2013 Issue

48 response to stimulus. The first test is surviv- ability, “fight or flee.” A person may become red in the face and yell or just slam the door. If the person at the door remains calm, the next response is also automatic based on an assessment of whether this stimulus isgoodor bad based on learned behavior. If the person watches “conservative” cable television, the response might be that global warming is a “liberal conspiracy.” Only if the person is will- ing to postpone a decision does the person enter into the engineer’s thought process of careful contemplation, wherever that process may lead. I call my figure simplistic, because two Nobel Prizes have been awarded on this model, and I recommend that the reader refer to these more complex models [8]. C. Fashion and Fancy One of the rule-making mechanism is what management literature refers to as “fash- ion.” A conservative thinker from the past, Julius Caesar (100 BC to 44 BC), described this behavior of “jumping onto bandwag- ons” in his conquest of Gaul (primarily today’s France but also extending east into a portion of today’s Germany) [11]: “It is a custom of theirs to stop travelers, even against their will, and to question them about where they have heard by chance or by inquiry on this subject or that subject; and in the towns a crowd will gather round traders and demand to know what country they have come from and what they have learnt there. Such hearsay reports often in- duce them to make momentous decisions, which they are bound to repent immediately afterwards, since they credulously swallow unconfirmed rumors…” Political movements are motivated by fash- ionable versions of historically American viewpoints superimposed on current prob- lems. One of these recurring movements has been described as “anti-intellectualism” [12]. This anti-intellectualismdividemight be described today as [13]: “…Onone sideare theunpretentiousmillions of authentic Americans; on the other side stand the bookish, all-powerful liberals who run the country but are contemptuous of the tastesandbeliefsof thepeoplewho inhabit it.” Engineers may not think of themselves as “bookish liberals,” but many folks see en- gineers just that way. Remember how the characters were suspicious of the engineer depicted in the film “Flight of the Phoenix” (originally released in 1965 and remade in 2004)? Engineers, wrap your head around those perceptions and imagine how to pro- vide leadership out of the distrust underpin- ning these perceptions. Figure 3 - Second Debate Figure 2 - a Naive Model of Decision Making TAKING POLITICAL ACTION | continued from page 47