I wouldn’t have it any other way
Like the flu, a person’s emotional state can be contagious. Watch someone cry, and you’ll likely feel sad; think about the elderly, and you’ll tend to walk slower. Now a study suggests that we can also catch someone else’s irrational thought processes.
Anyone who’s lost money on a fixer-upper may have succumbed to a classic economic fallacy known as “sunk costs.” You make a bad investment in a home that’s never going to sell for more than you put in to it, yet you want to justify your investment by continuing to throw money into renovations. One way to avoid this hole is to get advice from someone who has no self-interest in the project. But is the outsider still somehow susceptible to your mindset?
To find out, social psychologist Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues asked college students to take over decision-making for a person they had never met–and who they didn’t know was fictitious. The volunteers were split into two groups: one that felt some connection with the decision-maker and another that didn’t. (…)
The results suggest that companies trying to reverse results of bad decisions should find true outsiders. He points to troubled automaker Ford as an example. Instead of hiring from within–as General Motors (GM) recently did–Ford made Alan Mulally from Boeing, an aerospace company, their chief executive officer. Many experts believe that Ford is now recovering quicker than GM.
illustration { Mike Mitchell }
