Spotlight on Research at Movius: Behavioral Coding | Joanna Chango
Around the water cooler one morning, you hear three friends commiserating about what happened the night before. Steve’s wife yelled at him, telling him to stop speaking to her like a child. Rick joked about rolling his eyes at his wife’s comments about their vacation. Josh complained loudly that his wife didn’t do the dishes, as promised.
Whose marriage is most likely to end in divorce?
Rick’s. Twenty-five years of research on couples has provided a wealth of evidence regarding the specific emotions and behaviors that are most destructive to a relationship; eye rolling is among the most toxic. Using the Specific Affect Coding System developed by John Gottman and Jim Coan (and featured in the Malcolm Gladwell book Blink) researchers briefly observing newlywed couples can predict with high accuracy which ones will get divorced; will be less happy; and will make more visits to the doctor.
Negotiations in the business or policy world are different in important ways from the arguments and conversations that happen in a marriage. In some negotiation contexts, maximizing financial gains may be more important to one or both sides than preserving a relationship. There are surprisingly few studies that examine specific behavioral exchanges in negotiations. This should give our field pause, because Gottman and his colleagues discovered that many behaviors long assumed to affect marriages positively (e.g., active listening) and negatively (e.g., expressed anger) turned out to predict very little in terms of outcomes.
To increase our predictive power, and to share what we learn about potentially harmful “traps” in how negotiators interact, Movius Consulting has developed the Standardized Affective Recognition and Response system (StARR).
As a learning intervention, the StARR can provide a common language for emotional signals, behaviors, and patterns, increasing the efficiency of teams. One elegant line of research from collaborators at MIT and Carnegie Mellon found that the collective intelligence or problem solving ability of a team was only weakly predicted by team member’s average intelligence – but significantly related to how well group member’s took turns speaking; how many women were on the team; and how well team members performed at the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test (which involves accurately naming an emotion based only on only seeing eyes expressing it). In short, it seems that teams that can read emotions in one another become “smarter” and more effective at solving problems, outperforming even the smartest team member.
A reliable coding system also allows researchers to pinpoint behaviors and sequences of behaviors that may be helpful or problematic. Our long-term goal is to uncover relationships between behavioral sequences and substantive outcomes in the workplace and to share evidence-based, concrete strategies for recognizing and managing emotional experiences in negotiation and problem-solving contexts.
To understand why this might be beneficial, answer true or false to the following question:
A little sarcasm in response to a critical remark can help to defuse tension.
Research on couples suggests that the answer is false. Sarcasm as a communication behavior not only fails to decrease tension in a moment; it elicits harmful physiological reactions in conversations between spouses and is extremely detrimental to the health and stability of marriages.
By focusing on concrete behaviors to employ or to avoid, we can help negotiators and problem-solvers to better understand and name difficult behaviors and the physiological responses they produce; and ways to respond that avoid worsening the situation. Giving a person something to do tends is often a more effective intervention than telling them they are a “red” or “blue” type or asking them to engage in abstract activities (like self-reflection). Focusing on behavioral skills and strategies, rather than on states of mind, can be a helpful strategy for many learners.
Stay tuned!