The Power of Us & Social Identity at Work - Jay Van Bavel - #175

[00:00:02] I'll be honest, this is a tough subject for me because I've been thinking about doing something about identity for a while. But it's such an inflamed subject that it's really hard to bring in somebody who has a very measured voice in the space, who has the science and the research to back it up, came across you in your new book. And I've just been so impressed with the work that you've been doing.

[00:00:26] You know, obviously I've been following you on LinkedIn forever too. You just make really great posts out there. But can you tell us a little bit about the book The Power of Us and what is the role that identity plays in this moment that we're in? So the role of identity is really big in a much bigger way than most people have thought about it for many, many years. I think if there's two big things I encourage people to take home from this conversation today is think really deeply about what identities matter to you.

[00:00:54] And then the other thing is think very carefully about what groups you join. Because once you join a group, it will shape who you are, what you value, how you interpret the world. Well, say more about that. I'm curious. Why do groups matter so much? And something you said earlier is like everybody wants to feel included. You know, there was something in your book, I think it was chapter five, about fitting in. And I have like this, you know, I think most people experience this like, it's like high school never ends. Right.

[00:01:22] And so you as an adult, you're trying to, you know, kind of bridge a new identity or join a new social group. And at first it's very uncomfortable and it's a challenge. And it's like, oh, it's like you're trying to join the cool kids table, but you should be sitting at the other table. What role does that play in like inclusion as well in organizations for trying to fit into a new culture? I mean, you said so many interesting things there. Okay. So let me start with your metaphor that high school never ends.

[00:01:53] So here's an interesting finding. My wife is all published, does research on interpersonal interactions and teaches a class here at NYU and relationships. Her name is Tessa West. And very accomplished in her own right. Correct? Yeah. Very widely published. And she's published two books in the business space. One is called jerks at work about toxic coworkers and others job therapy. Okay. That's her background. So she knows what she's talking about.

[00:02:16] Welcome to directionally correct, a people analytics podcast with your host, Cole Knapper and today's guest, Jay van Babel, professor of psychology and neuroscience at NYU and author of the power of us.

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[00:04:05] As always, all opinions are our own and thanks for being a listener. Jay, thank you so much for joining me today. You know, some people tend to call directionally correct the Oprah of people analytics podcasts. But I know you recently joined Oprah's podcast and it should be coming out sometime around the same time as this. But thank you so much for joining today to talk about your book, The Power of Us, also with your co-author, Dominique Parker. Yep. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about this.

[00:04:35] This is, I'll be honest, this is a tough subject for me because I've been thinking about doing something about identity for a while. But it's such a kind of inflamed subject. It's really hard to bring in somebody who has a very measured voice in the space, who has the science and the research to back it up. I came across you in your new book and I've just been so impressed with the work that you've been doing. And obviously, I've been following you on LinkedIn forever, too. You just make really great posts out there.

[00:05:05] But can you tell us a little bit about the book, The Power of Us, and what is the role that identity plays in this moment that we're in? So the role of identity is really big in a much bigger way than most people have thought about it for many, many years. So I'll give you an example. When I ask people to write down or answer to the simple question, I am a blank.

[00:05:31] I'll ask people to list the top 10 things that come to mind when they're thinking about who they are as a person. And usually half of those, if not more, are about groups that they belong to. So it could be like, for me, I'm now talking to you as an author. And the moment I wrote my book, all these other authors connected with me and I got invited to like authors groups and workshops and support networks in a way that I had never been invited before. I didn't even know these existed. But that became an identity and I was suddenly given access to this group.

[00:06:02] When I get off this call, I go back to like research scientist in my lab and I have meeting after meeting. And then after that's done, I go home and I'm a father. And each of those is a different lens through which I'm going to be thinking about the world in terms of what do I value, what are my priorities, but also even how I interpret things. So when I'm at home with my kids, I'm a father, I'm interpreting things very differently. I'm not thinking at all about the topics we're going to be discussing. I'm going to be thinking about completely different things.

