Ideas

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

What can we do to cure boredom?

The quickest and easiest way is to change your context.

If you’re alone, it’s pretty straightforward: get up, go out, see friends, put yourself in a new situation where you have less control over your environment and things will stimulate you.

But there are a lot of areas where boredom seems tougher to deal with: relationships, work, etc.

Boring Relationship?

In the context of a relationship, stop thinking about you or your partner. Again, change your context. Don’t get dinner or drinks and talk. That relies on you two to be interesting. Go somewhere that’s already fun.

Doing thrilling stuff is the key to a fantastic first date. Roller coasters.Horror movies or suspense films.

And if you are just talking, stop playing it so safe. The best questions to ask on a first date are offbeat and fun. It’s better to talk about STD’s and abortions than the weather.

What kills most long-term relationships? A lack of excitement. The research points again and again to how important thrills are:

1. What reignited passion in long term marriages? Doing exciting things together.
2. Think a pleasant evening is all it takes? Researchers did a 10 week study comparing couples that engaged in “pleasant” activities vs “exciting” activities. Pleasant lost.
3. What can improve the sex in a relationship? Try a roller coaster together. Anything that stimulates your central nervous system also gets you going sexually.
4. Why would doing anything exciting have such a big effect on a relationship? Because we’re lousy about realizing where our feelings are coming from. Excitement from any source will be associated with the person you’re with, even if they’re not the cause of it.

Bored At Work?

What about at work? Work can be boring and you can’t change the context as much. Very true and this is a serious issue: a boring job can kill you.

The key to fighting boredom at the office is not excitement, it’s finding meaning in what you do. Broadening the definition of what it is you are doing, seeing it as a mission or calling, and feeling you are making a difference can make you happier, more fulfilled and less bored.

What if YOU are boring?

What if you’re boring? People who bore others are often self-indulgent — they just talk about what interests them. We all fall prey to this on occasion.

The best lesson here is from Steven Pressfield’s advice on improving writing: keep in mind that nobody wants to read your stuff. So keep things simple and always have the audience in mind.

What about chores that are undeniably boring?

If you have to do tasks that are boring and there’s no two ways about it, don’t take a break:

You may think that taking a break during an irritating or boring experience will be good for you, but a break actually decreases your ability to adapt, making the experience seem worse when you have to return to it. When cleaning your house or doing your taxes, the trick is to stick with it until you are done.

What about when other people are boring you?

At least in some situations, don’t be afraid to let your mind wander. Especially on the phone, research shows that people actually like us better when we’re distracted: we’re less negative, less complex and more personal in our speech. We also encourage the other person to talk more.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Join over 130,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

6 Hostage Negotiation Techniques That Will Get You What You Want

How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done – 5 Expert Tips

New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful

Marty Nemko is a career coach, writer, speaker and public radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and education reform.

Professors, the campus and even the university as an institution need to be replaced

Despite a college degree’s enormous cost, almost half of college freshmen (43%) don’t graduate even if given six years. If they graduate, a 2011 national study found, 36% of the 1,600 students tested “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” in four years. And in the just-published follow-up, which tracked those students since their graduation in 2009, one-quarter were living at home two years after graduation and more than half said their lives lacked direction. Twenty percent were earning less than $30,000 a year, half of those less than $20,000.

Hidebound higher education

College hasn’t changed much in centuries. For the most part, there’s still a research-oriented Ph.D. sage on the stage lecturing on the liberal arts to a student body too often ill-prepared and uninterested in that. That occurs on a plush campus with a porcine administration, which results in a four-year sticker price at a brand-name private college of more than $200,000. (And those are 2012 figures. They’re higher now. Plus, those figures exclude tens of thousands of dollars in books, travel, living expenses and miscellany.)

Time, not for reform, but for reinvention

The meteoric rise in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which see an average enrollment of 43,000 students per course, is an early sign that the public wants change. But MOOCs aren’t the answer. Sure, they’re free and available to all, but because they’re still taught largely by those professor types to often unprepared students, the completion and learning rates are low. MOOCs have a completion rate of only 10%.

