Harry 0:00

These lenses, if you will, these frames for looking at the world, become incredibly powerful because it gives you more choice. And I look at this as a way of evaluating and prioritizing interventions.

Narrator 0:20

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge 0:30

Harry, good to see you once again.

Harry 0:32

It is such a pleasure as is always the case.

Jorge 0:37

Yeah, it's always a treat. What have you brought for us today?

Harry 0:41

I am incredibly excited to share with you something that you cannot buy. I went to Amazon to see if I could get this book somewhere, and it's no longer available. I made a note to reach out to my publishing attorney and see if I can possibly license the rights to get it republished. There are a handful of books I have on my bookshelf behind me that I'll never get rid of. I have two copies of this book. I have one that is my reader's copy. I have another where I cut the spine off it so I could scan it so I have a digital copy, so I could print out pages like this. And this is a book that I was introduced to by Frank Andrews, who is my favorite professor at University of California Santa Cruz. He's no longer with us, he passed away a few years ago. He taught qualitative problem solving. He was an amazing, amazing man and he has a couple of books himself. He studied love. He was a chemistry professor, but he studied love. And he was one of the I guess the founding professors at University of California Santa Cruz, and they allowed this kind of cross-discipline work. So he taught qualitative problem solving and love as well as chemistry. Very well respected chemistry professor. At any rate, I have a couple of books on my shelf. This one in particular, absolutely, 100% changed my life. And this is from the... I think this is from the introduction. I'll tell you what the name of it is after I read it. Cool?

Jorge 2:29

Absolutely, let's do it.

Harry 2:30

Alrighty. Two roads diverged in the yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth, then took the other, just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim because it was grassy and wanted wear, though as for that, the passing there, had warned them really about the same and both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day. Yet knowing how way leads onto way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference. That was from Robert Frost and The Road Not Taken, and it's the opening quote in a book that I'm about to read from. Most contemporary economic theory and much so-called decision theory presumes that each of us possesses a roadmap from which we know or at least can guess to what destination our behavior will take us. These theories then use the properties of the destinations to predict the decision paths rational people will follow. Learning theories suggest instead that choices are made as we go along, that decisions are made on the basis of relatively insignificant local details and that we know only the destinations after we've arrived. It is not surprising that the behaviors predicted by these two models can be quite different, or that once we know the destinations and can reflect upon them, we might regret some of the choices that led us to them. Like their physical analogs, social traps are baited. The baits are positive rewards, which, through the mechanisms of learning direct behavior along lines that seem right every step of the way, but nevertheless end up at the wrong place. Complex patterns of reinforcement, motivation, and the structure of social situations can draw people into unpreferred modes of behavior, subjecting them to consequences that are not comprehended until it is too late to avoid them. And then I'm gonna jump ahead. In the ordinary trap, the bait draws the victim into the behavior that ultimately leads to unhappy consequences. Whereas in the counter trap, the adverse bait causes the victim to avoid a course of action, which, if followed, would've brought about a preferred consequence.

Jorge 5:51

Wow. That is really good. What is the name of the book?

Harry 5:55

So, the book is called Social Traps, and there are four authors, but only two are listed on the cover. One is John Cross and the other is Melvin Guyer. And this is a book about problem frames. And we've spoken a number of times about framing and this book absolutely changed the way that I see problem framing and diagnostic thinking and creating interventions. And it outlines five different types of what you might call "traps" that are effectively set in the context of social interactions with people. I think you can safely step back and say, independent of the social aspect of it, these are like classical problem frames. So, for example, I'll just give you one right off the top. A time delay trap is so obvious, right? Something you do that takes a long time to manifest, and then when it manifests, it's too late. And what Cross and Guyer talk about are the social mechanisms and reinforcement mechanisms and the things that cause somebody to be lulled into this trap such that they travel down it far enough so that by the time they realize they're in the trap, it's too late. Classic case of drinking too much at a party, wake up the next morning with a hangover, declaring you're never gonna drink again, and by the next Saturday, you're out partying again. It's a classical time delay trap. And it's the primary example. And there are other examples as well. If you think about problems as things that just show up in front of you, what happens when they don't? What happens when they emerge based on how you're engaging in the world? And so, time delay traps, what they characterize as ignorance traps, which I'll talk about, sliding reinforcers, which is one of my favorite, externality traps, and collective traps are really the five they bring attention to. And then they talk about the fact that you can mix and match them and end up with hybrid traps, but that doesn't really count. Like, the biggest light bulb in the world went on for me when I read this book. And it was like, "Oh wow. I do all of these things in one form or another."