[00:06:29] And so I like to think of identity as equivalent to like a set of lenses that change how you interpret the world, like sunglasses. And you put on and take off five to ten different sets of those each and every day. And all of us have them. And the other thing that's interesting is they aren't always obvious. So if people look at me, they might think he's a middle-aged white guy.

[00:06:54] But if you ask people what identities matter to them, almost always it's not those things. It is their role in their family or it is some like group that they're passionate about, like their local bar trivia team. Or for me, it's actually this squash group I'm part of where we meet like three or four days a week. And that's like my social community. And we all play together and help each other and then hang out with each other. And so you would not know that if you saw me. And you might not know that the other big thing for me is like being a parent.

[00:07:24] And so those are the things that actually matter to us every day in so many ways. And they're often invisible to other people. Let me ask you, I love the examples that you gave of like, it's like sunglasses you can take on and put on or take off and put on. And I'll tell you, this is something I'm personally struggling with. What do you do if your different identities come into conflict with one another? And how do you reconcile that? Okay.

[00:07:51] So the simplest solution is situations activate different identities. And whatever identity the situation is activating strongest tends to dominate how we're thinking. So there's a lot of talk about like things like intersectionality. And people have all these intersectional identities. But at least what my research finds over and over again is that what matters is the situation you're in. And that identity comes to the front of mind for the most part. Now, okay, there are some moments where they come into conflict.

[00:08:19] So I'll go back to my author identity. I'm working on writing another book. I am struggling. I'm falling behind like my schedule for what I want to write it, which is always how these things go. And now, okay, so this weekend, I am torn between trying to find a few hours here or there to catch up on this writing or carry my responsibilities as like a parent and like try to find fun activities for my kids. And so there are these tensions between these different identities.

[00:08:46] And a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking about how I'm going to trade off on these and balance these. And it's not easy. And it actually causes a lot of tension. So then the other way we solve it is not only what the situation is triggering. So if my kids are around me, they're not going to be parenting. But if they go out, they're teenagers. If they go out and hang out with their friends, then I'm not even going to be thinking about that anymore. You know, it takes it all out of my mind, out of sight, out of mind.

[00:09:12] But the other thing is to resolve these problems, we also have to think about what identity matters. And that's actually a deep existential question that people should ask themselves because, you know, we only live one life. There's only, you know, 4,000 weeks in the average lifespan. And we have to think about how am I going to invest those and which identities do I want to nurture? Which communities do I want to be a part of? And then we have to trade off on those because there's a limited number of time. And so that's actually a really critical question.

[00:09:41] I think if there's two big things I encourage people to take home from this conversation today is think really deeply about what identities matter to you. And then the other thing is think very carefully about what groups you join. Because once you join a group, it will shape who you are, what you value, how you interpret the world. Well, say more about that. I'm curious. Why do groups matter so much? So here's the thing.

[00:10:03] Once you join a group and care about being a member of that group, the next thing you look at is what are good members of that group doing? And how do I become a good member of that group? So I'm valued in the group. I get invited to group activities. I have status in the group. And so the way we do that is figure out what the norms are within the group and try to live up to those as best as we can. And sometimes this is not even happening consciously.

[00:10:30] We're like looking around to seeing what people are wearing and what they're doing and what music they listen to. And we're picking up and copying those all the time. And we might think of it even that it's my own choice what clothes I wear. But the reality is that fashion is a social norm. And, you know, one of the things I do when I teach class, I'm teaching what identities and norms, is I can show people pictures, my students, pictures of the fashion in someone from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s. And they can tell you instantly what decade they're from.

[00:11:00] So like if you see big shoulder pads and poofed up bangs, you know that's the 80s. And so people at each and each of those moments think they're being fashionable. They think they have good taste and they're an individual expressing themselves. But the moment we're out of those moments, we can look back and see, oh, goodness, like everybody wore that then. No one's worn it ever since. You guys were all just conformist to a norm that was trendy at that moment. And so fashion is just one place this happens.

[00:11:27] But norms impact what we eat, who we spend time with, how we work. And they're really powerful forces for dictating our behavior. Yeah. Let's bring this into the workplace a little bit. In prepping for this, you brought up an example and I thought it was just so interesting. A few months back, there was this Coldplay concert and what presumed to be like an executive and then the head of HR. And they seem to be caught on camera.

