A lot has been written in recent years about “strength-based” development approaches. Research suggests that you’re better off building on your natural strengths and talents than trying to improve your weaknesses.

The usefulness of the strength-based approach explains its popularity. It makes good sense: put yourself in situations where your gifts and talents can be put to good use and you’ll increase the likelihood of being successful.  

Strengths are good things. But too much of a good thing is often a very bad thing. Past a certain point, our strengths start to cast a shadow. The leader who is comfortable speaking in public may turn into an attention hog always seeking the limelight. And the leader who is a gifted critical thinker may become overly critical of others. The leader who has great interpersonal skills may place too much emphasis on subjective criteria when making decisions. And while it is true that every leader should develop and nurture his or her unique gifts and talents, this isn’t where development should end. To be fully developed as a leader, you need to go further. 

Every leader needs to be keenly aware that strengths can become overly potent — sometimes toxically so. The strength of drive can give way to dominance, which can become the weakness of intimidation. Likewise, the strength of confidence can slip over into the weakness of arrogance. Every leader is made up of sunshine and shadows. Paying attention only to the shiny parts of your leadership causes your shadow to grow, practically ensuring that efforts will backfire. 

When that recoil comes, and it happens to all of us, how do you learn and grow from it? Because here is one fundamental truth about a reality check: if you refuse to learn the lessons it can provide, a harder and more painful confrontation is sure to follow. As the saying goes, “If you don’t learn the lesson, you have to repeat the class.” 

Here are some quick tips for ensuring that you’re ready to benefit from whatever reality check you may next endure: 

1. Focus on the long game. Casting a light on your shadow is just a momentary speed bump on your longer leadership career. The bruise to your ego will eventually yield worthwhile lessons and changes. Focus on where you ultimately want your career to end up, not the detour it may have taken. 

2. Learn from your feelings. Pay close attention to the feelings that come up for you after your revelation. Identify what you’re feeling, precisely. Do you feel embarrassed, fearful, resentful, or something else? Then ask yourself, “What information is this feeling trying to give me?” and “What is the lesson this feeling is trying to teach me?” 

3. Remember, discomfort = growth. Comfort may be comfortable, but it’s also stagnant. You don’t grow in a zone of comfort. You grow, progress, and evolve in a zone of discomfort. The more uncomfortable the realization feels the more growth can result. 

4. Broaden your view of courage. Being vulnerable, open, and receptive to change is a form of courage. Hard-charging types wrongly see courage as being fearless. Nothing could be further from the truth. Courage is fearful. The simplest definition of courage is “acting despite being afraid.” Courage requires fear. As long as you keep moving forward, it’s when there’s a knot in your stomach, a lump in your throat, and sweat on your palms that your courage is doing its job. 

5. Don’t be oblivious to yourself. How much might it be costing you to remain loyal to your ignorance? Self-exploration and discovery can be painful, but what’s more painful in the long run is being a stunted human being, incapable of acknowledging, assimilating, or shoring up your shortcomings. 

6. Be your own project. Lots of people lead projects better than they lead themselves. Think about what it takes to lead a great project. You start by identifying your desired outcomes, you put together a timeline and pinpoint critical milestones, you marshal the resources the project will need to be successful, and you identify metrics to track progress. Guess what? You can manage your rebound in the exact same way. 

7. Stay present. Rather than try to avoid all that surfaces for you during and immediately after the humiliating event, fully immerse yourself in the experience. What feelings come up for you? What fears are at work? How might your feelings and fears serve you once the entire experience plays out? What are you learning and how can you put those lessons to good use? 

As much as self-discovery can be painful, it’s also fantastically rewarding. The journey to the center of one’s self is the most important voyage you’ll ever take. It’s how you become a whole person, truly knowing the full dimensions of your talents, idiosyncrasies, and deepest desires. 