Jorge 8:39

I'd like to circle back and, and unpack the five kinds of traps because when you were reading the passage, I was thinking, "It sounds like there's a taxonomy of traps here."

Harry 8:47

Yeah, exactly.

Jorge 8:48

And I'd love to get into it. Let me read it back to you, because I wanna make sure that I got the gist of the intro.

Harry 8:56

Yeah.

Jorge 8:57

When you were reading that, starting even with the Robert Frost poem, the image that came to mind was Steve Jobs's Stanford commencement speech. I realized we talked about Jobs in our last conversation, here he comes again. He also brought up this idea that you can't really make sense of your life's work looking forward, I think he said you can't connect the dots looking forward, only looking backward. which in that case I took to mean you have to be open to contingencies, serendipitous encounters with people and ideas, opportunities, that kind of thing. And in the case of Jobs's speech, he was talking at the tail end of a successful career, so he was talking about how he had made these choices during his life that didn't seem to add up too much at the time, but eventually looking back, led him to where he was. But what I heard in your reading there, is that it's also possible to end up looking backward and realizing that the choices you made really screwed up your life in some ways, right? You use the example of alcohol addiction and what came to my mind was like drug addiction, right? That's something that happens to so many people and it completely... I was just reading a few days ago that Matthew Perry's drug dealer was sentenced or something like that. He's someone who was a successful actor, like many, he became addicted to, drugs, and ended up dying from this. Is that a fair read, that there's a positive take on the, you can look at your life by connecting the dots when it's a positive life, but there can also be this kind of like warning system where it's like, "Hey, you're potentially making a mistake here that could really derail things!"

