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Month: July 2024

TB871: Lateral Thinking, Transitional Objects, and Metaphors

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

On the desk of my home office I have a set of Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies‘ cards. Every so often, I’ll pull out a card at random as a prompt to generate a creative solution to a knotty problem. Each card provides a unique prompt which is designed to shift your perspective and inspire new ways of thinking, for example, “Accretion” or “Who should be doing this job? How would they do it?”.

Although I didn’t know it a decade ago when I bought the cards, this technique aligns well with the principles of systems thinking and the use of ‘transitional objects,’ offering a pathway to explore complex situations in innovative ways.

Transitional objects

In systems thinking, the concept of ‘rich pictures’ is used to capture and express the complexity of perceptions within a particular situation. I used this approach in my previous MSc module, TB872. These pictures provide a creative outlet for individuals to project their understanding and emotions about a scenario, encompassing both positive and negative aspects.

This method is an example of using ‘transitional objects,’ a concept introduced by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. These objects, which exist simultaneously in the realms of reality and imagination, serve as tools for individuals to navigate the boundaries between fantasy and fact, internal and external realities, and creativity and perception (Winnicott, 1971).

In the context of systems thinking, rich pictures function as transitional objects by enabling participants to externalise and communicate their internal thoughts and feelings about a situation. This process of externalisation is important for understanding and addressing the nuances inherent in any system. As I explored in a recent post, situations are fundamentally ambiguous, and we are all subject to cognitive biases.

The use of rich pictures and other transitional objects in systems thinking can provide several benefits:

  1. Creative expression: represent perceptions and emotions creatively can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the situation.
  2. Intricacy management: visually mapping out the various elements and their interconnections can help show and manage the intricacies of systems.
  3. Enhanced communication: a visual approach can serve as a ‘common language’ to help facilitate communication among stakeholders with diverse perspectives.
  4. Emotional engagement: the process of creating and discussing transitional objects can engage participants emotionally, leading to deeper involvement and commitment.
  5. Problem identification: transitional objects can help identify underlying problems and issues that may not be immediately obvious.

Lateral thinking

Edward de Bono‘s concept of lateral thinking complements the use of transitional objects in systems thinking. De Bono emphasised the importance of encouraging the brain to break free from familiar patterns to produce creative and novel solutions. He likened this process to the way humour works, where a sudden shift in perspective leads to a new understanding. I’ve used his six thinking hats successfully with students, for example, to help them think through situations from different points of view.

Line drawing of a rectangle balanced in an unstable way on its bottom right-hand corner
Cropped from an image used in The Open University (2020)

Lateral thinking involves provocation and the use of unusual scenarios to stimulate new ways of thinking. In his Atlas of Management Thinking, de Bono illustrated this with a block improbably balanced on one corner, which symbolises the unexpected and the need to think differently about familiar objects. By integrating lateral thinking techniques, systems thinking practitioners can further enhance their ability to explore intricate situations.

As illustrated in the image, provocation is a key process in lateral thinking. It involves deliberately creating an unstable idea or situation to break away from conventional patterns of thought. This method encourages looking at the ‘what if…’ and ‘suppose…’ scenarios, thus encouraging a shift in perspective that can lead to innovative solutions.

Using metaphors

I’m a big fan of using metaphors in both my professional and personal life. I find that they help ‘unlock’ thinking that would otherwise not be available to me. So, when thinking about my area of practice and system of interest (“a system to promote lifelong learning” in a library context) I could think about the library as metaphorically being a ‘laboratory,’ a ‘seed vault,’ or a ‘constellation map.’

If we go a bit further with the latter of these, then a library can be viewed as a map of the night sky, where each book or resource is a star that helps navigate the vast expanse of human knowledge. Connecting these stars forms constellations, representing interconnected ideas and concepts. Just as navigators have historically used constellations to find their way, learners may use the library to chart their course through the ‘sea’ of information. This metaphor emphasises the interconnectedness of knowledge and the guidance that a library provides if we consider lifelong learning a ‘journey.’

