Decision Quality Blog

The subject of narcissism is at first an unlikely candidate for a blog about decision making. Or maybe not. A lengthy piece in the Washington Post opines that, wait for it, we westerners have descended to new depths of self-centeredness. Why? Not the least reason is that we have been conditioned for more, more, more, and it’s showing.

Entitlement is something that’s part of human narcissism. It’s an ego thing that transcends generations. When something goes wrong for others, it’s their fault. When something goes wrong for us, it’s not ours; it’s the fault of external forces. We project blame.

This projection often antagonizes a situation. Feeling entitled to something you aren’t getting leads to frustration, which leads to bratty behavior and confrontation. Nearly 80 percent of Americans say rudeness — particularly behind the wheel, on cellphones and in customer service — should be regarded as a serious national problem, according to a study by the opinion research firm Public Agenda.

An airport is a petri dish for rude behavior: a bunch of people in close quarters under time constraints. Stress and impatience lay down the welcome mat for brattiness.

"You have people screaming at customer representatives at airports because it’s snowing out — as if they’re entitled to have a sunny day," says professor W. Keith Campbell, who specializes in the study of narcissism at the University of Georgia. "That’s where it gets out of hand. With entitlement, the issue is, yeah, there are certain times where we’re entitled and other times we’re not. The problem is when we have that meter wrong."

It’s unreasonable to spend an hour on hold, in other words, but there are situations when basic entitlement turns into self-infatuation and blatant disrespect for others. All of this is tied to the feeling of not being satisfied, of thinking that some force is blocking the way to a goal we think we deserve.

"The question is, ‘What the heck is enough?’ " says writer and psychologist Carl Pickhardt, who specializes in parenting and child development in his private practice in Austin. "I see that all the time. A couple comes in for marriage counseling, and they ask me, ‘Are we happy enough?’ Somebody’s at a job they like, but are they successful enough? People have to make that choice. We are a dissatisfaction market society. Advertising constantly creates the notion that whatever we have is not enough. We can declare independence of that."

But how? It’s about realigning our expectations and then squelching the nagging voice in our minds that propels our discontent. Pennsylvania psychologist Pauline Wallin calls this voice our "inner brat," which is an evil twin to our "inner child." After years of counseling clients who routinely made mountains out of molehills, Wallin dived into the concept, named it and produced the book "Taming Your Inner Brat: A Guide for Transforming Self-Defeating Behavior."

Taming Your Inner Brat

Pauline, Ph.D. Wallin. Wildcat Canyon Press 2004, Paperback, 264 pages, $14.95

This sense of it’s never enough is the ego getting in the way of what might otherwise pass for a rational decision process. Public Exhibit A from just this week is the news, shocking and depressing, that the righter-of-wrongs himself, Elliot Spitzer, has apparently been caught on a Federal Wiretap arranging to meet a prostitute.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a person briefed on the federal investigation.

An affidavit in the federal investigation into a prostitution ring said that a wiretap recording captured a man identified as Client 9 on a telephone call confirming plans to have a woman travel from New York to Washington, where he had reserved a hotel room. The person briefed on the case identified Mr. Spitzer as Client 9.

Even if you can’t stand the idea of motorcycles, you should spend a few minutes playing around with the Vincent Motors Configurator . . .

If you’re interested in motorcycles, perhaps you should avoid it. This thoroughly engaging doodad allows you to wile away the hours not only dreaming about the brand-new throwback Vincent you can’t afford, but to dream about it in specific, customized-for-you detail. Brilliant.

People have two relationships with choices. One is that they are overwhelmed by the choices they perceive they face. Sometimes that’s because there are too many. Sometimes that’s because of the perceived consequences (in which case the problem isn’t with the choices, it’s with the outcomes you associate with the choices).

More often, we have too few choices, or at least two few interesting choices. There are lots of reasons for that, most of which have to do with being stuck in a rut . . . a rut of defining the problem in the same old ways or looking in the same old places for solutions.

The Vincent Motors Configurator is brilliant on the last point. It gives you lots of ideas. And because the company wants to sell you a bike, it gives you lots of ideas about how to think about and dream about their bike.

It’s brilliant for another reason as well (there, I’ve used that adjective thrice now). It engages the user in a branded transaction. That means it has done the following . . .

Involves the customer

Engages information for trust. With every mouse click, you’re trusting the brand more and giving the company more information.

Adapts the experience based on the interchange.

Delivers the essence of the brand.

I have a paper on the Branded Customer Experience. Email me if you’re interested.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: VincentMotors, Configurator, midlife rider, motorcycles, lust

I love articles like this one from the Wall Street Journal entitled “No Satisfaction: Why What You Have Is Never Enough”. . . [read]

We may have life and liberty. But the pursuit of happiness isn’t going so well.

As a country, we are richer than ever. Yet surveys show that Americans are no happier than they were 30 years ago. The key problem: We aren’t very good at figuring out what will make us happy.

We constantly hanker after fancier cars and fatter paychecks — and, initially, such things boost our happiness. But the glow of satisfaction quickly fades and soon we’re yearning for something else.

Similarly, we tell our friends that our kids are our greatest joy. Research, however, suggests the arrival of children lowers parents’ reported happiness, as they struggle with the daily stresses involved.

Which raises the obvious question: Why do we keep striving after these things?

If you’re not a Wall Street Journal reader, you won’t get to read the rest of the article, but the reasons fall into a couple of different categories

We’re strivers. Happiness is a very appealing notion. After all, our founding fathers were the first and only people to lay down that we have an inalienable right to at least pursue it. But it’s the pursue part that gets us every time. If you believe in evolution, then you need to remember that we’re wired to strive and to procreate, not to be happy. That’s why we don’t live in caves anymore. That’s why there are 6 billion of us.

We’re lousy forecasters. Another way of saying this is that the grass always looks greener on the other side. It may in fact be greener, but it won’t always be, and who says greener will make us happier anyway? Famous economists Daniel Kahneman and David Schkade did a study on this phenomenon. Here’s what the WSJ had to say about the results . . .

They asked university students in the Midwest and Southern California where they thought someone like themselves would be happier — and both groups picked California, in large part because of the better weather. Yet, when asked how satisfied they were with their own lives, both groups were equally happy.

“When you’re thinking about moving to California, you’re thinking about the beaches and the weather,” says Mr. Schkade, a management professor at the University of California at San Diego. “But you aren’t thinking about the fact that you’ll still be spending a lot of time in the grocery store or doing chores. People emphasize differences that are easy to observe ahead of time and forget about the similarities.”

When we predict what will make us happy, we’re also influenced by how we feel today. If we buy the weekly groceries just after we’ve had lunch, we will shop much more selectively. The downside: A few days later, we will be staring unhappily into an empty refrigerator.

Maybe most important, we fail to anticipate how quickly we will adapt to improvements in our lives. We think everything will be wonderful when we move into the bigger house. We don’t realize that, after a few months, we will take the extra space for granted.

Take none of this as an indictment of striving, dreaming, or wanting. Just be careful with the conceit that having some new thing or experience will result in some new permanent state of elevated bliss. It won’t. That’s neither good nor bad. It just is.

kah