The Confidence Map: Charting a Path from Chaos to Clarity - Hardcover

Atwater, Peter

 
9780593539552: The Confidence Map: Charting a Path from Chaos to Clarity
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593539559 ISBN 13: 9780593539552
Verlag: Portfolio, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A groundbreaking framework for making better decisions by understanding – and mastering – confidence.

What does our desire for certainty and control have to do with our decision-making? According to behavioral economics pioneer Peter Atwater, the answer is simple: everything. 

In The Confidence Map, Atwater explores the hidden role of confidence in the choices we make, and why events described as being unprecedented are often entirely predictable—if we know what to look for.

Using compelling stories from the past and present, Atwater shows readers how to apply the same tools he teaches the world’s leading institutional investors, corporations, and policymakers to help them make sense of complex situations and optimize strategy.

You will learn:
• How psychological distance consistently affects the choices we make
• Why "Me-Here-Now" decision-making is such a powerful force
• What happens at confidence peaks that leads to our downfall
• The five ways we respond to extreme vulnerability
• When consumers' feelings of certainty and control - not price - drive demand 

The Confidence Map is a book about why we do what we do, where we can and cannot trust our natural instincts, and how we can make sense of a world that too often feels senseless. 

Whether you’re investing in technology stocks, designing menu items for a fast-food franchise, or running an emergency room, Atwater offers an all-weather guide to avoid psychological traps, spot opportunities, and navigate the road ahead with clarity and purpose.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PETER ATWATER is an Adjunct Professor of Economics at William and Mary, and President of Financial Insyghts, a consulting firm that advises institutional investors, FORTUNE 500 executives, and global policymakers on how social mood affects decision making, the economy, and the markets. A pioneer in securitization and a long-time financial services executive, Peter’s work on social mood and decision-making has been featured in The Socionomist, Time Magazine, and The Financial Times.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: Visualizing Confidence


When I was growing up, we had one of those supersized National Geographic atlases-a blue, hardcover treasure trove of detailed maps of the world, about the size of a front-door welcome mat. My dad traveled a lot, and when he returned from a business trip, he would pull the atlas from the shelf next to our kitchen table, open it up-all but covering the table-and leaf through it until he found the specific map detailing the city he had just visited. As he spoke about his experience and pointed his index finger to different locations on the page, the maps helped me visualize where he had been and how far he had traveled to get there.

With each new trip, more pages of the atlas were highlighted. I gained a better sense of the world around me: individual cities and countries didn't stand alone but instead fit into a broader patchwork of geography. When my dad flew to Dubai or Saudi Arabia, which he did often, I knew not only his exact location in the atlas but, more broadly, that he was in the Middle East. Specific cities and countries began to fit together.

When I grew older, the atlas became more than just a series of maps I could use to assess relative distances and understand the broader geographic configuration of the world. As my father shared specific experiences from his trips, the atlas formed the framework for a rich, unwritten travel guide filled with interesting stories detailing what things looked like and how people behaved in different places on the map. I knew that on page 194, people ate sushi and drank sake. On page 179, they wore a thawb. On page 174, they spoke Russian and used the Cyrillic alphabet. Cultural norms added depth to the geography on the page. Later in my life, when I was the one traveling, I carried these associations with me. When I landed in London or Tokyo, I had a general sense of what to expect. I felt prepared. There was a line of understanding stretching from my childhood travels with my dad across the pages of the atlas to my real-world adult journeys abroad.

When I became a parent, one of my first purchases was an atlas of my own-and a globe, too. Like my father, I wanted my children to see that dots on maps were more than just locations; they represented people with stories and cultures-places where distinct things happened.

Little did I know how helpful this perspective would be in my second career.

