There are things in life that are unknown, and because they are unknown they are scary. About a month ago I was contacted by someone I followed on twitter and was asked to be on her radio show. That was something that I’d never done before.
For a moment, when I read that my heart jumped up in my throat and I thought “Gack!” There was a little bit of fear. (and yes, I acknowledged it and recorded it in WeFeel).
However, I really believe in WeFeel and what we can offer to therapists and the general public so I wrote back and said, “Yes” because this would be a good way to get the message out there. At that point it was easy — the date was set a month away so I didn’t even really have to think about it. So I didn’t, because when I did there was that little bit of fear again. And then the day was upon me and it wasn’t so bad.
The host of Moments of Clarity, Tiffany Werhner, put me at ease and we had a great conversation about where WeFeel came from and how it can help.
If you’d like to listen to the interview, here’s the podcast:
(or When did I lose my ability to decide where to eat without the whole planet’s input?)
As you navigate through this age of overloaded information, you’ll find that, by necessity, you will have to take shortcuts when it comes time to making decisions. If you use Yelp, Amazon, EBay, or any other service that features reviews given by people “just like you” then you probably have taken one of those shortcuts. You know what I’m talking about, ’cause just like me you’ve thought:
“I’ve never heard of The Steaming Burrito, but 92% of the reviewers say it’s the best, and so I shall dine there tonight!”*
For me, and maybe some of you, it’s become an addiction. Maybe addiction isn’t the right word. More like it has become so deeply integrated into my process that I won’t eat it, buy it, watch it, or hire it unless I can find something online that tells me it’s OK. Anonymous validation that if I want a steaming burrito, it’s gonna be good (and not overstuffed).
Crowd sourced information can help us make better decisions
If you are from the “When I was young our video games had 8-bits, one d-pad, and two buttons and we grateful to have it because our parents’ video games were rocks!” generation you’ll remember a time when you talked to actual people to get an opinion on a purchase, new restaurant, or movie. Well some of us did that, some of us who aren’t so good with the talking just found one thing we liked and stuck with it.
But even the most outgoing, know-everyone individual still had a limited pool of knowledge to draw from. We made lots of bad purchasing decisions. Case in point:
While people have been pondering the concept of the “Wisdom of the Crowd” for a long time (we’re talking more than 2000 years ago when Aristotle wrote about it), there hasn’t been a way for an individual to have near instantaneous access to the thoughts and opinions of huge amounts of people until fairly recently in human history.
Lior Zoref, showed us what can happen if we take the idea of crowd sourced thinking to the extreme back in 2012 when he gave the first ever crowdsourced TED talk. He recreated a classic example of guessing the weight of an OX by bringing a live ox on stage, the results are impressive.
So that settles it right? Evidence says turning to the crowd to make decisions is a good idea. I like good ideas. I like not having to expend mental energy on figuring out if I should spend my money on the latest mediocre remake of a mediocre movie from a time when I thought giant, sarcastic turtles that know karate were a good idea.
When we use online opinions we are borrowing anonymous trust
One of the benefits of the good ol’ days…or maybe just ol’ days, is that when we went and asked for an opinion from someone, we also had an existing relationship of trust with that individual. We wouldn’t have asked them in the first place if we didn’t put some weight into the validity of their response. That’s not to say, we don’t still ask our friends for advice, but that in many cases we have taken something that used to have an initial barrier of “Do I trust what this person will tell me?” and turned it into “Since lots of people have an opinion on this, it is equally (or more) valid than that of someone I know.”
We choose to seek out someone (anyone!) who already has built a trust with whomever we want to deal with so that we can minimize our risk. Once we find them, we can borrow their trust until we have some of our own. The more people we borrow from, the more confident we are that we have made a correct decision. And thanks to group feedback systems, there are now efficient means of borrowing huge amounts of trust:
5247 people gave it 5 stars, it must be good!
It’s crazy if you think about it, in less than a generation we went from depending on the voice of a trusted few, to the voice of thousands of random people to help us with our decision making process. There’s just a slight problem with that:
Anonymous trust can be purchased, faked and manipulated
In our efforts to make efficient decisions, we’ve inadvertently made the online review such a valuable commodity that it’s now become subject to Campbell’s law/Goodhart’s law. The gist of these laws/rules say that the more important a measure becomes, the more susceptible to corruption it becomes and that once a measure of something becomes a target/goal, it no longer is a good measure.
For example, on Yelp you have a restaurant and you know that 5 star restaurants get way more business than three star ones. You need to boost that rating and so you “bribe” your patrons by giving a 10% off coupon when they post a 5 star review. You took what was a good idea, providing people with a means of judging quality, and corrupted it by buying good reviews in order to draw in even more customers. As an aside I need to mention that, Yelp is doing all they can to fight these purchased and faked reviews.