Harry 11:23

I appreciate that the aperture that you've opened to look at what I'm talking about here. What I would say is it's not a, bimodal, a strict, two different ways of seeing this, because timeframe is so critical here. I think when you talk about the Steve Jobsian example, you're really talking about sense-making and you're talking about meaning-making, looking backwards, versus being able to do it looking forward, rather than anticipating problems and recognizing the choices that you've made in what you could arguably say is a much shorter timeframe that have real consequences. And so the dimensions I would separate are, this is not so much about meaning-making as it's about problem framing, number one. And number two, this isn't about looking at a lifetime of decisions as a much as it's about looking at the patterns of leading choices, like the indicators or choices that you could be making in a much smaller timeframe that have a very specific for lack of a better terms patterns of results. For example, in a time delay trap, I drink too much, I wake up the next morning, I have a hangover, then I claim I'm never gonna drink again. There are patterns associated with that. Sure, you can do it over a lifetime and you can look back and that plays out one way. But if you recognize that the details around getting drawn into the social trap of smoking with your friends when you take smoke breaks, as you start smoking, before it turns into an addiction, there are a lot of positive rewards that come from the choices that you're making and they may not add up to the costs associated with what those choices ultimately lead to. And sometimes, and in the case of potentially drinking and certainly smoking, these things can trigger addictions, which then make it very difficult to get out from underneath the options that you have in terms of making decisions, because once it becomes physiological, the decision process is so different. So that would be the first thing. When you talk about I'll go to the third one, like a sliding reinforcer trap, is a trap where you know something that works brilliantly in one context works very poorly in another much later. And I think the example in the book is somebody who sings a cute little song and does a jig and dance to their family and they gets a lot of rewards for it while they're young. And if they keep doing it, eventually they're not gonna get as much attention. And if they keep doing it, eventually they're gonna be dismissed unceremoniously. And if they keep doing it, they may get punished. So the exact same behavior shifts how people respond to it over time. But once you understand the kind of pattern that these things follow, you can start to see these things in operation. I lived in Texas for a while. And I'd be driving between San Antonio and Austin. We had the mothership for Rackspace hosting, which is where I worked at the time, was in San Antonio. We had a satellite office in Austin. I would drive along Highway 35. And in Texas they have looser traffic restrictions than they do in, say California or New York. And one of the things you don't have to do in Texas is shut the gate of your pickup truck. You can drive along at 80 miles an hour with a ladder and it can bounce around until it falls out. And when it lands on the ground, it can cause a horrendous accident if somebody were to drive over it. And so there's an idea of an externality trap, right? Where this thing has happened. And... oh, you know what I have, led you astray. This is actually a collective trap. It's not an externality trap. A collective trap is one in which the collective fails to act on something like a ladder in the roadway, and everybody makes their own excuses, everybody justifies their own action or lack thereof. And then, ultimately, somebody hits the ladder and has a terrible problem. So that's a situation where when I'm driving along and I see something on the road now that I think, "If I'm not in a position to do something about it, if I'm really not in a position to do something about it, I can call it in." By not calling it in, I'm actually contributing to a collective trap and somebody's gonna pay a price even if that isn't me. And maybe down the road, I may be the unfortunate recipient of somebody's ladder or something else that's been dropped in the road because the norm has become doing nothing, which might include calling no one. So these lenses, if you will, these frames for looking at the world, become incredibly powerful because it gives you more choice. And I look at this as a way of evaluating and prioritizing interventions.

Jorge 17:04

I can see that. And yet, what can I do in a situation in which I am facing a collective trap? Because almost by definition it sounds like that's a systemic problem and not an individual issue.

Harry 17:20

That's correct, but so in just the example that I gave you a minute ago, you now have a decision to make. Are you gonna contribute to that trap being triggered or are you gonna contribute to that trap being avoided? And as one of the collective, you now have... there's a choice architecture. You can pull over and dial 9-1-1, and you can report that ladder in the road. And before I read this book, I probably wouldn't have done it. I probably wouldn't have thought about it. It just never occurred to me. But I'll tell you, whenever I see a ladder in the road, or whenever I see something that has fallen out of the back of somebody's truck or fallen off the top of their van, I ask myself the question, "Is anybody else gonna do anything? And if not, what is my responsibility?" Whether or not somebody's gonna do something, what's my responsibility here? This happened to me just two weeks ago. I went around a corner and there was a tree down in the road and I stopped and I put my blinkers on just past the tree, and I dialed 9-1-1 and I flashed my brights at anybody coming the opposite direction, because the next thing that was gonna happen is they were gonna go around that turn and they were gonna hit that tree, and the sheriff hadn't had a chance to get there. So, I could have just driven on, but I chose not to because I was aware of the nature of what a collective trap is.

Jorge 18:44

The collective trap is one of several, right? I think said that there were five of them. And the mere fact that you have a taxonomy of these traps seems useful in that it would make traps more top of mind for you. I don't know how to pronounce this, but this idea of the, I think it's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, this idea that you are thinking of buying an Audi Q7 and all of a sudden you see Audi Q7s everywhere, right? Because they become top of mind. I wonder if there's something like that at play here where with a taxonomy of traps in mind, all of a sudden you are more attuned to see where these traps might be waiting to ensnare you.

