteria had missed some vital attribute, or the candidate in person had revelatory insights into the role which we hadn’t thought of, or simply an indefinable ‘star quality’ which it would have been very difficult to translate into the language of interview criteria. You need both intuition and analysis, guiding each other, to home in on the right solution.

Think of a problem you have to solve. Can you design a simple algorithm/checklist to make sure you don’t miss anything important?

Run the issue past your colleagues – particularly experienced ones

Other people have a different set of models of the world. If you look at a problem through their lenses as well as your own, you’re more likely to see it in 3D.
This is particularly true of your more experienced colleagues who have a richer library of patterns to draw on. There is a story that the great physicist Richard Feynman could look briefly at several pages of complex mathematical equations and conclude: ‘Looks about right’. He was a genius of course, but he was also steeped in his discipline and could instantly see the critical elements in the welter of formulae and whether they formed a coherent whole – a very advanced and abstract form of pattern recognition.

This may be an unfashionable suggestion, because we set such store by youth in our society, but your older colleagues can be an important resource. Sully was nearly 58 and had 40 years of flying experience behind him when he landed on the Hudson (see Article3). More experienced doctors make better clinical judgments. Many creative artists reach their pinnacle very late in their careers: Monet painted his last Waterlily paintings when he was in his eighties. We frequently encounter classical musicians, actors, academic experts, and indeed world statesmen, in their seventies and eighties. At the time of writing, the most popular television broadcaster on science in this country, Sir David Attenborough, is in his 90s.

Although other mental functions – working memory, the ability to focus, speed of processing – usually decline with age, there is evidence that our ability to see to the heart of problems goes on improving and remains undiminished. The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg suggests that the networks which we use most often remain robust as we age, and ‘are resistant to brain decay.’ Their frequent use means that they are ‘firmly encoded’, they do not require much energy to use, and they occupy a lot of the physical space in our brains so survive despite the loss of other areas. Many of us retain, indeed improve on, our ability to extract the gist of an issue and see matching patterns well past conventional retirement age.

4 Know yourself. Are You a Visionary or an Engineer?

Some people have the ability to move between intuitive and analytical processing as the task requires. But lab research has shown that many of us have some degree of preference for one or the other: we are more comfortable with either intuitive or analytical approaches to problem-solving.

In Article 3, I introduced the term Visionary to refer to intuitive processing and Engineer to refer to analysis. Which are you? Do you see problems holistically and rely on inspiration to solve them? Or is your first instinct to get to grips with the facts and construct a series of logical propositions? I am a Visionary but was lucky to work closely for many years with a very able Engineer. A typical dialogue would go as follows:

Me: ‘I’ve had a brilliant idea about how to solve the problem. I think that, if we did the following…’
Him: ‘Hmm. Interesting. Let’s test it against what we know. I think there are three difficulties we need to think through…’

There are psychometric tests – in particular the Myers Briggs Type Indicator – which can help you analyse your preferences and those of your team members. You need to be aware where your and your colleagues’ strengths and weaknesses lie to construct a balanced and effective team, one with the dual process built in. I will be coming back to the issue of personality in a number of future articles.

Sources
Gary Klein, Seeing What Others Don’t, Nicholas Brearly Publishing, 2014
‘Hartsfield’s Landing’, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Vincent Misiano, ‘The West Wing’ Series 3, Episode 14, first broadcast on 27 February 2002 http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/wwscripts/3-14.php

Elkhonon Goldberg, The Wisdom Paradox – How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older, Pocket Books 2007

Arthur S Elstein, Alan Schwarz, Clinical Problem Solving and Diagnostic Decision-Making; Selective Review of the Cognitive Literature, BMJ Vol 324, 23 March 2002

Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, The Heat of the Moment, Penguin Random House 2019

Nicholas Levy, Cindy Harmon-Jones, and Eddie Harmon Jones, University of New South Wales: Dissonance and Discomfort: Does a Simple Cognitive Inconsistency Evoke a Negative Affective State? Motivation Science 2018 Vol 4, No 2 95-108.

