THE YEMENI ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEM

CULTURE
business unusual | LIFE | TRAVEL | DESIGN | TRAPPINGS
Zuckerberg dropping out of college to
start a billion-dollar business and you
over-value that story in your head.
Meanwhile, you never hear about all of
the college dropouts that fail to start a
successful company. You only hear about
the hits and never hear about the misses
even though the misses far outnumber
the hits.
• You see someone of a particular ethnic
or racial background getting arrested and
so you assume all people with that background
are more likely to be involved in
crime. You never hear about the 99% of
people who don’t get arrested because it
is a non-event.
• You hear about a shark attack on the
news and refuse to go into the ocean during
your next beach vacation. The odds of
a shark attack have not increased since
you went in the ocean last time, but you
never hear about the millions of people
swimming safely each day. The news is
never going to run a story titled, “Millions
of Tourists Float in the Ocean Each
Day.” You over-emphasize the story you
hear on the news and make an illusory
correlation.
Most of us are unaware of how our
selective memory of events influences
the beliefs we carry around with us on
a daily basis. We are incredibly poor at
remembering things that do not happen.
If we don’t see it, we assume it has no
impact or rarely happens.
If you understand how these errors in
thinking occur and use strategies like
the Contingency Table Test mentioned
above, you can reveal the hidden assumptions
you didn’t even know you had
and correct the misguided thinking that
plagues our everyday lives.
Cell D No full moon and a normal night.
Nothing memorable happens on either
end, so these events are easy to ignore as
well.
This contingency table helps reveal what
is happening inside the minds of nurses
during a full moon. The nurses quickly
remember the one time when there was a
full moon and the hospital was overflowing,
but simply forget the many times
there was a full moon and the patient
load was normal. Because they can easily
retrieve a memory about a full moon and
a crazy night, so they incorrectly assume
that the two events are related.
I first learned about this contingency
table strategy while reading 50 Great
Myths of Popular Psychology and I find
that this simple table can be adapted to
many different situations. Ideally, you
would plug in a number into each cell
so that you can compare the actually
frequency of each event, which will often
be much different than the frequency you
easily remember for each event.
HOW TO FIX YOUR MISGUIDED
THINKING
We make illusory correlations in many
areas of life:
• You hear about Bill Gates or Mark
Social and professional networks
set to dominate MENA recruitment in 2016
Have you not been receiving
any responses to the employment
applications you have
sent out? This infographic
released by PayFort based
off the findings of LinkedIn’s MENA
Recruiting Trends 2016 report may
explain why that’s been the case.
According to this study, relationshipbased
hiring is redefining the way
the MENA region’s employers fill
open positions, with 41% of recruiters
admitting to tapping their social and
professional networks as a preferred
source for staffing. Recruitment
based on employee referral programs
is also emerging as another key mode
of staffing. The infographic also highlights
the emphasis placed by talent
acquisition specialists on “quality”
as an employee performance metric,
and how the new hire’s contribution
to “employer branding” is playing a
critical role in hiring. The study also
notes that at a time when employee
retention figures as top priority for
recruiters, the inadequate number
of “qualified” candidates and the
inability to meet the compensation
expectations of top talent continue to
be key obstacles. www.payfort.com
50 great myths of popular psychology © wiley blackwell | infographic © payfort
66 Entrepreneur june 2016