Ultimately, if you let it, a humiliating incident can be the entry point for a richer, fuller, and more complete understanding of yourself as a leader and as a human being. Armed with that knowledge, you’ll be better able to use your strengths — and actively mitigate the shadows your strengths sometimes cause — so they better serve you and others.  

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink claimed in a recent interview with Fox that “we have to get our employees back in the office.” According to him, doing so would result in “rising productivity that will offset some of the inflationary pressures.” 

Fink did not provide any data in the form of statistics, surveys, or studies to support his claims. He insisted, without evidence, that in-office work would reduce inflation. So what does the data say?

A widely-cited July 2022 study from the highly-respected National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found strong evidence that remote work decreased inflation. Namely, because employees strongly prefer mostly or full-time remote work, they are willing to accept lower wages to work remotely. As a result, the researchers found that remote work decreased wage growth by 2 percent over the last two years. Notably, the decrease in growth occurred specifically in the mostly higher-paid, white-collar positions that could be done remotely, leading to wage compression that reduced wage inequality between blue-collar and white-collar work. Given that higher wages result in more consumer spending, leading to inflation, the study concluded that remote work reduces inflation.

Plenty of other evidence supports the finding that remote work reduces wage growth, such as a June 2022 survey by the Society for Human Resources. It reports that 48% of survey respondents will “definitely” look for a full-time WFH job in their next search. To get them to stay at a full-time position with a 30-minute commute, they would need a 20% pay raise. A hybrid job with the same commute would need a pay raise of 10%. A different survey of 3,000 workers at top companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft found that 64% would prefer permanent work-from-home over a $30,000 pay raise. Indeed, companies that offer remote work opportunities are increasingly hiring in lower cost-of-living areas of the US and even outside the US to get the best value for talent. That’s a significant reason why one of my clients, a late-stage software-as-a-service startup, decided to offer some all-remote positions. 

This data shows that remote work decreases costs of labor and thus reduces inflation. What about Fink’s claims about productivity?

Surveys have long found that workers report being more productive working remotely, but we might feel some skepticism toward self-reported answers. It’s harder to feel skeptical of evidence from employee monitoring softwarecompany Prodoscore. Its President David Powell said, “after evaluating over 105 million data points from 30,000 U.S.-based Prodoscore users, we discovered a five percent increase in productivity during the pandemic work-from-home period.” 

And we have become better at working remotely over time. A Stanford University study found that remote workers were 5% more productive than in-office workers in the summer of 2020. By the spring of 2022, remote workers became 9% more productive, since companies learned how to do remote work better and invested in more remote-friendly technology. 

A July 2022 study in another NBER paper found that productivity growth in businesses relying on remote work like IT and finance grew from 1.1% between 2010 and 2019 to 3.3% since the start of the pandemic. Compare that to industries relying on in-person contact, such as transportation, dining, and hospitality. They went from a productivity growth of 0.6% between 2010 and 2019 to a decrease of 2.6% from the pandemic’s start.

Case study evidence backs up these broader trends, as reported in another NBER paper about a study at a real-world company, Trip.com, one of the largest travel agencies in the world. It randomly assigned some engineers, marketing workers, and finance workers to work some of their time remotely and others in the same roles to full-time in-office work. Guess what? Those who worked on a hybrid schedule had 35% better retention, and the engineers wrote 8% more code. Writing code is a standardized and tough measure of productivity and provides strong evidence of higher productivity in remote work.

The evidence demonstrates that remote labor costs less and is more productive, reducing inflation at both ends. What about ancillary costs?

Employees can save much money, up to $12,000, for full-time remote work, according to a Flexjobs analysis. That involves savings on transportation, such as gas, car maintenance, parking, or public transport. Workers also don’t have to buy expensive office attire or eat out at overpriced downtown restaurants. Workers need to pay somewhat more for cooking at home and higher utilities. Yet these costs are much smaller than the costs of coming to the office.