[00:11:56] And then more details came out later about it. But I don't want to tee up the story too much. But can you tell about like what role, you know, your book and identity played when you were kind of unpacking what happened there?

[00:12:36] Okay. And then they immediately both like ducked and it was funny. And Chris Martin made a joke about it. And that video, people had access to that video and it went viral and it was seen by 300 billion people. 300 billion, not million. And there's only 8 billion of us on earth. So that means like the average person saw that video like 15 times or something like that. Sorry, three. Yeah. Is it 20, 15, 20 times? Yeah. A lot.

[00:13:04] And I remember seeing it multiple times go through my various social media feeds that day that it was going viral. And the poor woman in the video was going through separation. It wasn't like she was having an affair. But it was early in their relationship and they were coworkers and it was her boss. And so she, you know, it was embarrassing. But she got so much vitriol and hate online and even in person that it was absolutely devastating.

[00:13:30] And so she was, she was on Oprah trying to figure out why are people so mean now? And I was invited to do a follow-up episode drawing on the lessons from my book. And the two lessons from the book about this increased lack of civility and hostility, not only online, but in the real world, you know, with air rage or with baristas getting harassed at work. Apparently doctors and nurses actually are in the most dangerous environment. They're constantly harassed and attacked now.

[00:13:58] And so the two lessons from my book are that one is that we're not seeing these other people as part of us. You know, when we go into an airline, people are seeing the stewardess who's helping you as them, as different from me. And if they are blocking my goal, I, I, they don't deserve the dignity or positive treatment that I would give to someone who is part of a community that I belong to.

[00:14:23] And so people have started to draw, the term I use for it, really smaller and smaller moral circles. Their identities have gotten a lot smaller. If we draw bigger, more inclusive identities about everybody in my community, everybody in my country, everybody around the world is part of a group that I care about. We treat them much better. The second aspect is the norms.

[00:14:44] The moment we see like these videos go viral and we see people getting harassed, a lot of people join in the harassment because a, they think everybody else is piling on. And so it seems fun. The other thing is they see other people saying this is, you know, these people are caught cheating. It's morally reprehensible. And so they want to express that they're a virtuous person by joining in and harassing them too. And so a lot of the harassment stems from those two things. It's trying to like signal that you belong in the group by sharing their moral values.

[00:15:13] You know, the term for it is virtue signaling or piling on because you get outraged along with everybody else and see everybody else is doing it. And so those are like actually really corrosive norms in a society if they're not used very carefully because they can lead to harassment and all kinds of terrible mistreatment of other people. But yet to us, it often feels justified or morally justified when we do it.

[00:15:37] Well, again, keeping this in the lane of organizations, I know you do some consulting as well as speaking in different organizations. Why is this rise of incivility started to creep inside of work? Yeah. First of all, I'll just say there's a lot of evidence that it's increased at work. People are being, you know, we talked about just a minute ago, customers being more rude and inappropriate to staff and all of these lines of work. But you're seeing incivility between coworkers.

[00:16:07] And so there's a couple of things that are happening. Again, it's an organ. And part of it is a little bit due to remote work. So with remote work, I always like to say the positives because we're remote working right now. You can do all these cool things, connect to people. Share ideas and spread it to the world. You can also avoid the commute and all of the pain and cost and labor that comes with that. And people are just as effective working remotely. So the effective part is not a problem.

[00:16:33] What happens is you actually lose a sense of trust with your colleagues over time when you've been remote. And there's a huge study on this in Finland. And the longer and longer and longer you spent remote, the less and less you trust them. And there was also a study that was done in Microsoft where they analyzed 61,000 employees after they went remote during the pandemic. And they had all their emails, all their Microsoft Teams meetings, all their texts to coworkers. Microsoft had all of this data.

