Amerika

Some days, you recall things from the past at random, and what came to mind was this trendy song from the 1990s by some band called “Jesus Jones” that featured hopeful lyrics for the period after Communism, or maybe just the ramblings of a bunch of stoners who found a burrito in the freezer:

I was alive and I waited, waited
I was alive and I waited for this
Right here, right now
There is no other place I want to be
Right here, right now
Watching the world wake up from history
Right here, right now
There is no other place I want to be
Right here, right now
Watching the world wake up from history
Right here, right now
There is no other place I want to be
Right here, right now
Watching the world wake up

Did the world wake up from history? Francis Fukuyama thought so; he believed that history had ended with the standardization of all human societies in liberal democracy, and that globalism was the future.

Maybe we are waking from that, too, and it seems more like a dream than a reality. The 1990s feel very far away, and it has to do with almost every expectation that we have from life being different, although the pendulum appears to be swinging back.

In life, the first mover often has the advantages. Whoever gets there first defines the expectations, and then people shoehorn any new data into the paradigm and categories of those expectations. This means that the first person to act or characterize a situation defines how others will react:

After the participants had opened the different boxes, the researchers asked them to estimate the value of each one and choose their favorites. Some participants judged the boxes immediately, but others “slept on it” and decided after an overnight delay.

A pattern quickly emerged: When the participants had to make a decision right away, they tended to remember and judge boxes not by the entirety of their contents, but rather by the first few items they came across.

“We found that people are strongly biased by first impressions,” said lead author Allie Sinclair, who did the research as part of her Ph.D. in the lab of Dr. Alison Adcock, a Duke professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

This should not surprise us much; if you come back to your neighborhood and someone tells you that your house is on fire, that is a reasonable starting point for your actions. However, if it is not your house or not a fire, gradually uncertainty sneaks in as your expectations drift farther from reality.

Not surprisingly, comparing expectations to reality causes stress and neurosis as you find yourself wondering if you in fact have the right approach this time:

For sales professionals, the job’s inherent uncertainties—such as long sales cycles, complex negotiations, and reliance on commissions—can create a breeding ground for neurotic tendencies. This is especially true for B2B (business to business) salespeople, whose work differs greatly from the consumer salespeople we all interact with.

Our comprehensive study, which involved around 1,700 B2B salespeople and 24,000 non-sales professionals, found a clear link between B2B sales roles and increased neuroticism. The research shows that the constant uncertainty in B2B sales jobs triggers defensive emotional responses which, when activated frequently, can reinforce and heighten neuroticism over time.

The harmful effects of chronic uncertainty in sales work—namely, a change in personality that may lead to mental disorders—should be treated, in essence, like any other workplace hazard.

At some level, we are a species trolling each other into doing what we want. Each person portrays the world as he needs to in order to feel good about his situation, but he experiences stress if others do not share this, so he tries to recruit them to his point of view.

If he can come up with a new characterization, that gives him a first mover advantage. To say that Rome is not falling but progressing makes everyone set their expectations to that. Perhaps in the 1990s we set our expectations to the unrealistic, and since then have been neurotic and playing catch-up to figure out what was true after all.

Tags: expectation bias, first mover, neurosis, uncertainty