Undergraduate courses should not be taught mainly by Ph.D.s. The gap between their and their students’ intellectual capabilities and interests is too great. The instructors should be mainly bachelor’s-level graduates who themselves had to work hard to get an A. Just as you’d probably learn computer basics better if taught by someone who had to work to acquire mastery rather than by a born computer whiz, the same is true of most undergraduate courses. To be licensed to teach, prospective instructors should have to complete a pedagogy boot camp, a one-weekend to one-semester intensive, which ironically, in most colleges, is required of teaching assistants but not of professors.

Most courses would be taught via online interactive video, which would both save much money—no campus required—and allow a dream team of the world’s most transformational instructors to teach. That way, everyone—from the poorest, weakest student to the most brilliant—would have access to the best in interactive instruction. In addition, the online format allows for individualized pacing and exciting simulations impossible to provide in a nation’s worth of live classes.

Extracurriculars would occur at local gyms, swimming pools, theaters and athletic fields. Where those were insufficient, facilities on existing campuses would be used, but much of campuses could be sold off.

Importantly, courses would not be attached to any institution. Anyone could submit his or her course for approval to the U.S. Department of Education. Screening would be done only for quality and rigor, not for censorship of content. If approved, the instructor, when posting availability of the course on one of the existing MOOC sites (Coursera, edX or Udemy), could include a badge saying the course is U.S. government–approved for X units of undergraduate credit. When a student has completed the specified number and type of courses to comprise a bachelor’s degree, the student would submit proof of completion to the Department of Education, plus the results of a proctored exam that would assess if the student had acquired bachelor’s-level skills in reading, writing, critical thinking and mathematical reasoning. If so, they would be granted a U.S. bachelor’s degree.

The result would be a far better college education at far lower cost.

A high-quality pathway for academically weak students

Today, we push nearly everyone to college, even those who did poorly in high school, for whom college is unlikely to be the best way to spend their years and money. America needs a major apprenticeship initiative like those in Germany and England: a partnership between schools and employers that creates a high-quality experience for high schoolers whose track record indicates they’re more likely to succeed in a practical curriculum than by deriving geometric theorems, deciphering the intricacies of Milton or applying quantum mechanics.

In the meantime, what to do?

Higher education’s glacial pace of change, despite years of withering criticism, does not portend major improvement in the offing. So what’s the current crop of would-be college attendees to do?

Attending college should not be a fait accompli. If you did poorly in high school or are burned out on academics, you’re likely to join the almost half of college freshmen who don’t graduate even if given six years. So you might want to consider a noncollege path. For example, while not ideal, America does have a system of apprenticeships. Or try to work at the elbow of a successful, ethical business owner or nonprofit executive. Or consider the military: It offers training in a wide range of career fields. Or take just a gap semester or year to refresh and edify yourself in the real world before starting college. Try some focused traveling—for example, visit elementary schools in different areas and keep a blog. Or start a simple business. Even if it fails, you will have learned much about entrepreneurship, organization, people and life.

A College Report Card

If you are planning to attend college, you’ll make a wiser choice if you ask each prospective school’s admissions office for the following information, which collectively make up what I call the College Report Card:

• Results of the most recent student-satisfaction survey.
• The most recent report by a visiting accreditation team (for a college to retain accreditation, a team of experts periodically visits for a few days and writes a report listing the identified strengths, weaknesses and recommendations).
• The four-year graduation rate.
• The average four-year student’s growth in writing, analytic reasoning and mathematical reasoning (many institutions use a standardized exam like the Collegiate Learning Assessment).
• The percentage of students who graduate with their intended major who are professionally employed or in graduate school within six months of graduation.

It would be a consumer boon if the government mandated that all colleges post the College Report Card on their home page.

We claim that American higher education is the world’s best. Like many claims, it deserves closer examination.

Marty Nemko is an award-winning career coach, writer, speaker and public radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and education reform. His writings and radio programs are archived on www.martynemko.com.

What assumptions are you making based on incomplete information?

Answer by Heather Spruill on Quora.

When you’re not calm, you’re reacting. More specifically, you’re reacting to something that touches on fear or insecurity (worried about something bad or defending your ego), and that’s slipping in ahead of your logical thoughts.

That’s a thought habit. You do it because you’ve been doing it, and you can change it with some mindfulness — it’s easier with a little help from a friend or confidant, if one is available.

The hardest part is learning to stop yourself BEFORE you get jammed up. There’s an opportunity to tap the breaks when distressing things arise, and you need to pay attention and look for it. Practice “taking a step back” and thinking about what’s happening in your head vs. what’s actually happening in the world.