Introducing the Confidence Quadrant

A few years into teaching my class on confidence and decision-making, I realized my students were struggling. The concepts I was trying to share felt too abstract to them; students were having trouble "seeing" the connections between their own actions (as well as the behavior of others) and confidence. Trying to separate confidence into two distinct feelings, certainty and control, didn't help matters-I had simply created a jumbled-up word cloud. Not only did I need a way to show that specific feelings drive behavior, I also needed to show how and why that was the case. I needed to turn the word cloud into a simple, easy-to-use framework that made it clear that different mixes of our feelings of certainty and control lead to different outcomes in our preferences, decisions, and actions. Moreover, the framework needed to acknowledge and allow for the fact that our feelings routinely change, altering how we act. I realized that, like my father with the atlas, I needed a map that enabled my students to see specific feeling locations in relationship to others, on top of which I could then layer stories that revealed the norms and behaviors unique to each location. With that map in hand, my students would better understand why our feelings of certainty and control matter so much, and what happens as these feelings change when we move from location to location around the map.

With this in mind, I developed a tool I call the Confidence Quadrant (Figure 1.1). As you look at it for the first time, ignore all the labeling. Just think of it as a map made up of four distinct states-like a map of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest.

If you've traveled to Four Corners, where the boundaries of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona all come together like the center of the image above, the differences from state to state there are indistinguishable. Without the granite monument and the small, detailed bronze disc at its center, you'd never know where one state ends and the next begins. But the farther away you drive from that marker, the more unique the culture, the norms, and the topography of each state become.

Rather than subdividing a physical region, like the American Southwest, into four unique states, the Confidence Quadrant divides our feelings of confidence into four unique environments that reflect the relative mix of certainty and control we feel in our lives. The horizontal axis of the Quadrant measures the relative intensity of our feeling of certainty-how sure we feel about what is ahead-while the vertical axis measures the relative intensity of our feeling of control-what level of influence we feel we have over the outcome.

Just as at Four Corners, our feelings of certainty and control are indistinguishable at the center of the Quadrant, no matter which of the four environments we are in. But as we move away from the center, each of the four confidence environments of the Quadrant becomes increasingly distinct. There are consistent patterns of behavior-cultural norms, as it were-that characterize our presence in each box. Different combinations of certainty and control change how we feel and, in turn, how we act. There is a clear relationship between our location on the Quadrant and our behavior.

Before I go any deeper into these connections, I think it's important we start with a quick tour of each of the four confidence environments of the Quadrant.

The upper right-hand box, where we feel high levels of both certainty and control, is our "Comfort Zone." We are confident in this box, relaxed and optimistic about what we see ahead. Here, things feel familiar to us. We believe we will succeed at whatever it is we are undertaking.

When athletes are in the upper-right box, they describe it as being "in the zone": time passes quickly; actions seem effortless. Likewise, business leaders routinely map their greatest successes to the Comfort Zone-positive outcomes like expectation-beating product launches, career promotions, and stock-option gains. The Comfort Zone is where leaders feel most valued, appreciated, and rewarded. It's also where we have fun. When prompted, my students always identify the Comfort Zone as the location of experiences like spring break and prom-unless, of course, their date was a dud.

Those dud experiences typically show up in the lower left-hand box-the "Stress Center." This box is where we feel powerless-we lack control-and the future feels uncertain. We feel vulnerable here. We are anxious, pessimistic, and doubtful of our ability to handle things. In the Stress Center, even easy things feel hard.

A few years ago, a student rushed into my class late, making profuse apologies: "Professor," she said, "I'm so, so sorry I'm late, but I'm in the lower left-hand box! Last night, I had a fight with my roommate. Then I overslept this morning. And to top it all off, I have an organic chemistry test this afternoon that I didn't have time to study for!" In her exasperation, she perfectly captured what it feels like when we are in the Stress Center-it seems as though everything is going wrong at once and there is little we can do to stop it.

Business leaders describe the Stress Center as the place where they work hardest and get recognized (and paid) the least. It is where they experience their greatest failures, too. Demotions, firings, and the fallout from...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593539559
ISBN 13 
9780593539552
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Portfolio
https://www.wetones.co.uk/

105 Golborne Rd
London
W10 5NL
Vereinigtes Königreich
Verantwortliche Person
M.E.G Cards & Gifts
443000000000
paula@megcards.com

48 Cloyfin Road
Unit 4, 48 Cloyfin Road
Coleraine
Londonderry
BT52 2NY
Irland