by Dan Heath
Shop Talk in the Xerox Lunchroom
Photocopiers are perhaps the most complex machines that most of us will ever use. What other everyday machine combines optical, mechanical, chemical, and electrical technologies? It’s a wonder copiers work at all. And often they don’t. When there’s a problem—and it’s not one that a cubicle-dweller can fix by opening and shutting the paper tray a few times—it takes a very sophisticated repair person to troubleshoot the situation.
Researcher Julian Orr spent a lot of time among Xerox copier repairmen and found that they spent a lot of time swapping stories. Take the story below, which was told by a Xerox copier salesperson over a game of cribbage at lunch. (We’ve provided some explanatory comments in brackets.) The salesperson starts with a reference to a recent mechanical change made by copier designers in an attempt to prevent an ordinary power surge from frying multiple components:
The new XER board configuration won’t cook the board if you had an arcing dicorotron. Instead, it now trips the 24-Volt interlock on the Low Voltage Power Supply, and the machine will crash. But when it comes back up it’ll give you an E053 error. [This is a misleading error code that refers to an area of the machine that is unrelated to the real problem.]
That’s exactly what I had down there, at the end of the hall, and Weber and I ran for four hours trying to chase that thing. All it was was a bad dicorotron. We finally got it running long enough so that we got an E053 with an F066 and the minute we checked the dicorotrons we had one that was totally dead…. [Orr reports that there was a long pause for cribbage.] Yeah that was a fun one.
These cribbage-playing guys in the lunchroom are simply talking shop, as we all do. A misleading E053 error may not constitute drama in your world, but no doubt we all have our equivalents.
Why do people talk shop? Part of the reason is simply Humanity 101—we want to talk to other people about the things that we have in common. Xerox repairmen work with photocopiers, so they talk about them. But that’s not the only factor at play here. For example, the storyteller above could have shared the general arc of the story without the details: “I had a real bear of a problem today—it took me four hours to get to the bottom of it. I’m glad that one’s over.” Or he could have leapt straight to the punch line: “After hours of hassle, I traced the problem back to a measly burned-out dicorotron. How was your morning?”
Instead, he tells a story that’s much more interesting to his lunch partners. It has built-in drama—a misleading code leads two men on a wild goose chase until they uncover, through lots of work and thought, that the problem is simpler than they initially thought. Why is this story format more interesting? Because it allows his lunch partners to play along. He’s giving them enough information so that they can mentally test out how they would have handled the situation. The people in the room who weren’t aware of the misleading E053 code have now had their “E053 schema” fixed. Before, there was only one way to respond to an E053 code. Now, repairmen know to be aware of the “misleading E053” scenario.
In other words, this story is part entertainment and part instruction. Shop talk conveys important clues about how to respond to the world. It teaches nurses not to have blind faith in heart monitors. It teaches copy repairmen to beware of the misleading E053 code.
But the stories above aren’t simply transferring nuggets of information. The Xerox story is not functionally equivalent to an e-mail sent around the company that contains the line “Watch out for false E053 codes related to burned-out dicorotrons.” Something more profound is happening here. It will take a bit of unpacking to reveal the additional value that these stories bring.
The Un-passive Audience
Stories are strongly associated with entertainment—movies and books and TV shows and magazines. When children say “Tell me a story,” they’re begging for entertainment, not instruction.
Being the “audience” for a story seems like a passive role—audiences who get their stories from television are called “couch potatoes,” after all. But “passive” may be overstating the case. When we read books, we have the sensation of being drawn into the author’s world. When friends tell us stories, we instinctively empathize. When we watch movies, we identify with the protagonists.
But what if stories involve us in less intuitive, more dramatic ways? One team of researchers has produced some exciting evidence suggesting that the line between a story’s “audience” and a story’s “protagonist” may be a bit blurry.
Three psychologists interested in how people come to understand stories created a few for their study participants to read on a computer. They divided the participants into two groups. The first group read a story in which a critical object was associated with the main character in the story—for instance, “John put on his sweatshirt before he went jogging.” The second group read a story in which the same critical object was separated from the main character: “John took off his sweatshirt before jogging.”
Two sentences later, the story threw in a reference to the sweatshirt, and the computer was able to track how long it took people to read that sentence. Something strange happened: The people who thought John had taken off his sweatshirt before the jog took more time to read the sentence than the people who thought John had it on.
