By Jennifer Latson

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Check out the full episodes of The Index!

Epiphanies — the sudden “aha” moments that can spark innovation and shift the course of a career or a life — may be growing rarer. Why? Former Rice Business Professor Erik Dane spells it out in an episode of The Index, a new podcast jointly produced by Rice Business and Texas Monthly.

Dane’s research demonstrates that, to lay the foundation for epiphanies, we need to alternate between being present and sharply aware of what’s happening around us, then softening that focus and letting our minds wander without a definitive purpose. But with a smartphone in our hand — or even in the same room — we’re unlikely to do either.

“It’s harder to focus or to let your mind wander, because your phone will grab you from either of those states,” suggests Tim Taliaferro, Texas Monthly’s chief innovation officer, who interviewed Dane for the episode.

“Yes. It’s the state of living in limbo,” Dane says. “I do think the mind is probably jumpier now than it has been historically, due to these digital distractions and our inability to manage those distractions as effectively as we’d like.”

But there are steps we can take to make our minds more receptive to sudden flashes of insight — and Dane explains how.

The Index grew out of a collaboration between Texas Monthly and Rice Business at the 2019 South by Southwest music and technology festival, where the two entities co-hosted a pop-up experience in an Austin storefront. Dane and other Rice Business professors presented some of the groundbreaking findings from their Rice research — and the podcast was born.

Hosted by journalist Saul Elbein, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the NPR radio show This American Life, among other outlets, The Index explores economics, psychology, and the hidden business of everything.

In one episode, Rice Business professor Anastasiya Zavyalova discusses the science of scandals: how they start, how they end, and what to do when you’re caught in one. In another, Rice Business Dean Peter Rodriguez explains the economics behind why it’s so difficult to make a living in the arts.

“This is a great dismal science story,” Rodriguez says. “Take a Mozart concerto. He writes it in 1789. It takes four musicians and 56 minutes to perform in 1789; it takes four musicians and 56 minutes to perform in 2019. In other words, there are no productivity increases, by nature of the good itself, in live performance. … You can’t say, ‘Play the notes faster!’ ”

Other half-hour episodes include insights from Rice Business professors Utpal Dholakia and Douglas Schuler, along with Rice Business Wisdom editor Claudia Kolker and “modern-day wildcatters” Gabriella Rowe, the CEO of Station Houston; Marc Nathan, vice president of strategy at Egan Nelson; and Lawson Gow, the CEO and founder of The Cannon — all of whom are working to make Texas a leader in tech innovation.

“Wildcatters are, of course, the old independent oilmen known for raising capital on pluck and spending it on a hunch. So how does that translate to a modern tech economy?” Elbein asks. “How does an oil town and an oil mentality become a tech mentality?”

“It’s one of my favorite parts of Houston — I think it’s more of an ethos than a specific group of individuals, but it’s that idea of rolling up your sleeves and getting it done,” Rowe says. “In the world of tech that we see in Houston, that means a whole lot of innovation to solve really big problems.”

The Index is the latest way Rice Business is making its professors’ research accessible outside the halls of academia, in the hopes that their science-backed, peer-reviewed insights will help spark the innovation needed to solve really big problems. As Elbein points out, much of this research has far-ranging applications that will prove useful well beyond the boardroom.

Take Dane’s research on epiphanies, for example. Dane started studying them because he wasn’t sure they actually existed.

“So this is kind of an academic looking for Bigfoot,” Elbein says.

“It’s common in Hollywood — these lightbulb moments that are dramatized,” Taliaferro replies. “And he wanted to figure out, does that really happen? So he surveys 500 people. And about half of them reported having had epiphanies.”

“It’s really exciting. You find out that this thing you thought was this mystic or metaphysical concept actually happens to people kind of a lot. So why was that even relevant to a business professor in the first place?” Elbein asks.

“He studies cognition: how we think, and how we come up with ideas,” Taliaferro explains. “[Epiphanies] represented a new model of problem-solving. All businesses have problems to solve. So if you’re a business that can foster better problem-solving, you have a competitive advantage in the marketplace. So it is actually important to the bottom line that a company be good at solving problems. So this is legit research for a business professor to be engaged in: How do good companies do this?”

The answer, according to Dane’s research, comes down to mindfulness — especially when we can channel what he calls “the traveler’s mind.”

“There’s nothing sacred or hallowed about a given conversation or a particular trip that imparts the epiphany onto you, but unless you’re truly mindful in the moment, it’s going to be hard for stimuli you encounter to open you up,”  Dane says. “How can we think about our surroundings in an entirely new way, even if we’re used to them? I talk about a concept called the traveler’s mind.”

“If you went on a trip six months ago, you can probably remember it in vivid detail. But can you tell me what you were doing on Tuesday two weeks ago?” Taliaferro says, explaining the heightened observational powers inherent to the traveler’s mind. In other words, approaching our everyday world with the same curiosity and focus we use when we explore new places can yield discoveries that get closed off when we go into autopilot mode.

