People skills
John Wattis, Stephen Curran, Elizabeth Cotton in Practical Management and Leadership for Doctors, 2019
Human beings have very powerful hypocrisy detectors. If what is said does not match what is done, we usually spot this very quickly. The failure may be due to insincerity, poor management or uncontrollable external circumstances; but the dissonance will be noted and likely attributed to insincerity or incompetence, whatever the real reason. Again, this can be understood in evolutionary terms as one of the consequences and conditions of reciprocal altruism. This means that it is very important for any doctor in management to be prepared to deliver what they declare! Sometimes, a failure to deliver will be excused because colleagues understand that unpredictable external events beyond a manager’s control are responsible. Some coaches use the aphorism ‘under-promise, over-deliver’ which emphasises the importance of not undertaking to do something we do not subsequently achieve. This is particularly the case if you are dealing with an issue of conflict at work such as a case of bullying or victimisation. When something has gone wrong, it is important to both acknowledge that something has gone wrong and also to acknowledge what steps you are going to take to remedy them. People are very rarely satisfied with kind words and cheering up – when something has gone wrong, it is important to act.
People skills
John Wattis, Stephen Curran, Dinesh Bhugra in Practical Management and Leadership for Doctors, 2017
Human beings have very powerful hypocrisy detectors. If what is said does not match what is done, we usually spot this very quickly. The failure may be due to insincerity, poor management or uncontrollable external circumstances; but the dissonance will be noted and likely attributed to insincerity or incompetence, whatever the real reason. Again, this can be understood in evolutionary terms as one of the consequences and conditions of reciprocal altruism. This means that it is very important for any doctor in management to be prepared to deliver what they declare! Sometimes, a failure to deliver will be excused because colleagues understand that unpredictable external events beyond a manager’s control are responsible. Some coaches use the aphorism ‘under-promise, over-deliver’, which emphasises the importance of not undertaking to do something we do not subsequently achieve.
Good People / Moral Enhancement
Jonathan Anomaly in Creating Future People, 2020
Apart from problems with the political feasibility of enforcing mandatory genetic enhancement, it is unclear how we can harmonize our private choices in a way that is likely to produce a beneficial aggregate outcome. The most general worry is that even if we can imagine an optimal distribution of moral traits, enhancing altruism, or a sense of justice, may not be an evolutionarily stable strategy. A strategy is evolutionarily stable if it can survive indefinitely in competition with other strategies in particular environments. Some strategies are stable across a wide range of environmental niches, and against a broad set of other strategies. Conditional cooperation, also known as ‘reciprocal altruism’ in biology or ‘tit for tat’ in politics, is an example of an evolutionary strategy that is stable not only relative to many different environments and strategies, but even across species (Trivers, 1971; Axelrod, 2006).
The Selfishness Questionnaire: Egocentric, Adaptive, and Pathological Forms of Selfishness
Published in Journal of Personality Assessment, 2019
An important conceptual question consists of whether selfishness in general is simply the opposite of altruism. Past research suggests that altruism and selfishness are related but different concepts, as altruistic acts are not always selfless. For example, although individuals might engage in reciprocal altruism, this social reciprocity ultimately maximizes the genetic fitness of the giver and as such can be viewed as selfish (Dawkins, 2006). Altruistic acts can also be used to build an individual's reputation in his or her social community, an ultimately selfish strategy that has been noted in classic studies of psychopaths (Cleckley, 1976). Furthermore, even in the absence of an audience, giving to others has been argued to be motivated by a “warm glow” reward, a positive feeling associated with activation of the ventral striatum, a brain area associated with reward (Harbaugh, Mayr, & Burghart, 2007). These perspectives suggest that selfishness and altruism are not polar opposites. Although we expect a negative association between selfishness and altruism, we also anticipate that selfishness will relate to other measures characterized by low altruism (e.g., Machiavellianism, psychopathy) independent of its association with altruism, a test of incremental validity.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Altruism
- Evolutionary Biology
- Cleaning Symbiosis
- Gene-Centered View of Evolution
- Competitive Altruism
- Evolutionary Models of Food Sharing
- Koinophilia
- Norm of Reciprocity
- Psychological Egoism
- Reciprocity