Companies save much money on real estate, utilities, office furniture, cleaning services, and related costs. An average office space per employee can be up to $18,000 annually, which means savings can add up fast. No wonder office occupancy is down, and companies are cutting their real estate footprint. For example, Amazon – which allows full-time and part-time remote work – recently paused its construction of five towers in Bellevue, Washington, due to remote work. 

Companies are investing more into support for work from home, such as IT and cybersecurity. And more forward-looking ones are providing remote work support for home offices. For instance, Twitter, Facebook, and Google provided a flat stipend of $1,000 for home offices. As another alternative, one of my clients, the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, researched the best options for home offices and provided a standardized and wide range of home office technology and furniture to its staff. Doing so improves productivity and is a wise long-term investment. And such expenses are much less than the costs of employees in the office. 

Thus, in addition to lower labor costs and higher productivity, employees and employers pay much less to have staff work remotely. All the evidence shows that remote work decreases inflation. 

Such information is readily available, and Fink could have assigned a summer intern at BlackRock to find the evidence but chose not to do so. He’s not the only one joining many prominent CEOs in driving employees back to the office. What explains this seemingly contradictory behavior?

As a behavioral science expert in decision-making around the future of work, I can tell you that I’ve observed many leaders exhibiting poor judgment, likely due to a combination of cognitive biases. One is called the belief bias, where our belief in the desirability of an outcome – such as Fink’s desire for workers to return to the office – causes us to misinterpret the evidence supporting this outcome. Another is confirmation bias, where we look for evidence that confirms our beliefs and ignores evidence that does not. 

Thus, while the facts clearly show that remote work reduces inflation, improves productivity, and reduces costs, it took many efforts to convince some traditionalist executives within my client organizations about the benefits of remote work. Their discomfort – due to these cognitive biases – undermined their judgments. It discussed cognitive biases and how to avoid trusting our intuitions in new contexts to turn them around.

Hopefully, prominent CEOs like Larry Fink and many others will recognize the dangerous consequences of inflation and the bottom lines of their companies driving employees back to the office. Otherwise, their companies and the economy as a whole will suffer. Their poor judgment should teach all business leaders to rely on facts and not wishful thinking in their public communication and decision-making.

I learned that lesson as a result of my difficult childhood bouncing between hotel rooms, foster homes and orphanages. By the time I was 18 years old, I had lived in 18 or 20 different places.

At 3 years old I was kidnapped by my father and told my mother had died. Dad picked me up in his Ford Roadster and drove me from St. Louis to California to start our new life. He truly loved me—I don’t have any doubt about that. Unfortunately because he was a Merchant Marine he was almost always at sea. He never could catch a break and therefore couldn’t provide a stable childhood for me. 

The constant moving around left me without a sense of normalcy or consistency. I learned to handle change easily and even seek it out. I was comfortable facing life’s changes and transitions and had the ability to shift course easily—which helped me greatly in my business career.

Finding my place from one schoolyard made me more resilient. Achieving some success helped me build my confidence, too. I was good student and pretty good athlete, lettering in high school basketball and baseball.

My adaptability, resilience and confidence carried me to the University of Rochester, the U.S. Navy, and Harvard Business School. And proved to be useful when I held executive roles with financial companies like at E. F. Hutton, Lehman Brothers, and Furman Selz. These skills continued to guide me when I became the Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the University of Rochester and continue to today in my current role as chairman of High Vista, a Boston-based money management company.

My background also gave me the ability to relate to almost anybody. You can’t truly understand others unless you’ve lived and struggled and gone through hardship. That understanding came into play whenever I read resumes of job applicants—I could see into other people’s lives more easily and better recognize who they were underneath their accomplishments and experiences.

But who was I?

When I went to college, I buried my past. I submerged it under concrete, patted it down, let it dry and became a different person. I was ashamed of my upbringing, and I didn’t want to get any benefit or sympathy for it. People would ask about my background and I would say, “My mother died when I was 3, my father’s a Merchant Marine, and my home address is a post office box in San Francisco,” and that was the end of it.