There are two types of situations that commonly result in unproductive excitement:

• Getting confronted when you aren’t prepared
• Anticipating something with an uncertain outcome

The first situation, confrontation, takes discipline and practice. You need to do some mental work ahead of time so that you’re better prepared for the next experience — that means reviewing past experiences and dissecting them so that you have more tools ready to handle the next surprise/uncomfortable conversation/etc.

The second, anticipation, is something you can work through as it happens once you get some basic ideas worked out.

Here’s what to think about:

What’s happening in your head?
Are you afraid of a particular poor outcome? Humiliation? Loss? Pain? The unknown? Loss of control? Something burdensome or annoying? Bad news?

What is it that you’re really worried about? How likely is that outcome? How bad would it be really? What’s the worst thing that can happen? How likely is it to go in that direction? So what if it did? How bad is that really?

In your mind, the stakes might automatically be set at “disastrously high” — is that accurate, though?

What’s actually happening in the world?
The other person isn’t a complete unknown. What are they looking for? What are they responding to? What do they need? f they’re mad or intense, what will help them feel less upset? Do they need you to listen? To act? To apologize? To reassure them? To take them seriously?

What assumptions are you making based on incomplete data? We often assign personal meaning to things that have no implications for us personally, or assume that a particular outcome necessarily follows something that’s really not strongly correlated. Challenge those assumptions. It’s not easy, which makes it helpful to have a calm friend to help you keep things at arm’s length. What’s really happening? What does it really mean?

Meanwhile — what can you do to make things less fraught? Recognizing you’re upset/un-calm lets you re-negotiate the circumstances.

• Ask for time, ask for space.
• Communicate ahead of time to let people you work closely with know that for you, having the information in advance and having a chance to review (rather than just springing an ad hoc discussion on you) it will make meetings more productive, if that’s true for you.
• Have words ready to de-escalate tense situations. Try to remove emotional language and accusatory statements from your tool box.
• Stay on what’s real without immediately leaping to what the implications are (or might be) when you’re discussing things.
• Have questions ready to re-focus things in productive directions.
• Stay aware of how you’re feeling and what your body language is telling the other person and yourself. Your tension can compound when you feel yourself tensing up physically — concentrate on neutralizing your posture, relaxing your shoulders, avoid leaning forward, and open your hands.

This question originally appeared on Quora: How can I stay calm in difficult situations?

The environment at Penn does not seem to have changed so radically that it would reach the Playboy pinnacle

I have no idea why I am so devoted to the University of Pennsylvania. What I do know is that I was a much better person when I graduated in 1972 than when I entered four years earlier. Which is why I am currently serving my third year as president of my class, as a longtime alumni interviewer of high school applicants for admission, and a mentor to different on-campus groups.

Like alumni of colleges around the country, I check out the US News and World Report rankings of universities and colleges and have been gratified when Penn rises in the poll and somewhat dismayed when we fall. Last month, one publication selected Penn as the top research university in the world; another proclaimed that more Penn graduates are billionaires than those of any other college. Neither of these two titles came as a surprise to me.

However, Playboy’s selection of my alma mater as the top party college in the nation came as a total shock to this undergraduate from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although over 50 percent of my class joined either fraternities or sororities, the popularity of the Greek system at Penn diminished significantly during my four years there as the peace movement and feminism gained traction. At that time, the legal drinking age in Pennsylvania was 21, and fake IDs were relatively hard to obtain. Unless you were friends with the hockey players who served as bouncers at the legendary campus bar, Smokey Joe’s, an underage male student had no chance of entering. And as recreational drugs got more popular on campus, the taste of the cheesesteaks improved, but the parties did not.

I went to memorable parties in my time at Penn—including one that ended with my dining room table broken in half and two women waking up in my bed—but they were few and far between. I spent most of my nights either working until deadline in the newspaper offices or writing papers due the next day.

The environment at Penn does not seem to have changed so radically that it would reach the Playboy pinnacle. In conjunction with my alumni activities, I visit the campus a minimum of five times per year. At nearby bars, I’m just as likely to see students from Drexel as Penn. As I stroll down Locust Walk through the center of campus after a football or basketball game, the fraternities that line the east side of the walk seem more subdued than they were 40 years ago. The students are better dressed and better-looking, but it always seems like the undergrads are in a rush—to the library, to the gym, to a music organization, or to a part-time job. With these types of pressures, it is difficult for me to understand when Penn students have time to party enough to draw Playboy’s attention.

