Habituation.

With this discussion of habituation, we continue our series of articles for what we call our non-HR readers. By non-HR readers, we mean anyone not in the human resources department but still involved in recruiting new employees.

While our primary goal is to offer the most comprehensive and innovative psychometric test on the market, we also aim to help you recognize certain processes in your employees.

Before we go further, we'll touch upon the neuroscientific foundations on which our test is based.

Alongside man's basic need for movement, learning ranks high on the list of "priorities." Learning can be non-associative when an organism is exposed to a stimulus once, or generally, several times, and learns or infers from these stimuli. Learning can also be associative when an organism learns about the relationship between various different stimuli or between a stimulus and its own actions.

Beyond non-associative learning, the concept of habituation is important to us. We will illustrate habituation with something we cannot ignore or deny today: the SARS-Cov-2 virus infection. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by the newly discovered coronavirus.

This isn't our first encounter with coronaviruses; they are a large family of viruses found in both humans and animals. Under an electron microscope, they appear crown-shaped, hence their name, corona, from the Latin word (as it is medicine) meaning crown. Some coronaviruses have been known since the 1960s, causing everything from common colds to severe respiratory infections. Not so long ago, we encountered SARS, which also belonged to the coronavirus family. Today, we have the new coronavirus SARS-Cov-2, and the WHO has named the disease caused by SARS-Cov-2 COVID-19. So, SARS-Cov2 is the virus, and COVID-19 is the disease it causes. Corona or Corona… it's a crown.

But what do COVID-19 and habituation have to do with each other?

In non-associative learning, we distinguish two concepts. Habituation is the weakening of an organism's reaction to a repeated, (more or less) harmless or insignificant stimulus (after a while, the incessant drilling from a 'jackhammer' somewhere in the building won't bother us as much). We also have sensitization, which is the strengthening of an organism's response to various stimuli that immediately arise after a stronger, harmful stimulus.

And now that we've seen what habituation is, let's focus a bit on memory.

Input data, when put into context, enters sensory memory, then short-term memory, where it will either trigger a reaction or lead to forgetting, or, after repetition, become long-term memory.

Sensory memory stores include visual, auditory, and tactile memory. They have a very limited capacity and will retain information for up to five seconds (or less).

Short-term memory also has a very limited capacity and will retain information for only a few minutes, usually just long enough to complete a task (e.g., remembering one of your PINs). After that, the information is lost or, through repetition (the same PIN dozens of times), transferred to long-term memory. Information only moves to long-term memory after a certain amount of repetition, where it will eventually remain. It has a large capacity and stores permanent memory traces.

Let's return to COVID-19. There was a lot of information. Most of it revolved around the number of infected, recovered, and deceased, changing daily. How many were infected yesterday? Well… a lot. And today? Well… still a lot.

In addition to the sheer volume of information, it was mostly unstructured. One task force member would present one part, another member another part… no one summarized.

What, if anything, did we remember from all of it? From the beginning of the pandemic? Fear! After all, we ended up in lockdown with an immeasurably smaller number of infected (How many were there in total? Daily? Overall?), and today, no one mentions that same lockdown.

And what happened to us? Habituation. Either we got used to it and stopped caring, or, even worse, it irritates us.

However, the situation is not harmless at all. But most of us don't know anyone who has been or is sick. So, most of us 'coded' it as a harmless or insignificant event. We simply got used to it. We forgot the rest. Or we didn't want to remember at all.

We do not consider COVID-19 a harmless disease. It is clear to us that for most young and healthy people, it might be, but for COVID-19, there is still no vaccine to protect all those who need it. The elderly, sick, immunocompromised, respiratory and cardiac at-risk, and so on.

This was just an example of how communication, even within our companies, can be dangerous. Dangerous enough for our employees to become indifferent. To get used to it.

So, communicate. Clearly and loudly. Repeat. Be structured. Draw conclusions. But leave no room for fear. Even in the #newnormal. There's no need for us to 'vaccinate' our employees. Let someone else truly handle that.