#132: Backpacks, bias, and your unrealistic summer plans
You know how, when teaching finishes for the summer, you feel all-powerful and end up vastly over-estimating how much you'll be able to get done before the new academic year? And, have you ever noticed that the opposite happens once term starts up again: you're overwhelmed, you panic because you don't think you're going to manage to do everything, but then you surprise yourself and it's all fine in the end? Yeah, well, there's a reason for that. Join your imperfectionist pal for a speculative little dive into the psychology of perception, and some ideas about how you can smooth out the bumps and make nice, sensible plans all year round.
References
Balcetis E, Dunning D. Cognitive dissonance and the perception of natural environments. Psychol Sci. 2007 Oct;18(10):917-21. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02000.x. PMID: 17894610.
Balcetis E, Dunning D. Wishful seeing: more desired objects are seen as closer. Psychol Sci. 2010 Jan;21(1):147-52. doi: 10.1177/0956797609356283. Epub 2009 Dec 17. PMID: 20424036.
Proffitt DR, Bhalla M, Gossweiler R, Midgett J. Perceiving geographical slant. Psychon Bull Rev. 1995 Dec;2(4):409-28. doi: 10.3758/BF03210980. PMID: 24203782.
Proffitt DR, Stefanucci J, Banton T, Epstein W. The role of effort in perceiving distance. Psychol Sci. 2003 Mar;14(2):106-12. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.t01-1-01427. PMID: 12661670.
Schnall S, Zadra JR, Proffitt DR. Direct evidence for the economy of action: glucose and the perception of geographical slant. Perception. 2010;39(4):464-82. doi: 10.1068/p6445. PMID: 20514996; PMCID: PMC3298360.
Episode transcript:
Big plans for the summer? Good luck with that.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello my friends, I hope you’re all doing fantastically. We’re in the middle of GCSE season here, which (for those of you not in the UK) is the first set of important exams that kids do here, when they’re 15 or 16. The elder imperfectionist child is in the middle of them at the moment. All very stressful, but also, she’s so much more organised and focused than I was at that stage. It’s all so much more fraught now. When I was a nipper, going to university was still free, and if you were lucky you even got a bit of free extra money thrown at you for living expenses too. You came out of it all, post-graduation, in a bit of debt, but not that much compared to today. All that meant that, if you got the grades, going to university was a no brainer. Why wouldn’t you go? I mean, obviously I’m biased, given that I went to university and never really left, ignoring a couple of detours. But anyway, the affordable option of going to university means there was no need to worry, while you’re still at school, about what you were going to do afterwards - you could think about that later, like in your final year, when you’re about 20. You can postpone it indefinitely if you carry on down the academic route. But now, university means giant debts, compounded by the lack of earnings while you’re studying. The stakes are much higher, and that all means having to think carefully and seriously about your future plans at a much younger age. There is a huge weight of stress being carried by the 16 year olds who are doing their GCSEs at the moment. Fistbumps of solidarity if you’re parenting one. Empathy and admiration if you’re one of those 16 year olds. I doubt you are, though - do people that age listen to this podcast, other than friends of my kids who are having a nose about? If you’re here, you’re very welcome, anyway - even if you know me in real life and plan to troll me by doing my ‘Hello, friends’ back at me the next time you see me and then acting like it’s top comedy.
Anyway. Time to get down to business. Cast your mind, if you will, to the coming months, and the stuff you need to get done. If you’re an academic, your mind is probably going to the teaching-free period over the summer (if you’re a northern hemisphere person, at least), and you’re looking forward to indulging in your annual ritual of vastly overestimating all the stuff you’ll be able to accomplish. Finish an unfeasible number of writing projects. Declutter your home. Take wholesome hikes in nature. Rewrite that module you’ll be teaching next academic year. Learn to weave baskets. And all of this while relaxing to the full, completely resetting your energy levels, so that when the new academic year begins, you’ll be fresh as a daisy. If you’ve been here before, you’re probably sniggering, because you know this is a trap and that you’ll barely manage to do a fraction of that stuff - but even so, it’s hard to recalibrate and rein it in with a more realistic and achievable set of goals.