The student body seemed as surprised as I was by this latest distinction. In an online survey conducted by the campus newspaper, 76 percent of respondents said that Penn does not deserve the Playboy ranking. One of the students I mentor, Cha Cha, wholeheartedly agrees. As she explained to me in an e-mail, “I don’t think anyone was not surprised by this ranking. … If you aren’t into parties, you definitely won’t really come in touch with any—which is probably more unavoidable at an actual party school.”

Cha Cha—who is going to graduate with degrees from both the Wharton School and the College of Arts and Sciences—chose Penn because she believed it would give her the tools she needed to become a force in the medical industry. While she might be an atypical student, even for Penn (she studies on big party weekends like Homecoming), she is closer to the norm on campus than a regular binge drinker is.

As a high school senior when I applied to Penn, I had no ambitions to be a force in the medical industry, or any other industry. I was thinking every weekend there would be an alcohol-induced orgy. I was infrequently right. Cha Cha clearly has a better grip on the value of a Penn education than I did—or that Playboy does, for that matter.

Jeffrey M. Rothbard is a partner in the law firm of Rothbard, Rothbard, Kohn & Kellar in Newark, New Jersey. He wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.

John McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.

He's not right, but neither is the other side—the truth about 'blackness' is somewhere in the middle

Charles Barkley is on the griddle for suggesting too many black people think it’s white to be successful. Barkley said that such people think “it’s best to knock a successful black person down ’cause they’re intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they’re successful. It’s crabs in a barrel … We’re the only ethnic group that says, ‘Hey, if you go to jail, it gives you street cred.’”

Bleacher Report’s Mike Freeman had posed, based on his own locker-room interviews, that part of the reason Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson’s teammates don’t like him is that “some of the black players think Wilson isn’t black enough”—Wilson is “well spoken.” Barkley agreed with Freeman; controversy was officially sparked. But too many people who agree either with Barkley or Wilson’s teammates are off-base; the truth is somewhere in the middle, and it forces us to look squarely at some things many find awkward.

A standard response for people inclined to agree with Barkley would be something like, “Yeah, that’s right. What’s ‘black,’ anyway? There’s no ‘black’ way to talk. There’s no way for somebody to ‘blacker’ than somebody else.” But there is. I don’t know how many black people think it’s “black” to go to jail, but that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as black—or blacker.

We are trained to think it’s stereotyping to say that. And indeed, all black people do not exhibit black cultural traits to the same extent. But the traits exist. Example: linguists have documented that one can indeed sound black. Both white and black Americans can almost always immediately tell whether someone is black on the phone even when the subject matter is race-neutral and there is no “slang” involved. And black speech is not the same as white Southern—who really thinks Jeff Foxworthy talks the same way as Tracy Morgan?

And then, wouldn’t it be strange if black culture somehow consisted only of speech? Like any culture, black culture also includes favorite foods, modes of dance, senses of humor (Black Twitter, anyone?), religious traditions, dress fashions and aspects of carriage and demeanor. This is what black culture is. To pretend the entire conception is a stereotype because people exhibit it to varying degrees is to dismiss generations of scholarship and art lovingly documenting exactly this culture. Blackness is beyond skin color.

The elegant way of putting it: some people are more rooted in black culture than others. The simpler way of putting it: some people are blacker than others.

If their reported sentiments are true, then Wilson’s teammates are not wrong in sensing that Wilson is less black in how he talks. Where they are wrong is in having a problem with it. Too many black people hear someone like Wilson talking and make a quick assumption that because he’s less rooted in cultural blackness than they are, he must not like them. Or that he has somehow denied a part of his real self. This belief is dead wrong, both as fact and because of where it leads.

The fact part: legions of black people wearing the culture more lightly than Wilson’s teammates love black people of all kinds quite deeply, thank you very much. And very few of them are under the impression that they are white, a tough notion to maintain in front of a mirror.

