every once in a while on the show i like to dive into topics about psychology that we can apply in our day-to-day lives in really practical ways and today's episode is one of those dives my name is jonathan gutrell you're listening to developer t my goal on the show is to updriven developers like you find clarity perspective and purpose in their careers today's episode is a little bit on the clarity side i talk a lot about calendars on this show and part of the reason for that is because it's the most clear way that we can see the investment of our time though not every single thing we do in a given day is going to be represented by our calendars at least at work for the majority of people listening to this show you have some kind of tracking of your major blocks of time whether that's because you have to in order to protect it or because you actually use this as a tool to help you get some understanding of your life now of course we've mentioned the importance of using your calendar not just to know what to do next but also to evaluate that investment how are you spending your time what is the value on activity x versus activity y in today's episode i want to look at this from a different angle specifically the ordering of the things that you do if you had to rate on a scale from one to five how important the order of your various tasks is what would you rate it from context you can probably guess that my rating is likely to be a little bit higher than one or two and perhaps leaning more towards four or five and the reason for this is because of two phenomenon that we see in psychology and in biases that we can observe pretty readily the first is called priming the concept is whatever you experience before you can call this a prior or an antecedent or whatever that thing is that's happening before an event changes the way you perceive that event probably one of the most salient examples for me when i watch a tv show i'm watching a show and i'm like oh my god i'm going to watch a tv show or a movie where i read a book that has some kind of horror element or you know there's an intruder into a house or something like this i'm more likely to feel nervous about somebody intruding into my house i may be a little bit more likely to double check the locks on my doors many people experience this where you hear a noise in the hallway and you're more likely to kind of overanalyze what that noise was had you watched something or read something completely different say a comedy you'd be much less likely to notice those things to pay attention so closely to the creaks in the hallway even though those two events are completely disconnected how does this apply in our work research shows that even simple things like imagery change the way you think about the following events there's one study that showed a picture of money in the background during a questionnaire and the person went on to the next part of the study and they were more likely to act stingy so this happens in subtle ways that can be kind of difficult to predict or control for but you can definitely think about the larger effect of priming you think about let's say two back-to-back meetings in the first meeting you're talking about kind of creative strategy well in the second meeting you may be more open minded and you're more likely to act stingy so this happens in subtle ways that can be kind of complicated or thinking in diffuse manner rather than thinking in really specific or strategic manner if you just read a blog post about the importance of testing assuming that you didn't immediately disagree with it then it's likely that even though you're not explicitly trying to improve your tests you may be more thorough with the testing that you do in a coding session after reading that blog post so what this really means is that the thing that you're trying to do is to act stingy so this is a really good way to do that and this is a really good way to do that and this is a really good way to do that and this is a really good way to do that things that you are exposed to have an influence of your behavior sometimes in minor ways sometimes in more significant ways the most commonly cited version of this is why you still see extremely high fake prices on items that you know are on sale even though you can cognitively understand that the item never really costs as much as the original price said it was that still creates an anchor and it creates a price that you can't really buy because it's not really worth it and it's not really worth it and it's not really worth it and it's not really worth it and it's not really worth it and it's not really worth it priming effect on your brain your brain is primed with a high original price and a significant sales cut and so whether you like it or not you will feel the feelings of getting a deal the second effect is not so much an internal effect on us as much as it is an error in perception let's say that you are part of an interview committee and you have an absolutely terrible interview in the morning the interview is so bad that you have to cut it short and you all take a break you go have lunch and you come back for the second interview of the day whether you know it or not this interviewer actually has a huge leg up on the competition and that's because of a simple statistical reality called regression to the mean let's say you have a sample set of 10 developers and let's imagine that you have expectations of a certain number of people and you have a set of 10 developers that are calibrated well in other words a good developer in an interview is actually going to seem good to you right not well calibrated a bad developer might seem good or a good developer might seem bad but your expectations are realistic for the role it lines up you know with the distribution of talent in this group of developers well if you were to randomly select one of the engineers in this group on average you would have a good developer in this group and you would have a good developer in this group on average you can expect one to