[00:17:03] And when the researchers came and looked at it, what they found is that people were really good at working with their media team. But they lost a sense of connection to everybody outside of that. And so you lose a sense of organizational identification. You lose a sense of cooperation with people who are not part of your tiny little silo. And you really become in an echo chamber. And so you don't treat those other people with the same support and respect that you would if you were like bumping into them at the water cooler or sitting next to them at lunch when you're at work.

[00:17:33] And those little interactions, we underestimate the power they have in A, making us feel good, having all these positive interactions. B, feeling a sense of connection, not only with them, but with the organization. And C, innovation. Most innovation happens when people who are not part of the same kind of tiny viewpoint perspective or team get together and realize they actually have a problem that they can help each other solve. So there's all kinds of downsides of this in organizations. And this is actually, it's really bad, right?

[00:18:02] So research shows instability increases disengagement, leads to retention problems. And when you have retention problems, who are you losing? Usually it's your best employees because they're the ones who have outside offers. And it also can lead to things like sabotage and up escalation. If I think you, if I don't trust you and think you're out to get me, I'm not going to help you when you need something done or you need a request for information. I'm going to hide it from you. And so this is what happens.

[00:18:32] And once you start down that road, it can really lead to a vicious negative spiral. Yeah, this is really close to home. I know in prepping for this, I told you about in the field of people analytics, there was this huge wholesale change that happened with the pandemic. And so immediate and none of the people in the field were ready for it, even if they said they were ready for it, they weren't. And it was it was a great moment for the field to shine because I think we did some of our best work, but nobody was prepared to do our best work when the pandemic happened.

[00:19:01] And then there were things like what happened with George Floyd. Right. And then the rise of DEI in the workplace. And then there was the cultural backlash to all of that. And the funny thing, and this is one of the reasons I brought you on, is people analytics was not prepared for any of it. But we were right in the thick of what do we do about this? How do we analyze this for organizations?

[00:19:24] And so if you kind of like do like a postmortem, how should we have been thinking about these transformations in the role that identity and norms played and group membership and all of that during that transformation? And again, I know you've done some work with Amy Edmondson in the past as well, psychological safety. What roles does that play in this kind of equation? Yeah. So I'll start with the psychological safety piece.

[00:19:48] To me, that is one of the most important constructs in organizations, which means that teams outperform, you know, the sum of their parts as well as other teams if they have a sense of psychological safety. And again, just psychological safety is the opposite of how it's described on TV. It's not having a safe space. It's not retreating from people. It's not disengaging and not talking through your challenges and conflicts. It's the opposite.

[00:20:16] It means it's a safe place to disagree with people. It's a safe place to dissent. It's a safe place to challenge the status quo, to propose risky new ideas. And even if those are wrong, you're not going to get socially ostracized or excluded or punished in some way. And that actually unlocks all kinds of innovation and great ideas and flourishing and happiness.

[00:20:42] And so that is the fundamental thing that I think all organizations should be aiming for. And I want to say that you need not only psychological safety, but you need high standards. Because if you have psychological safety but low standards, people feel comfortable, but they don't advance. You really need to – if you want excellence, you really also have to need high standards.

[00:21:01] This is a place that pursues excellence, but we do it by challenging one another and supporting one another and taking risks and being smart about it and learning from our failures. And taking ideas from anybody who has a good idea, even if they don't have a fancy title in front of their name or even if they're new to the team. And that's what unlocks all the creative genius of everybody. Otherwise, I've been in teams that have that and they flourish. I've been in teams, research teams that do not.

[00:21:27] And I remember that feeling of just biting my tongue the whole meeting, not saying anything so I won't get criticized or shot down by my boss if I challenge his idea. So I really have felt that and experienced it and the research backs it up. Okay, now to move to DEI. So my earliest research since I was doing my PhD 20 years ago, 23 years ago now, was on implicit bias. Implicit bias became this huge thing, but that was in the early days where we were studying it.

[00:21:56] And one of the things I was doing at the time for my PhD was trying to find ways to reduce implicit bias that were positive and constructive. And I found maybe the most powerful way to do it is just to create a more inclusive identity. So if you are part of a mixed race team, implicit bias instantly goes away. And I found this with all kinds of studies in multiple universities, multiple countries. I also looked inside people's brains.

