rational | Careers - in Theory
Posts Tagged rational
Bolster the jockey – being rational in a hard world
Posted by David Winter in Career success, Decision making, Understanding clients on 16 January 2012
I would like to thank Karen DeCoster (@notchuraverage1), a career and technical education specialist at Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, for contributing this post — David
This jockey may not require bolstering
Several months ago, a series of discussions on the LinkedIn Group Careers Debate caused me to re-examine my counselling beliefs and methods, particularly as they apply to helping individuals struggling with career indecision. For the most part, I use a direct and sometimes confrontational approach in assisting individuals such as the panicked college junior who can’t seem to settle on a major, the millennial who describes being miserably “stuck” in a job that she hates or the chronically unemployed 50 something professional who is resistant to change. While no single methodology can guarantee success in counselling indecisive individuals there is one that seems to fit well with my direct approach.
In graduate school, one of my first classes was a course in which we examined various theories and procedures used in counselling. Two theories particularly resonated with me: Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) and William Glasser’s Reality Therapy (now called Choice Theory) in that order. Over the years, there were a few others but as the saying goes, you never forget your first.
applying theory, attitude, beliefs, career indecision, emotions, rational, rational emotive behaviour therapy, REBT
Posted by David Winter in Career choice, Decision making on 11 May 2010
The red one...no, the yellow one, no...
Choosing an expensive item such as a car can be hard enough. In 2006 Ap Dijksterhuis, a researcher from the University of Amsterdam, made things a bit harder. He gave people various items of information about a selection four of cars and asked them to choose the best option.
The information had been engineered so that each car had a different mixture of positive and negative attributes, but one car was designed to be a best option and another was designed to be the worst option.
Dijksterhuis then divided his subjects into four groups. To two of the groups he only gave four items of information per car (simple condition), whereas the other group had to deal with 12 attributes per car (complex condition).
After reading the information about the cars, half of each group were allowed four minutes to think about their choice (conscious choosers). The other half were given anagrams to complete in order to distract them from thinking (unconscious choosers). They were then asked to make their choice of the best car and their result was compared with the real answer.
In the simple condition (four attributes per car), there was no real difference in success rate between the conscious and the unconscious choosers. However, in the complex condition (12 attributes per car) the people who had been distracted made consistently better decisions than the people who had been allowed to consider the choice.
So, is the unconscious mind better at making complex decisions than the conscious mind?
Dijksterhuis, A. (2006) On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect Science, 311(5763), 1005-1007. DOI: 10.1126/science.1121629
choice, cognitive bias, complexity, decision, Lehrer, rational, unconscious
Do I still like MBTI? (Part 2)
Posted by David Winter in Career choice, Decision making, Models, Understanding clients on 5 May 2010
In my last post I did some deconstructing of MBTI and the Jungian theory of psychological types that inspired it.
Now I’ll have a go at putting it back together again. Although, as with most of my attempts at reconstructing things I have dismantled, it won’t look the same and I’ll probably have a few bits left over!
I finished the last post by proposing that Jung had, in fact, developed a simple but elegant model of cognitive functions. I’ll start from there…
decision, instinct, Jung, MBTI, personality, rational