Dear Prudence

The sun is up, the sky is blue,
it’s beautiful and so are you.
Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?

This song first appeared on The Beatles famous White Album, the lyrics by John Lennon are about actress Mia Farrow’s sister, Prudence Farrow, who became obsessive about meditating while practising with Maharishi Mahesh in Rishikesh, India. She’d stay in her room meditating all the time. This all has little to nothing to do with a super cool airline pilot research paper I recently read, but it’ll sorta make sense in a couple of minutes.

The paper is Character Strengths of Airline Pilots: Explaining Life and Job Satisfaction and Predicting CRM Performance by Hadassah Littman-Ovadia and Elad Raas-Rothschild of the Ariel University, Israel. It was published towards the end of last year in the peer-reviewed journal Psychology.

They had a hundred and seventy-seven airline pilots fill out extensive personality and character trait measures, job satisfaction questionnaires, aviation and personal background surveys. Then after flying a trip together, another pilot completed a confidential crew resource management (CRM) behaviours peer assessment on the study pilot. Then they did some statistical calculations and came to some conclusions. Interesting insights into the inner life of airline pilots.

The strengths most frequently endorsed as general signature strengths by the pilots were integrity (62.7%), critical-thinking (43.5%), prudence (39.5%), love (39.0%), fairness (38.4%), creativity (32.8%), perseverance (27.1%), and teamwork (22.6%). The strengths most frequently endorsed as bottom-ranked strengths by the pilots were spirituality (95.4%), zest (46.3%), bravery (45.8%), love of learning (38.4%), and appreciation of beauty and excellence (33.3%). The paper has all the details presented in several tables. When asked about character strengths used at work, the results were more definitive:

“We found that the strengths most used by commercial airline pilots during their work were prudence (4.37 ± 0.65) and self-regulation (4.11 ± 0.84), while the strengths least used by pilots were bravery (2.30 ± 0.90) and creativity (2.45 ± 0.92).”

Prudence and self-regulation. Bravery and creativity.

When comparing the character strengths to observed CRM behaviours, several strengths were good predictors: Self-assessed curiosity, social intelligence, leadership, gratitude, hope and zest. This is a different mix than ‘pure’ personal flying, and points to the different, more social, aspects of great crew performance. They also map pretty good to pilots who feel good in general:

“Life satisfaction for airline pilots was found to be most associated with character strengths of hope, curiosity, zest, integrity, and gratitude. Job satisfaction for airline pilots was found to be most associated with strengths of zest, hope, leadership, humor, and gratitude. Findings also highlighted the contributions of curiosity, leadership, gratitude, zest, hope, and social intelligence to CRM behaviors during flight.”

Comparing the pilot results against databases of more than a million adults from 75 countries allowed the researchers to tease out what is different for airline pilots. So while strengths like fairness and integrity are commonly cited by many people:

“Prudence, as one of the five personally top-ranked (signature strengths), is unique to pilots. Moreover, prudence, a strength characterizing about 40% of the pilots, has been previously found as one of the least endorsed strengths in general population. Regarding the low side of the hierarchy of strengths, while spirituality and zest were found to be among the lowest strengths also in the general population, bravery (and also love of learning and appreciation of beauty) being one of the five bottom-ranked strengths is unique to pilots. Thus, the uniqueness of the aviation pilot’s profile emerging from this study is having prudence at the top and bravery at the bottom.”

And this translates to the strengths we use at work. “The strengths most used by pilots at work were prudence and self-regulation, while the strengths least used by pilots were bravery and creativity.” Sounds about right.

So in the cockpit, prudence good. Bravery bad. Got it! But separately, for life satisfaction and good CRM performance, we need to cultivate a separate set of strengths around zest and hope, curiosity and gratitude. We need disciplined attention in the cockpit. But don’t sit quietly meditating all day like Prudence did, get out a bit and enjoy The Beatles.

“If pilots understand that being curious about their own work, about their colleagues’, and about their crew will contribute to their proficiency in CRM behaviors, they might find that inner strength and cultivate it.”

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All quotes from Littman-Ovadia, H., & Raas-Rothschild, E. (2018). Character Strengths of Airline Pilots: Explaining Life and Job Satisfaction and Predicting CRM Performance. Psychology, 9, 2083-2102. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2018.98119