David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Doing is Learning

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I come from a world of careful preparation.

Dot was an anesthesiologist who knew that you always got 8 things ready before you did the 9th thing, even when it was going to the beach. Frank was an engineer who was carefree to the point of irresponsibility in his off-duty life, but methodical in his professional one. I don’t remember my parents throwing themselves into projects and learning while they went along. Not even once.

Sometimes, though, preparation can be an impediment, even an excuse to avoid jumping in and figuring out how it all fits together.

Judging when you’re ready to “just do it” is part science and part art. The art is in knowing when jumping in could be good for you—that you’re talented and resilient enough to profit from the experience. It comes from the suspicion that learning it while you’re doing it will get you where you’re going a whole lot faster. So whether you take this advice also has to do with self-confidence, or your lack of it.

I don’t know whether Frank Wilczek knew that he was headed for a Nobel Prize when he took his leap from mathematics to physics with little of the necessary groundwork, but he certainly wanted to get someplace in a hurry. This is what he said about jumping into his new discipline in a recent essay:

         “My approach was different. I hadn’t taken many physics courses, so my preparation had gaping holes. I could manipulate the physics equations as abstract mathematical symbols, but I often had only vague notions about what the symbols meant. Conversely, if you told me about a situation in the physical world, I might have trouble figuring out which equations applied.

Nevertheless, I resolved to leap right to the frontiers of research. I found a great thesis advisor… and an important problem, and I went for it. I picked a subject area where nobody really knew what they were doing, so I didn’t start so far behind. I learned or improvised what I needed as I went along, made lots of mistakes –and got my thesis done quickly.” (emphasis added)

Wilczek didn’t recklessly jump off a cliff, but hedged his bets in a new area “where nobody really knew what they were doing” so he wouldn’t be so far behind. (That kind of judgment is pure art.) He also jumped because he didn’t know about either the meaning or the application of what he did know already, and that more preparation wasn’t going to solve either problem. (That kind of feeling seems more like instinct.) Wilczek sensed that what your actions mean and how your knowledge can be applied will only be learned by doing it.

In 2004, Wilczek won physics highest prize for a subject I can name—asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction—but not describe. When it may have counted most, his talent and ambition were undeterred by his lack of preparation for achieving it.

photograph by Justin Knight

Sometimes you write to yourself as much as to others.

I’ve often risked the death of a good idea by over-preparing instead of just grabbing it and running as fast as I could for the horizon. I call it the eat-first-jump-later phenomenon, because the eating almost always makes you too full to jump. I’ll do it later, after a nap and a walk with the dog, even though I know that it’s better to jump on an empty stomach.

So I’ve often been over-prepared and under-experienced, like I suspect many introverts are. Too much time spent in our heads and not enough outside of them.

There’s fear in over-preparers too, of course. What if I get it all wrong? (Nobody gets everything wrong.) What if I embarrass myself? (What, in front of the bystanders who aren’t risking much of anything?) I mean: what if ALL I show is how much I don’t know? (Well that dimension of embarrassment can spur your effort to avoid more of the same the next time around.)

Little experience jumping into action can also make you oblivious to the likely consequences when you finally do have the impulse or summon the courage. You’ve simply never learned how it’s best to feel and act in the heat of the moment.

Many years ago, I remember tripping and falling on an uneven sidewalk at the Penn campus. A group of West Philly teenagers watched me fall, and one started shrieking with laughter. I got up, approached, and with the side of my shoe upper cut her ample butt saying: “What’s wrong with you?” Of course, it was about what was wrong with me, but I couldn’t help myself. How much better if I’d been able to go over and thank her for giving me the best reason yet to watch where I was going. It would have demonstrated my self-control, and probably startled her more than I did with the bounce of my foot.

Mistakes are not excuses for your anger or confrontation. Instead, they’re lessons (gifts really) to learn from. I could merely have said, “Thank you young lady,” if I’d had more experience, on the ground, both making mistakes and handling their consequences.

So I’ve come to appreciate that the best antidote for the over-preparers and under-experienced is practice in taking those first steps into the relative unknown. Each time is an occasion to  trust that your instincts, know-how and better angels will help you make it to the other end.

Just like learning how to cook one simple meal instead of learning “how to cook,” the first step can be a simple one and, by hedging your bets, you can improve your chances of building self-confidence and overcoming your fears when the next opportunity beckons.

As a line from one of our Nobel laureate’s fortune cookies famously said: “The work will teach you how to do it”—in ways that preparation never can.

