RECENTLY, when I looked out of the window of my room at the Singapore General Hospital onto the junction where Chin Swee Road and the Central Expressway cross Outram Road to join the Ayer Rajah Expressway, I saw bumper to bumper traffic between 7.30am and 8.30am.
Isn't Singapore supposed to be in a recession - indeed, the worst recession we have experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s? Yes it is, and Singaporeans are groaning.
Yet the wealth and income of most Singaporeans today are more rather than less than they were 10 years ago, even after accounting for inflation. So why the rather gloomy mood? The answer is that everything is relative. Singaporeans are comparing their wealth and income today to what they had in the boom years preceding 2008.
Consider a scientific experiment conducted on capuchin monkeys and reported in the journal Nature in 2003. The monkeys were trained to hand a token to a human experimenter in exchange for a cucumber. When two monkeys were able to see that each received one cucumber in exchange for one token, both felt satisfied and happily ate their cucumbers.
But when the experiment was changed so that one monkey received a grape and the other a cucumber, in full view of each other, the second monkey became upset, a grape being more desirable than a cucumber. When both were asked to hand over a token after that, the second monkey became uncooperative.
If one monkey was given a grape without giving the experimenter a token, the other monkey would become even more uncooperative and would toss either the token or the cucumber out of the test chamber. But if the first monkey was removed and a grape placed where it had been, after a while, the other monkey would gradually settle for the cucumber, seeing that no other monkey was getting a grape.
If capuchin monkeys can become dissatisfied comparing themselves to their peers, more so humans. We compare our present to our past, often forgetting the bad times and remembering only the good. We also compare ourselves with our peers.
If we see others suffer as we do, we resent our situation less. If a particular sub-group of the population suffers more than other sub-groups, the comparison is invariably noticed by the unfortunate sub-group. The perceived iniquity would rub salt into their wounds, aggravating the resentment they feel and causing jealousy towards those they perceive to be luckier than they.
A study last year reported in the journal Industrial Relations revealed that employee well-being is dependent upon how their wages compare with those of others in the comparison group, as opposed to the individual's absolute pay. Researchers Gordon Brown, Jonathan Gardner, Andrew Oswald and Jing Qian asked undergraduates to rate how satisfied they would be with the wages they might be offered for their first job after college. Subjects expressed feelings about each potential wage in the context of a set of other wages. The researchers also analysed data from 16,000 employees who reported on workplace satisfaction.
Employees did not care solely about their absolute level of pay. They were more concerned about how their incomes compared to those of the people around them in the workplace. And individuals were not influenced solely by their relative income but rather by the rank-ordered position of their wages within a comparison set.
'Our study shows how ordinal rank has a statistically significant effect upon well-being,' the authors concluded. 'Human well-being depends in a particular way upon comparisons with others.'
The lesson to be learnt by organisations like the one I lead, the National Neuroscience Institute (NNI), is that every employee must know how he has been appraised so he will know his salary, bonus, annual increments and promotions are fair. It is not enough for the system to be fair; the staff must be able to see clearly that the system is fair.
NNI has implemented peer appraisal to supplement the reporting officer's appraisal. When the two diverge, the countersigning officer must try to figure out the reason for the discrepancy and come to a fair decision about the person being appraised. I usually ask both the reporting officer and the peer the reasons for their appraisals.
But I hope everyone at NNI does not judge his or her worth by the remuneration he or she receives. We each contribute to NNI in different ways; yet we all succeed or fail as a team. In addition to the doctors, the administrators, nurses and medical technicians at NNI all play a role in enabling the institute to deliver the best neuro-medical care we can to our patients.
At the national level, it is important that sub-groups in the population that are suffering more than others in the current recession receive more help. At the same time, the entire population must feel that the Government has tried its best to look after everyone fairly. The richer members of our community should not flaunt their wealth. It would be even better if those who can afford it, donate their time and resources to help the less fortunate.
We are all in this economic downturn together, and we should strive as a nation to pull through together. That way, we will emerge from this crisis more resilient and more united than we are now. That is my hope for Singapore.
The writer is director of the National Neuroscience Institute. Think-Tank is a weekly column rotated among eight leading figures in Singapore's research and tertiary institutions.
