托德·B·卡什丹 (Todd B. Kashdan) 博士是乔治梅森大学心理学教授，也是关于人类幸福感、好奇心、勇气和韧性领域的权威学者。 他发表了 220 多篇科学文章，被引用超过 35,000 次，并获得美国心理学会 颁发的早期职业心理学杰出科学贡献奖。 他是多本书的作者，其中包括《不服从的艺术：《如何有效地提出异议和反抗，好奇吗？》 和《你的黑暗面的好处》，已被翻译成超过十五种语言。 他的研究经常出现在《纽约时报》、《大西洋月刊》和《时代》杂志上，他的文章也出现在《哈佛商业评论》、《国家地理》和其他出版物上。 他是微软、梅赛德斯-奔驰、保德信、通用磨坊、美国国防部和世界银行集团等不同组织的主讲人和顾问。
Todd B. Kashdan, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at George Mason University, and a leading authority on well-being, curiosity, courage, and resilience. He has published more than 220 scientific articles, his work has been cited more than 35,000 times, and he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively, Curious? and The Upside of Your Dark Side, and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. His research is featured regularly in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time, and his writing has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, National Geographic, and other publications. He is a keynote speaker and consultant for organizations as diverse as Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Prudential, General Mills, The United States Department of Defense, and World Bank Group.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Help us understand what you mean by insubordination or principled insubordination.
TODD B. KASHDAN
We're really talking about principled rebels. And when we talk about insubordination, we're talking about most of us live in these social hierarchies, and there's the idea, this started in the military and still goes on, where if someone at a lower rank questions or challenges a command or a norm that someone of a higher rank, that's considered an act of insubordination. And one of the main problems of that, I think anyone who's listening can acknowledge, is it depends on the quality of the idea of the person who's raising the question.
I just realized there was this whole body of literature on minority influence that no one had put together into a book for the general public, and considering the racial reckoning that occurred during COVID-19, the extra attention to diversity, to disadvantaged groups, every moment of society, it just feels like it's more and more relevant of what I've been working on.
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If you don't have the numbers, if you lack status or you lack power, the way to be persuasive towards a group is much different than if you do have the title or are socially attractive in that group.
The key is I stress-tested everything that I study, which is: would this intervention work on being influential if you were in a corporation? If you were in a parent-teacher meeting? If you were on a sports team, and you thought that there was, you know, excessive homophobia or sexism in the locker room? And it kept on being that a lot of these interventions ended up being very effective. And they start with really acknowledging how can we modify the norms to be respective of views that are different from what the majority considers valid?
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So thinking about how do you innovate such an archaic status quo system, such as the educational system? Let's just play with America for right now. How are you going to be persuasive? So again, it's not only do you want to focus on like, what's the endgame in terms of the skills and the knowledge base that we want for our children when they walk out of a high school or they walk out of an elementary school?
Like what, what do we want them to look like? How do we want them to act? How do we want them to behave? It's hard to imagine too many people not thinking about: I want them to have social skills. I want them to have some level of character and virtue, and I want them to be able to be somewhat independent and autonomous after being given instructions or guidance on an issue.
And so from there, if you start with the question of what do we want them to look like, then you can go backwards and say to what degree are we providing the blocks and the training to match up with those skills? And what you find very quickly is the answer is we're not even close because –we're focusing on important things, math, reading, analytical skills, history - but when you get down to the metrics of what you want, how you want someone to walk through the world, you realize the fallibility of the current education system. And I really think that we really want to teach people critical thinking.
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There's a couple of psychological elements that are embedded in your thought about climate change. One is we have to expand the timeline. And we often think about things in months and years as opposed to decades. And that's a big challenge of how human brains operate. And so if you think in the context of quarters, if you work in an organization, of in terms of building cars or building houses or building factories, then you're not thinking about that 20 years from now, you'll no longer be in the red, you'll be in the black in terms of income. But as you said, there has to be a collective willingness where we're willing to sacrifice the short-term, cheaper things for the expensive things, for clean air now, knowing that the only way it gets cheaper over the course of time is the commons. Is that the commons decide is that we are going to spend money to make money later, by spending money, we can actually continue to improve the technology. So it becomes cheaper and cheaper to have solar-powered households, electric cars, and infrastructure that supports electric cars that happen there.
That's the challenging part. And I think part of what I'm trying to do to educate the public about this: Part of being persuasive is acknowledging the two-sided message of trying to talk about climate change. So everyone talks about the benefits, and no one talks about the costs.
You have to acknowledge short-term sacrifices, financially, socially, and then value-wise. If you've identified with a group where the origin of the Fords, you know, Ford Model T cars, and if you're really a big car aficionado, and you like Mustangs and BMWs and Lamborghinis...is that this requires a deviation from an affinity that you identify with. People who are social activists about climate change, they do not acknowledge that there are psychological costs and social costs for individuals that haven't had the buy-in yet. And because of that, their critics can pounce on them immediately and say, "I have too many pleasures and I have an intact family that is functioning well, and my company is doing well. So why would I risk any of that for this 10, 20-year message that you're giving me?" So the two-sided message is effective if you have the confidence that you can talk about the logistics and the economics that are involved with these issues
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This is the cause that's most near and dear to me is the criminal justice system. And I think there are so many current issues right now to be considering, but one of them is people normally, they're going to reenter society. And so when you have these questions of should people who are incarcerated receive education, particularly be able to get high school degrees and college degrees, and there's actually so much friction and so much disagreement with that. The question is, in terms of the endgame, do you want people to come out who are educated and reenter society and can contribute something? Or do you want people who actually are the same person as when they came in and perhaps actually have a sense of vengeance because they feel that they were unduly and unfairly punished or punished for too long? Or don't know how to reengage with the non-criminal members of society.
And I would say, geez, how could you not root for increasing the EQ, the emotional intelligence, increasing the IQ, the analytical intelligence problem-solving ability, of people? So when they come out, and they're faced with the ambiguity of: I have no money, should I go back to the criminal life or go back to the non-criminal life? They would be able to make a good decision. What's the best way of increasing people's problem solving abilities? Reading books, talking about them, and having conversations is the best strategy for adults to increase their intelligence quotient.
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Better than mindfulness, curiosity and the willingness to be open to other perspectives and reveal diversion of perspectives, it's linked with more innovation, it leads to willingness for greater social support for your ideas. So you're talking about finding allies more work, family integration, less burnout, more engagement, and then a greater tendency to experience flow where you lose yourself in your work in the workplace. And there's these wide-ranging benefits that occur.
And what you find is the two dimensions of curiosity that are the most beneficial in the workplace, one is called joyous exploration. And that's really just this pure pleasurable sense of wonder that there's a lot of interesting things in the world, and I just know less than I think I do, and I want to be exposed to that novelty. The second one gets less attention. It's what we call stress tolerance. It's that when you have the lure of the novel, the divergent, and you know, the mysterious and complex, there's always a level of anxiety. You are moving away from the knowns and the own unknowns, and you are going into the face of acknowledging there's uncertainty, and you don't know how things are going to turn out. The people that can better tolerate that without trying to close and reach an answer quickly, they're the ones that are more likely to be creative, more likely to be innovative.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Bianca Bartolini. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