Your Upbringing Always Affects Your Principles

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Chris Arnade may have returned to the roots of what has always been most important to him.

He grew up hardscrabble middle-class, where the choices were between new clothes and car repairs on the one hand, and a good education, on the other. He went on to become a successful Wall Street trader, but in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash left that career behind to try and capture the stories of downtrodden but hopeful men and women across America.

I’m not saying that this was courageous or that his life today is exemplary. (You can draw your own conclusions about that.) But there may be ties between where he came from, how he climbed so far up the ladder, what he realized once he got there, and how he’s chosen to live and work ever since. The moral arc we’ve taken since childhood is worth considering—particularly its pull on us to return.

When I came upon Arnade’s story recently, the facts of his past seemed to make powerful suggestions about the ways he’s decided to set his priorities today. Of course, it’s always perilous to select and then connect up the historical dots to your current realities, because hindsight can prove almost anything when it tries hard enough. But the values that you acted on as a child are always in dialogue with your current priorities, and it seems to me that Arnade’s story demonstrates the gravitational forces that are always at play in this kind of correspondence.

Arnade’s family stuck out in its corner of the rural South because of its well-known views on civil rights. His father was a Jewish academic who had fled Nazi Germany, while his mom was a socialist activist. Arnade played sports in high school and learned how to handle a gun, but recalls being ridiculed as a n—lover. Unlike the world of his family, is hometown of San Antonio, Florida was conservative, Catholic and a bit more down-on-its-luck.

Arnade photo of pawn shop in San Antonio Florida

His parents raised him along with six other siblings. While neither big families nor limited possessions were unusual in San Antonio, the Arnades used their limited resources to take their kids on far-flung research trips that opened them up to the wider world and ultimately to send all seven to college—opportunities that were almost unheard of in their community.

Beyond his family’s politics and commitment to education, Arnade’s upbringing made him something of an outsider in another way. He was neither his family’s youngest nor its oldest child. As he said later:

“Being caught in the middle you end up something of a watcher. You never fit in entirely.”

Another Arnade photo, of a Quik Mart in San Antonio

It was almost like being an immigrant, caught between his old country and his new one.

Arnade went to college at Johns Hopkins and ended up getting a doctorate in particle physics. He parleyed his comfort with numbers into a Wall Street job, selling emerging market bonds. Arnade made a lot of money and for the first time had a comfortable life, but several disruptions were soon to follow.

In the years between 2008 and 2012, the stock market crashed, the banks that lost billions for regular people were bailed out by the federal government, his mom (who had her own views about his career) died of cancer, his proprietary trading desk was closed under new regulations, and his fellow traders were complaining that Obamacare had raised their taxes.

It rankled Arnade, and during this time, he seemed torn to his co-workers. One reported that he’d leave work to take half-day walks, reporting back later that he’d taken pictures of poor people and those who had recently arrived in America. This is how Arnade describes that transitional time in a piece he wrote for Quartz:

“I had a very good life. So did the people around me. . .

 We were the front-row kids, and we felt we had done everything right. We had studied hard and gone to good schools. Most of us had parents who supported us. Our schooling got us good jobs that allowed us to live in nice neighborhoods.

Many of us were geeks, educated in the sciences, and steeped in clever rational arguments. With a PhD in physics, I was part of the wave of rocket scientists that changed Wall Street.

Buttressed by our math, our spreadsheets, our data, and our obsession with the rational, we had a confidence that grew into hubris as we entered and changed more and more industries, from baseball to finance, politics and journalism.

That hubris should have dissolved following the financial crisis in 2008. Our unchecked faith in numbers, and in ourselves, had proved disastrous. We should have admitted guilt and rethought the things we were certain about. Instead we focused on bailing ourselves out and moved along as if little had happened.

It was during this time that I started photographing New York City. I would go on long walks to escape the stress of my job in the aftermath of the crisis. I started letting my decisions be guided by unquantifiable things like empathy and curiosity rather than probability.”

When I confronted a similar career pivot, I had a refuge in the Coast Guard that was as far away for me as Arnade’s poor and immigrant sidewalks were from Wall Street. I thought about everything that was wrong with where I’d been, but never trusted enough to let my empathy or curiosity play much of a role.

With “big firm lawyer” behind me, I tried to plan my way to the future. (How much does my next job have to pay so I can cover my expenses? What values are most important to me? What do I want to be when I grow up?) My sense is that Arnade never analyzed the particles in his physics like I tried to do; his was more of a backward drift in the direction of his heart.