References

TB871: Ambiguity and cognitive biases

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

You may have watched this video which was referenced by the brilliant Cathy Davidson in her book Now You See It. But perhaps you haven’t seen, as I hadn’t, a related one called The Door Study. TL;DR: it was one of the first confirmations outside of a laboratory setting of ‘change blindness’. What we perceive is usually what we’ve been primed to pay attention to, rather than simply us sensing data from our environment.

It’s a good reminder that, phenomenologically-speaking, much of what we experience about the external world, such as colour, doesn’t actually ‘exist’ in an objectively-meaningful way. We construct our observation of the environment; everything is a projection. As the module materials quote Heinz von Foerster as saying: “Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer” (The Open University, 2020a).

When it comes to systems thinking, this is a key reason why the idea of ‘perspective’ is so important: the world is different depending on our point of view, and we can struggle to see it as being even possible to observe it differently. A good example of this, other than the familiar rabbit-duck illusion is the Necker cube (The Open University, 2020b):

A series of lines that look like a 3D cube

This is literally a flat pattern of 12 lines, so the fact that most of us see it automatically as a 3D object is due to our brains modelling it as such. However, our brains aren’t sure whether we should see the underside of the bottom face of the cube, or the upper side of the top face. As with the rabbit-duck illusion, our brains can see one of these, but not both at the same time.

Going further, we can take the ink blot below, taken from the module materials (The Open University, 2020c):

Using this diagnostically is usually referred to as a Rorschach test which many people think is pseudo-scientific. However, it is interesting as a parlour trick to show how people think about the world. For example, I see two people with their hands behind their backs, kissing. I’m not sure what that says about me, if anything!

Spending a bit more time with the ink blot, I began to see it as a kind of eye covering that one might wear at a masked ball. Switching between these two is relatively easy, as the primary focus for each is on a different part of the image.

There are similar approaches to the above, for example the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) created by Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan at Harvard University, which presents subjects with an ambiguous image (e.g. a photograph) and asks them to explain what is going on.

The rationale behind the technique is that people tend to interpret ambiguous situations in accordance with their own past experiences and current motivations, which may be conscious or unconscious. Murray reasoned that by asking people to tell a story about a picture, their defenses to the examiner would be lowered as they would not realize the sensitive personal information they were divulging by creating the story.

(Wikipedia)

These approaches show how much we construct our understanding of the world rather than just experience it as somehow objectively it is ‘out there’. There’s a wonderful image created by JM3 based on some synthesis by Buster Benson which I had on the wall of my old home office (and will do in my new one when it’s constructed!) which groups the various cognitive biases to which we humans are susceptible:

Diagram titled "Cognitive Bias Codex, 2016" showing different cognitive biases organized around a central brain image into four categories: "Too Much Information," "Need To Act Fast," "Not Enough Meaning," and "What Should We Remember?".

As you can see, these are boiled down to:

  • What should we remember?
  • Too much information
  • Not enough meaning
  • Need to act fast

Here are some of the most common ten biases we are prone to:

  1. Confirmation bias: Favouring information that confirms pre-existing beliefs while discounting contrary information, often seeking validation rather than refutation.
  2. Fundamental attribution error: Overemphasising personality-based explanations for others’ behaviours and underestimating situational influences, particularly noted in Western cultures.
  3. Bias blind spot: Believing oneself to be less biased than others, exemplifying a self-serving bias.
  4. Self-serving bias: Attributing successes to oneself and failures to external factors, motivated by the desire to maintain a positive self-image.
  5. Anchoring effect: Relying too heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the anchor) when making decisions, influencing both automatic and deliberate thinking.
  6. Representative heuristic: Estimating event likelihood based on how closely it matches an existing mental prototype, often leading to misjudgment of risks.
  7. Projection bias: Assuming others think and feel the same way as oneself, failing to recognize differing perspectives.
  8. Priming bias: Being influenced by recent information or experiences, leading to preconceived ideas and expectations.
  9. Affinity bias: Showing preference for people who are similar to oneself, often unconsciously and based on subtle cues.
  10. Belief bias: Letting personal beliefs influence the assessment of logical arguments, leading to biased evaluations based on the perceived truth of the conclusion.

