Facebook, Human Fear and Corporate Management

by DKashyap

Facebook, Human Fear and Corporate Management

What can we learn from Facebook about human fears that can help us run better companies and improve interpersonal relationships?

With more than 1 billion users world wide, Facebook is like its own virtual nation. A nation, that promises its citizens an almost unconditional citizenship, with a perceivably elaborate scheme and regulations to protect the rights of its citizens. This article, however, is not about how great Facebook is as a social networking website, it is about discussing one of the most important of many reasons why Facebook is more successful at connecting with you at an individual level and have a relationship to the point, that you don’t remember what you did with your free time, before Facebook came along.

Facebook team, wittingly or unwittingly, have understood the way we as humans are wired for fear and how it drives our lives, and might I add, have found the most ingeniously innocuous ways to address some of those fears. Many world religions and psychologists have talked about those fears in different ways and have worked with them or used them to control or care, depending upon their motives and intentions.

Just like most animals, we are wired to fear scarcity of material resources that make our physical lives possible, and to fear predators that might steal from us or hurt us in more ways than just physical. However the story gets interesting when we talk about the third unique fear that we have as human beings.

The Third Fear: Fear of Lack of Meaning and Significance in and of life itself (FLMSL).

 I call it unique because it requires imagination and we are the only species that have the apparatus that makes imagination and higher level thinking possible; the prefrontal cortex. FLMSL is important to be understood before we can talk and explore and connect it to our virtual relationship with Facebook.

 Let’s do a thought experiment: Think what will happen if you die right now and somehow even though you can not interact with the world you are able to observe it. What you observe is this, after brief moments of grieving even your loved ones move on in life. Some early some slightly later, but eventually everyone’s resilience kicks in and they start going about life as they did when you were there.

 This thought that ‘I don’t mean much in the long and large scheme of things,’ and ‘I am quite dispensable,’ is a rather unpleasant and unsettling thought. To a few it drives them to the famously known ‘existential crisis.’ Let me repeat, it is important for human beings to have Meaning and Significance in and of life itself. We are the only species that advocates pursuit of contentment, however, even in that pursuit we are not satisfied with the amount of contentment we ‘should have’ had to avoid FLMSL.

 The extent of FLMSL can of course vary and manifests itself in many different ways in different people according to their personality types and their past and present choices they have made to deal with it.

 FLMSL shows itself in many ways in our lives: our desire to be loved, our desire to be listened to, our desire to achieve professionally to feel ‘worth it’ to ourselves or showcase the same to others, our desire to excel, our desire to have friends and so on; basically our desire to be visible to others and to ourselves. May be not human mind so much, but human brain understands the evolutionary importance of being liked and talked about and not forgotten and cared for and shared with.

 There are myriad ways in which people can choose to deal with FLMSL. These choices can decide whether the expression and manifestation of this unique fear/desire is healthy for us or not.

 I will constrict the scope of this article to only exploring the more benign expression of this fear/desire. Other expressions like our need to insult others, our need to not just shine but also out-shine others, our habit of talking over others, our ways of being ‘liked’ by association with other ‘liked’ people, our easily offended ways of interacting with the world, our need to control others either through domination or submission, our need to desperately hold on to a relationship that is obviously not good for us and many other ways in which FLMSL can run amok. That’s a topic for another post.

 That noted, let’s get back to how Facebook addresses FLMSL. Facebook addresses our need/desire of having a meaning and meaning something to ourselves and others, in different ways and intensity in our lives. It not only let’s you express through your postings what’s important to you it gives the avenue for it to be ‘liked,’ ‘shared’ and ‘commented’ upon.  The classical textbook ways of making people feel important.

 Facebook gives you visibility, albeit virtual but a strong psychological perception of visibility and importance nonetheless. It lets you gauge the extent of your importance through the visibility of your posts, pictures and your videos. Thereby implicitly answering the question, do I matter? Do I have meaning?

 Is it not the same thing that we are looking for in our relationship with other human beings? And feel disillusioned and dis-interested when we don’t feel welcomed and important in their lives? Is that why Facebook starts to be a more real relationship tool, through which we achieve a non-judgmental and yet a reassuring platform to present and showcase ourselves?

 It is almost like we use Facebook as an impact-assessing tool. How much do I mean and affect the world around me, sometimes also counted through the number of people and/or achievements I can showcase on my wall. The way when Hulk in the movies, hits the floor with his fist the impact fades out as the distance from his fist increases, the same way for us the greater our impact travels the better we feel.

We can imagine what we would feel like if these numbers matched our Facebook posts.

It then doesn’t come as a surprise that the most preferred professions or positions are the ones that provides us with the most visibility, which puts us front and center of public admiration, a movie star or Queen of England. One important way we also measure the net worth of a star is, with the impact and reach he or she has on a global scale.

Some individuals need the stage of an Academy Awards Ceremony to feel like they have never felt before, some just need that psychological stage being provided to them by their loved ones, but we all desire it.

 Objectively speaking, when outside triggers like friends, family and bosses & team members at work address FLMSL by giving our humanness a holistic visibility and importance, the happiness quotient of the individual goes up and it stays up (with minimum fluctuations) when the FLMSL is addressed from within the individual. When the individual has converted his need for meaning and significance in life to a flexible desire. From “I need people to listen to me, and if they don’t, either I am bad or they are horrible” to “It’s highly desirable that people listen to me, but if they don’t, I can still manage to be happy.’

 Corporations understand this today more then ever before that a happy person is a more productive person. In leadership training, we need to see if the team leaders, managers and even team members are able to make each other feel visible and important in real, relevant and meaningful ways.

 Do people in your team and department feel they are ‘Liked’ and appreciated or corrected in ways that are likeable? Are they being ‘Commented’ upon in ways that are genuine and holistic view of them? Are their success stories or challenges being ‘Shared’ in ways that are learning and problem solving and not blaming?

 So if we want to slow down the attrition rate of good people in our companies and in our private lives, especially because of preventative reasons, we might want to look at the way Facebook addresses a uniquely human need of wanting to matter.