The job that gradually emerged for him was documenting the stories of poverty, addiction and finally, wherever there was a forgotten corner of America struggling for dignity. To find these stories Arnade travels the back roads, sleeping in his van or cheap motels. His wife was alarmed at first by his change of focus and loss of income, but she became his collaborator as he posts his visual chronicles on his Flikr account, in essays created for The Atlantic, or in videos about the aspirations of Trump voters.

Arnade seemed to be looking for the truths that had been masked by his upscale life.

In a 2013 interview on NPR, he recounts how one homeless junkie told him that do-gooders often “offer to buy me lunch. But very rarely does anybody ever ask me who I am.” So Arnade started asking.

After one conversation, he asked the call girl how she wanted him to describe her in the picture he had taken.  “As who I am,” she said. “A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.” Encounters like this challenged his outlook. “I naively thought that I would see the same cynicism towards faith that I had, and I saw the exact opposite,” he said. Since their optimism seemed revelatory, he thought that it might say something to others too.

Arnade picture of Jose Villa in La Villita, New Mexico after Villa shared his American Dream: “To live a successful life on your terms, to be accepted by others on your terms, and to accept others on their terms.”

According to The Wall Street Journal story where I first learned about him, Arnade’s new career “is an attempt to reconcile his multiple identities.” Maybe. But it certainly includes a return to what he thought was most important to him as a kid. In that NPR interview about his new job, Arnade says: “This is more comfortable to me. This is what I grew up with.” And in what was described as a view from the back row interview, he had this to say:

“I often use my favorite example, which is McDonald’s. I grew up in a white working-class town, so for me, it’s kind of rediscovering what I already knew. But McDonald’s, which is viewed with contempt [by the front row], is actually a center of community, it’s where people gather. McDonald’s is not a joke.”

Of course, his kind of route is never a full circle. Everyone changes along the way, and the back row isn’t known for writing in The Atlantic, The Guardian, or being interviewed and profiled as often as he is. But Arnade has become a kind of megaphone for the values of his heartland, where residuals of respect, reverence, and outrage over injustice remain. It’s not only what he knew and felt was important back then, but his processing of it by that outsider’s perspective in all the years since.

Moral foundations are first established in childhood. They don’t determine what follows, but are always a part of the continuing conversation that conscience plays inside our heads.

Most people find it hard to look at themselves from a critical distance, decide what they should or should not do, and go on to act accordingly. What does my basic decency require me to do here, they wonder. One way to liberate the conversation from the confusion that surrounds it is to ask: what would the child in me do?

—just like Chris Arnade might be asking.

Why Craft Masters Love Their Jobs

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Every job is about two things: what it brings to you and what it brings to others.

Today, new iterations of old-time, blue-collar jobs are providing a new breed of craft masters with the personal validation that comes from using their specialized knowledge to serve grateful customers. These butchers, haircutters, distillers, bartenders and a host of others celebrate proud skills / that enable them to produce something tangible / for people they know.

Each part of their work definition speaks to the quality (or lack of quality) in our work too.

For example, many of our jobs seem inconclusive. I spent all these hours, was aggravated along the way, tried to stay motivated, but at the end of the day, week, month or year, what have I accomplished?

Having something (anything) beyond a paycheck to show for your effort is what’s missing in many, if not most, service economy jobs today. As those in manufacturing, farming and fishing—big jobs a century ago—have left to take on “office work,” what the modern workforce actually produces has gotten harder to either describe or personalize.

Customer satisfaction – Quality control – Teamwork – Greater efficiencies – More sales.

What is your contribution to any of them? Whatever you’re adding may earn you a raise, but probably does little to improve your work engagement because there was almost nothing tangible that you either produced or could “own.” When the fruits of your labor feel this remote from your effort, the level of job satisfaction always tends to be low.

On the other hand, think of the difference if you were giving someone a great haircut, mixing an unforgettable cocktail, or aging a steak to perfection. There is nothing remote about these benefits because someone “thanks you” for your expertise right away. You can take their gratitude home with you that night and recall, with pride, your accomplishments before returning to work tomorrow. It’s sustaining, makes you feel that you’re doing something worthwhile, even when the financial rewards are less than an office job might bring.

What is the calculus that motivates today’s craft masters, and how could their trade-offs change your thinking about the jobs you have or the jobs you want?

