Study: People have never been more afraid to speak their minds

November 10, 2021

Findings just released from a study conducted by Crucial Learning—a Provo-Utah-based company that offers courses in communication, performance, and leadership—indicate that a shocking 9 out of 10 people have felt emotionally or physically unsafe to speak their minds more than once during the past 18 months.

Predictably enough, the conversation topics that have generated the most fear include political or social issues (74%) and COVID-19 issues (70%), the company states in a news release posted on PRNewswire.

The study of more than 1,300 people found that instead of voicing their opinions or concerns, respondents are resorting to a host of unhealthy behaviors that are crippling constructive dialogue and driving viewpoints farther apart. Among the behaviors are the following:

Staying silent but feeling inauthentic (65%)
Avoiding people (47%)
Silently fume and stew (42%)
Ruminating about all the things they’d say if they had the courage (39%)
Faking agreement (19%)
Severing relationships (14%)

Indeed, 39% of survey respondents reported feeling unsafe either every day or every week. Only 7% report that they are just as confident as ever in social situations.

Emily Gregory, a co-researcher of the study and coauthor of a brand new third edition of the book, Crucial Conversations, said the results begged the question: What is causing this heightened fear?

“Is the sole cause of our anxiety and subsequent silence the results of a volatile social landscape?” asked Gregory. “Or are there other factors at play and we’re actually in more control of our conversations and outcomes than we think?”

Leaning on a long-established concept in psychological research called the Least Preferred Coworker scale, Gregory and and her co-researcher Joseph Grenny asked subjects to describe their level of fear in a recent social situation and their scaled perception of the person(s) they were fearful of addressing. For example, were they more open or close minded, informed or ignorant, or rational or irrational? Using stepwise regression, they next measured how much of their fear could be accounted for by more negative characterizations of others.

The result? Those who tended to tell more extreme stories about their conversational counterparts were more than three times more likely to feel fearful and 3.5 times more likely to lack confidence in speaking their minds.

“We were stunned to see the size of the effect stories have on our confidence and ability to speak up,” Gregory reports. “But it makes sense. If I tell myself you are an ignorant, evil, jerk, I’m more likely to think you’ll be vindictive—or worse—if I disagree with you.”

Having identified subjects who faced similar communication challenges, but generated more confidence and less fear, Grenny and Gregory asked them to identify skills that help speak up with poise and integrity. Top skills included:

Make it safe (used by 76% of confident subjects). When emotions escalate, good crucial conversationalists reassure others of their respect for them and point out values they both share.
Get curious (used by 72%). Rather than try to decide “who is right,” they sincerely try to understand the world view of the other person. They ask questions, seek to understand, and show interest.
Start with facts, not judgments or opinions (used by 68%). Carefully lay out the facts behind their point of view. Use specific and observable descriptions.
Don’t focus on convincing (used by 48%).Don’t let your main goal be to change the other person’s mind. Instead, encourage the sharing of ideas and listen before responding.
Be skeptical of your own point of view (used by 42%). Conversations work best when you come in with a combination of confidence and humility. Be confident that you have a point of view that is worth expressing, but humble enough to accept that you don’t have a monopoly on truth and new information might modify your perspective.

Research contact: @CrucialLearning

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast