There has been a rise in the number of conferences, like TED, that are multidisciplinary. Do you have anything to say about the value of a multidisciplinary approach? Well, I do thinkit’s an important shift. For so long we thought the way to solve any problem was to break it down into its narrowest possible slice. But now we see how interrelated all sorts of different things are. Whenyou lookat the research, you’ll realize that a lot of our
different disciplines are completely nonsensical. So, for exam- ple, we have one discipline called “psychology,” which is about what’s happening inside the individual.We have another disci- pline called “sociology,” which is about what’s happening between individuals.But there’s no real distinction between those two things—they really are part of the same things. And then we have another discipline called “economics,” which is about how people behave when they’re dealing with money, and another discipline called “philosophy,” about their moral val- ues. But the two are not separate in the waywelive. They inform each other. And so I thinkwe’re learning that the mind is not divided into disciplines the way we think, so it’s important to bring peo-
“I attend a lot of conferences, and I bring a high degree of skepticism about how efficient they’re going to be in my getting information. Typically, time is wasted by panel discussions where each panelist gives a three- minute spiel, without having a focal point of debate.”
ple together. And then the final thing is that the study of evo- lution and the study of the brain’s behavior inform everything. And so, if you’re doing law, if you’re doing business, if you’re doing history—the underlying structure ishowthe mind shapes how you thinkand feel.
In researching the book, youattended a lot of conferences. Did that experience suggest to you any ways that conference models could be changed to be more effective? I do attend a lot of conferences, and I bring to them a high degree of skepticism about how efficient they’re going to be in my get- ting information. Typically, time is wasted by panel discussions where the moderator just goes down the line and each panelist gives a three-minute spiel, without really having a focal point of debate. I’m always amazed—I’m sure I’m guilty of this—that there are speakers who utter sentences that have no purpose. If you say something in front of 500 people, each sentence is pre- cious and there should be a point to each sentence. You should never waste a sentence, but we all waste so many sentences in meaninglessness. I thinkI find that frustrating. PowerPoints—I’m of two minds. Some people hate them.
Some people love them. I find they can be deadening when they reduce everything to mere data. On the other hand, I thinkthe
126 pcma convene December 2011
research shows that if you want to get people to shift their think- ing, if they have misconceptions that you want to clear up, a chart and a graph is a really powerful way to do that. It does change the mind. That part of PowerPoint can be quite useful.
You talked about mindfulness in The Social Animal, and I was wondering if that’s a term that you were comfortable with before writing the book? Not at all. [Laughs.] I’m a typical, emotionally avoidant male, and the idea of sitting still and sort of thinking about myself and how I’m thinking still makes me very uncomfortable. But I was really struckbyhowmuch the neuroscientists—whoare pretty secular and [are] materialists—how much they respect medi- tation,howmuch they respect the DalaiLamaandwhat he does. And they say that meditation really works. And that Tibetans and other people really understood some things about ourselves that are only now rediscovered.
Can you imagine a place for mindfulness in civic institutions? Yeah. It would take a leap if you went to most business con- ferences and went to the halls of Congress, and said, “Let’s stop and let’s all be aware of what’s deeply going on inside ourselves.” I think you’d encounter emotional resistance from a lot of peo- ple. But that doesn’t mean it would necessarily be a stupid thing to start to do.
You’ve talked about the fact that reason is not separate from our emotions, but we create policy as if we are entirely rational. Do youhave any ideas about where we can begin to change that? Well, one realm is in education.We have testing regimes that emphasize what can be counted and measured inmath and read- ing scores. And yet what matters is the relationship between the teacher and the students. Sowecan organize our schools to max- imize the richness of that relationship. And I thinkthat’s true in business, too. I was just at dinner
with a bunch of technology people, and one of them worked at Bell Labs, which 30 years ago was this incredibly dynamic, mission-driven place, and then I think[it] sort of settled down and became just another workplace, kind of boring. And that shift really had an impact on how productive Bell Labs was. And then, there are other things we could be aware of, [such
as] howmuch financial contagions can spread around the world and distort decision-making—when people decide house prices are going to go up forever, or that they are so smart that they know how to manage risk.We can build firewalls to prevent those kinds of contagions.
What in your opinion is the best news that you uncovered in your research? How smart we are deep down. A lot of people think reason is really smart and emotions aredumb. And that sometimes is true —the unconscious is really bad atmath, sowemake some pretty bad risk-assessment decisions. On the other hand, our uncon- scious processes are really good at pattern recognition—mak- ing associations between different things.We should spend a lot more time cultivating the skill of pattern recognition, which is something we’re really good at—listening to ourselves when we sort of survey the landscape and pick out the essential patterns.