Among many other things, Instagram is a forum for craft masters, and I’m following several, including haircutter @crimsonjenny, woodworker @gingerwoodturner, and meat maestro @butcherfarrell. Everyday they show me their work, celebrate their tools, and introduce me to their clients. Talk about job satisfaction—it doesn’t get any more tangible than it seems to be for them:

 

What exactly do jobs like these bring to the person doing them? For one thing, they provide something that is clear and measureable to them.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton describes the experience like this:

“How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object—whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug—and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.”

Concreteness can also come from “living the experience.” It’s akin to what many professionals are looking for when they pursue endurance sports, effectively making their exploits in extreme situations into second jobs. As noted last week in Outside magazine, what these men and women may want the most is to be able to explain to themselves and to others at least one thing that they’re accomplishing with their skills:

“Ask a white-collar professional what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they’ll need at least a few minutes to explain their answer, accounting for [office] politics, the opinion of their boss, the mood of their client, the role of their team, and a variety of other external factors. Ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next race, however, and the answer becomes much simpler [for the one who’s giving the answer as well as for the one who’s hearing it].”

In the same article, Michael Crawford says that using your skills this way relieves you of the need to offer “chattering interpretations” to explain your worth. You can simply point to the race you ran, the mountain that you climbed, or the house that you built. Results like these provide demonstrations of your value that are readily apparent to everyone.

By contrast, how much “knowing appreciation” did you receive for your work last week? How proud are you of your output, how convinced of your worth given what you accomplished with your skills and experience?

Craft masters know about the pride and sense of empowerment that come from demonstrating their skills. But they also know something about work that no commitment to endurance sports can provide: the gratitude of serving someone beside yourself.

Craft masters are connected to their customers in at least 3 ways. For one thing, those receiving their services are often their peers. As such, their work is a way for both servers and served to recover some of the place-based kinship that was disrupted when national manufacturers, big box stores, on-line merchants and assembly-line service providers drove their predecessors out of business.

Both craft master and customer also respect the specialized knowledge and skill that is being demonstrated. Both may even see themselves as connoisseurs. Customers like to have their steaks, cocktails or haircuts lavished with attention, and the masters revel in their customers’ knowing appreciation of what they do.

Finally, there is transparency about what craft masters add and deliver. Customers generally know where their raw materials come from and how they transform them. It’s the opposite of products appearing on most store shelves whose point of origin, manufacture and supply chain are cloaked in mystery. Transparency establishes loyalty to the work itself and tends to deepen the bonds of trust between master and customer.

Pride and confidence in your skill and experience.

Mutual bonds of gratitude with the beneficiaries of your work.

These rewards don’t belong to craft masters alone. Instead they represent choices (and sometimes trade-offs) at the heart of every job. When these rewards are important enough, you either find them in your current jobs or demand them in future ones. They are essential benefits in every work bargain, and far too often, we’ve forgotten to expect them.

(If you are interested in reading more, a sociologist’s take on jobs in the new urban economy is provided in Richard Ocejo’s recent book and Michael Crawford’s classic essay, “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” can be found here.)

Rewind and Get It Right This Time

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Whenever my face hits the mud of a first mistake, I’m usually surprised by how many people seem to be watching and wondering: What will he do next? What’ll he say? What does he really mean? Has he accepted responsibility for what’s happened? Said he’s sorry?

Assume that your mistakes will always attract a crowd, especially at work. When you’re busy (or overwhelmed) it’s surprisingly easy for one knee-jerk reaction to compound your next one, until you’re doubling-down while everyone else is wondering why you’re so intent on making a bad situation even worse.

An audience that expects little from you

Work mistakes are rarely private moments. And that’s actually the interesting part, because a mistake that’s out in the open gives you a chance (sometimes repeated chances) to say something courageous and totally unexpected about yourself, to start-over in front of a surprisingly large audience that’s close to writing you off.

There were two news stories this week with just this kind of ending.

Everything about them speaks to a crowd that’s even larger than those who were already following because we don’t get to see anyone rewind and start over very often, and secretly hope (at least I think we do) that when the moment arrives, each of us will have the character to do the same.

I got into writing about values because I’m convinced that most people want to act morally but few actually know how. There are several reasons for this today, including:

  •          a decline in institutions that once saw themselves as custodians of our social values, such as churches;
  •          the reluctance of other institutions (like schools and parents) to pass their own values on to new generations; and
  •           a preference for lazy cynicism (in politics, in the media, and in our interactions with one another) instead of forging deeper commitments.

As a result, even when you want to act morally, you are increasingly “on your own” to figure out how.

Even when you want your work to mean more than a paycheck, you have to figure out how to find and do work that can engage your mind and heart like that.