be about normal somewhere in the middle of the pack part of this is because likely there is some kind of distribution that is not linear in other words if you were to stack rank these developers it would be linear but if you were to actually compare them one-to-one to each other the majority of them are going to be similar to each other the very good developers and the very bad ones are outliers there's not as many of those as there are average developers now let's imagine that the random developer that you interview is terrible now what should you expect for the next engineer that you pick from the group hopefully with the priming that i just used i'm using my own tricks here uh you know the answer to this the answer is that the next developer you pick is likely to be average right this is because the majority of the people in that group are average but here's where the weird psychology and neurology and the things that i can't really explain the science of come into play your brain isn't necessarily expecting the next person to be of any particular type your brain is falling prone to that priming effect and expecting things to look kind of like the first one and so when that next person is to your brain drastically better than expected it's easy to overshoot how much better they are in other words the contrast between the two is the same as the contrast between the two people in the group makes the difference this concept called regression to the mean essentially means that for any given single sample it's easy to fall outside of average and at some point in the future you're likely to return to the average this means if an athlete has an outstanding season they very often the next season have a fall from grace in other words they return to well somewhere close to average the average for them in comparison to their previous outstanding season seems like a fall but in fact the outstanding season was the outlier as you can see in that last example this happens on both sides if you had an absolutely incredible developer interview that morning then the next person might be at a disadvantage even if they are better than average if they're lesser than the previous person it's hard for your brain to calibrate just exactly how to reset your expectations to somewhere around average and this makes sense because our brains don't typically think in terms of sets we don't think about the whole picture we don't think statistically by nature instead we think on an individual experience basis this is why stories and anecdotes tend to be more persuasive than large sets of statistics and so even though intellectually you can understand that regression to the mean is going to happen that eventually the outliers are not going to continue that eventually the team that you root for that keeps on winning season after season will probably start losing games again when it actually happens our brain has a hard time computing and reasoning why this is important to understand with the ordering of your meetings because it might mean that if you have an outstanding candidate or if you have a incredibly bad candidate it might mean that you need to reschedule any later in the year so if you have an outstanding candidate or if you have an outstanding candidate or if you have an outstanding candidate or if you have an outstanding candidate that may not necessarily be possible but another way that you can combat this is to create more specific and systematic ways of evaluating candidates this is true across the board when we have topics that require multifactorial evaluation for example a candidate for a role there's many different things that should be considered for that candidate and you should be able to evaluate candidates that are more specific and systematic ways of evaluating and you should be able to evaluate candidates that are more specific and systematic ways of evaluating to be able to retrospectively look at that candidate amongst all of the other candidates this forces you to get away from that gut feeling that you get from being jerked back either away from the bottom end or from the top end to somewhere in the middle and instead evaluate some specific sub part of that person also for what it's worth some of the people who may feel like they are absolutely excellent may actually be average when you look at all of the traits rather than the subparts of that person so if you have an outstanding candidate you should be able to take a look at that candidate and see what he or she is doing and ultimately this is a simple question you can ask yourself and then decide what you want to do about it does the ordering of my events today actually matter and if it does matter if i predict that there will be some kind of effect is it something that i know how to deal with is it going to have a negative or perhaps even a positive effect maybe i choose to prime myself with a particular kind of content or a particular kind of imagery and that kind of content is going to be a part of can be a strategy that you use. These are all tools and our psychology can be used to our favor as long as we understand how to do that. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. If you enjoyed this episode, I'm going to ask you the rare thing that I ask, which is leave a review in iTunes. This is the best way to help other engineers find the show. It's the best way to help the show get boosted in iTunes. You know that. And it's also a great way for me to learn a little bit more about what you all prefer to hear about on the show. So leave a review in iTunes. You can reference specific episodes or you can talk about the show more generally. All of it is appreciated for both my instruction and for other engineers who are looking for good podcasts out there. They don't know which one to pick. You are a stronger voice in that. You have more power to convince an engineer to listen to this episode or to listen to this podcast than I do. So I'm asking you, if you enjoy this show, help me out. 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