If you've ever played Color Addict, you're familiar with the Stroop effect, but you may not know that this is what the interference of irrelevant information in a cognitive task is called. The game consists of reading cards on which the same word contains two pieces of information : for example, the word " green " is written, but it is written in blue ink.
When you have to process a large amount of information at a high frequency, chances are that you will confuse green and blue !
Understanding the Stroop effect is important in the management of complex situations because it allows us to better identify the needs of individuals in terms of clarity of information and intensity of solicitations.
At the origins : the desire to optimize the level of attention of individuals
John Ridley Stroop's Experience
The Stroop effect takes its name from the twentieth-century American psychologist John Ridley Stroop. An instructor in psychology and education in a military school, he had the idea of a test to measure an individual's attention and concentration skills. He therefore developed a game in which names of colour were inscribed in a colour other than the signifier.
Participants must first pronounce only the word that is written. Most of them manage to do so without difficulty. The selective attention bias is in full play: the participants mentally put themselves in " reading mode" and ignore the " setting " represented by the colour in which the word is inscribed.
It gets complicated when, right after having them read the word, Stroop now asks the participants to say the color of the print : they have to get rid of the bias installed to focus on another level of information selection. Moreover, most adults are more accustomed to looking for information in the content of things than in their form.
And it becomes downright perilous when Stroop alternates the requests : one time he asks for the word, one time he asks for the color, then three times in a row the word, then twice the color... Most participants end up confusing and failing in the test !
Attention variables
The Stroop test can immediately be used to distinguish the individuals who are best able to stay focused on a goal in a context of multiple stresses. It is therefore not surprising to see it enter the corpus of exercises intended to evaluate intellectual aptitudes, if not intelligence.
But above all, this test will pave the way for a whole series of research on the variables of attention. What stimulates her, to begin with ? Where we discover that attention is as low when we attend a lecture given in a monotonous tone as it is when we put individuals in competition with each other over a short period of time.
Between the two, a multitude of modalities more or less promote attention : the level of stakes, the variation of durations, formats, the quality of the relationship with the teacher (or the trainer, the researcher, the manager, etc.), the movement of the bodies, the mobilization of emotions...
When inconsistency does damage
The effects of inconsistency on effectiveness
At the same time as the Stroop effect highlights the levers of attention, it implicitly points to the factors that degrade individuals' ability to react. At the forefront is incoherence. Whether it manifests itself in contradictory orders, paradoxical injunctions, gaps between words and actions or submission to the emotional elevator, incoherence is terribly energy-consuming.
It imposes on the brain a demanding task of sorting and prioritization, mobilizing a " slow system" of which we know how much it costs in effort. The first effect, therefore, of subjection to inconsistencies : fatigue. Our brain responds to this symptom by activating its defensive reflexes but also by switching our decision-making capacity to " fast " mode. However, it is the rapid system that promotes the activation of biases and the reinforcement of stereotypes. In other words, the risk of making lower quality decisions or even making mistakes increases as contradictory information increases.
Inconsistency and disengagement
In addition to increasing the risk of error, inconsistency discourages... And ended up disengaging. This is a perfectly normal psychic response: torn between contradictory information, the individual suspends his involvement, as if he were waiting, consciously or not, for the environment to stabilize in order to be able to position himself.
Imagine a manager whose actions are contrary to what he advocates in his speeches (an exemplary manager, hum hum...) : his employees, not knowing whether, in order to progress, they must adopt behaviors similar to his or her expressed demands or satisfy his or her expressed demands, adopt wait-and-see attitudes, if not outright avoidance strategies.
These employees may have the courage to address this problem of inconsistency to the manager and the manager will say that he takes into account their need for alignment by promising to adjust the situation. But if he quickly resumes his previous habits, the inconsistency is compounded by the loss of confidence. Because this is what misalignment affects, in the end, trust.
Misalignment and counter-productivity
In an incongruous context, individuals can go so far as to adopt counterproductive behaviours.
For example, some will respond to their need for realignment by focusing almost exclusively on their interests, at the risk of frenzied individualism. Is it necessary to specify that this does not do much good to work collectives?
Others will enter into opposition : mainly occupied with detecting (and denouncing) situations revealing a lack of coherence, they find in misalignment the reason that justifies their acts of sabotage of the atmosphere, questioning of authority, disloyalty or even betrayal.
And then there are those who, believing that the rules of the game are not legible, define alternatives, in parallel. For example, when a manager loses influence due to inconsistencies, it happens that someone in his team informally and quietly takes control of the collective. This is not said, obviously not written in the organizational chart, it does not go through the normal channels of the managerial relationship and therefore does not provide the guarantees of the official hierarchical relationship to the parties. Beware of the risks of abuse of power !
The importance of consistency, especially in times of change
Consistency, a must-have for leadership
If there are those who believe that subjecting individuals to incoherence strengthens their attention span, their level of resistance to pressure and stimulates their agility, we have to face the facts : it produces mostly deleterious effects in the short term for the majority of us and it doesn't work on anyone in the long term. Aiming for coherence is therefore always a good idea, especially when you are in a position of leadership.
It is a question of ensuring the clarity of the information that is communicated, in particular by ensuring that too many messages are not disseminated at the same time. Because the more the guidelines multiply, the more the risks increase, that they overlap at the intersection of different directions.
It is also, and perhaps above all, a question of giving the same direction to the entire journey from intention to results. For example, if as a leader, you carry and affirm the conviction that well-being at work is a factor of performance, you will have to make it a reality... But it will have to be done by using methods that give you a sense of immediate well-being or reasons to make an effort to achieve a better level of well-being. Not so simple when, for example, the increase in the well-being of all involves the renunciation of certain habits or certain privileges of a few.
Congruence in change
Maintaining consistency sometimes becomes a challenge. In phases of change in particular, which in essence create a tension between " a before " to which individuals are adapted and a projection of the " after " surrounded by uncertainty. In itself, change produces the Stroop effect on the present in that it proposes two statements of the same situation : what we know that we no longer want, what we don't know from which we hope for something. It is not surprising that change then produces phenomena called " resistance " but which in reality correspond to the fundamental need to " find meaning ".
For the manager, it is a matter of managing transitions by respecting the psychological needs of each person while orchestrating the collective movement.
