Terry Elliott's List: Dissertations and Doctoral Life

• icked this up from the WPA listserv: a recent article from the Boston Globe cites research that indicates that contemporary scholarly work cites a fewer range of sources than work in the past.

  James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work. Overall, Evans says, published research has expanded, due to a proliferation of journals, authors, and conferences. But the paper, which appeared in July in the journal Science, concludes that the Internet's influence is to tighten consensus, posing the risk that good ideas may be ignored and lost - the opposite of the Internet's promise.

  "Winners are inadvertently picked," says Evans. "It drives out diversity."

• • reacting in situ
• • an assumption
• Suppose that you were a senior Army officer in the early days of the Second World War and were trying to put together a crack team of fearless and ferocious fighters. Sandy Nininger, it now appears, had exactly the right kind of personality for that assignment, but is there any way you could have known this beforehand? It clearly wouldn't have helped to ask Nininger if he was fearless and ferocious, because he didn't know that he was fearless and ferocious. Nor would it have worked to talk to people who spent time with him. His friend would have told you only that Nininger was quiet and thoughtful and loved the theatre, and his commanding officer would have talked about the evenings of tea and Tchaikovsky. With the exception, perhaps, of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a love of music, theatre, and long afternoons in front of a teapot is not a known predictor of great valor. What you need is some kind of sophisticated psychological instrument, capable of getting to the heart of his personality.
• Over the course of the past century, psychology has been consumed with the search for this kind of magical instrument. Hermann Rorschach proposed that great meaning lay in the way that people described inkblots.
• nnie Murphy Paul tells us in her fascinating new book, "Cult of Personality,"
• twenty-five hundred kinds of personality tests. Testing is a four-hundred-million-dollar-a-year industry. A hefty percentage of American corporations use personality tests as part of the hiring and promotion process. The tests figure in custody battles and in sentencing and parole decisions. "Yet despite their prevalence—and the importance of the matters they are called upon to decide—personality tests have received surprisingly little scrutiny," Paul writes. We can call in the psychologists. We can give Sandy Nininger a battery of tests. But will any of it help?
• It is tempting to think, then, that we could figure out the Myers-Briggs type that corresponds best to commando work, and then test to see whether Sandy Nininger fits the profile.

  • It would be interesting to decide whether tests are predictive. Shouldn't they be? But you would need to find a way to adminster them secretly then decide whether the subject's behavior matches the predicted behavior.
• but the basic question here is surprisingly hard to answer.

  • man, this is the crux of it--can we simplify the complex. Nope.
• This is the first problem with the Myers-Briggs. It assumes that we are either one thing or another—Intuitive or Sensing, Introverted or Extroverted.
• We have a personality in the sense that we have a consistent pattern of behavior. But that pattern is complex and that personality is contingent: it represents an interaction between our internal disposition and tendencies and the situations that we find ourselves in.

  • This goes to the heart of the problem--what does it measure and if it measures what it says then how useful is it in the complexity of the world.
• And since personality is contingent, not stable, how we answer is affected by which circumstances are foremost in our minds when we take the test.
• I'm quite pleased with the personality inventory we devised. It directly touches on four aspects of life and temperament-romance, cognition, family, and work style—that are only hinted at by Myers-Briggs. And it can be completed in under a minute, nineteen minutes faster than Myers-Briggs, an advantage not to be dismissed in today's fast-paced business environment. Of course, the four traits it measures are utterly arbitrary, based on what my friend and I came up with over the course of a phone call. But then again surely all universal dichotomous typing systems are arbitrary.
• Jung didn't believe that types were easily identifiable, and he didn't believe that people could be permanently slotted into one category or another. "Every individual is an exception to the rule," he wrote; to "stick labels on people at first sight," in his view, was "nothing but a childish parlor game." Why is a parlor game based on my desire to entertain my friends any less valid than a parlor game based on Katharine Briggs's obsession with her son-in-law?
• This idea—that our personality can hold contradictory elements—is at the heart of "Strangers to Ourselves," by the social psychologist Timothy D. Wilson. He is one of the discipline's most prominent researchers, and his book is what popular psychology ought to be (and rarely is): thoughtful, beautifully written, and full of unexpected insights.

  • Rather than just criticize, perhaps it would be fair to suggest this book and author as a partial solution to this desire to simplify.
• The adaptive unconscious is more likely to influence people's uncontrolled, implicit responses, whereas the constructed self is more likely to influence people's deliberative, explicit responses. For example, the quick, spontaneous decision of whether to argue with a co-worker is likely to be under the control of one's nonconscious needs for power and affiliation. A more thoughtful decision about whether to invite a co-worker over for dinner is more likely to be under the control of one's conscious, self-attributed motives.

  • an example of adaptive unconscious v. constructed self
• What we really need is an understanding of how those two sides of his personality interact in critical situations.