Because I spent so much time moving and reinventing myself, I had the ability to always move forward. That came into play when my mutual fund firm, Greenwich Management Company, folded. I had started the company from the ground up (which I discourage) as a subsidiary of Capital Research. I tried, futilely, to simultaneously to manage the company’s money, market its product, and manage its people, which turned out to be a painful lesson in trying to wear too many hats at once. 

It was difficult to fail but I decided to chart a new course, I resigned from Capital Research and ended up working at E.F. Hutton, one of the country’s largest retail brokerages. That job springboarded me to Lehman Brothers, where I weathered turmoil and infighting while guiding the company’s investment management division to new heights. After Lehman Brothers, I found my dream job becoming the chairman of Furman Selz a small investment bank. 

In 1996, at the age of 60, I finally uncovered a shocking truth buried inside a long ignored suitcase of my father’s letters: my mother wasn’t dead, after all. After I learned about my mother, I grappled with whether to connect with her. I had a wonderful career and a great family, and I didn’t want anything to complicate that. My past had been buried for so long.

“You must take a chance,” my wife Barbara said, and she was right.

I did take a chance, and my mother turned out to be a wonderful presence in my life. Reconnecting with her allowed me to see the similarities in our personalities. It filled in the half of the equation that had been missing. It helped me understand, finally, who I am—and who you are is an interplay between your genes and your experiences. If you’re an only child, or a middle child, or the sixth of 12 children, or if you live in a fancy neighborhood your whole childhood, or you bounce around to 18 different places, your perspectives will be different.

I’ve been fortunate to do almost anything that I’ve wished, including helping to found the Nantucket Golf Club. The golf club has become one of the largest charities on the island and has preserved hundreds of acres of beautiful land from development. It puts two students through college per year with full-ride scholarships, and this year 10 other students received vocational scholarships. The golf club has contributed to more than 50 different charitable causes, provides employment opportunities, and has enchanced many people’s lives and will for years to come.

In your lifetime, try to create an institution or something that will outlast you. A lot of the companies I worked for are gone. But my family, the University of Rochester, the golf course and my relationships with good friends will live on for a long, long time. 

And for that, for everything, I find myself so grateful.

It’s not just pathological “people pleasers” – at one time or another, almost all of us have found ourselves agreeing to do tasks we don’t want to do, whether it’s accepting a coffee invitation from an acquaintance or acquiescing when a colleague wants a favor.

Of course, there are times when an unpleasant activity is necessary. But often, we’re the culprits in maxing out our own schedules, because we’re too quick to agree to discretionary tasks that could have been declined with little or no consequence. 

In the moment, we might justify our decision as prosocial behavior and putting deposits in the “favor bank.” And a few stray requests likely won’t harm your overall productivity. But over time, these small “yeses” compound, and even an hour or two a week has serious opportunity costs. After all, time is finite and when you allocate it toward other people’s agenda, it prevents you from accomplishing your own. 

You can’t add water to a glass that’s already full, and if you want to have the bandwidth to pursue your own long-term goals, you’ll need to hone your skill at evading unnecessary tasks. In my book The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, I lay out strategies for how to politely extricate ourselves from others’ requests and expectations, and instead redirect that energy toward higher and better uses. Here are three you can employ right away. 

Reject middling opportunities. 

Most experienced leaders are pretty good at saying no to terrible offers (“Could you copyedit my dissertation for free, by Thursday?”). We’re also smart enough to snap up great offers when they come around (“How’d you like to land a six-figure deal?”) 

The issue is primarily with middling opportunities, that have both good and bad aspects to them. It could be attending an event that seems tedious, but your friend invited you. Or speaking for free, but there might be useful contacts in the audience. Or doing an informational interview with someone’s cousin’s friend, because you might need a favor from them one day.