Sascha Topolinski and Fritz Strack, University of Wuerzburg: The Architecture of Intuition: Fluency and Affect Determine Intuitive Judgements of Sematic and Visual Coherence and Judgements of Grammaticality in Artificial Grammar Learning, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 2009, Vol 138, No 1, 39 – 63

John Kounios and Mark Beeman, The Eureka Factor – Creative Insights and the Brain, Windmill Books 2015, p66 et seq. The experimenters asked their subjects to solve word puzzles against the clock. These may be solved analytically, by systematically trying out different combinations, or intuitively, by waiting for the solution to pop into the conscious mind. They found that, though most people used both strategies, the subjects tended to prefer one or the other.

I’ve been asked to set out my plans for future articles. Here are the broad topics I will be covering. Do let me know if there are others you would find useful.

Introduction to the unconscious mind

• Magic and Misdirection – the role of the unconscious in the workplace (Article 1)
• President Trump - poster boy for misdirection (Article 2)

Problem-solving (the cognitive unconscious)

• Making Better Decisions: the role of intuition in decision-making and how you can improve your judgment (Articles 3-5)
• Creativity: the psychology of creativity; how to nurture it in yourself and your team; the creative personality

Understanding and getting the best from yourself (the emotional unconscious #1)

• The importance of authenticity
• Finding personal fulfilment at work
• Motivating your team and the role of culture
• Psychological glitches, eg workaholism, over-sensitivity to criticism, perfectionism: where they come from and how to deal with them in yourself and your colleagues
• How coaching (and therapy) can help

Understanding and getting the best from other people (the emotional unconscious #2)

• The psychology of empathy and its role in the workplace
• Influencing and persuading people: passion and skill
• Working with different personalities: how psychometrics can help

 

‘Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. and if the jump saves much time and effort. [It] is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, [and] the stakes are high……. These are the circumstances in which intuitive errors are probable, which may be prevented by a deliberate intervention of [our conscious minds].’

Daniel Kahneman, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, Chapter 7, pp 78ff.

It’s hard to think of a more accurate description of the early months of the pandemic in 2020 than as an ‘unfamiliar’ situation in which ‘the stakes are high’ - just the circumstances in which it’s dangerous to take decisions guided by unconscious intuition rather than conscious analysis. Yet that is exactly what both the UK’s politicians and its scientific advisers were doing during these pivotal weeks. If our hyper-rational world experts could be in thrall to their unconscious minds at such a crucial time, then clearly the rest of us need to be on our guard.

How intuition systematically leads us astray

Misleading intuitions are just as convincing as accurate ones. We all fall all the time into the particular unconscious traps I want to look at in this article. They are ‘salience’ bias (what Kahneman refers to as the ‘availability heuristic’), ‘confirmation’ bias, ‘groupthink’ and 'overoptimism'.

They are part of how we think, intrinsic to our unconscious ‘operating systems’ even when we believe we are at our most rational and rigorous. Evolution has hardwired them into us, either because they provide processing shortcuts or comforting emotional shields that enable us to cope psychologically with the chaos of reality, or both. It’s important that we are aware of them, and do what we can to counter them by engaging our conscious, critical minds.

In what follows I draw particularly not only on the work of Kahneman but also that of Tali Sharot on the evolutionary biology and neuroscience which underlies unconscious bias.

The Covid traps

The UK’s late lock down in early 2020 was described by Parliament’s Health and Social Care and Science Committees as ‘one of the worst public health failures in UK history’. Our death toll in the first wave was the highest in Europe and our economy very badly affected. New Zealand locked down in late February, Italy on 9 March and Germany on 22 March, while we waited until 26 March. Experts have suggested that the Government could have reduced the impact of Covid on public health and the economy very significantly if it had introduced stringent measures – closing borders, schools and businesses, restricting mixing and social distancing, increasing testing and tracing capacity – even a week earlier than it did.

Why didn’t the UK Government react faster? We had the advantage of forewarning: the infection didn’t reach the UK until two months after the outbreak in China and several weeks after that in Italy and other European countries. We had time to prepare and learn from the experience of others. The World Health Organisation was urging quick and decisive action to contain the disease and other countries were rapidly locking down and introducing testing.