[00:22:21] We had fMRI studies where we looked to see what is it changing their brain activation patterns when they see people who are the same or different from them. And it did. The moment that you're part of a team, it triggers something very primitive of us psychologically that says these people are with us. And you instantly value them. You want to be their friends more. You trust them more. And so DEI that does that is effective. That's actually the eyepiece, the inclusion piece, is creating an inclusive environment. And guess what?

[00:22:50] Every single person on earth loves being in an inclusive environment. And if you describe what it is versus not, everybody would opt into it. So I actually started working and giving talks in organizations. My work was cited in a Supreme Court case. So I ended up being influential. And I would go to companies and try to give them tools to be inclusive. And here's why the inclusion piece matters with the diversity piece. Lots of research on this. Diverse teams are not any more effective.

[00:23:19] In fact, they can grind to a halt and have conflict unless they have a shared identity and psychological safety. When they have that, then they flourish. They outperform because they have more perspectives and they tend to be more creative. And so just having diversity alone without the inclusion piece can be a struggle for people to deal with. If it has that inclusion piece in psychological safety, they actually outperform other groups.

[00:23:46] But people talk about these as they're separate, but they have to be the same. Okay. So I noticed when I would give these talks and workshops, they would resonate with people. They're little eureka moments. You can see their eyes lighting up. I would be brought in by the HR team to try to convince the CEO that this mattered. And they would always thank me after because now the CEO got it. Okay. Something changed after 2020. The type of DEI work that was happening in organizations backfired, a lot of it.

[00:24:16] And some of it was backfiring before. There's a lot of evidence of certain types of DEI trainings don't work. And in some cases they backfire. But the type of stuff that was backfiring was getting used more and more often. And this is the stuff where you break people into different racial groups. You make people cry or feel guilty for things in the meeting. Those increase interracial anxiety. They make people feel stigmatized.

[00:24:45] They make it harder to cooperate. People retreat under those situations. You do the opposite of psychological safety. Those types of trainings destroy psychological safety. And then it led to a backlash because guess what? It was no longer an inclusive environment. It was making people feel uncomfortable. It was making them distrust others, feeling devalued. And so in some sense it was almost inevitable that eventually there was going to be a backlash to this.

[00:25:13] And I also think that companies embraced the backlash. A lot of them who had these lofty DEI goals and mission statements immediately tossed those aside. And people were mad. They were like, okay, well, you didn't stand for anything. But part of the reason they weren't standing for it is because they were spending all this money. They were paying these high-paid consultants to come in. And it was a massive waste of resources when it was being done wrong. And companies could see this. If it was working, I don't think they would have backed away from it.

[00:25:42] But when they went to... And so I have friends who work as chief diversity officers. And I would go out for beer with them. And I'd be like, what is happening? I'm seeing these things go viral on social media. And these famous people get books and talk about this. And I'm like, this is violating 75 years of social psychology. Like all the research I've done and known about and the stuff that actually replicates and works about building shared identities with superordinate goals, cooperative structures,

[00:26:09] shared equal status, inclusive and psychologically safe environments. I could see that it was doing the opposite. And here's what he told me. You mentioned LinkedIn. He said, the people with the most extreme perspectives on this are dominating the attention economy. They're getting all the attention with their books and their posts on places like LinkedIn. And so companies see that and they see them as, oh, these are the people driving the conversation. I'm going to hire them for $50,000 to come in and do this training or workshop.

[00:26:39] And so that's a little bit of the attention economy, I think, was like amplifying the most extreme perspectives, not the most scientifically rigorous and well-grounded perspectives that were most productive and most likely to work. And I saw it at NYU happened. I'll tell you a funny story about NYU. I have four or five people in my department who have published research on implicit bias.

[00:27:04] And then NYU, instead of asking any of us, hired some implicit bias consulting group. And they came in and they sent an email to everybody inviting them for implicit bias training. And I looked, I read the description of it, and it was totally wrong. They were saying this is actually implicit violence. And I'm like, no, implicit, not a single scholar who's ever published a paper on implicit bias would describe it that way. It's about reaction time differences on the order of 100 milliseconds in a button pressing task.

