c) Start making late-night hang-up calls to the supervisor’s home?
A couple of days after the man is fired, his supervisor finds a dead snake in his mailbox at home.
Was it placed there by:
a) A neighborhood prankster?
b) A member of the Snake Protective League trying to raise social consciousness?
c) The man fired a couple of days before?
I’ve used these obvious examples to demonstrate one of the greatest resources for predicting human behavior: You will rarely fail to place people in the most likely category when you frame the choice between contrasting options. This may seem obvious, but it is a powerful assessment tool.
A woman in an underground parking lot is approached by a stranger who offers help loading groceries into her car. She could refine her predictions about the man, and enjoy a creative exercise, by asking herself, Is this man:
a) A member of a citizen volunteer group whose mission is to patrol underground parking lots in search of women to help?
b) The owner of a supermarket chain looking for the star of his next national advertising campaign?
c) A guy who has some sexual interest in me?
By the time you consciously develop even the first possible category for your multiple choice list, you likely already know the correct answer and you have already considered the level of immediate hazard intuitively. Intuition, remember, knows more about the situation than we are consciously aware of. In the parking lot, it knows when the woman first saw that man, as opposed to when she first registered seeing him; it may know when he first saw her; it may know how many other people are around. It knows about the lighting, about how sound carries here, about her ability to escape or defend herself should she need to, and on and on.
Similarly, when assessing the fired employee, intuition knows how long he held on to resentments in the past. It remembers sinister statements he made that were followed by some unsolved vandalism. It recalls his disconcerting story about getting even with a neighbor.
The reason for creating three options is that it frees you from the need to be correct; you know that at least two of your options will be wrong, and this freedom from judgment clears a path to intuition. In practice, this turns out to be less an exercise in creativity than an exercise in discovery; what you may think you are making up, you are calling up. Many believe the process of creativity is one of assembling thoughts and concepts, but highly creative people will tell you that the idea, the song, the image, was in them, and their task was to get it out, a process of discovery, not design.
This was said most artfully by Michelangelo when asked how he created his famous statue of David. He said “it is easy—you just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.”
Well, you can know it will be a man long before the statue is complete. It is an irony of prediction that if you just wait long enough to commit, every prediction will be accurate. By the eleventh hour, most factors are apparent, and they are less likely to change because there is less opportunity for intervening influences. The key is to complete a prediction far enough in advance to get some benefit, in other words, while you still have time to prepare or to influence outcome.
Why, after all, do we make any prediction? To avoid an outcome or exploit an outcome. To do either, prediction must be followed by preparation. Prediction without preparation is just curiosity. Predicting that Lucky Dancer will run fastest is only valuable when you have time to exploit the outcome by placing a bet at the racetrack. Conversely, if you are standing in the path of the galloping horse, you use the same prediction to avoid the outcome of being trampled, and you get out of the way.
The amount of preparation appropriate for a given outcome is determined by evaluating the importance of avoiding or exploiting it and the cost and effectiveness of the strategies you’ll use.
In deciding what preparations or precautions to apply, one also measures the perceived reliability of the prediction. If I predicted that you would be struck by lightning tomorrow and said that I could ensure your safety for $50,000, you wouldn’t be interested. Though it is very important to avoid being struck by lightning, the reliability of my prediction is low, and thus, the cost is much too high. If, however, a doctor says you need immediate heart-transplant surgery or you will die, the $50,000 cost is suddenly reasonable. The outcome of death is the same with lightning or heart failure, but we perceive the reliability of the medical prediction as much higher.
This same process of comparing reliability, importance, cost, and effectiveness (which my office calls the RICE evaluation) is how people go about making many daily decisions.
Society makes its precautionary decisions using the same RICE evaluation. Avoiding the assassination of a big-city mayor is less important to society than avoiding the assassination of a presidential candidate. That’s why we spend more in a week on a presidential candidate’s protection than we spend in a year for most mayors. We may consider our prediction that a presidential candidate might be shot to be more accurate than that a mayor might be shot, but it isn’t necessarily so. In fact, mayors have been shot more often and more lethally than presidential candidates. When we add governors to the mix, we find that nearly all have protective details, some quite extensive, but I am unaware of any governor ever killed in office. (Two governors have been attacked while in office, but neither because he was governor: George Wallace, because he was a presidential candidate, and John Connolly, who was in the car when President Kennedy was shot.) So, though a mayor is more likely to be killed as a result of holding the office, I am sorry to tell my mayor-readers that we care more about avoiding that outcome for governors.
