December 7, 2024

Shortcuts: Sometimes Second-Best Makes a Better Role Model

Here’s something to think about. It may not be A-Rod’s drug use or lying that should preclude him from being a role model. It’s his very success.

Recent research into role models says we may be choosing the wrong people to emulate, and that could be hurting us professionally.

“The more exceptional performers are, the less we may learn from them,” said Chengwei Liu, an assistant professor of strategy and behavioral science at the University of Warwick in Britain.

In fact, he said, we may do better to look to solid workers who aren’t as flashy as those at the top, but consistently perform well.

Professor Liu and his co-author, Jerker Denrell, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Warwick, drew their conclusions by developing a simulation model in which success depends both on skill and past success. In other words, the probability of success increases if the previous outcome was a success.

Based on simulated data, they looked at how average skill levels vary with the number of successes achieved and found that players who achieved exceptional performance had an average skill level that was lower than the skill level of those with fewer successes.

“The most successful players are not the most impressive,” they wrote. “Rather, the moderately successful players are the most impressive ones.”

That’s because “chance events outside the control of individuals often influence performance,” Professor Liu wrote in the paper, which was published in the June 2012 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Luck and the rich-get-richer dynamic — in which those who succeed early are more apt to receive resources and attention — often play a crucial role in determining who ends up on top.

Those at the pinnacle of their field may also have taken huge risks, which could be dangerous to imitate.

And, to circle back to my A-Rod example, it may be illegal or unethical deeds that push the supersuccessful to the top. We’ve seen it so often that we shouldn’t be surprised, yet somehow we always are.

“We tend to be attracted to extreme performance, but maybe it should make us more suspicious,” Professor Liu said.

Annie Murphy Paul, who wrote about role models on the Brilliant Blog, said: “As a society, we fetishize the guy who is No. 1, with the idea that if we do what he does, we’ll be successful. However, research suggests that can be very misleading. No. 1 might be the outlier and No. 2 might have gotten to where he is through hard work and prudent decision-making.”

There’s another problem with looking at the best of the best. Rather than being inspirational, it might just be depressing.

“There’s a simple idea that exposure to illustrious role models will inspire people to think, ‘I can be just like that,’ when really it’s a much more complicated psychological process,” said Ms. Paul, who writes about social science and the brain. “Often we look at them and think, ‘I’m not anything like that.’ ”

For example, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, mother and best-selling author, may be a great role model. Or she may seem so perfect that matching her success seems unattainable.

Research looking specifically at the impact of female role models on women’s desire to be leaders says the latter is often the case.

In one experiment, conducted by Crystal L. Hoyt, an associate professor of leadership studies and psychology at the University of Richmond, and a graduate student, Stefanie Simon, 60 female college students were told they were being asked to look at leaders’ influence on group productivity. In fact, the experiment was to see how the women were influenced by various role models.

The women were asked to assume the fictitious leadership role of president of the human resources department and lead a selection committee to hire a new junior associate.

E-mail: shortcuts@nytimes.com

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/your-money/sometimes-second-best-makes-a-better-role-model.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Russia Begins Selectively Blocking Internet Content

The country’s communications regulators have required Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to remove material that the officials determined was objectionable, with only YouTube, owned by Google, resisting. The video-sharing site complied with a Russian agency’s order to block a video that officials said promoted suicide. But YouTube filed a lawsuit in Russian court in February saying the video, showing how to make a fake wound with makeup materials and a razor blade, was intended for entertainment and should not be restricted.

Supporters of the law, which took effect in November, say it is a narrowly focused way of controlling child pornography and content that promotes drug use and suicide.

But opposition leaders have railed against the law as a crack in the doorway to broader Internet censorship. They say they worry that social networks, which have been used to arrange protests against President Vladimir V. Putin, will be stifled.

The child protection law, they say, builds a system for government officials to demand that companies selectively block individual postings, so that contentious material can be removed without resorting to a countrywide ban on, for example, Facebook or YouTube, which would reflect poorly on Russia’s image abroad and anger Internet users at home.

So far at least, the Russians have been mostly singling out not political content but genuinely distressing material posted by Russian-speaking users.

On Friday, Facebook took down a page globally that was connected to suicide after it was flagged by the Russian regulatory agency, called the Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Communications, known by its acronym Roskomnadzor. A spokesman for the agency had told Facebook it had until Sunday to comply or risk being blocked in Russia.

For Facebook, the response turned out to be an easy decision. Everybody concerned — the company, the government and opposition figures — agreed the suicide-themed user group was not a friendly page. The group, called “Club Suicid,” was deemed serious enough not to be sheltered by Facebook’s criteria for “controversial humor.”

“We reviewed the content and it was removed because it violated our terms of use,” the company said in a statement.

Facebook says it also complies with local legislation to ban content in certain countries, though that was not the reason for removing the page in this case.

“Notable examples of where most services, including ours, will I.P.-restrict access for certain counties are in Germany” and in France, where it blocks content related to Holocaust denial, and in Turkey, where content defaming the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is blocked, Facebook said in its statement.

The spokesman for the Roskomnadzor agency, Vladimir Pikov, said that a separate government agency, Rospotrebnadzor, a consumer-protection organization intended to ensure the safety of food and consumer goods, had made a determination that the Facebook post promoted suicide, and was thus a public health threat.

Twitter, the microblogging site, in March began complying with Russian requests to remove posts — two because they appeared to be related to an attempt to deal in illegal drugs and three posts for “promoting suicidal thoughts,” according to a statement issued March 15 by Roskomnadzor. Twitter has been “actively engaged in cooperation,” the statement said.

Izvestia, a Russian newspaper, reported that Twitter and the Russian agencies’ officials had been in negotiations since November to create a mechanism for selectively blocking Twitter posts inside Russia.

Anton Nosik, a blogger and journalist in Russia, called the law in a telephone interview “absurd, harmful and absolutely unnecessary.” But, he said, so long as regulators focus on genuinely macabre material like sites visited by people fascinated by suicide, he is not overly concerned about a crackdown on the videos and Web pages in the Russian blogosphere. “The track record of the authorities shows they are not going to enforce it strictly.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/technology/russia-begins-selectively-blocking-internet-content.html?partner=rss&emc=rss