And outside of traditional religion, almost no one is offering help to those who are groping for these answers today—which is another reason why these stories seem so compelling.

The first is about a message T-shirt that Frank Ocean wore at a recent concert, and the second is about a twist in the admissions policy at the University of California at Irvine. So in case you missed them. . . .

Photo by Angela Weiss/Getty Images

I was already a Frank Ocean fan. (If you don’t know his music, you can get a taste of it here.) He has also been a hiatus from touring, so when Ocean reappeared recently in New York City his fans were already watching. But it was his T-shirt that caused a sensation.

The T-shirt featured a tweet from an 18-year old named Brandon Male that asked: “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?” Both the sentiment and the bid to “just be quiet” are very Frank Ocean, but Mr. Male had a different reaction when he found out about it. His tweet was suddenly selling even more T-shirts, and the sellers still hadn’t bothered to reach out and say: “Thanks man.” This time, Mr. Male couldn’t let it go.

Kayla Robinson, also 18, runs the on-line company which sells the T-shirt. It calls itself the Green Box Shop. Mr. Male had already contacted the company last January, after somebody known as @lustdad posted an image of himself on Twitter wearing the same T-shirt and saw his post retweeted 87,000 times and liked by 191,000 people. (To put this in context, the most retweets or likes my posts have ever gotten is around 5.)

Anyway, Mr. Male thought this was valuable promotion too, but when he contacted the Green Box Shop, someone who was not Ms. Robinson pretty much blew him off. “They told me I needed to calm down and said they credited me on Instagram one time,” he said. He was prepared to let it slide, but then Frank Ocean out the T-shirt on.

Following the concert, Mr. Male took his complaints to Twitter directly and received an outpouring of support (“give him his coin!”), some of which finally got Ms. Robinson’s attention. Apparently, she doesn’t handle the social media side of things, but realized that something was happening, that is, something beyond her company receiving 5400 more T-shirt orders than it received on a typical weekend. Ms. Robinson sent Mr. Male $100 and added a link to his tweet on her product page, but if she thought this would put the matter to rest. . . . As Mr. Male told the New York Times: “They threw me $100 and told me to go away.” By his calculation, $100 was less than 1 percent of the new revenue the Green Box Shop pulled in over those two days alone.

Of course, this is where it gets interesting.

While great legal minds were speculating on whether the use of someone else’s tweet can result in monetary damages (It’s yet to be decided), Ms. Robinson admitted that hers was “an impulsive decision. I hadn’t looked at the number of sales [and] it does look like I was just throwing money at him to keep him quiet.”

She also said something else that’s far more noteworthy. “It would be pretty irresponsible of me to just take [his words]. Being a creator myself, people have copied my shirts before, I totally understand Brandon.” Then she reportedly called him to apologize and to set up a time to talk numbers. Where Ms. Robinson could have re-trenched, instead she rewound while the skeptical were watching.

The second story follows a similar arc.

When the University of California at Irvine admitted its new freshman class, 800 more applicants than it could “feed and house” said: “Yes!” Irvine has long been a popular destination for first generation college applications, and it was no different this year. This is what a recent applicant pool there looked like:

Accurately forecasting an incoming class is often a problem because calculating the “yield” on admissions is little better than guesswork. (When I was a college sophomore, so-called “overflow freshman” were put up in a local motor inn where, among other things, they were rumored to enjoy much better food.) Anyway, because Irvine’s lawyers informed them that an admission letter is only a “conditional offer” (based on satisfactory completion of high school, submitting paperwork on time, etc.), the university eventually withdrew 500 of its acceptances as applicants failed to meet one or another of its requirements like: “No deposit check by May 1 and you’re out.”

You can read a newspaper account of the gnashing of teeth that ensued, reactions that prompted the university’s next misstep. Even though it had never once rescinded admissions because of late checks, Irvine insisted that it was just “following policy” when it acted as it did. (Who knows what its lawyers were advising at this stage.)

Once again, the seemingly most clueless point is where things get interesting. Was it press involvement? Still other lawyers threatening to sue? We don’t know. But from a public letter shortly thereafter, it’s clear that Irvine’s chancellor, Howard Gillman, had a change of heart.

“We are a university recognized for advancing the American Dream, not impeding it. This situation is rocking us to our core because it is fundamentally misaligned with our values. The students and their families have my personal, sincerest apology. We should not have treated you this way over a missed deadline.”