From there it’s a short step to thinking that things not associated with black talk—like school—are white and therefore disloyal. That helps drag black kids’ grades down (and studies have not disproven that, despite a certain hype). Also, if you think straying from black culture means you’re antiblack or not “real,” then there follows the idea that true blackness means holding back from reaching out beyond the black world for much of, well, anything. Some years ago in a truly unpleasant reality show, Black. White., a black family posed as white while a white family posed as black; the black guy told the white guy—proudly!—that real black people don’t stand up straight and aren’t curious.

So telling people like Wilson’s teammates that there’s no such thing as someone being less black than someone else is just not true. What’s sloppy, dangerous and backward is calling someone not black enough.

McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of What Language Is (and What It Isn’t and What It Could Be), The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Authentically Black and Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America, among other books.

Arthur Caplan, PhD, is the Director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Not only is quarantine not needed for responsible people and health workers who self-monitor, if enforced it will do far more harm than good

Nervous government officials who seem more interested in appearing tough rather than letting science actually defeat Ebola in the United States are misusing quarantine.

Prominent governmental officials such as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and potential presidential candidate Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey have succumbed to pandering in the face of Ebola. In fact, the Governor has now doubled down on his unscientific and ill-thought through policy of quarantining those exposed to someone with Ebola. He practically begged to be sued for summarily quarantining a heroic nurse, Kaci Hickox, upon her return from West Africa, even after she tested negative for Ebola. “Whatever. Get in line…I’ve been sued lots of times before. Get in line. I’m happy to take it [the decision to quarantine] on.”

The line is already forming. Hickox, a nurse who wil not be bullied, is at the head of it. The Governor will lose. And he should. State-mandated quarantines make little sense as a weapon against Ebola in the United States.

Christie tried to imprison Hickox without any explanation or even a hint of legal due process in a tent with no running water or TV at a Newark, New Jersey, hospital after she came back from a harrowing volunteer visit to fight Ebola in West Africa. She was tossed into the tent despite the fact that she exhibited no symptoms and was not infectious. She protested her confinement, scared New Jersey officials into letting her go and headed back in a limo to her husband and hometown in Maine.

Governor Paul R. LePage now says that Maine requires health care workers such as Hickox, who return to the state from West Africa, remain under a 21-day forced home quarantine. Hickox says no way.

“Going forward, she does not intend to abide by the quarantine imposed by Maine officials because she is not a risk to others,” her attorney, Steven Hyman, told reporters. “She is asymptomatic and under all the protocols cannot be deemed a medical risk of being contagious to anyone.” Hickox will, however, do what is right and appropriate. She plans to abide by all the self-monitoring requirements suggested by the Centers for Disease Control.

Self-monitoring is the accepted, scientifically validated way to handle non-symptomatic people exposed to those with Ebola. Craig Spencer, the doctor who is now the only Ebola patient in America in a hospital, self-monitored while moving around New York City. When he got symptoms, he went to the hospital. Number of people he infected while self-monitoring? Zero.

Not only is quarantine not needed for responsible people like Hickox and Spencer, if enforced it will do far more harm than good.

Amber Vinson was the second nurse from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas to get the virus while caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man who began showing Ebola symptoms after arriving in Texas and died under her care when he was finally admitted to that hospital. When she was discharged from the isolation unit at Emory University Medical Center in Atlanta, there were at least 30 doctors and nurses gathered around her as she joyfully thanked them for saving her life. I saw a room of heroes.

But if you are the Governor of New Jersey or New York or Maine, you must have seen something very different—30 people who ought to be immediately quarantined as a result of exposure to a person with Ebola. The same holds true for everyone who had any interaction with Hickox in her short stay in the isolation tent in Newark. This will include everyone in the courtroom in Maine if she shows up there, as is her right to fight mandatory quarantine.

Quarantine is a very intrusive tool in fighting disease. Our legal system permits it, but only when there are no other less restrictive ways to control an outbreak. There are less restrictive ways to contain Ebola, for example, self-monitoring and voluntary isolation at home. Those things work. The only people in America who got Ebola are health care workers who cared for Ebola patients. And to date, all but one who have been treated in America have survived. Ebola is not the lethal disease in the U.S. that it is in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, making quarantine even harder to justify.

The way to manage Ebola is with strict monitoring for symptoms. The way to manage fear and ignorance is with quarantine. The way to defeat Ebola in West Africa is to treat volunteers as responsible, moral heroes. The way to allow the epidemic to spread is to lock-up those who offer the only chance for treatment and eradication.

