Five Laws of Human Nature

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Michael Marshall shares five laws of human nature — including Parkinson’s law and Student syndrome — with various sub-laws:

Parkinson’s law

Civil servant, historian and theorist Cyril Northcote Parkinson suggested in a 1955 article that work expands to fill the time available for its completion – backed up with statistical evidence drawn from his historical research. More recent mathematical analyses have lent support to the idea.

Parkinson also came up with the “law of triviality“, which states that the amount of time an organisation spends discussing an issue is inversely proportional to its importance. He argued that nobody dares to expound on important issues in case they’re wrong – but everyone is happy to opine at length about the trivial.

This in turn may be a result of Sayre’s law, which states that in any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.

Parkinson also proposed a coefficient of inefficiency, which attempts to define the maximum size a committee can reach before it becomes unable to make decisions. His suggestion that it lay “somewhere 19.9 and 22.4″ has stood the test of time: more recent research suggests that committees cannot include many more than 20 members before becoming utterly hapless.

Student syndrome

“If it weren’t for the last minute, I wouldn’t get anything done.” So said an anonymous wit, and none but the most ferociously well-organised can disagree.

In fact, procrastination is a major problem for some people, especially those who are easily distracted or are uncertain of their ability to complete a task.

One of the most well-known examples of vigorous procrastination is student syndrome. As anyone who has ever been (or known) a student will know, it is standard practice to apply yourself to a task only at the last possible moment before the deadline.

Student syndrome is so common that some experts in project management recommend not assigning long periods of time to particular tasks, because the people who are supposed to do them will simply wait until just before the deadline to start work, and the project will overrun anyway (International Journal of Project Management, vol 18, p 173).

Some of the blame for student syndrome may be laid at the feet of the planning fallacy: the tendency for people to underestimate how long it will take to do something.

If you often get caught out by how long things take, we recommend considering Hofstadter’s law, coined by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.”

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