Lie To Me (if you can!)

Tim Roth plays the face detective in this new TV series called 'Lie To Me'. He can always tell if someone's lying or telling the truth by analyzing a person's face, body, voice and speech. While watching the series I kept wondering. If every child in the world was trained in school to be able to detect lies, would people stop lying realizing it wouldn't work? What's your view?

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Good Relationship Banking

I have been doing some re-reading of a favorite book of mine "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman. In one of the chapters it talks about John Gottman, a University of Washington psychologist who has charted the emotional ecology of marriage with such precision that, in one study, he was able to predict which couples seen in his lab would divorce within 3 years with 94% accuracy!!! This is how he does it:

While the couples talk, sensors record the slightest flux in their physiology; a second-by-second analysis of their facial expressions (using the system for reading emotions developed by Paul Ekman) detects the most fleeting and subtle nuance of feeling. The result is akin to an emotional X-ray of the marriage.

What does this have to do with banking you might be thinking. Well, this is my thought.

Although it would be good for all couples to go through such emotional analysis of their relationship/marriage, we can't force people to do it. What we could do is to give every couple a financial incentive to try it.

Set up a new type of bank that grants loans to married couples on the condition that they pass John Gottman's test. If your marriage is proven to have a 94% chance to succeed and doesn't lead to a divorce, it's probably a good chance that the couple will work well with each other to solve out financial difficulties that arise in the future.

I don't mean to suggest that all married couples that stay together will fully repay their loans but the premise is that loans to couples who can stay together and solve their problems in ways that are not destructive can be more reliable.

It's just another metric to add to the decision to grant a loan if you are a bank. I admit it is an unusual practice/metric to add. But if good relationships lead to less loan delinquency and this metric is set as a condition before granting a loan, it will also bring social good in addition to more reliable profits for banks.

In the midst of the worst credit crisis and major scams such as the Madoff scandal, a lot of people talk about going back to the basics of banking, building anew relationships of trust. Investment banking used to be described as relationship banking in the not too distant past. Making loans to couples whose relationship is good can be Good Relationship Banking in the most literal sense of the term.

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Can therapy diminish an author's urge to write?

What prompted me to this question was thinking about authors whose books are fiction and auto-psychoanalytical. The themes are always personal obsessions they have which urge them to write about them. The work is never auto-biographical. They write esoteric fiction that reads as very real. They write compulsively, locked in their private space for hours. I wonder if these authors went through therapy and talked about their obsessions whether they might lose the urge to write about them. I'm thinking that if therapy won't diminish an author's urge to write, how it might affect his choice of themes and literary style going forward.

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