Harry 19:40

Absolutely. And because it's not only where the traps are waiting to and snare you, but the traps themselves have a set of mechanisms and you may encounter the mechanisms and every time you consciously encounter a mechanism, you now have more choice. So I think it's a combination of being aware, as you're saying, of the possibility that these traps exist and what they are and how they work, and then recognizing what, in effect, the mechanistic function of the trap is, so that when you encounter one of those mechanisms, you can ask yourself the question, "Am I gonna take the bait?"

Jorge 20:22

So it sounds like there's an awareness angle, but there's also a skillfulness angle, knowing which species you're dealing with lets you deal with it better. Under different conditions, given the amount of time we have left in this conversation, I would've asked again for the book and where folks can read more about this, but you've already said that it's out of print, so I'm wondering if in the last few minutes we have here, you could go over the five traps again and maybe just very briefly summarize what they are so that folks can get a sense of what the taxonomy looks like.

Harry 21:03

Yeah, absolutely. And also, I will commit to writing this up and making it available so that we can tack it back in, and that way people have what the traps are, why they're important, roughly how they work. It's something that I feel like I should have for folks anyway, and I don't have a good writeup of this, so I will make it available. But as we talked about, there are time delay traps. And we've talked about the fact that they're things that you're sucked into where the effect of them doesn't show up until later. And, the ignorance trap is another one that is a little harder to understand. It seems straightforward on the surface, but it's also called the Midas Trap. And you remember King Midas, whatever he touched, turned to gold. And, of course, he was ignorant of the fact that the thing that he wanted most, I guess was, this love. And he went and touched her and she turned into gold and then she no longer existed in the form that he wanted. And so being ignorant of something and either the unintended negative consequences of what would happen if you were to engage in that particular way is a trap that is very context-dependent, because it depends on what you're ignorant of. And sometimes that's the behavior that in one context works really well and in another context works really poorly. And you have to recognize that the power behind that thing or ignorant of is that it may have deeply negative unintended consequences in a context in which are very important to you or other people. So I mentioned sliding reinforcer earlier, with the example of a child singing a song. A real life example for me with sliding reinforcers is, I had a startup, many years ago, called Public Mind. And really, the first person that I hired was a complete savant. I think he got his undergraduate degree in computer science when he was thirteen and then got his master's degree when he was like sixteen from Carnegie Mellon. It was just absurd. He was incredibly smart. And he had a bunch of very strange and idiosyncratic behaviors, which were incredibly wonderful when he was nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one. And then, as he got older, these things were less and less cute. And in his forties, they aren't cute at all. And so, the very same behaviors that can generate a set of positive reinforcement that can lull you into the belief that these behaviors are intrinsically good over time can play out very poorly for you if you're not aware of that. So watching for the indicators of when your belief that those things are going to be good starts to wane is a very powerful antidote. Externality traps. We deal with these every day. An externality trap, you could think about, like the canonical example is, nobody really suffers from one family doing a barbecue. But if everybody in the neighborhood does a barbecue, you have smog, right? And so there's an externality of the potentially negative effects of something that when they add up, they start to create a problem that becomes a problem for everybody, including the person who may have started it, but they didn't see it because it was external to them. And then we've talked about this notion of collective traps where, either everybody doing something or everybody not doing something contributes to the negative experience that folks are gonna have. So those are the five. And then of course I mentioned there's hybrid traps, which are combinations of these things, which get very sticky. But let me stop there and, bring it back to you, Jorge.

Jorge 25:10

This sounds like a, really useful list. And, again, it's a shame that the book isn't available. Do please write something up. And, if you do, we'll include it in the notes for this episode. But this has been very useful, Harry.

Harry 25:27

Fabulous. I'm glad I had an opportunity to share this. It was an important book in my life.

Jorge 25:32

Yeah, I could tell, when you started reading it, your voice got a little, wobbly there. I was like, "Wow, Harry's really feeling it!"

Harry 25:39

That's great. Yeah, it really changed the course of my life.

Jorge 25:43

I'm very happy that you shared it with us. Thank you.

Harry 25:46

Yeah. Thanks, Jorge.

Narrator 25:50

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.