When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(31)
The researchers surmised that what was going on was “signaling.” We all want others to think well of us. And for some people, the lighting of Hanukkah candles, often done in front of others, is a signal of religious virtue. However, the celebrants believed the signals that mattered most, the ones that projected their images most powerfully, were those at the beginning and end. The middle didn’t matter as much. And they turned out to be right. When Touré-Tillery and Fishbach conducted a subsequent experiment in which they asked people to assess the religiousness of three fictitious characters based on when those characters lit candles, “participants thought the persons who did not light the Menorah on the first and last night were less religious than the person who skipped the ritual on the fifth night.”
In the middle, we relax our standards, perhaps because others relax their assessments of us. At midpoints, for reasons that are elusive but enlightening, we cut corners—as one last experiment shows. Touré-Tillery and Fishbach also engaged other participants in what they claimed was a test of how young adults perform on skills they hadn’t used much since childhood. They handed people a stack of five cards, each of which had a shape drawn on it. The shape was always the same, but it was rotated into a different position on each card. They gave people scissors and asked them to cut out the shapes as carefully as possible. Then the researchers presented the cutout shapes to lab workers not involved in the experiment and asked them to rate, on a 1-to-10 scale, the cutting accuracy of the five shapes.
The result? Participants’ scissor skills rose at the beginning and end but slumped in the middle. “In the domain of performance standards, we thus found that participants were more likely to literally cut corners in the middle of the sequence rather than at the beginning and end.”
Something takes over in the middle—something that seems more like a celestial power than an individual choice. Just as the bell curve represents one natural order, the U-curve represents another. We can’t eliminate it. But as with any force of nature—thunderstorms, gravity, the human drive to consume calories—we can mitigate some of its harms. The first step is simply awareness. If the midlife droop is inevitable, just knowing that eases some of the pain, as does knowing that the state is not permanent. If we’re aware that our standards are likely to sink at the midpoint, that knowledge can help us temper the consequences. Even if we can’t hold off biology and nature, we can prepare for their ramifications.
But we also have another option. We can use a little biology to fight back.
THE UH-OH EFFECT
The best scientists often start small and think big. That’s what Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould did. In the early 1970s, both were young paleontologists. Eldredge studied a breed of trilobite that lived more than 300 million years ago. Gould, meanwhile, concentrated his efforts on two varieties of Caribbean land snails. But when Eldredge and Gould collaborated, as they did in 1972, their puny subjects led them to a gargantuan insight.
At the time, most biologists believed in a theory called “phyletic gradualism,” which held that species evolve slowly and incrementally. Evolution, the thinking went, moves gradually—over millions upon millions of years—Mother Nature working steadily with Father Time. Eldredge and Gould, however, saw something different in the fossil record of the arthropods and mollusks they were studying. The evolution of species sometimes advanced as sluggishly as the snails themselves. But at other moments, it exploded. Species experienced long periods of stasis that were interrupted by sudden bursts of change. Afterward, the newly transformed species remained stable for another long stretch—until another eruption abruptly altered its course once again. Eldredge and Gould called their new theory “punctuated equilibrium.”12 Evolution’s path wasn’t a smooth upward climb. The true trajectory was less linear: periods of dull stability punctuated by swift explosions of change. The Eldredge-Gould theory was itself a form of punctuated equilibrium—a massive conceptual explosion that interrupted a previously sleepy stretch in evolutionary biology and redirected the field down an alternative path.
A decade later, a scholar named Connie Gersick was beginning to study another organism (human beings) in its natural habitat (conference rooms). She tracked small groups of people working on projects—a task force at a bank developing a new type of account, hospital administrators planning a one-day retreat, university faculty and administrators designing a new institute for computer science—from their very first meeting to the moment they reached their final deadline. Management thinkers believed that teams working on projects moved gradually through a series of stages—and Gersick believed that by videotaping all the meetings and transcribing every word people uttered she could understand these consistent team processes in a more granular way.
What she found instead was inconsistency. Teams did not progress steadily through a universal set of stages. They used wildly diverse and idiosyncratic approaches to getting work done. The hospital team evolved differently from the banking team, which evolved differently from the computer science team. However, she wrote, what remained the same, even when everything else was diverging, was “the timing of when groups formed, maintained, and changed.”13
Each group first went through a phase of prolonged inertia. The teammates got to know one another, but they didn’t accomplish much. They talked about ideas but didn’t move forward. The clock ticked. The days passed.