Wow, what a go-getter you are! Just constantly taking on more and more, ever optimistic about your own capacities, struggling not to get carried away by your own eagerness to excel and achieve, eh? Except you’re not, though, are you? Not all the time. Fast forward to when teaching starts up again, and our calendars start filling up with classes, meetings, seminars, and stuff we forgot we’d committed to, emails start arriving faster than we can respond to them without dedicating ourselves full-time just to keeping on top of our inbox, and we have so many things going on that it’s impossible to keep them all in our consciousness at once, leading us to experience that creeping sense that there’s always a ball somewhere that we’ve dropped without realising, and then perhaps we end up getting seduced by a possibly-helpful-but-probably-not sense that we had better urgently research which task- and information- management and planning apps we ought to start using. In the midst of all that, we’re very unlikely to think that we have the capacity to take on any more commitments or get involved in any new projects. I mean, that makes sense, to an extent - our plates are already pretty full, so of course we need to be careful about adding to our burden. But often it seems more than this. Just as, at the start of the summer, we risk overestimating how much it’s possible to achieve over the coming months, once our term-time tasks start to mount up again, we often underestimate how much we’re likely to be able to get done. What this looks like, in practice, is panicking about a task that seems too big to complete adequately and on time, and then realising once we get started that it’s actually achievable. Or, feeling desperate and helpless in the face of the sheer volume of stuff there is to do, but then once we take a deep breath and get down to cataloguing the things that need to be done, finding that it’s actually not at all unrealistic to hope that we might make a passable job of it.
This isn’t a comparison that applies uniquely to academics. The lesson seems to be: our judgments about how easy it’s going to be for us to accomplish things are influenced by the burdens we’re already carrying. For academics - or, for a certain type of academic, anyway - that often means overestimating how productive we’re likely to be over the summer, and underestimating how productive we can be during term time. But if you’re not an academic, or not that sort of academic, perhaps that pattern has a different rhythm. If you, or someone you know, is doing their GCSEs at the moment, that means carrying the burden of needing to make important choices right now or very soon, which likewise might result in a bleaker than necessary outlook. And, what am I basing these observations upon, you might wonder? The answer is: conversations with academic colleagues, coaching clients, and personal experience.
But there’s something else, too. Recently, I got to thinking about all this while I was diving down a rabbit-hole of perception psychology research. It turns out that the way in which we perceive the world around us is influenced by all sorts of stuff about ourselves. Now, to avoid getting jumped on by a load of angry philosophers, let me acknowledge that this idea has been thoroughly explored and developed in philosophy in a tradition that goes back to the 17th-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. But it’s not the influence of Kant’s categories on our perception of the world that I’ve been thinking about recently - it’s the influence of some far more pedestrian factors, which relate to judgments about how easy or difficult or nice or nasty it is likely to be to do the things we need to do. According to various psychologists over the years, we’re more likely to perceive hills as steeper than they really are when we’re tired, when we haven’t had any sugar lately, or when we’re carrying a heavy backpack; we’re likely to perceive objects we desire - like an ice cream on a hot day - as closer than they really are, and we perceive the environment in which we’re completing an undesirable task as less ‘aversive’ if we believe we’re undertaking the task voluntarily compared to involuntarily. The psychologists who did that final study - Emily Balcetis and David Dunning (yes, he of the Dunning-Kruger effect) - deserve a special mention for being awesome trolls. They had their study participants (quote) ‘[walk] across a campus quad while wearing a costume inspired by Carmen Miranda’, who was, Emily and David remind us, (another quote) ‘usually clad in a large fruit-basket headdress’. Then the participants (quote) ‘knelt on an all-terrain skateboard and pushed themselves up a grassy hill’, hopefully while no longer being kitted out like Carmen Miranda. Shut up everyone, it’s science. Anyway, the skateboarding Carmens who reported that they didn’t feel they had been forced to participate in the experiment judged the distance across the quad as shorter and the grassy hill as less steep than the ones who felt they didn’t have a choice in the matter. I would love to know what was going through the minds of the ones who felt coerced. Why did they go along with it all? Were they too polite to say no? Did they get yelled at by Emily and David? Were they gamely complying for the sake of advancing humankind’s collective knowledge?
Anyway. There’s been lots written about the results of some of these and other perception experiments. We don’t need to get into the details here. Our takeaway can be, simply, that when we make judgments about our environment - things like distance and elevation - we’re doing more than dispassionately appraising the world around us. What’s going on in us has an influence on what we perceive.
This got me wondering about how these sorts of findings might hold lessons for the ways in which we view what it’s going to take for us to achieve our goals. To be clear, the sorts of studies I’ve mentioned relate to judgments about distance (in metres or feet) and elevation (in degrees), based on what we can see. None of that research applies straightforwardly to judgments about how we reach our goals, because most of the time reaching our goals involves something more complicated than moving a certain number of metres at a certain angle. So, the parallel I’m going to draw here is an analogy only. ‘Research suggests’, as tabloid journalists like to say before making grand claims based on inadequate evidence. But, I think it’s useful food for thought. It seems to me that a big part of the reason why we academics are in the habit of overestimating how much we’re likely to accomplish over the teaching-free summer period, and underestimating how difficult it will be to complete our work during the busy term, has to do with how much of a burden we’re already carrying. After all, for many of us, the start of the summer feels like the shedding of burdens. Our teaching is all tied up for another year. The emails slow down. There are no more meetings for a while. We’re free! And so, newly weightless - metaphorically speaking, of course - our possibilities open up. Things we’d like to achieve seem achievable, perhaps for the first time ever. That mountain that looked too steep to climb while we were lugging a backpack weighed down with task lists, deadlines, and unread emails, doesn’t look quite as steep now we’ve dumped our load.