‘Salience’ or ‘Availability’: a processing shortcut

The Government had long recognised the risk posed by a global pandemic. It had occupied the top place - on the basis of combined probability and seriousness - on the Government’s ‘Risk Register’ for a number of years. Whitehall Departments are regularly required to update the Register and demonstrate that they have the necessary measures in place to mitigate the risks, and the Department of Health had carried out two simulations to test its pandemic response. But, despite the fact that one of the simulations had been based around a coronavirus, the UK’s practical preparations focused on flu and the lessons from the 2009 flu pandemic.

The UK hadn’t experienced the recent epidemics of other coronaviruses, SARS and MERS, which had taken hold in Asia. Its preoccupation with flu, to the exclusion of other viruses, was attributable to what some psychologists refer to as ‘salience bias’ and Kahneman calls the ‘availability heuristic’: our intuitive tendency to judge the frequency of an event by the ease with which instances come to mind rather than by examining the facts and evidence. This unconscious shortcut is why we fear plane crashes more than car accidents, though we’re much less likely to be involved in the former: air disasters are rare, involve a lot of people, are reported very graphically and make a vivid impression on us, while car accidents are a daily occurrence, mostly unreported.

Even our rational scientific advisers had been led astray by intuition, with serious consequences. Flu is less infectious and less deadly than Covid. It requires a less robust response. As a result we were poorly prepared for Covid. We hadn’t given adequate consideration to the logistics of lock downs and testing or the need for a large supply of PPE for medical staff or carers.

Confirmation bias: protecting ourselves from doubt

So, many epidemiologists remained wedded to their flu-based modelling in the early crucial weeks after the first cases were identified in 2020. They assumed that there was plenty of time to prepare and even, at one stage, that it would be unwise to suppress the virus altogether and desirable to achieve some degree of herd immunity. Their reassurances were of course what the politicians wanted to hear.

Confirmation bias prevents us from reacting to evidence that contradicts our assumptions. Our brains protect us from ‘cognitive dissonance’, the psychological unease of wondering whether we might be wrong. We are programmed to seek out information and interpret it in a way that strengthens our pre-established opinions, and to discount evidence that contradicts them. We’re more sensitive to information showing that other people have come to similar conclusions and less sensitive to information that others dissent. And, paradoxically, the cleverer someone is, the better at analysis, the more able they are to organise the evidence to suit their case.

It seems an odd way for evolution to work – to select for people who won’t change their minds in the face of contrary evidence. But Tali Sharot explains that, like our other unconscious shortcuts it is helpful to us – ‘adaptive’ - because most of the time, in our normal lives, when we encounter a piece of information which contradicts what we believe about the world, that piece of information is wrong. If we gave all information equal weight, and continually second-guessed ourselves, we’d never make decisions and wouldn’t be able to get on with our lives. But the consequence is that it’s very difficult to let go of a pre-established opinion or to change someone else’s mind about something, even when we are sure they are wrong.

Groupthink and the illusion of control: avoiding ostracization

The UK’s advisers had publicly espoused a strategy that was different from most other nations’ approaches. This exposure appears to have entrenched them in their decision; no-one felt able to challenge the group consensus; they even explicitly maintained that while they knew their strategy seemed counter-intuitive, given what others were doing, nevertheless they were right and others wrong. They continued to rely on it until the evidence from Italy demonstrated incontrovertibly that Covid was much more dangerous than flu. They were clever people, adept at interpreting data. Their emotions were involved; they had staked their reputations on the flu scenario.

Our unconscious minds place us at the centre of our worlds; they give us the illusion of control. We consistently overestimate the effect of our actions on events and underestimate those of external influences. The UK’s scientific advisers were almost all men. Research has shown that men are more likely to make categorical decisions, while women tend to see things in a more nuanced way – shades of grey versus black and white. Society expects men to be decisive and prepared to take risks, while women are conditioned to be more thoughtful and receptive to others’ views.

Overoptimism: protecting ourselves against reality

And finally, as in the US, there was a hidden, comforting, emotional assumption pervading the culture in which decisions were made: that the UK was exceptional and impregnable. Neither the US nor the UK could believe that great Western nations could possibly be affected; surely this was something which only happened in Asia? Like President Trump, the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson was very reluctant to face up to the reality and be the bringer of bad news.