And that brings me to what prompted this post. Back when we were working on our (unfortunately failed) Kickstarter campaign, we were contacted by people offering to sell us likes on Twitter and Facebook. There were places that would take our money to pledge it right back to our campaign in order to make it look like we had more real supporters.
We could buy fake trust and lend it out to all those people who needed to borrow some in order to trust what we were doing. Being the naive not-so-little Aspie that I am, it made no sense to me until I started looking into the value of borrowed trust. It turns out cheating the system is a huge thing.
So what are we as intelligent (you are still reading this post that has gone waaaaay long, so you clearly are smart) individuals supposed to do? I did the search for you and found a piece of advice that I really liked on a page from some attorneysthat will get fake bad reviews removed for you:
Trust the 3 star review
That’s something I never thought about. I normally jump to the 5 stars and then the 1 stars and ignore pretty much everything else. Logical to me- see what the best and worst of something is. But something in that article stuck with me:“Nobody leaves a fake three star review.”
So for me, I’m going to change how I borrow trust. I will start by looking at the 3s; taking the time to read the comments. People who post 3 star reviews seem to point out both the good and the bad of whatever it is they are reviewing. There’s no rabid fan loyalty and no agenda. I’m certainly not saying don’t trust places with 5 star reviews, and definitely not saying choose the mediocre 3 star somethings.
Give loyalty to the services that are the best out there. Just be smart about the unknown. The trust you are borrowing may not be real. If honesty is what you value you most in your trust lender, then right there in the middle with the 3s are a great place to start.
*Ok, so I made up “The Steaming Burrito” but you know what I mean.
Introducing the latest addition to WeFeel – a toolbox with emotional tools you can use on your own or with a care provider. The toolbox was on our project map from the beginning and has been the most requested item as we’ve introduced WeFeel to therapists and care providers over the past few months. Take a look at what the toolbox has to offer and give us some feedback in the comments.
The landing page for the toolbox
The Toolbox Landing Page
My Goals:
Once you click on the toolbox icon you land here where you get a quick overview of how you are doing on the goals you have set. I find seeing the progress I’m making, and how much more I need to do motivating. This gauge shows the progress over ALL your goals, except the ones you have completed.
Self-Talk Scratch Pad
How we talk to ourselves has a big influence on us. Changing negative self-talk to something more positive is a great skill to learn. This gives you space to jot down things you want to say to yourself to improve that skill. If you’ve got a mantra or affirmation you like to repeat, this is a good place to put it.
Important People and Services
There are people and services you can rely on for help. Since WeFeel is available across many countries, those services can vary. Taking the time to put in services for your area and people you can rely on will help you if you get to a crisis. You might not need to call, just the reminder that they are there for you might be all you need.
Goals
The Goals page
Goals are ways we improve ourselves. Even if you don’t have them written down, there are things that you want to do, places you want to go, or aspects of yourself that you want to change. Writing them down can be scary because it makes them real, but it also gives you a way to actually accomplish those things. The goals page gives you a place to write down your goals and keep track of your progress.
An important part of being able to accomplish big goals is to break them down into manageable parts. You list them here as sub-tasks, and as you check each sub-task off the progress meter for that goal will go up. You can add or remove sub-tasks as needed, so when life throws a monkey wrench that might have derailed you in the past, you can just make an adjustment to what you need to do.
The free version offers you one goal to track (hey, we gotta eat too!), but in the paid version you can have as many goals and sub-tasks as you want. That gives you the freedom to break really big goals into smaller sub-goals and subtasks that don’t seem too intimidating.
The goals list shows the goal and your next sub-task. Just tap on a goal to see all the details and check off the sub-tasks as you complete them.
Coping Strategies
As you learn to recognize your emotions by tracking them, you will also want tools to help you deal with them. You can create coping strategies on your own or with a councilor, therapist, or partner to have them in place before you feel them. These coping strategies integrate with the emotion tracking side. Whether you record emotions based on a scheduled or random prompt, or are feeling something strongly and decide to record it, a prompt will pop up reminding you of the coping strategy that you enter here.
A coping strategy pop-up
For example, if you are working on anger management you can put in coping strategies for the various levels of anger. Then when you feel anger, those strategies will pop up and remind you in the moment.
In the free version you can add a coping strategy for your Outlook. The paid version offers coping strategies for Outlook, the 6 core emotions, and the custom items you track.
Medications
The medications page is a place for you to write down any medications and supplements you might be taking. While WeFeel isn’t designed to remind you to take medications, we know it is hard to remember all the complicated names and dosages every time you are asked to provide a list. This lets you have it with you on your phone when you need it.
There you have it — the toolbox in a nutshell. We look forward to hearing what you think of the toolbox and how you use it.
Get the App
When you download the WeFeel App you start a journey. Where that journey takes you is up to you, but you can't get started without the app:
Coping Strategies