Arthur Caplan, PhD, is the Director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Know it or not, you often decide whether or not to trust someone based on crazy reasons. How attractive someone is, whether they’re the same gender as you are, whether someone blushes, and the state of your ever-changing mood all affect whether you trust somebody.

In some situations you trust people more just because they have a beard:

…male politicians might want to consider not shaving because the “presence of a beard on the face of candidates could boost their charisma, reliability, and above all their expertise as perceived by voters, with positive effects on voting intention.”

You make up your mind about someone in 100 milliseconds.

Yeah, read it again: 100 milliseconds. What happens when you’re given additional time? You become more convinced you’re right:

Judgments made after a 100-ms exposure correlated highly with judgments made in the absence of time constraints, suggesting that this exposure time was sufficient for participants to form an impression. In fact, for all judgments—attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness—increased exposure time did not significantly increase the correlations… additional time may simply boost confidence in judgments.

And what quality do you value in a friend more than any other? You guessed it: trustworthiness.

What’s the reason most people cite for wanting to leave their job? Not trusting their employer.

And maybe you’re right to be wary. Most people do violate the trust of even close friends:

“60 percent of people confessed to sharing even their best friends’ secrets with a third party.”

Research shows that in life-or-death situations, you can probably forget about all that better-angels-of-our-nature stuff. It’s pretty much every man for himself.
But is that the best way to live? Probably not if you want a long, enjoyable life.

People who give others the benefit of the doubt are both happier and healthier. In fact, high-trusters are actually better at lie detection:

…high trusters were significantly better than low trusters were at detecting lies. This finding extends a growing body of theoretical and empirical work suggesting that high trusters are far from foolish Pollyannas and that low trusters’ defensiveness incurs significant costs.

Expecting others to be selfish can be a self-fulfliing prophecy:

The expectations people have about how others will behave play a large role in determining whether people cooperate with each other or not… One’s own expectation thereby becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who expect people to act selfishly, actually experience uncooperative behaviour from others more often.

And cynicism can lead to a downward spiral:

When people trust others, they painfully learn when other people prove to be untrustworthy; however, when people refrain from trusting others, they fail to learn of instances when the other person would have honored their trust.

Think that people are poor because they trust too much and the wealthy get their money by duplicity? Actually, being skeptical of people’s motives isn’t the path to riches:

People were asked how much they trust others on a scale of 1 to 10. Income peaked at those who responded with the number 8.

Those with the highest levels of trust had incomes 7% lower than the 8’s. Research shows they are more likely to be taken advantage of.

Those with the lowest levels of trust had an income 14.5% lower than 8’s. That loss is the equivalent of not going to college. They missed many opportunities by not trusting.

Clearly, on average, it’s better to trust too much than too little, even from a financial perspective.

Okay, but does this mean trust everyone? How do you pick?

You can tell Nobel Peace Prize winners from America’s Most Wanted at a rate much better than chance. More often than not for first impressions, you can trust your gut:

Estimates were significantly better than chance, indicating that individuals can identify permanent altruistic traits in others.

But how does this affect how you should handle relationships?

Oddly enough, nothing worked better than good ol’ tit-for-tat:

A tit-for-tat strategy plays the iterated prisoners’ dilemma game by cooperating on the first move, and then making the same choice as the other player did on the previous move. This strategy has been shown to be a very robust in that it does well with a wide variety of other strategies, provided that there is a sufficiently large chance that the same players will meet again.

That old rule we all know turned out to be incredibly robust. All it required was imitating the other player’s last move. If they’re cooperative, you cooperate. If they screw you, you screw them back.

Robert Axelrod, who documented the findings in his book, The Evolution of Cooperation, explained what we can learn from the findings:

“Tit-for-tat won the tournament, not by beating the other player, but by eliciting from the other player behavior that allowed both to do well.”

At least in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, “doing unto others as they do unto you” may not put you ahead, but with time it educates others that, all other things being equal, it’s clearly more profitable to work with you than not.

So…

All things being equal, trust people or at least trust your gut. Early in ongoing relationships, consider tit-for-tat.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Join over 130,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done – 5 Expert Tips

6 Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day

8 Things The World’s Most Successful People All Have In Common