The jam test
In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell shares an interesting psychological experiment involving jam (the kind you put on your toast):
In one test, a group of jam experts were asked to taste and rank a variety of jams from best to worst quality. Then a group of random college students were asked to do the same. When they compared the results, aside from a few discrepancies, the best jams always rose to the top and the worst jams fell to the bottom of the list. The experts and college students more or less agreed on the rankings.
Then in a second test, the experts and the college students were asked to repeat the task of ranking the jams. Now in addition, they were asked to provide reasons for their decisions. The expert rankings remained pretty much the same as in the first test, and they were able to articulate using industry jargon and specific knowledge of jam production to justify their rankings. The college students, on the other hand, ended up with jumbled rankings that placed some of the worst jams toward the top and the best jams toward the bottom of the list.
What happened? The researchers believed that when one is asked to provide reasoning, the decision-making is moved from the subconscious to the conscious mind. And because the college students lacked the vocabulary and knowledge to justify their "gut" reactions, they swayed away from their intuition in an effort to justify their decisions.
The study warns us of the dangers of thinking too much, and it is true that sometimes your gut feeling leads you to make better decisions.
On the other hand, Gladwell points out that the study also reveals this: when the college students (non-experts) were asked to provide reasoning, they actually held a bias toward simplicity and the easily justifiable in reasoning. In other words, having to provide reasoning for their rankings without the expertise to do so made them avoid complexity when making decisions. That is a danger too since our decisions can become too superficial.
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Recognizing this second danger and its consequences made me think about its ramifications on hiring conductors and arts leaders in our own industry:
Our hiring committees need to be diverse and usually consist of musicians, community members, other organizational leaders, stakeholders, and staff members. In other words, this is normally a group of non-experts in conducting or arts leadership. They have experience in those areas and work with people in those areas, but they are not necessarily experts.
Let's consider what happens when these non-expert hiring committees (like the college students in the jam test) are tasked with justifying their decision. What do we end up saying? We end up with saying things like this "feels right" or "I really like this person" or "they feel like a good fit" without being able to concretely articulate specific reasons why they feel this way. Lacking expertise and specific vocabulary, we hold a bias toward the simpler reasoning because we are human beings - not because we are malicious nor pretentious.
Now let's now consider this: How often are conductors hired based on rankings and reasoning made by a group of conductors? How often are arts leaders hired based on rankings and reasoning made by a group of arts leaders? Never! That wouldn't be practical - or realistic. But I'm curious to imagine what kinds of decisions would result? Would it be better or worse? Thinking more about it, it is probably more of an ideal-world scenario than a practical one.
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The bottom line is that hiring committees that are diverse in expertise are not necessarily bad nor do they lead to bad hires. And the reality is that hiring committees cannot be made up of only conductor or arts administrator experts because those roles serve many different kinds of people within an organization.
So while expert-only committees are not the solution to eliminate bias toward simplicity and superficial decisions when hiring artistic leaders, we can improve how we utilize our committees that are diverse in expertise.
And the jam test informs us of the importance of two things:
Capitalizing on the individual expertise and strengths of knowledge
Understand and articulate why each person is on the committee and which perspectives of expertise they are contributing to the decision.
Articulate clearly the areas of expertise the committee is really evaluating in candidates. Does the committee have at least one member who could address each area being evaluated with adequate vocabulary and expertise? How are these individuals empowered to take charge in their specific area?
What mechanisms could we put in place to prevent making "college student" type decisions as a group?
Recognizing when our reasoning is biased toward the easily justifiable
Ask ourselves: Does this reasoning exist simply because we had to justify it to ourselves? Did we scramble to make a decision because we needed to give an answer?
Our feelings can guide us but always be able to answer "why" it makes us feel so and dig one level deeper in our reasoning.
Ensure that the people providing the reasoning has the expertise to do it with integrity.
Know who to ask for help when we need to acquire expert reasoning for decisions. It's OK to realize that we don't have solid reasoning or have anyone to do it, but we should always have pathways to seek help.
There may never be a perfect way or a perfect group of individuals to make hiring decisions. At the same time, we can strive toward examining what we are evaluating, who's evaluating it, and the depth we wish to achieve in our reasoning.
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