That’s where we get into trouble. Author and entrepreneur Derek Sivers suggests a helpful framework to cut through the justifications: if your gut reaction isn’t an enthusiastic “hell yeah,” then you should say no. In other words, anything less than a 9 out of 10, or even a 10 out of 10, becomes a ‘no.’ It may sound draconian, but it keeps you from clogging your schedule with sub-par choices, so you have room for truly great opportunities. 

Choose a lens. 

We’d all like to simultaneously earn a lot of money, spend tons of quality time with our family, have a robust health and wellness regimen, and more. And while all of that is possible to some extent, the truth is, it’s typically not all possible at once. We have to make tradeoffs – and it becomes essential to know what your top priority is. 

Terry Rice was an experienced digital marketer, and when he started his consulting business, he had a stroke of luck that almost any new entrepreneur would relish: “A client offered me a $20,000 a month retainer,” he recalls. But there was a catch. 

The new assignment would have required an hours-long commute. “The main reason I started my company was to spend more time with my family,” he says. “But with this opportunity, I would have rarely seen my daughter. Beyond that, I wasn’t super enthused about the project I would have been working on. And given the time constraints, I wouldn’t have been able to work on other projects I was passionate about.”

Terry did something that more of us should: he identified the key values he wanted to use in evaluating opportunities. In his case, it wasn’t money (if it were, he would have said yes instantly). Instead, he prioritized time with his family, and the ability to work on interesting projects. That enabled him to cultivate the resolve necessary to stand firm. “The same company kept reaching out to me for a year,” he says. “It was sometimes challenging to say ‘no,’ especially during the slow months, but I’m glad I continued to turn down the opportunity.” 

Respond quickly. 

For many of us, it’s easy to say no to a request we literally can’t do (“Sorry I have to miss your birthday party – I’ll be in Spain!”). But it’s much harder – and more fraught with guilt – to reject an opportunity when we could manage it, but simply don’t want to. 

So we procrastinate, and the invitations linger in our inbox for days or weeks (sometimes even months), compounding the problem because now we need to apologize not just for declining their request, but also our embarrassing delay in doing so. As a result, we oftentimes cave in and agree, as expiation for making them wait so long – the ultimate counterproductive strategy. 

Despite the emotional challenge – nobody likes to disappoint others or potentially hurt their feelings – if you’re going to say no, it’s a far better strategy to do it quickly so you don’t get their hopes up (“She’s probably strategizing to find a way to make it work!”) or insult them (“I’m obviously not very important if he’s making me wait three weeks for a response”). 

Instead, we need to rip off the bandage – for instance, you could say, “Thank you so much for thinking of me for this! It sounds like a great opportunity but I’m afraid I’m not able to join you. Sending best wishes!” Of course, they likely would have preferred a “yes.” But very few people will hold a prompt and polite “no” against you. 

If we stand any chance at taking control of our schedule and leveraging it to accomplish our most important long-term goals, we have to get better at saying no to things we don’t really want to do. These strategies can help. 

Turning your company toward social impact can be scary. What guidelines should you follow? How will you pay staff with an unproven business idea? Fear holds many leaders back, especially entrepreneurs working in uncharted waters.

Malcolm Wood, a British-Chinese restaurateur, at the top of his game in hospitality and food, risks his life to show how rapidly the world’s glaciers are disappearing. Like a young Richard Branson — a serial entrepreneur with some extreme sports thrown in — he took his love for the natural world and created a movie, The Last Glaciers, that would make people sit up and notice. He shares his journey of overcoming personal fear and how business leaders should think as they move toward the social impact economy:

As a kid, I was super scared of heights. To overcome this, I turned to sports that challenged me as a way to confront my fears. Since then, I have been fascinated with challenging myself and my limits in both work and vertical sports. I also went through a period of my life where I worried a lot about the future, death, feeling overwhelmed, and being constantly stressed. My feeling was a combination of being overworked, my personal life not going where I wanted, and a severe injury that saw me lose the use of an arm for two years. Flying and climbing mountains saved me from this downward spiral. It has taught me life lessons about risk management, how to face up to fear and unpleasant facts, and has given me lifelong friends.