Just like we don’t know how much Ms. Robinson agreed to pay Mr. Male, there’s still some uncertainty at Irvine as this goes to press. 300 applicants who simply missed a paperwork deadline have been re-admitted, but another 200 are still in limbo because of other conditions on their admission. What is clear is that prior mistakes were acknowledged, a more generous spirit was expressed, and two people declared to everybody who was listening that doubling down on a bad idea doesn’t have to be the last word.

It is always better to think through the ramifications of work decisions beforehand and act accordingly, but in the real world, it sometimes doesn’t happen that way—particularly when a seemingly “bigger” opportunity or problem is confronting you.

That’s when the “ramifications” of one bad decision compound, just like they did here. But what really matters comes next. These stories have a moral that says: even when you’ve doubled-down, it’s never too late..

How Slowing Down Your Judgments Lets in Some Light

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When it comes to morality—is something right or wrong—you have a trigger finger. Everybody does.

However open-minded you think you are, the closed-minded parts of you are likely to beat you to the punch every – single – time. These mind-closers include your emotions, hopes, habits, beliefs, prejudices and instincts (like that reptilian fight or flight). These sub-conscious drives literally make you jump to conclusions. It’s as if something fundamental in you were threatened.

A quick Q&A so you’re with me so far:

  1. The next time politics comes up in conversation, how long does it take you to decide that what you’re hearing is right or wrong (2 seconds, 10 seconds, until the person has stopped talking)?
  2. On a social issue you know little about, will you give someone you view as religious the benefit of the doubt or be skeptical right away?
  3. If you color your politics blue, how open to persuasion are you when you hear a red perspective? Same question if your color is red and you’re hearing a blue perspective (Not open at all, tune out most of it, will hear them out, will actually talk to them some more about it)?
  4. Which hat are you wearing right now?

Your moral judgments are likely to be rendered before you’ve “thought about it” at all. (Your “reasons” for them come afterwards, that is, when you bother to come up with them at all.) And as the “religion” question suggests, your subconscious may have judged what someone will be saying before they’ve even opened their mouths.

So if our unthinking selves are leading us “by the nose,” is it inevitable for the conversation to break down in almost every area where we share things in common?

Actually, it’s not.

But let’s begin by reiterating that your moral judgments—the decisions made in the light of your values—are the most powerful motivators in your life.

I’m writing about “following your values to a good life at work” because of how your jobs can empower you when they are aligned with this evolutionary flow.

However, reconciling what’s rational and deliberate (your work) with what’s subconscious and intuitive (your values) requires you to take one key step. Because moral judgments happen so quickly, it almost always helps when you slow them down.

Why? (1) because you can, and (2) because your reasoning faculties—some of the better angels of your nature—have a chance to inform your moral judgments, making those judgments more nuanced and constructive without losing any of their primal force.

In his groundbreaking Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel Prize winning economist) made much the same point, arguing, among many other things, that when we “slow down” the “fast process” of moral judgment, there is an opportunity to introduce some reason into it. Indeed, many thought that Kahneman’s book was so important when it came out in 2011 that they made animated summaries of it. Here’s one of them that amusingly illustrates the downsides of too-fast thinking in several contexts, including making judgments about almost everything you value.

Two new studies, out this week, got me thinking again about not being so knee-jerk (and predictable) myself. Moral fervor grounds good work but it’s also the seedbed for dogmatism.

Based on surveys of more than 900 people, the researchers behind these studies found some important similarities between the religious and the non-religious people they tested. The most dogmatic believers said their convictions were based on empathy while the most committed nonbelievers claimed to be fact-based analyzers. But in fact, the opposite was true. In both groups, the most certain were less adept at either analytical thinking or the ability to look at issues from another’s perspective.

So where you fall on this spectrum matters.

In his book The Righteous Mind, self-described liberal Jonathan Haidt surveyed 2000 Americans and reported finding that those identifying themselves as liberal were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. “Liberals don’t understand conservative values,” he wrote. “And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.”

Dogmatic. Predictable. But, in fairness, almost everyone with a moral perspective sits on a high horse.

Haidt argues persuasively that your values or “moral intuitions” guide your behavior long before you can give your reasons for what you said or did. But he also argues for the effort to become more open to opposing views, to pause and reflect before reacting, and to break up your ideological segregation by seeking out different perspectives. (Haidt talks more about why good people are divided by politics and religion in this video clip of him speaking to Google employees.)

There are several reasons for a deeper consideration of the role that’s played by your values —including your better life and work. But for now, it may be enough to reflect on becoming less dogmatic and predictable whenever your values come racing to your defense.

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