There are many things about human behaviour that are very peculiar. Here are two examples of some mind-screws; one for sportspeople and the other for MBA students.
When you are told that the distance for a particular cycle race is 100 km a cyclist will expend all of her energy until the finish line with nothing more to give. Strangely enough, if the cyclist was told the race distance is 120 km then a psychological recalibration occurs and a physical effort will be realised where on the mountain-top finish the cyclist will be exhausted, with nothing more to give. Nothing has changed other than an official saying the race is shorter or longer.
In other words, we set ourselves a goal (or have a goal set) and then we go until we reach the goal. If the goalpost – or finish line – is moved we then get ourselves into a psychological tizz – we are mind-screwed.
The MBA example is this: We are told that the exam marks for Prof John Ford's Management Accounting and Dr Peter Tobin's Information Knowledge Management will be available after 4pm on Thursday (The normal waiting period for module results is 7 weeks). Being human beings we lock in on the 16:00:00 PM (UTC +2:00) [Pretoria, Harare] time.
At exactly 16:00:01 PM (UTC +2:00) [Pretoria, Harare] we log on and can’t find the marks. We do this again at 16:01:41 PM (UTC +2:00) [Pretoria, Harare] and still no marks.
Sure enough the marks appear on my nth logon attempt at 16:09:56 PM (UTC +2:00) [Pretoria, Harare].
As a human being and MBA student I should avoid the exam mark tizz and just logon to ClickUp in the evening with a mug of Horlicks sometime after the 8 o’ clock news. But, no I have been mind-screwed and I will log on at exactly 16:00:01 PM (UTC +2:00) [Pretoria, Harare] – I’m only human after all.