Most importantly, it has shown me how to stop time and appreciate the life and beauty around us all. In extreme sport so, you have no choice but to focus on the present. Situations constantly change and require your total focus and attention. It all happens in a moment, with very high stakes on the table. If you can make it through one day at a time with this mindset, that’s all that counts.

You can’t always live life in fear. These experiences help define your identity and help you realize what you want in life. You can’t keep it all in your head as a fantasy because real life is messy and weird. But it can also be great — if you embrace it. In adventure sports, you’re constantly assessing risk. It’s part of every preparation: the decision to step out the door, define your objective, and continually evaluate to see if that objective might be yours today. People often say the higher the risk, the higher the reward. I can’t weigh the risk against the reward without thinking about the loss I may experience if things go wrong. But I also can’t camp in that headspace for too long. The riskiest things can give you the most joy (and potentially the most profound grief), and I’d rather do my best to calculate those risks well and not be held back by imagined failures. Life is too short to stand on the shoreline.

The Last Glaciers: a Push Outside my Comfort Zone

People will look at our film — the mountaineering and paragliding — and think we are reckless and crazy. What you won’t see is a long dedication to learning: the many training courses in which we invested; hours of training and briefings; risk analysis chats over multiple dinners, meetings, and coffees; safety courses, and the number of flight hours that we needed to rack up to ensure we had the right level of experience before executing our plans.

I have a photograph of myself, director Craig Leeson, and our lead cameraman Cody Tuttle on a summit in Peru, trying to smile for the camera. We were deeply exhausted. We had climbed almost 20,000 feet twice within 24 hours: once to try and reach the summit, and again to try and fly off it to get some aerial shots of the glaciers below, a feat never before achieved in a tandem glider. Putting these goals together was the hardest physical thing we ever did during the movie’s creation. We had tons of setbacks on the expedition: a crashed drone, missing camera parts, broken pro cameras, motorbike crashes, everyone getting altitude sickness from a too-fast ascend…the list goes on. Nevertheless, we pushed ourselves to the limit to create this story, and the experience has changed us forever.

My day job as an entrepreneur focuses on food and beverage, and people often ask me how this is linked to being an adventure athlete. It’s straightforward, I love the outdoors, and cooking and sustainability are embedded in my love for the environment. I’ve been working on our environmental documentary, “The Last Glaciers,” for the past five years. The purpose of the documentary is to showcase the effects of climate change, as highlighted by the diminishing rate of glaciers on the world’s mountain ranges and polar ice caps, and clarifies the multiple contradicting messages presented to the public and remove any doubt that climate change is a grave concern.⁠

Consumers are now demanding sustainability from businesses where they choose to spend their money. We must adopt these new practices not only to better the planet – which is the most important thing – but also to preserve our industries in the long run. So sustainability is hugely important to me and my businesses. We try to look at sustainability as a whole and use it to shape what we do. Yes, it’s more expensive to do things that way. Yes, it’s more effort and sometimes not 100% possible, but we all need to work on doing business in an ethical manner — and we need to start somewhere.

Business can be challenging. You never know for sure the outcome of all your efforts, and you can’t see unforeseen challenges. Tough times are inevitable, but how you compose yourself during these times defines you and will define your future. Never forget the fundamentals that shaped you, and when things seem like they are breaking down, go back to basics.

In my CEO coaching practice, I have observed that there are two ways to change: Either the CEO is sufficiently ambitious to chase that change, or the CEO eventually feels enough pain to become obligated to make that change.

For obvious reasons, the former is preferred as the latter usually involves an accumulation of pain or collateral damage that forces the change, which ideally is avoided.