“So if we can find ways to open our eyes to these otherwise mundane moments, I do think it increases the chances of epiphanies,” Dane says. “And really just making better decisions and solving problems more effectively.”

Jennifer Latson is a staff writer and editor at Rice Business and the author of The Boy Who Loved Too Much.

Based on research by Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung and Gita V. Johar

• Feeling ownership over a product can activate a person’s identity in areas related to the product. It can also deactivate a person’s identity in areas unrelated to the product.
• When product-related identity is activated, performance in activities related to the product is likely to improve. 
• At the same time, performance in non-related activities is likely to get worse.

Want to get better at a task? It may be possible to shop — or imagine — your way to success.

Just pretending to shop for items associated with certain skills (for example, a fancy calculator) may actually improve your performance in areas related to that skill (in this case, math).

That’s because our identities are highly influenced by our possessions — which we often experience as part of ourselves. As a result, this activation of an identity by our possessions, even imaginary ones, can enhance performance. For example, one study found that by using a pen labeled “MIT” on GRE exams, students scored higher than those using a standard Pilot pen, particularly when they believed that their inner ability was fixed, and that they had to rely on external products to improve their ability.

In 2018, Rice Business professor Jaeyeon Chung and Gita V. Johar of Columbia University took a close look at the implications of this human quirk.

In a series of experiments, Chung and Johar found that the product-related activation of our identities (e.g., calculator ownership awakening an inner math prodigy) can actually de-activate our identities unrelated to the product, and undermine performance in other tasks.

For example, shopping for a calculator could make you perform better on a math test, but worse on a creative-writing essay.

Merely owning an item, the scholars discovered, is only part of the equation. Self-concept clarity — that is, the strength and clarity of one’s personal beliefs — makes a difference as well. A person whose self-concept is well-defined, consistent, and stable is less likely to be influenced by external factors such as possessions.

To measure the phenomenon, Chung and her colleague devised a series of experiments. The results showed that when a person merely imagines an item she longs to own, two inner changes occur: Identities related to the product are awakened, and identities unrelated to the desired object are stifled. Strikingly, these changes have measurable consequences on the performance of tasks.

But how do you awaken an inner self through possession, and measure its effects? The team found an ingenious approach: They assigned people to a control group or an experimental group, and then asked them to peruse an online IKEA. The control group was told to shop for items to go in a senior citizen home. The experimental group shopped for items to go into their own homes.

The experimental group, who got to imagine items such as a MALM bed in their own bedrooms, were more likely to think of themselves as artistic designers than were their counterparts, the imaginary retirement home shoppers. The exercise, in other words, had activated participants’ art-related identities.

Next, Chung and Johar asked everyone to complete a math task. The experimental group scored lower at this than did those in the control group. Their newly awakened identities as design mavens had undermined their ability to solve math problems, apparently because they were unrelated to the fetching Scandinavian décor they’d imagined owning.

The researchers then took another approach. Asking one group of participants to imagine owning a calculator, they activated that group’s “math identity.” They then asked all the participants to engage in a short IQ test. Though there was only one test, the researchers labeled it two different ways, indicating to some participants that the test measured math skills, and to others that it measured creative writing skills.

Despite the test being exactly the same, the would-be calculator owners performed markedly worse when they thought they were doing a creative writing project than when they thought the test measured their math skills. Why, exactly? The researchers concluded that imagining owning a piece of math-y technology and activating their “math person identities” tamped down participants’ “creative writer” identities — so much so that it actually degraded their performance in that area.

In a third experiment, Chung and Johar asked a group to envision calculators that they actually owned, rather than simply imagining buying one. Again, the group that felt ownership regarding a math tool performed better on tasks that seemed math-related, but worse on tasks that seemed unrelated to math. The finding was robust when the task itself was exactly the same and the only difference how the task was labeled.

Interestingly, identity activation and performance were influenced by the participants’ level of self-concept clarity. Some people have a clear and consistent self-view that does not vary over time; these are individuals who are less likely to rely on their possessions or other environmental stimuli to infer who they are. These individuals were less likely to be affected by the “ownership” of a calculator.

In other words, self-concept clarity limited the power of ownership on identity activation and performance. Chung and Johar’s findings offer practical implications for both business and academia. Owning or even imagining that you own an object linked to a particular task can make you feel — and act — more like an adept.

So the next time you have a big quantitative test coming up, consider browsing for a high-end calculator first — and unwinding with your oil paints or “Infinite Jest” when you’re done. For best results, of course, take the test with your Rice-labeled pen.

Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung is an assistant professor of marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Chung, J. & Johar, G. (2018). The seesaw self: Possessions, identity (de)activation, and task performance. Journal of Marketing Research, 55(5), 752-765.