This result is subtle but fascinating. It implies that we create a kind of geographic simulation of the stories we hear. It’s one thing to say “Reading stories makes us see pictures in our head.” We’d all find that statement intuitive. It’s quite another thing to say that when John left his sweatshirt behind, he left it back at the house in a more remote place in our heads. For that to be true, we cannot simply visualize the story on a movie screen in our heads; we must somehow simulate it, complete with some analogue (however loose) to the spatial relationships described in the story. These studies suggest that there’s no such thing as a passive audience. When we hear a story, our minds move from room to room. When we hear a story, we simulate it. But what good is simulation?
A group of UCLA students were asked to think about a current problem in their lives, one that was “stressing them out” but was potentially solvable in the future, such as a problem with schoolwork or with a relationship.
The students were told that the goal of the experiment was to help them deal with the problem effectively, and they got some brief instructions on problem-solving: “It is important to think about the problem, learn more about it, think about what you can do, take steps to deal with it…. Resolving it could reduce your stress, make you feel pleased with how you dealt with it, and help you grow from the experience.” After receiving these instructions, this “control group” was sent home and asked to report back to the lab a week later.
A second group of students, the “event-simulation” group, were kept in the lab. They were asked to mentally simulate how the problem had unfolded:
We would like you to visualize how this problem arose. Visualize the beginning of the problem, going over in detail the first incident…. Go over the incidents as they occurred step by step. Visualize the actions you took. Remember what you said, what you did. Visualize the environment, who was around, where you were.
The event-simulation participants had to retrace, step by step, the events that led to their problem. Presumably, reviewing the chain of causation might help the students think about how to fix the problem, like programmers engaged in systematic debugging.
A third group, the “outcome-simulation” group, was asked to mentally simulate a positive outcome emerging from the problem:
Picture this problem beginning to resolve, you are coming out of the stressful situation…. Picture the relief you feel. Visualize the satisfaction you would feel at having dealt with the problem. Picture the confidence you feel in yourself, knowing that you have dealt successfully with the problem.
The outcome-simulators kept their focus on the desired future outcome: What will it be like once this problem is behind me?
After this initial e
xercise, both of the simulation groups were sent home. Both groups were asked to spend five minutes every day repeating their simulations, and to report back to the lab a week later.
Now it’s play-at-home time: Make a quick prediction about which group of students fared best in coping with their problems. (Hint: It’s not the control group.)
Here’s the answer: The event-simulation group—the people who simulated how the events unfolded—did better on almost every dimension. Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulating future outcomes. In fact, the gap between the groups opened up immediately after the first session in the lab. By the first night, the event-simulation people were already experiencing a positive mood boost compared with the other two groups.
When the groups returned a week later, the event simulators’ advantage had grown wider. They were more likely to have taken specific action to solve their problems. They were more likely to have sought advice and support from others. They were more likely to report that they had learned something and grown.
You may find these results a bit counterintuitive, because the pop-psychology literature is full of gurus urging you to visualize success. It turns out that a positive mental attitude isn’t quite enough to get the job done. Maybe financial gurus shouldn’t be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.
Why does mental simulation work? It works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. Brain scans show that when people imagine a flashing light, they activate the visual area of the brain; when they imagine someone tapping on their skin, they activate tactile areas of the brain. The activity of mental simulation is not limited to the insides of our heads. People who imagine words that start with b or p can’t resist subtle lip movements, and people who imagine looking at the Eiffel Tower can’t resist moving their eyes upward. Mental simulation can even alter visceral physical responses: When people drink water but imagine that it’s lemon juice, they salivate more. Even more surprisingly, when people drink lemon juice but imagine that it’s water, they salivate less.
Mental simulations help us manage emotions. There is a standard treatment for phobias of various kinds—spiders, public speaking, airplane travel, and others. Patients are introduced to a relaxation procedure that inhibits anxiety, and then asked to visualize exposure to the thing they fear. The first visualizations start at the periphery of the fear. For example, someone who’s afraid of air travel might start by thinking about the drive to the airport. The therapist leads the patient through a series of visualizations that get closer and closer to the heart of the fear (“Now the airplanes’ engines are revving up on the runway, sounding louder and louder …”). Each time the visualizations create anxiety, the person pauses for a moment and uses the relaxation technique to restore equilibrium.
Notice that these visualizations focus on the events themselves—the process, rather than the outcomes. No one has ever been cured of a phobia by imagining how happy they’ll be when it’s gone.
Mental simulation helps with problem-solving. Even in mundane planning situations, mentally simulating an event helps us think of things that we might otherwise have neglected. Imagining a trip to the grocery store reminds us that we could drop off the dry cleaning at the store in the same shopping center. Mental simulations help us anticipate appropriate responses to future situations. Picturing a potential argument with our boss, imagining what she will say, may lead us to have the right words available when the time comes (and avoid saying the wrong words). Research has suggested that mental rehearsal can prevent people from relapsing into bad habits such as smoking, excessive drinking, or overeating. A man trying to kick a drinking problem will be better off if he mentally rehearses how he will handle Super Bowl Sunday: How should he respond when someone gets up for beers?
Perhaps most surprisingly, mental simulation can also build skills. A review of thirty-five studies featuring 3,214 participants showed that mental practice alone—sitting quietly, without moving, and picturing yourself performing a task successfully from start to finish—improves performance significantly. The results were borne out over a large number of tasks: Mental simulation helped people weld better and throw darts better. Trombonists improved their playing, and competitive figure skaters improved their skating. Not surprisingly, mental practice is more effective when a task involves more mental activity (e.g., trombone playing) as opposed to physical activity (e.g., balancing), but the magnitude of gains from mental practice is large on average: Overall, mental practice alone produced about two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.
The takeaway is simple: Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we’re suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain. Hearing the nurse’s heart-monitor story isn’t like being there, but it’s the next best thing.
Or think about the Xerox E053 code story. Why is hearing this story better than a warning about “misleading E053 indicators” in the training manual? It’s better for precisely the reason that flight simulators are better for pilots than stacks of instructional flash cards. The more that training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be.
A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. It’s back to the Velcro theory of memory, the idea that the more hooks we put into our ideas, the better they’ll stick. The E053 story builds in emotions—the frustration of failing to find the problem and being misled by the machine’s code. It builds in historical background—the idea that the recent change in the “XER board configuration” led to this new error. At the end, it delivers a kind of meta-level moral: You shouldn’t have complete faith in the error code. This “code skepticism” is something the repairmen can apply to every future job they undertake.
It’s easy for a doctor to treat appendicitis once it’s been diagnosed, but the problem is learning to distinguish an inflamed appendix from an upset stomach or food poisoning or an ulcer. Or think about beginning algebra students, who can solve complex equations but grind to a halt when they’re presented with a simple word problem that involves exactly the same math. Problem X doesn’t always identify itself as Problem X.
This is the role that stories play—putting knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day-to-day existence. More like a flight simulator. Being the audience for a story isn’t so passive, after all. Inside, we’re getting ready to act.
CLINIC
Dealing with Problem Students
THE SITUATION: Professors have to deal with the occasional nuisance in class—an angry, aggressive, or challenging student. Many professors are caught by surprise and aren’t sure how to deal with the situation. In this Clinic we’ll compare two different messages that were intended to share strategies for coping with these students.
• • •
MESSAGE 1: The first message was produced by Indiana University as a resource for instructors.
Remain calm. Slow down and regularize your breathing. Don’t become defensive.
Don’t ignore them. Attempt to defuse their anger. Arrange to meet them during a break or after class. During the meeting, acknowledge the student’s emotions and listen. Talk in a professional and courteous manner.
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1: Notice that there’s nothing unexpected here—nothing that is uncommon sense. (And if dealing with difficult students is common sense, then why do we need to publish tips for dealing with them?) Most of the advice—”Remain calm;” “Don’t become defensive;” “Attempt to defuse their anger”—is both too abstract and too obvious to stick. (Few teachers believe that you should freak out in response to a problem student.)
• • •
ME
SSAGE 2: The second message was posted, informally, to a newsgroup by a professor named Alyson Buckman, who wanted to share her experience with other teachers in the group:
I had a student … who talked loudly and often in the back of the class, generally when I was speaking. I could hear his comments at the front of the room, and so could everyone else. He also disagreed with me on every point I made, no matter what it was. Students began very quickly to complain about his behavior in their journals and suggest methods, generally designed to humiliate, of dealing with him.
I tried several things from the beginning, but finally called he and his confidante in class up to the front at the end of class one day and scheduled appointments with me in my office. I made sure I had witnesses to these appointments as well—one of the perks of being in a shared office space. The confidante, I believe, had been trapped into that role—the other student just utilized his body as a means to disruption.
When I met with the bully, he came in with sunglasses on and a totally defiant behavior. I started with “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on in the back of the room …” and he responded, “I disagree with you.” I attempted to talk about this and met with silence.
It was not until I told him that other students were complaining and suggesting treatments for the situation that he listened. His body language totally changed as did his manner. I didn’t have a problem with him from then on. My basic understanding of this little teaching lesson was that students who display contempt for the teacher might very well be brought into check by other students. After all, he thought he was showing off for them and found that they didn’t want to hear or see it.