Johnson was famed for his ‘boosterism’. Most of us have a rose- tinted view of ourselves and the future - which is why we cleave to politicians who encourage us in this view. Tali Sharot has made a study of our species bias towards over-optimism – our inclination to overestimate the likelihood of encountering positive events in the future and underestimate the likelihood of encountering negative ones. The data show that most people overestimate their chances of professional success, the abilities of their children, their future health prospects and likely lifespan, and hugely underestimate their likelihood of divorce, unemployment and serious illness. The exception to this is people who are moderately depressed and have a more realistic view of the future.

Sharot suggests that this bias is evolution’s way of protecting us from falling into despair and inertia because we all know that inevitably one day we will die. Our brains are programmed so that we can imagine sought-after events much more richly and vividly than adverse ones, which seem vague and blurry. We find it easy to imagine what success will be like, but when we think about the possibility of failure the images seem much less compelling. And indeed, in general this bias is benign. If our view of the future is rosy, we suffer less stress and our mental and physical health is better. The evidence shows that moderate optimists live longer, are healthier and happier, make better financial plans and are more successful.

The problem arises when we allow our comforting assumption that ‘everything will be fine’ to blind us to the possibility that actually it may not; and it’s compounded by our ability to maintain our rosy view of things in the face of mounting contrary evidence. We see this bias in operation every day in the way in which the costs of large projects – the ill-fated HS2, for example – continually escalate and deadlines drift as initial budgets are revealed to be unrealistic and obstacles which should have been foreseen come to light.

Kahneman characterises the way in which our emotions bias our thinking as substituting ‘how do I feel?’ about an issue, for ‘what do I think?’ about it. The UK’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union is another example where politicians encouraged us in this bias. A Survey in December 2023 found that 55% of people in Great Britain thought that it was wrong to leave the European Union compared with 33% who thought it was the right decision. ‘Bregret’ has set in because the benefits promised by those advocating leaving in 2016 have not been realised. And indeed it is those people who voted for Brexit - mainly less prosperous and less well-educated - whose lives have been most damaged.

People wanted change, to defy the liberal elite, and the prospect of ‘taking back control of our laws and borders’ seemed very attractive. But there was no analysis of the evidence for the prospective benefits or of the economic downside of leaving our biggest trading partner; indeed, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, actually forbade the civil service to carry out any analysis of the effects of leaving, so confident was he that the vote would be to remain. The cheering assumption that all would be for the best was never subjected to proper conscious challenge.

Invoking the Engineer

As this account shows, it is extremely difficult to counter the ways in which our unconscious minds systematically undermine our rationality. Mostly we don’t notice it’s happening, and when we do we are very adept at rationalisation, at constructing logical arguments to demonstrate that our unconscious promptings are right.

Our only weapon in this war is to engage our conscious, analytical minds; to invoke the dual process and check our intuitive promptings against facts, evidence and logic.

It helps greatly in dealing with the slipperiness of intuition to have some formal tools and get into the habit of applying them: simple algorithms or checklists and procedures. When they were captured by the salience of flu, for example, it might have been helpful if the advisers had ‘triangulated’, ie made a deliberate attempt to give due consideration to all sources of information, particularly external ones – the advice of the WHO, the responses in Asia and other parts of the world, as well as to the UK’s experience and modelling.

The optimism bias is particularly difficult to deal with because of its emotional content. To have any chance of countering it we need to engage our imagination and emotions as well as our rational faculties. Gary Klein has invented an exercise that seeks to do this by engaging the project sponsors in the task of envisaging, not the best outcome, but everything that might go wrong – he calls it a ‘pre-mortem’. He suggests that when the team is converging on a decision but has not yet formally committed to it, they should get together and carry out the following exercise:

‘Imagine that we’re a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Take 5-10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.’

In the next article I will provide more practical advice on using your conscious mind to validate your intuitions and how you can train your intuitive ‘muscle’.

Sources
Kahneman, D, Thinking Fast and Slow, Allen Lane, 2011
Coronavirus: Lessons Learned to Date, House of Commons joint report by Health and Social Care Committee and Science Committee, October 2021
Sharot, T, The Optimism Bias, Robinson, 2012, and The Influential Mind, Abacus, 2018
Shrira, I, Women More Likely than Men to See Nuance When Making Decisions, Scientific American, September 2011