What happened to these promising economists? Why didn’t they manage to get it together?

The short answer: stress did their heads in.

These economists had to survive in an extremely competitive environment. Their interaction with their hot-shot supervisors revolved primarily around being roasted and toasted in public seminars in which their work was held to practically the same standards as those of their Nobel guy supervisor. You might as well give up before you try! And, many of them did. They became so deflated by the constant criticism that they severely underperformed.

In less extreme ways, the same thing happens to many PhD students at some stage of writing their PhD. Even though they enjoy the intellectual challenge of writing a PhD, the mental/ emotional challenge is tougher than they had foreseen.

How to understand this? Why weren’t they ‘tougher’? Why didn’t the competitive environment lead to them doing their best work? That’s the theory, right? That competition and challenge will result in ‘excellence’?

An influential stress model, the effort-reward imbalance model (Siegrist 1996), explains that social reciprocity is the key concept to understanding stress at work. When social reciprocity is lacking in an organisation, in other words, when high efforts are not balanced by rewards received, this elicits recurrent negative emotions and a sustained stress response. The rewards in the model are formed by money and job security (OK, let’s forget about those two when you are writing a PhD), but most importantly by esteem. Whether people feel valued is one of the most important determinants for wellbeing. When this model is empirically tested, academia does badly. Being an academic is in the top-10 of most stressful professions (Rugulies 2009). (And this particular study looked at academics in Denmark. I wonder what the score would have been if they had done a study at the economics department of our not-to-be-named prestigious institution).

Lack of rewards in academia most often isn’t personal (although it can certainly feel that way). It is built into the system. Some of the ways the effort-reward balance may become skewed include:

• Supervision is difficult and undervalued. Publications count. Supervision doesn’t. Guess where your supervisor’s priority lies….it’s probably not your PhD. When you’re writing a PhD, lacking social rewards may be also due to unavailable supervisors, or even simply the lack of social skills under brilliant, but slightly (or not so slightly) autistic professors.
• Criticism. Criticism is the foundation of academic research and dealing with criticism is a major component of an academic’s life. But when emotional bank accounts run empty as the result of not feeling valued, criticism can start to feel like an attack. That’s when things go awry.
• A highly individualistic culture. As an academic you enjoy a lot of freedom. No boss to please, no set working hours, no-one telling you what to do. The flip-side of the coin is that it is often just you and your work, that is of little importance to anybody else. This is especially true when you’re writing a PhD. You are putting a lot of effort in without much output or reward, especially in the beginning. When I was writing my PhD I discussed my work with my supervisor about once every six or eight weeks. That’s a long time to go without significant interaction or encouragement.
• The reward structure in academia is a long-term one. It takes years to write a PhD. It may take years to get a paper published. It takes a lot of stamina to keep going if results and rewards are lacking in the short run.

A final component in the effort-reward imbalance model is a person’s personal characteristics. Over-commitment is seen as a key variable. Other personality traits that make someone more vulnerable to stress include perfectionism and competitiveness. This doesn’t bode well for academics, as these seem to be the bare minimal requirements for being allowed to join the academic community!

Another way stress in organisations is conceptualised is by looking at the balance between job demands, and job control. Again, academia doesn’t do well.

• Publish or perish culture. It may take years to publish a paper, and even when your work is of high quality the outcomes are uncertain. This may only be a matter of time, but time matters.
• Peer review. Constructive feedback can improve your work, but equally, when reviewers disagree on the fundamentals it may be an utterly confusing and demotivating experience. You may have to start all over again.
• The difficulty of measuring academic productivity is one reason counting publications has become so important. It is also the reason PhD programmes have all sorts of deadlines based on number of chapters submitted etc. But is academic progress linear in this way? Probably not.
• Job prospects. Academic jobs are increasingly precarious. Getting tenure, and a fixed contract, is now the holy grail. At the same time all the above still applies. Being good at what you do is a necessary, but no longer a sufficient condition to succeed. The rat race continues.
• The culture of meritocracy. Even though everyone knows how uncertain (low control) the academic environment is, people still very much act as if the system is merit-based (which it is to a degree, but certainly not fully, at all.) Publications and impact factor count, the rest less so. The lack of openness about the role of luck and rejection can create self-doubt and shame, and foster the negative aspects of competition, which then leads to lack of cooperation and trust.

Considering all of this, the odds as far as stress goes are definitely stacked against you. Universities and PhDs are not designed to provide a decent effort-reward and demand-control balance. In the optimal scenario, universities (and supervisors) would be aware of these mechanisms, and improve the balance by developing a culture where the shadow sides of the current set-up of academic incentives is better understood and reflected on. Ideas include: providing more support by means of valuing and rewarding supervision, reflecting on how progress is assessed and on the limitations of metrics and publication-counting, better counselling and mental health support, better training for a transition to non-academic jobs etc. It would be great to see a shift from the reductionist paradigm back to a way of thinking and working which supports academics.

In the meanwhile, there’s a lot you can do to find personal strategies to thrive in a less-than-optimal environment. It starts with acknowledging the mechanisms that cause you (and everyone else) stress, and recognising this isn’t a personal problem. There is nothing wrong with you, it’s the incentives that are messed up! Once that’s clear, you can start breaking the stress cycle in a way that works for you.

One final note to finish the story: at the physiological level, stress leads to underperformance. A stressed-out and under-confident state can be caused because the effort-reward/ demand-control imbalance triggers negative thoughts, which trigger unpleasant feelings, which trigger the body to react with a flight-or-flight response, which then informs the brain something is really wrong, which in the absence of more positive input results in a vicious cycle that can go on and on and on (see: the stress cycle). If the body and mind are in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight productivity drops. That in itself may be another trigger for negative thoughts and feelings. And so on, and so on.

In such a situation, the stress response can take over completely, and spins out of control. Everything that has to do with work now feels like a threat, and fear becomes a primary reality. The bad news: this happens so gradually, that such a state of distress feels ‘normal’, and does not lead to a correction towards a more peaceful and productive state. That’s why our brilliant economists are still there, trying to finish their PhDs, even though they are miserable and unsuccessful. Being stressed, stuck and miserable has become their new normal.

To perform well, the stress cycle has to be broken somewhere along the chain. We’ll be getting into this next week.

References

Rugulies, R., Aust, B., Siegrist, J., Von Dem Knesebeck, O., Bultmann, U., Bjorner, J. B., & Burr, H. (2009). Distribution of effort-reward imbalance in Denmark and its prospective association with a decline in self-rated health. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 51(8), 870.

Siegrist, J. (1996). Adverse health effects of high-effort/low-reward conditions. Journal of occupational health psychology, 1(1), 27.