With societies, as with individuals, when the RICE evaluation is made irrationally, it is always because of emotion. For example, avoiding the outcome of hijacking is so important around the world that passengers are screened for weapons more than one billion times each year. Only a few hundred people are actually arrested on weapons charges, almost none of whom had any intention of hijacking a plane. Ironically, the only deaths associated with airline hijacking in America have occurred since we instituted weapons screening. So, given the effectiveness, we pay a lot to do something that might prevent just a few incidents. We do this because of emotion, worry specifically. To be clear, I support screening of airline passengers, but this is as much for the fear-reducing benefits and deterrence as for the actual detecting of weapons.
The likelihood of burglary in your area may be remote, but the importance of avoiding it makes the cost of having locks on the door seem reasonable. Some people consider burglary to be more likely, or consider avoiding it more important, so they purchase security systems. Others don’t feel that way. Our approaches to caution and precaution all boil down to a personal RICE evaluation. Ask yourself about the reliability of the safety predictions you make in your life, the importance of avoiding a bad outcome, and the effectiveness of available precautions. With those answers, you can decide what precautions to apply to personal safety.
When you are at imminent risk, intuition forgets about all this logical thought, and just sends the fear signal. You are given the opportunity to react to a prediction that has already been completed by the time it comes into consciousness. These intuitive predictions are involuntary, but often we must make predictions consciously. How can those be improved? Ingmar Bergman said, “Imagine I throw a spear into the dark. That is my intuition. Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle to find the spear. That is my intellect.”
Simply by throwing the spear, we greatly improve conscious predictions. By nothing more than the act of inquiry, or even curiously wondering about what a person might do, we enter into a conscious alliance with our intuition, an alliance with the self. Logic and judgment may sometimes be reluctant to follow that spear into the jungle, but the concepts in the next chapter should help persuade them.
▪ CHAPTER SIX ▪
HIGH-STAKES PREDICTIONS
“Onc
e the principle of movement has been supplied, one
thing follows on after another without interruption.”
—Aristotle
I recall the case of a man who drove to a hotel near his home and requested a room on the highest floor. Though he had no luggage, he was escorted up to the eighteenth floor by a bellman. As a tip, he handed over all the money in his pocket (sixty-one dollars). He then asked if there would be paper and a pen in the room. Five minutes later, he jumped out the window, committing suicide.
Was this suicide foreseeable by the reception person who checked him in, or by the bellman? Both had an opportunity to observe the guest’s conduct and demeanor, but they were predicting entirely different outcomes. They were answering such questions as: Can he pay for his room? Is he the authorized user of his credit card? How can I get another tip like that? The pre-incident indicators for those predictions do not include the ones relevant to suicide, such as: Why does he have no luggage? Why does a person who lives nearby check in to a hotel? Why did he seek a room on a high floor? Why did he want a pen and paper? Why did he give away all the money he had?
People do all these things for differing reasons, of course. The man might have lost his luggage. He might be staying in a hotel even though he lives nearby because his home is being fumigated (but then, wouldn’t he have luggage?). He might he staying in a hotel because he just had an argument with his wife (and ran out too quickly to gather any belongings). He might have requested a room on a high floor for the view, and he might have asked about pen and paper to write a note to someone (his wife?). He might have given all his money as a tip because he’s generous. A question that could give meaning to his other behavior is: Does he appear depressed? But that’s not an issue on the minds of hotel staff.
While I’m sure some lawyer could make a case for the hotel’s liability, the real point is that to consciously predict something, one must know what outcome is being predicted, or see enough pre-incident indicators to bring that possible outcome into consciousness. Here, some Zen wisdom applies: Knowing the question is the first step toward knowing the answer.
The Language of Prediction
If you were surrounded by a pack of unfamiliar dogs that caused you fear, you could have no better companion than Jim Canino. He’s an expert in canine behavior who has worked with hundreds of dogs that people considered vicious or unpredictable. Though you and Jim could observe the same actions by a dog, he’d be more likely to recognize the significance of those actions, and more likely to accurately predict the dog’s behavior. That’s because he knows the dog’s predictive language. For example, you may believe that a dog that is barking at you is likely to bite you, but Jim knows that barking is simply a call to other dogs. Growling is the signal to respect. In the predictive language of dogs, the growl means, “Nobody’s coming and I have to handle this on my own.”
When someone speaks to you in a language you don’t understand, though you hear the sounds clearly, they carry limited meaning. For instance, look at the following paragraph:
Flememing. r o b e r t do. Bward, CCR, L-john john john john john john john john john john, GGS, stosharne, :powell. Kckkm, cokevstner, michL fir fir fir fir fir, hawstevkings, bjacksrowne, steV1der, dgeLnrs.
This may look like gibberish, but your intuition has probably told you it is not. That paragraph contains the names of fifteen famous people, but in a slightly different language than the rest of this book.
Flememing is Ian Flemming (E in Flemming). R o b e r t do is Robert Deniro (Robert D-near-O). Bward is Warren Beatty (War in B-D). CCR is Caesar (cc’s-R). L-john john john john john john john john john john is Elton John (L—ten john). GGS is Jesus (gg’s-S).
