Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is literally just emotional labor: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/5ea9f140-f722-4214-bb...

> we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators

So the job goes to the people who, in the eyes of the interviewer, can best fake happiness. The more desperate you are for the job for economic reasons, the more pressure on you to fake it convincingly. Big bright but not desperate smile. Right set of inspirational stories. No complaints or demands.

From article:

>> Here are three examples of simple exercises, each backed by rigorous evidence of effectiveness. In the first, the Gratitude Visit, participants prepare and present a 300-word testimony of gratitude to someone who changed their life for the better. In the second, Three Good Things, participants write down three things that went well each day and what caused those things to go well, for one week. The third, Using Signature Strengths in a New Way, calls on participants to complete an online strengths survey and then use one of their top strengths in a new way each day for at least a week

I don't know whether it's because I'm not American or just really cynical, but I absolutely hate this kind of mandatory public performance of fake emotions. It's also more work for the employees to do; presumably this essay-writing is on the clock, in addition to other duties? I wonder if there will be an essay mill you can go to for the right set of inspirational stories to feed to your manager?

Note that none of this stuff ever touches real concerns. Are the employees unhappy about the process? The breakroom snacks? The pay and pensions? Casualisation? Sexual harassment? (Obviously if someone gets groped at work, their happiness factor will go down, and that can be used against them in performance improvement)

All of this has already been seen with the Bradford factor, a means of measuring employee sickness and targeting them for firing.

> I don't know whether it's because I'm not American or just really cynical, but I absolutely hate this kind of mandatory public performance of fake emotions.

It seems that you completely misunderstood the study, a longitudinal study conducted over 5 years and compared against a real world factor outside the study: military awards irrespective of any study.

"mandatory public performance of fake emotions" relates to this paragraph of the article which I quoted:

>> Here are three examples of simple exercises, each backed by rigorous evidence of effectiveness. In the first, the Gratitude Visit, participants prepare and present a 300-word testimony of gratitude to someone who changed their life for the better. In the second, Three Good Things, participants write down three things that went well each day and what caused those things to go well, for one week. The third, Using Signature Strengths in a New Way, calls on participants to complete an online strengths survey and then use one of their top strengths in a new way each day for at least a week

Reading carefully, it is not clear whether those exercises were things that were specifically "validated" by this specific study, in the military, since the next paragraph talks about the "ENHANCE" programme in the military.

The study claims that high measures of X resulted in more rewards statistically validated against a long enough timespan and large enough sample size, where X is whatever they chose to measure. In this case the measure is happiness as defined by prior research which they describe in moderate details under the heading: "What Do We Know About Happiness?"

I think a lot of your points are good ones, but I wonder why you're so convinced it has to be fake emotions? It is not outlandish to think a person would have real gratitude for someone or three good things that happened in a day or strengths they can apply in new ways.

I share your sense that forcing employees to do these exercises is pretty gross, but these are not exercises that would be difficult or which I would balk at in my own private life. Not all emotion is fake...

"Not all emotion is fake..."

Agreed. But when people are incentivized to show outward indicators of certain emotions, people aren't particularly good mind readers which makes it hard to parse out fakers from the authentic, it leaves the door open for opportunism, smarm, passive aggression and a different flavor of toxicity.

The way I see it:

Authnetic and happy?

Fantastic!

Authentic and morose?

Not ideal but if the person makes positive contributions and can be trusted theres potential for value add.

Inauthentic with a sunny disposition?

This screams underhanded, manipulative and untrustworthy. Fuck off.

Makes me think of an adage from Warren Buffet.

"We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don't have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you're going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb."

https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/warren-buffett-hiring-t....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com