The results were rather remarkable:
So overall, managers had less brain activation during the task. Does that mean they have defective brains? Could this be a neurobiological explanation for the behaviour of Pointy Haired Boss and David Brent?
Not at all, say the authors. The lower activation in the brains of managers means that they were more efficient:
the managers might have found a more efficient way of sorting the presented words. This might have enabled them to faster decide for their preferred category... Managers as expert decision-makers would seek to find a rule or heuristic on which they could base their decisions. According to previous studies, this phase of rule identification would involve the caudate nucleusWhile non-managers wasted brainpower on thinking through the task with several areas of their cerebral cortex, the managers (so to speak) downsized their neurological expenditure by outsourcing the work to their caudate nucleus, an area responsible for applying a simple but effective rule.
One of the problems with these kinds of group-comparison fMRI studies is that under-activation can equally well be glossed as "deficient" or "efficient". Curiously, it usually ends up being whichever fits with the author's narrative.
That's assuming you agree that the task was about "decision making". It consisted of seeing a long series of pairs of words, one "individualistic" such as 'power' and one "collectivistic" such as 'harmony'. Participants just had to pick which word they liked best. There were no right or wrong answers. I'm not sure what kind of manager would have to do anything like that in real life. Maybe a manager of a fridge magnet poetry manufacturer?
That's also assuming the results are solid. The authors provide few details on the fMRI methods (the main results are said to be "cluster-level corrected at p less than 0.0013", which is an unusual threshold to use and an extremely strict one (0.05 cluster-level is more common; this is about 40 times stricter).
Still. If you do buy these results, the message is: management is literally about using as little of your brain as possible...
Caspers S, Heim S, Lucas MG, Stephan E, Fischer L, Amunts K, and Zilles K (2012). Dissociated neural processing for decisions in managers and non-managers. PloS one, 7 (8) PMID: 22927984
19 comments:
I'm writing up my neuroimaging PhD at the moment, and I often worry whether my research is worthwhile. Then occasionally I'm reminded of the mountains of facile fMRI research that's routinely done out there and I feel much better about myself.
Thanks,
The problem with all these kinds of tests, whether it's just surveying or putting someone in an extremely unnatural environment, is that the questions are based on an assumption of how a process works and therefore by definition can't be reliable.
You can never ever produce a real objective questionnaire, and even less if you are trying to 'prove' an assumption.
@petrossa: I think you are confusing two different aspects here. It is certainly correct that fMRI experiments are far from an ideal way to test real world situations. The same probably applies to most lab-based psychology experiment.
But for cases like this one, a complete replication of real world scenarios is unnecessary. If there is an significant interaction between task and group (or condition) the result can still be meaningful as it shows you something about the difference between groups under these tasks.
Regardless of this issue, however, I am uncertain how much experiments like this really show. As NS points out, they can essentially be interpreted posthoc in any which way you please. At the very least further experiments are necessary to really determine what any of this means.
Nitpicker, you exactly proved the point i wanted to make.
That you make the assumption that the two are the same because it sounds logical to you.
They are not. They take place in vastly different circumstances, the input to the brain is totally different.
The results from the one say absolutely nothing about the other.
So now we know why dead fish heads make better managers. Neuroscience is rapidly becoming a pseudoscience even more than psychiatry.
Interesting! Here, in India, we've to serve the government for one year as medical officers after completion of medical graduation from government institutes... I was wondering what changes this managerial duty might be bringing about in my brain...
@petrossa: I'm afraid you are still missing the point. The task in the scanner need not be informative about anything outside the scanner. It merely shows a difference -inside- the magnet. It requires further work to establish whether the circumstances in the scanner they are exposed to are in any way relevant to managerial lifestyles or not.
This paper is total garbage. Do people actually get paid real money to produce this bullshit? If so does anyone know where I can get access to a fMRI scanner because I have some ridiculous ideas of my own.
For a start the main assumption is 'decision making is a key task of managers'. As opposed to whom? What rot. I worked for a software company as a manager but I had to make more crucial decisions when I was a programmer than when I was a manager. This paper may demonstrate how most managers reach decisions.. down at the pub... sorry I mean at important meetings.
Furthermore, as information theory shows, in order to even make a decision most information has to be discarded. Can a scanner show this process in action? Why not? This is pseudoscience in action eh?
Anonymous 5 09 12 at 01:34
Thanks but what can you expect from people thinking that science is an observation art who still believe in biological psychiatry in addition with location, location and location being the clue to the understanding of how the brain work?
And this is only part of the pseudo-science the clients of psychiatrists are suffering from because you find clinical psychologists and psychiatrists for whom any published paper is the expression of The Truth. When they have said "it has been published", they feel it is the end of the discussion...
Not to mention the sexy girls and young men who are the Big Pharma ambassadors to the clinical practitionners.
Anonymous: "does anyone know where I can get access to a fMRI scanner because I have some ridiculous ideas of my own."
Well most research MRI scanners are unused overnight and on weekends (especially Sundays). But the scanners are always on (it costs more to shut them down than to keep them powered up - long story). So all you need to do is find a radiographer willing to run the scanner and sneak into your local neuroscience department... ;-) Seriously though, I bet one day some enterprising neuroscience dept. will start renting out their scanner for random people to get pictures of their brain or whatnot out of hours. A lot of rich people might pay to do that.