Interestingly, probably 75% of CEO-related situations I work within have pain as the provocation. Maybe that’s just human nature? I don’t know.

The nuance here is that, generally, the CEO is aware of the need for change, so recognizing the need to change isn’t the problem. Acting on it, however, seems to be.

‘Staying in the pain’ is a term I often use with CEOs: sitting in the discomfort and dealing with it all the way through. The reasons not to are pretty evident — and we’d all rather be doing things that we’re naturally drawn to, and find fun.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the world that you, as a CEO, lives in. External stimuli will only increase given the unpredictability of the world around us, so there will inevitably be parts of your business that you will have to intervene in, regardless of your appetite to do so.

My wish for you is to get ahead of the game, recognize what needs your attention, and dive energetically into changing what needs to be changed – driven by ambition rather than obligation.

There’s something that’s really enjoyable (and relieving) about getting a source of the strain off your desk.

Imagine you’re driving along the highway, and see an electric sign saying “79 traffic deaths this year.” Would this make you less likely to crash your car shortly after seeing the sign? Perhaps you think it would have no effect? 

Neither are true. According to a recent peer-reviewed study that just came out in Science, one of the world’s top academic journals, you would be more likely to crash, not less. Talk about unintended consequences!

The study examined seven years of data from 880 electric highway signs, which showed the number of deaths so far this year for one week each month as part of a safety campaign. The researchers found that the number of crashes increased by 1.52% within three miles of the signs on these safety campaign weeks compared to the other weeks of the month when the signs did not show fatality information.

That’s about the same impact as raising the speed limit by four miles or decreasing the number of highway troopers by 10%. The scientists calculated that the social costs of such fatality messages amount to $377 million per year, with 2,600 additional crashes and 16 deaths.

The cause? Distracted driving. These “in-your-face” messages, the study finds, grab your attention and undermine your driving. In other words, the same reason you shouldn’t text and drive.

Supporting their hypothesis, the scientists discovered that the increase in crashes is higher when the reported deaths are higher. Thus, later in the year as the number of reported deaths on the sign goes up, so does the percentage of crashes. And it’s not the weather: the effect of showing the fatality messages decreased by 11% between January and February, as the displayed number of deaths resets for the year. They also uncovered that the increase in crashes is largest in more complex road segments, which require more focus from the driver. 

Their research also aligns with other studies. One proved that increasing people’s anxiety causes them to drive worse. Another showed drivers fatality messages in a laboratory setting and determined that doing so increased cognitive load, making them distracted drivers.

If the authorities actually paid attention to cognitive science research, they would never have launched these fatality message advertisements. Instead, they relied on armchair psychology and followed their gut intuitions on what should work, rather than measuring what does work. The result was what scholars call a boomerang effect, meaning when an intervention produces an effect opposite to that intended.

Unfortunately, such boomerang effects happen all-too-often. Consider another safety campaign, the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign between 1998 and 2004, which the US Congress funded to the tune of $1 billion. Using professional advertising and public relations firms, the campaign created comprehensive marketing efforts that targeted youths aged 9 to 18 with anti-drug messaging, focusing on marijuana. The messages were spread by television, radio, websites, magazines, movie theaters and other venues, and through partnership with civic, professional, and community groups, with the intention for youths to see two to three ads per week.

A 2008 National Institutes of Health-funded study found that indeed, youths did get exposure to two to three ads per week. However, on the whole, more exposure to advertising from the campaign led youth to be more likely to use marijuana, not less! 

Why? The authors find evidence that youths who saw the ads got the impression that their peers used marijuana widely. As a result, the youths became more likely to use marijuana themselves. Indeed, the study found that those youths who saw more ads had a stronger belief that other youths used marijuana, and this belief made starting to use marijuana more likely. Talk about a boomerang effect!