There’s also the fact that the summer is more likely to be a period for pursuing goals that we want to pursue, rather than goals that are imposed on us. We can pour our energy into that writing project we care about, instead of being forced to spend it on learning to use that new teaching delivery platform, which is how we might have to spend our time during the term. As our skateboarding Carmen Mirandas helpfully showed us, the road to achieving those goals that we’ve voluntarily chosen strikes us as shorter and less hilly than the road to the goals that are forced upon us. So, when we think about our freely chosen summer goals, everything is hopeful and rosy - at least until term starts again, when we can commiserate with our colleagues about how once again we failed to achieve everything we set out to achieve over the summer.
Which isn’t the only thing that happens once term starts up again, is it? The burdens pile up, the voluntarily-chosen projects get pushed aside by the ones we don’t have any choice about, and everything feels harder and more stressful.
The good news, though, is that our view of the road ahead of us is likely to be just as biased during the busy term as it is over the summer. We start the summer overestimating how easy it’s going to be to accomplish things, and we start the term overestimating how difficult it’s going to be. You might like to keep that in mind as the term gets underway and you find yourself feeling increasingly stressed and desperate. The chances are, you’ll do a better job of managing everything than you think you will.
You know, as I was putting together this episode, I started to worry about whether I might be giving unscrupulous managers ammunition that they can use against their overwhelmed employees. I mean, what if my academic friends were to approach their managers to ask for help because they are so overwhelmed, only to get told that they’re imagining it all and that they’re nowhere near as overstretched as they think they are?
That would certainly be a reason not to make this episode - at least, if I believed that academic bureaucrats scour my podcast episodes for ideas about how to gaslight their underlings. But in any case, that line of reasoning only works if you overlook the extremely relevant fact that it’s because those overwhelmed underlings are carrying such a burden that they are overly pessimistic about their ability to do their jobs in the first place. Piling on the burdens makes people worse at managing their time and effort. The answer for managers, then, is to avoid overburdening people if you want them to be able to do their jobs. At least, it is if the lesson I’m trying to draw from the research I’ve described is applicable in this sort of case.
So, what can you do? If you’re listening to this with the suspicion that your summer bucket list might already be out of hand, and you’re now worried about the whiplash that will follow when term starts and you switch from overestimating your capacity to underestimating it, is there anything you can do to smooth things out - to keep your expectations of yourself reasonable throughout the rhythms of the academic year?
Absolutely there is. I suggest that you make specificity your weapon of choice against out-of-control expectations. A lot of the time, we think of the summer as just a vast stretch of empty time, of non-specific length, into which we can just chuck a load of loosely defined goals, without thinking carefully about exactly how the goals fit together with each other and with the time we have available over the summer. And, why wouldn’t we think in that way? If we’re focusing on projects that are personally important to us, rather than ones that other people have insisted that we do, there’s nobody breathing down our necks asking us to be specific with dates and deliverables. If you want to keep things realistic, though, be specific. Get clear about exactly how much time you have this summer. Subtract any time for holidays, or other stuff you have planned. How much of the time that remains is available to work on the various projects you want to focus on? How much is available for each project, and given your answer to that, how realistic is it to expect to get done? If, for example, your plans include writing a new article from scratch, and it turns out you have only six days to devote to it (given what else you have going on), you probably need to rein it in a bit.
Something similar applies for the less-fun panic that many of us feel when term is underway and the obligations start piling up. Have you ever had that experience of waking up at 3am, heart racing, and thinking, ‘oh god I can’t possibly get it all done!’? If so, again, specificity is what you need. Break it down - later in the day, I mean, not at 3am. What, exactly, do you need to get done, and by when? Do you have the time to devote to it, given what else you need to do? If not, can you find the time - perhaps by scaling back somewhere else, or by asking for help, or by renegotiating a deadline? When you do this, what you’re doing is taking that ominous, nebulous blob of I-can’t-do-it future failure, disappointment, and embarrassment and breaking it down into quantifiable tasks that are much easier to manage and make decisions about. Those constituent tasks probably aren’t going to be a barrel of laughs, but they’re not wake-up-hyperventilating-at-3am fodder either.
So, there you go. Is your mind turning to how you might use your time once you have a bit of breathing room? I’d love to know what you have planned, and whether I might have inspired you to give some thought to where you can best focus your efforts. You can get in touch via The Academic Imperfectionist website. Until next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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