  • yes!
• But the reason employers want a magical instrument for measuring personality is that they don't have a year to work through the ambiguities. They need an answer now.

  • And this is exactly the reason we need to be damned careful with these. Part of business's problem these days is a demand for quick solutions. Problem/solution is printed on their foreheads inside and out. That is a problem begging for a solution, but I am in no hurry.
• When I contacted D.D.I., I was told that I was going to be Terry Turner, the head of the robotics division of a company called Global Solutions.
• Some of it was positive: I was a quick learner. I had good ideas. I expressed myself well, and—I was relieved to hear—wrote clearly. But, as the assessment of my performance made plain, I was something less than top management material:

  • assessment
• You spoke of win/win solutions from a business perspective and your rationale for partnering and collaboration seemed to be based solely on business logic. Additionally, at times you did not respond to some of the softer, subtler cues that spoke to people's real frustrations, more personal feelings, or true point of view.

  • This is what we needed before we entered into the program.
• y day as Terry Turner was meant to find out only what I'm like when I'm the head of the robotics division of Global Solutions. That's an important difference. It respects the role of situation and contingency in personality. It sidesteps the difficulty of integrating my unconscious self with my constructed self by looking at the way that my various selves interact in the real world. Most important, it offers the hope that with experience and attention I can construct a more appropriate executive "self." The Assessment Center is probably the best method that employers have for evaluating personality.

  • Very potent. This measurement in context is what we need in order not to waste precious time and money.
• The center makes a behavioral prediction, and, as solid and specific as that prediction is, people are least predictable at those critical moments when prediction would be most valuable. The answer to the question of whether my Terry Turner would be a good executive is, once again: It depends.
• he quality of being a good manager is, in the end, as irreducible as the quality of being a good friend. We think that a friend has to be loyal and nice and interesting—and that's certainly a good start. But people whom we don't find loyal, nice, or interesting have friends, too, because loyalty, niceness, and interestingness are emergent traits. They arise out of the interaction of two people, and all we really mean when we say that someone is interesting or nice is that they are interesting or nice to us.

  • EMERGENT TRAITS!!!!!
• We just have to acknowledge that his file will tell us little about the thing we're most interested in. For that, we have to join him in the jungles of Bataan.

  • We are measured when we are tested-in the crucible.

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• iven that quantification and the American way of life has a close association (e.g.

   

  Banta 2004), this view might seem a little incongruous. From the Stanford Binet to

   

  the MMPI, the NEO-PI and beyond, the US has led in the development and use of

   

  psychological instruments across many professions and has exported that approach

   

  elsewhere, particularly in business, where the connection between testing and the

   

  workplace originated in the1920s.

  • criticicm of Paul's work

• the educational hegemony of traditional schools continues to decrease.

  • Who has been "colonized" and who is "colonizing"? I think that our minds can be occupied and colonized.
• In an effort to stave off obsolescence

  • Common responses:
    
    1. Unaware of perceived threat
    2. Denial/Inaction
    3. Insulate the silos
    4. Suppress the threat
• 

  • This is the formal, stylized, default representation of the flow of power and identity. No one denies its validity although there are backchannels that work as a shadow network of power.
    
    I love the idea tht firewalls, filters,plans, policies, rules, regulations are the insulation from the "world".
• Institutions that are opening up are betting that the benefits obtained by sharing their resources will outweigh the expenses incurred in their creation.

  • The operative word here is "betting". What is my university "betting" on because I want them to know there is no sure thing in the field.
• They understand that allowing students to access these sources, sharing their own, and helping students learn how to manage and understand all of it, will add value to what it is that they do as institutions.

  • New definition of university and of teaching in that university.
• providing access to these resources and teaching students how to benefit from them not only serves the students, but also keeps the institution from becoming irrelevant, although admittedly, institutional influence will most likely be diminished as more learners self-organize.
  

  • New "teaching" paradigm puts the learner front and center. Find the best food, put it in a proper trough, and let the goats get to it? Not a good metaphor because it suggests yet again that the learner will be passive. If anything, the learner becomes even more 'obnoxious'. And I mean that in the best possible way.
    
    The advent of the obnoxious learner...
• 

  • This begins to look more like the ecology of a neural network--a society of mind--where teachers are more like neurotransmitters that enable thought to occur.
    
    Note the greyed-out nodes. Since distance is no longer a factor in sharing information then the proximity of these nodes is much closer. We probably don't even know how close we really are. Nor do the experts out there know.
• 

  • Is this a typo? Istitution? It is a serendipitous one:
    
    I-stutution
    Me-stitution
    We-stitution
• 

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• With effective storytelling, ideas are embraced, adopted, and fostered faster and more efficiently. At IDEO, we use whatever storytelling medium best fits the message—videos, skits, immersive environments, narratives, animations, even comic strips—to convey to clients and stakeholders the intent, potential, and emotional experience of an idea or product.