Archive for September, 2011
I Dare You!
If you’ve never gone to the Harvard Implicit site to take one of their many tests, you are missing an opportunity to learn about yourself, or at least, confirm what you already know or suspect.
All the tests I’ve seen are set up similarly, so after you take one or two, others might seem redundant. The power is not in the process, but the content; so ignore how the tests are set up, and pay attention to your responses.
Note that I got confused on one of the tests I took last night and I did not receive any results because there were too many mistakes. Make sure you understand the instructions before proceeding.
The first time I came across this site was when I attended a diversity conference and one of the speakers had us take one of the many tests to open our eyes about what kind and degree of biases we held. She made it clear that we all have prejudices and act on them, often unconsciously. The point of taking the test(s) was to develop awareness of our biases, manage our biases, and develop cultural competence.
The results were memorable and prompted the majority of attendees to want to talk about diversity at a much deeper level than when they walked in the door.
I know that there’s a strong correlation between our biases and listening. If, for any reason, conscious or unconscious, the speaker triggers a prejudice, that directly influences how attentive we are to that person. I wonder how seriously a listener who tells dumb blonde jokes takes the information delivered by a Marilyn Monroe look-alike?
Case in point. Many moons ago I ran a learning center at a college and we had a tutoring program. The faculty was very good at recruiting student tutors who met our criteria. A professor said he was sending over the top student in all of his science classes. About fifteen minutes later a beautiful young woman with curly blonde hair piled on top of her head, wearing knee-hi boots and rather seductive-looking clothing came to my desk.
As was customary, I asked how I could help her, I’m sure in a somewhat patronizing tone. As I started to reach for a tutoring request form, she introduced herself and said Professor Jennings suggested she come talk to me about becoming a tutor. Her favorite subject was physics, but she felt confident she could help students with most science subjects. She probably accounted for 25% of our tutoring load with great success for those students who looked past her looks and listened to her brilliance.
Let us know, if you are comfortable, what tests you took and how what you learned about yourself influences your listening.
Harvard University’s Implicit Association Test, which gauges prejudicial attitudes or beliefs about certain groups of people:
Assessments Galore
One of my LinkedIn connections offered everyone in the Group a scholarly report, “Learning Styles and Pedagogy in Post-16 Learning: A systematic and critical review” by Frank Coffield, Institute of Education, University of London; David Moseley, University of Newcastle; Elaine Hall, University of Newcastle; Kathryn Ecclestone, University of Exeter. Indeed, the report is impressive and extremely well researched.
What struck me the most were the number of assessments that they critiqued, for I had no idea there were so many instruments available in just one category: learning styles.
The main models chosen for detailed study are as follows:
Their conclusion: (p 182)
Research into learning styles can, in the main, be characterized as small-scale, non-cumulative, uncritical and inward looking. It has been carried out largely by cognitive and educational psychologists, and by researchers in business schools and has not benefited from much interdisciplinary research. As a result, as Sternberg has argued: ‘the literature has failed to provide any common conceptual framework and language for researchers to communicate with each other or with psychologists at large.’ (2001, 250).
So what does all that mean to Hear! Hear? Your Listening Portfolio? While it’s not categorized as a learning style inventory, certainly listening factors in mightily with the ability to learn.
But that’s not the point of this post. I mean to say that there are a lot of assessments in the marketplace; some are worthy of research like those on the above list, while others are hastily drawn and without much rigor. Hear! Hear? was carefully developed, well researched, and tested, so I am confident it would be worthy of these author’s scrutiny.
I’m curious. How many of the assessments on the list do you know and have tried? What’s your opinion of them?
Neuromarketing and Listening
The crux of neuromarketing is to get to the subconscious brain before the conscious mind kicks in. Why? The neuroscientists would say it is to tap into a mind free from biases, memories and learning. The marketers would say it is to increase the likelihood that a product will sell.
As you know, much of our research at ListeningImpact focuses on the role of the brain in determining listening preferences. We’re pretty sure that there’s an instantaneous reaction when we’re in a listening situation that governs whether we will pay attention to the speaker(s).
The neuromarketers are trying to unravel that same hypothesis. Can we program the brain to pay attention? For us in the realm of listening, it is to help people make better decisions, collaborate more openly, and develop more satisfying relationships that happens when the brain is engaged in listening. For the neuromarketers, it is to reduce the failure rate of new products (80%) and increase the chances people will rush out to buy a product.
What the neuromarketers are doing is fascinating. Let me quote from an article, They Have Hacked Your Brain by Adam L. Penenberg, in the September 2011 issue of Fast Company magazine, p 89 that explains how the neuromarketers track what’s going on in the brain. Hang on, it’s heady:
…neuromarketers can track electrical waves as they relate to emotion, memory, and attention from specific areas of the brain: namely, the amygdala, an almond-shaped region that plays a role in storing emotionally charged memories and helps trigger physical reactions (sweaty palms, a faster heartbeat); the hippocampus, where memory lurks; and the lateral prefrontal cortex, which governs high-level cognitive powers (one being attention). Once the brain waves are collected, complex algorithms can sift through the data to connect each reaction to a specific moment.
What has all that to do with listening? While we don’t attach an EEG machine to people’s heads, we do help people identify what they pay attention to and what they ignore. We also educate people about all the various triggers in their lives that influence their attention. For example, when someone becomes aware of her physical reactions to another person, she can use her body to bring herself back into the interaction just by shifting position.
We at ListeningImpact and the neuromarketers with their very sophisticated technology aim to:
- Tap into the pre-conscious brain to isolate it from conscious thought and resulting behaviors
- Enable people to develop skills that will slow knee-jerk reactions to other people, information, and situations
Channel the brain, body and emotions into maintaining attention