You now know enough of that language to get the remaining nine names. These word puzzles show that meaning is often in front of us to be harvested. Sometimes we need only believe it is there.
These puzzles show something else too, something about the differences between intuition and conscious prediction. If the solution to one of these puzzles does not come right away, it is then a matter of letting the answer surface in you, because stare though you may, there is no additional information forthcoming from the puzzle itself. If you solve one, the answer was available in you somewhere. Many people resist this idea, believing that they solve the puzzles by moving the letters around and trying them in different order, as if they were anagrams. But they are not anagrams and they have no consistent rules, and people often get them immediately without having the time to figure them out.
I show a series of these intuitive puzzles when I give speeches and ask audience members to call out the answers as they come to them. Most of the correct answers—sometimes nearly all of them—come from women. It’s also so that most of the incorrect answers come from women. That’s because women are willing to call out what comes to them—they are willing to guess. The men, conversely, won’t risk being wrong in front of a roomful of people, so they won’t call out an answer until they are sure it’s correct. The result is that while each man is plodding through his personal logic test for each puzzle, the women have called out all the answers. Woman are more comfortable relying on intuition because they do it all the time.
Intuition is just listening; prediction is more like trying to solve the puzzles with logic. You may have greater confidence in conscious predictions because you can show yourself the methodology you used, but that doesn’t necessarily increase their accuracy. Even though this is a chapter about improving conscious predictions, don’t believe for a moment that when it comes to human behavior the conscious predictions are any better than the unconscious ones.
▪ ▪ ▪
We predict the behavior of other human beings based on our ability to read certain signals that we recognize. In Desmond Morris’s Bodytalk, he describes the meaning of gestures and body movements and notes in which parts of the world various meanings apply. Amazingly, sixty-six of the signals are listed as being valid worldwide, universal to all human beings in every culture on earth. The majority of them are presented unconsciously. Everywhere in the world, the chin jutted forward is a sign of aggression, the head slightly retracted is a sign of fear, the nostrils flared while taking a sharp breath is a sign of anger. If a person anywhere on the planet holds his arms forward with the palms facing down while making small downward movements, he means “Calm down.” In every culture, stroking the chin means “I am thinking.”
Just as these movements are unconscious, so is our reading of them usually unconscious. If I asked you to list just fifteen of the sixty-six worldwide gestures or physical movements, you’d find it difficult, but you absolutely know them all and respond to each intuitively. Earlier I mentioned the predictive language of dogs, which is all non-verbal. Desmond Morris has identified one of the non-verbal parts of human language, but we have many others. Often, knowing the language of a given prediction is more important than understanding exactly what a person says. The key is understanding the meaning and the perspective beneath and behind the words people choose. When predicting violence, some of the languages include:
The language of rejection
The language of entitlement
The language of grandiosity
The language of attention seeking
The language of revenge
The language of attachment
The language of identity seeking
Attention seeking, grandiosity, entitlement, and rejection are often linked. Think of someone you know who is always in need of attention, who cannot bear to be alone or to be unheard. Few people like being ignored, of course, but to this person it will have a far greater meaning. Imagine Al Sharpton or Rush Limbaugh unable to garner attention by the methods they do today. Believing they deserve it (entitlement and grandiosity), knowing they need it (fear of rejection), and committed to being seen and listened to (attention-seeking), they might strongly resist a loss of attention. If the need in them is great enough (and you be the judge), they might do so
me pretty extreme things to draw interest.
Think of a person you know whose self-evaluation is lofty or grandiose, perhaps even with good reason. When he volunteers for something and later learns that he was not chosen or wasn’t even seriously considered, the news will have a different meaning to him than it would to a modest, humble person. Such a person might also feel humiliated more quickly than a modest person.
In each prediction about violence, we must ask what the context, stimuli, and developments might mean to the person involved, not just what they mean to us. We must ask if the actor will perceive violence as moving him toward some desired outcome or away from it. The conscious or unconscious decision to use violence, or to do most anything, involves many mental and emotional processes, but they usually boil down to how a person perceives four fairly simple issues: justification, alternatives, consequences, and ability. My office abbreviates these elements as JACA, and an evaluation of them helps predict violence.
Perceived Justification (J)
Does the person feel justified in using violence? Perceived justification can be as simple as being sufficiently provoked (“Hey, you stepped on my foot!”) or as convoluted as looking for an excuse to argue, as with the spouse that starts a disagreement in order to justify an angry response. The process of developing and manufacturing justification can be observed. A person who is seeking to feel justification for some action might move from “What you’ve done angers me” to “What you’ve done is wrong.” Popular justifications include the moral high ground of righteous indignation and the more simple equation known by its biblical name: an eye for an eye.