Coping Mecca-nisms.

I've mentioned before the thrill when a personal hunch turns out to coincide with a fully developed academic theory - and it seems I've stumbled on to another one.

I've long observed startling patterns in how people deal with issues that are presented to them - in my own mind I had created a rough summary that I called The Six Ds":

• Delegate - Make it someone else's problem.
• Defer / Delay - Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?
• Deny - What problem?
• Distort - The problem really isn't as big as you think it is.
• Dismiss - It's not actually a problem.
• Deal With / Do - Hand me a shovel.

I see these all the time - at work, in projects, in politics...once you start looking for patterns in how people are avoiding an issue, you can't stop seeing them.

In the back of my mind I had also started to think on how one would calculate the economic cost of each of these strategies.  Perhaps something like this:

Final Cost  =  Original Cost  x  Coping Strategy Factor

Where the Coping Strategy Factor of just dealing with the issue was 1, and the varied for the others.

Note that I'm not suggesting that any of these strategies are inherently "bad", in fact delegating an issue to the right person can often be more efficient than dealing with it yourself.  Likewise, deferring an issue is a very real option for a time-bound non-critical low-risk issue.

But alas, I am 23 years late.  I finally got around to searching the literature and found this rather thorough treatment of coping strategies (I kind of expected this - that's why I had deferred looking for it):

Assessing coping strategies: A theoretically based approach.

Carver, Charles S.;Scheier, Michael F.;Weintraub, Jagdish K.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 56(2), Feb 1989, 267-283. 

doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.56.2.267

Here's a copy of the paper on harvard.edu.

And here's the important bit - their (exceptional) classification system:

I'm not well-versed enough in psychology to know if this is a seminal paper (I'll ask my mother next chance I get) but it's certainly an interesting read and a well-structured model.  I haven't seen anything in there about modelling the economic cost of each strategy, so there's still a bit more looking to do.