Of course, it’s not only government authorities whose campaigns suffer from boomerang effects. Consider Apple’s recent highly popular “Apple at Work” advertising campaign. Its newest episode, launched in March 2022, is called “Escape from the Office.” It features a group of employees who, when told they must come back to the office as the pandemic winds down, instead chose to quit and launched an office-less startup using Apple products.

A week before the launch of its ad campaign extolling remote work and slamming the requirement to return to the office, Apple demanded that its own employees return to the office. That juxtaposition did not play well with the 7,500 of Apple’s 165,000 employees who are part of an Apple Slack room for remote work. 

One employee wrote “They are trolling us, right?” and others termed the ad “distasteful” and “insulting.” After all, the ad illustrates how Apple helps corporate employees work from home effectively. Why can’t Apple’s own staff do so, right? That hypocrisy added to the frustration of Apple employees, with some already quitting. Again, a clear boomerang effect at play.

We know that message campaigns – whether on electric signs or through advertisements – can have a substantial effect. That fits broader extensive research from cognitive science on how people can be impacted by nudges, meaning non-coercive efforts to shape the environment so as to influence people’s behavior in a predictable manner. For example, a successful nudging campaign to reduce car accidents involved using smartphone notifications that helped drivers evaluate their performance during each trip. Using nudges informing drivers of their personal average performance and personal best performance, as measured by accelerometers and gyroscopes, resulted in a reduction of accident frequency of over one and a half years.

Those with authority – in government or business – frequently attempt to nudge other people based on their mental model of how others should behave. Unfortunately, their mental models are often fundamentally flawed, due to dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases. These mental blindspots impact decision making in all life areas, including business to relationships. Fortunately, recent research has shown effective strategies to defeat these dangerous judgment errors, such as by constraining our choices to best practices and measuring the impact of our interventions.

Unfortunately, such reliance on best practice and measurements of interventions of such techniques is done too rarely. Fatality signage campaigns have been in place for many years without assessment. The federal government ran the anti-drug campaign from 1998 to 2004 until finally the measurement study came out in 2008. 

Instead, what the authorities need to do is consult with cognitive and behavioral science experts on nudges before they start their interventions. And what the experts will tell you is that it’s critical to evaluate in small-scale experiments the impact of proposed nudges. That’s because, while extensive research shows nudges do work, only 62% have a statistically significant impact, and up to 15% of desired interventions may backfire.

Nonetheless, Texas, along with at least 28 other states, has pursued mortality messaging campaigns for years, without testing them effectively by behavioral scientists Behavioral science is critical here: when road signs are tested by those without expertise in how our minds work such as engineers, the results are often counterproductive. For example, a group of engineers at Virginia Tech did a study of road signs that used humor, popular culture, sports, and other nontraditional themes with the goal of provoking an emotional response. They measured the neuro-cognitive response of participants who read the signs and found that messages “messages with humor, and messages that use word play and rhyme elicit significantly higher levels of cognitive activation in the brain… an increase in cognitive activation is a proxy for increased attention.”

The researchers decided that because the drivers paid more attention, therefore the signs worked. Guess what? By that definition the fatality signs worked, too! They worked to cause drivers to pay attention to the fatality numbers, and therefore be distracted from the road. That’s an example of how NOT to do a study. The goal of testing road signs should be the consequent number of crashes, not whether someone is emotionally aroused and cognitively loaded by the sign.

But there is good news. First, it’s very doable to run an effective small-scale study testing an intervention in most cases. States could set up a safety campaign with 100 electric signs in a diversity of settings and evaluate the impact over three months on driver crashes after seeing the signs. Policymakers could ask researchers to track the data as they run ads for a few months in a variety of nationally representative markets for a few months and assess their effectiveness. More broadly, any leader should avoid relying on armchair psychology and test their intuitions before deploying internal and external initiatives. Our feelings about how other people may respond often lead us astray due to our mental blindspots, requiring leaders to show humility and decrease their confidence in their gut impulses.