Management is a different skillset. It's mostly social. Anyone can work for someone else but not everyone can manage people. When I was a new manager I had lots of ideas, wanted to do everything, make big changes, overhaul everything, was caught with the details, micromanaged. Now I don't think at all. My decisions are based on people. If I get too caught with the nit picky operational details it stresses the staff. Trust and delegating. It doesn't matter if the staff are health professionals to educators, employees are all the same. Sheep. This study makes sense to me.
Employees have it easy, they just do their job and go home whereas management have to stress about everything, like the budget balancing, constant budget cuts, interviewing and training staff, lots of side things like handling irate clients, employee demands, breakdowns, monitoring sick, leave, hours accrued, a lot of unbelieavle s* on the side it takes the whole day. Whipping in and out of meetings at once, with a client, take a call, woosh the boss is here, nope she's there, no she's gone now, she'll be back, she's too busy, memo here there everywhere, call back here there everywhere, arrange a meeting here there everywhere. It's the hundreds of little things to attend to, all off the cuff sticky situations you need to resolve on the spot. True you don't think, you react but if you don't have a reaction like a Ferrari then staff slack, clients lose confidence, the whole operation collapses. Remaining positive and motivating staff is a real challenge also handling changes/ideas. I don't give ideas a time of day unless it's going to generate a personal bonus of at least 350 bucks an hour. My time is precious, I'm not going to listen to your s* unless you have clear dollar signs coming out of your mouth.
omg - I think that the paper is refering to much higher level management who have to make the important strategic decisions and not the low life level that you seem to be at. ;-) I would not be surprised to see this paper used in the future to further justify banker's bonus figures. Maybe even help choose our political leaders?
@omg: I think you are touching at thes stinking heart of the subject matter here:
1. Of course there are differences in what managers do compared to any random group of non-managers. This in itself is not only unsurprising but it's almost a definition.
2. Now, it is also a very sensible assumption that differences in what you do day to day are in some way reflected in the way your mind and your thought processes work (the task inside the MRI scanner may or may not tap into such differences - see the discussion with petrossa earlier).
3. If the above is the case, there may also be neural correlates, either in the function or the structure of such brains.
In my book the problem arises because of course the same applies to any specialist group. Psychiatrists, neuroscientists, paramedics, bankers, butchers, fighter pilots, taxi drivers, politicians, homeless people, Russians, theoretical physicists, Albert Einsteins, UFO-abduction believers, you name it. It is actually not at all surprising if any such specific group will show some degree of specialization compared to a normative broad control group. Combine this with sufficient statistical power and you can find almost anything (this issue has been discussed on this blog before).
Moreover, you cannot interpret these findings in any other way that posthoc speculation. It's all reverse inference. You test some group, you get some brain patterns, and then interpret what these brain patterns represent based on what previous, other neuroimaging experiments have show these areas to be involved in. This inference need not be invalid but there is no way to know this without further experimentation. And in many situations a particular brain area may be activated by very different things.
Studies like this seem entirely exploratory. There is nothing wrong with that but they should be clearly labelled as such. If they make bold reverse inferences they ought to back this up with further evidence. If not they should just leave the data for what they are: a test confirming (provided the stats are sound) a difference between groups or conditions. It's not wrong to admit that you don't know if that difference is meaningful or what it actually represents.
Anon, I doubt higher management if such a thing exists would give the time and day to be injected with radioactive s* for a science study. I've never been in a scanner and I never will. I don't trust those nasty things. So I suggest you keep occupying yourself with Bilderberg conspiracies.
NP, yes, I agree. Although just to let you know I don't interact with employees from elsewhere when it comes to professional matters. I speak to the manager, director or head because it doesn't seem to matter what field, managers speak the same language, we 'get' each other. Even in my personal life, this afternoon I raked some leaves with a real estate tycoon discussing food and investment matters. Yes he happens to be a billionaire but so what leaves need to be raked. Decision makers 'get' each other. They see further up the food chain in my opinion.
@omg: Sorry for being pedantic (wait, why am I apologizing, I picked this name for a reason!) you do not get injected with any substance in a fMRI study, neither radioactive nor anything else.
You can use contrast agents with MRI but this pretty rare in research on humans and I doubt strongly that this was done in this experiment; it certainly would not be necessary for getting this result. (Correct me if they did use contrast agents though as I have not read this paper. I have little interest in such localization studies for the aforementioned reasons. By and large the neuroimaging field is moved beyond these sort of experiments.)
NP, thanks for the correction. Radiation, radioactive PET, clunky magnets mean the same to ignorent me. I'm not sure what you said in the second paragraph but thanks for the expository addendum.
>That's also assuming the results are solid. The authors provide few details on the fMRI methods (the main results are said to be "cluster-level corrected at p less than 0.0013", which is an unusual threshold to use and an extremely strict one (0.05 cluster-level is more common; this is about 40 times stricter).
It might mean that the author has done several other tests they haven't told you about and then Bonferroni-corrected the alpha level to compensate for the cherry-picking.
Why is .0013 less strict than .05? sorry I'm not from neuroscience - do they test in favor of the H0 or what? I thought they test FOR differences between groups - so .0013 would be much more strict than .05, assuming that H0 speeaks for no differences? Don't get that at all...
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