Of course, just having these on one’s wall, or being able to name them, doesn’t make us any less likely to fall prey to them!

References

TB871: Going beyond WEIRD biases

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

As mentioned in a previous post, recent research in behavioural economics and evolutionary psychology has shed light on why humans often make seemingly irrational choices. Behavioural economics focuses on how people’s decisions deviate from classical economic theories of rationality, while evolutionary psychology examines how these choices may have been advantageous in our hunter-gatherer past. These fields suggest that our built-in biases, once beneficial for survival, now manifest as errors in modern contexts.

A seminal study entitled ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’, challenges our understanding of human thinking by revealing a significant bias in psychological research. This meta-study suggests that much of what we consider to be universally true about human cognition is based on findings from a narrow, unrepresentative segment of the global population. This segment, termed WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), is disproportionately represented in psychological research.

The authors of the study state:

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self‐concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior—hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity.

(Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan, 2010, p.2)

The authors demonstrate that WEIRD subjects often show distinct psychological traits compared to non-WEIRD populations. For instance, in spatial cognition, WEIRD individuals typically exhibit an egocentric bias, while non-WEIRD groups often use allocentric reasoning. Similarly, differences are noted in social decision-making, moral reasoning, and self-concept. These findings highlight the importance of considering cultural contexts in psychological studies and caution against overgeneralising results from WEIRD populations.

One key aspect explored in the study is the difference between analytic (rule-based) and holistic (family resemblance-based) thinking. The following diagram taken from the paper illustrates this contrast by showing the relative dominance of these cognitive styles across different cultural groups:

The image is a bar graph comparing the relative dominance of rule-based versus family resemblance-based judgments of categories for a cognitive task among different groups. The y-axis is labeled "%Analytic - %Holistic Judgments," with positive values indicating a bias toward rule-based judgments and negative values indicating a bias toward family resemblance-based judgments. The x-axis lists the groups: EuroAm, Herders, Fishermen, Farmers, Asian American, and East Asian. EuroAm and Herders show positive values, while Asian American and East Asian show negative values. Both Fishermen and Farmers have small positive values. The graph bar sizes vary, with EuroAm having the highest positive value and East Asian the lowest negative value.

The diagram compares European-American, Asian-American, and East Asian university students, alongside herders, fishermen, and farmers from Turkey’s Black Sea coast. It highlights that European American students exhibit the most pronounced bias towards rule-based judgments, while other groups show varying degrees of holistic thinking. This evidence indicates that societies and cultures are not all equally predisposed to systems thinking, which requires the ability to think holistically and in process terms.

This insight is crucial for systems thinking, which relies on holistic and process-oriented thinking. The Henrich et al. study indicates that not all cultures are equally predisposed to this type of thinking. Therefore, when engaging with diverse cultures, we must remain mindful of these differences to encourage better understanding and collaboration.

Section 3.3 of the paper further delves into the implications of these differences in thinking styles for various cognitive domains, such as social interactions, problem-solving approaches, and educational practices. For example, the preference for analytic thinking in WEIRD societies often leads to a focus on categories and rules, while holistic thinkers from non-WEIRD societies might approach problems by considering relationships and contexts.

This difference can influence how people from different cultures collaborate and make decisions. In professional and educational settings, understanding these cognitive styles can improve communication and teamwork by recognising and valuing diverse perspectives. Moreover, appreciating these differences can lead to more effective strategies in fields like marketing, policy-making, and international relations, where cultural sensitivity is paramount.

By acknowledging and addressing these biases, we can develop a more accurate and comprehensive view of human behaviour, ultimately enhancing our ability to understand and connect with people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

References

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