To Act or Not To Act

You know that feeling when you find yourself suddenly and unexpectedly in the spotlight? Chances are you know the feeling. If you are one of the rare few that don’t, you have almost certainly been in the crowd when someone else finds themselves thrust into the merciless glow of the spotlight.

There you are, minding your own business, comfortably anonymous in the crowd, when suddenly and without warning you realize that everyone’s attention is trained on you. You didn’t ask for the attention and you definitely aren’t prepared for it. It’s an experience that induces a spontaneous rush and unique blend of emotions, including the sheer panic of trying to figure out what to do, in real time, as the eyes of the crowd stare expectantly at you.

Maybe you’ve had the misfortune of knocking over a tray of dishes in a crowded restaurant. Maybe you’re my wife and the (literal) spotlight roaming the crowd in search of a volunteer at a Cirque Du Soleil show stops on you. Maybe you’re enjoying yourself at a professional sporting event when it’s brought to your attention that you’re being broadcast on the jumbotron in front of 20,000 people. Or maybe you’re 12 years old and you strip out of your sweat pants and trot towards the pool to start swim practice at 7 am when you realize everyone is staring at you because you’re wearing tighty-whities instead of a swimsuit.

The unexpected glare of the spotlight is jarring, if not downright frightening. Most people, given the option, would choose to avoid the experience all together (especially if it involves your underwear). But we don’t have the option. Almost everyone becomes the unexpected center of attention a few times in their life. And, interestingly, almost everyone has the same reaction when they find themselves in this situation: Do something. When forced into the spotlight, rarely does a person just sit there and do nothing. Our instinctual reaction is to act.

If you’ve just knocked over a tray of dishes in a crowded restaurant, you either drop to the floor and try to quickly clean up the mess or you look for the nearest exit to make an escape. If the volunteer spotlight lands on you, chances are you will willingly volunteer for whatever the show has in store. When you realize you’re on the jumbotron, if you’re like most people, you do one of three things: you smack your neighbor and point up to the screen, or you make some ridiculous celebratory gestures with your hands and/or arms, or you jump up and just go dumb. And if you’re the poor kid that just accidentally PG-13 streaked his entire swim team, you bolt for the coach’s office and call your mom for an emergency ride home. What you won’t do is nothing. What you won’t do is just stand there and go about what you were doing as if the spotlight never landed on you.

Why is it we are compelled to act when we are unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight?

Action Bias

Behavioral science tells us, given a certain set of circumstances, we have an innate bias towards action. Formally defined, an Action Bias is when “…people have an impulse to act in order to gain a sense of control over a situation and eliminate a problem…[an Action Bias is] particularly likely to occur if we do something for others or others expect us to act…[an Action Bias] may also be more likely among overconfident individuals or if a person has experienced prior negative outcomes, where subsequent inaction would be a failure to do something to improve the situation.”

To summarize, there are three key circumstances that promote an Action Bias:

• Need to gain control (picking up the mess you made in knocking over dishes)
• Expectation of others (you aren’t supposed to say no to the volunteer spotlight)
• When we are overconfident (these 20,000 people need to see my dance moves)

(To be fair, we don’t always have a bias towards action. There are circumstances that will promote an Omission Bias — tendency to favor doing nothing — but that is another article for another day. Back to the Action Bias…)

So, there you have it. Behavioral Science has, once again, trained its focus on a curious aspect of human behavior and provided understanding that had previously alluded us.

Or did it?

Sure, Behavioral Science is the first to formally identify, define and validate the term “Action Bias”, but knowledge and understanding of the concept is at least as old as recorded history itself.

Just Do It

Back in ancient Mesopotamia, citizens of humanity’s first great civilization had two sayings in particular that spoke to the importance of taking action:

• Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.
• He who knows how to move around becomes strong. He will live longer than the sedentary man.

Not to be outdone, the bible also informed believers of the rightness of acting:

• So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
• But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.

Today, we have a wide variety of ways we encourage one another to default to taking action:

• Just do it.
• Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
• Actions speak louder than words.
• Talk is cheap.

Bottom Line

I’ll be the first to admit that these sayings don’t exactly hit the mark regarding behavioral science’s technical definition of Action Bias, especially in regard to the three circumstances outlined above. They are more like cheerleaders for the merits of having an Action Bias. In fact, the way these phrases are structured raises an interesting question: Do we have an action bias because it’s evolutionarily beneficial, and therefore we tell each other to act? Or have we talked ourselves into a preference for taking action, which makes acting feel as if it will benefit us? In other words, which came first?

Perhaps a critical mass of our chimpanzee ancestors, those that successfully passed their genes on to us, when presented with the choice between acting or not, survived because they chose to take action. Maybe they were the ones who survived because they we’re pro-active in their hunting and exploring and what not. Or maybe there was no critical mass of “actors” and we’ve consciously decided that acting is better than not, which we’ve communicated through sayings like these.

Like the old chicken or egg dilemma, we may never definitively know which came first. It’s an interesting question in its own right, but it’s outside the scope of our discussion here. We came to simply recognize the contributions of behavioral science in furthering our understanding of human nature, while also acknowledging that these are concepts that we’ve been aware of for long time.

That said, now that we are talking about it, I wish I had more time to dig into the “which came first” question. Actually, my lack of preparedness has me feeling a bit anxious. It feels like, all of a sudden, you’re all staring at me. It feels like I’ve been put under the microscope. I don’t like this feeling. In fact, if you’ll excuse me, I’m just gonna head towards that exit…