[00:27:33] That spills over into subtle decisions. It doesn't predict, it's not correlated with anything close to the things people, these consultants were talking about. So God knows how much NYU spent. I'm going on a rant now, but it's, I don't know, we spent $100,000 doing something that almost certainly was misinformation and almost certainly backfired. And at minimum, it was an app at just a total waste of money. And if they had just emailed any of us, we would have been happy to help them.

[00:28:01] And so when you see scientific organizations with the leading experts on it doing this, you know that like, of course, how is some big company going to know how to do this? They don't have the experts there to tell them this is wrong. And so I would then, so then the next thing started happening. I would, I stopped getting invited because I'm white to do DEI because that was out of vogue. And then companies would have these sessions of backfire.

[00:28:27] And then I would get an invitation to go in and clean up the mess because they'd be like, we paid someone, we had them in and it totally was a disaster. Now, how can we fix it? And so then they had to spend twice as much money and they probably ended up back just if they're lucky at ground zero. So that was the vicious spiral of where that went.

[00:28:45] And so I really do hope we get DEI back, but I really hope when we get it back, it's not these kind of fringy practices and policies and ideologies that backfire. That's just my hope because I do think it's really valuable if the data backs it up. And something you said earlier, it's like everybody wants to feel included. You know, there was something in your book, I think it was chapter five about fitting in.

[00:29:11] And I have like this, you know, I think most people experience this like, it's like high school never ends. Right. And so you, as an adult, you're trying to, you know, kind of bridge a new identity or join a new social group. And at first it's very uncomfortable and it's a challenge and it's like, oh, it's like you're trying to join the cool kids table, but you should be sitting at the other table. What role does that play in like inclusion as well in organizations for trying to fit into a new culture?

[00:29:40] I mean, you said so many interesting things there. Okay. So let me start with your metaphor that high school never ends. So here's an interesting finding. My wife is all published, does research on interpersonal interactions and teaches a class here at NYU and relationships. Her name is Tessa West. And very accomplished in her own right, correct? Yeah. Very widely published. And she's published two books in the business space. One is called Jerks at Work about toxic coworkers and others job therapy. Okay. That's her background. So she knows what she's talking about.

[00:30:09] She published a big piece in the wall street journal a couple of weeks ago. And her point is almost exactly what you said. And she had found lots of evidence that backs us up. Learning how to navigate relationships when you're young predicts your success in companies because everything is about relationships. And guess what? I shared this data on LinkedIn a few months ago, and it was showing that we talk all about AI and technical skills and coding, but guess what?

[00:30:38] Over the last 40 years, the value placed on social skills has surpassed the value companies placed on technical skills. And I think that's even a gap's going to get bigger as people can offload technical skills to things like AI. Once everybody becomes a coder, that's no longer a very distinctive skill. And so the social skills matter. Okay. People who don't have relations. And by the way, so now here's the problem. Gen Z young people are not dating. They're not having sex. It's a problem.

[00:31:07] They have very few friends that they're hanging out with in person. All the data backs us up. And this has been a long trend. And so now those young people are coming to my class. I see them at NYU. And they struggle to have skills to come. They don't want to come to office hours to meet professors because it's too anxiety provoking for many of them. And then they go get a job and they struggle to manage relationships at work. They up escalate conflict in ways they shouldn't. They struggle to take feedback and get mentorship.

[00:31:35] They can't find negotiations or win-win situations when things go wrong. And so they're struggling. All the data is backing this up. If you have relationships in high school and you can learn how to navigate that, that actually predicts your success navigating it at the workplace. And so we actually need to create relationships. And not just romantic ones, all kinds of real in-person relationships. I would argue that's called training your social cognition. At high school and universities, we train people's cognition.

[00:32:06] They memorize math and writing and all these things. But what they're really often learning inside and outside the class is what they really like to learn is social connection, social relationships. And they're learning a ton. And also COVID reset all that. All the kids who got stuck learning from home for two years lost a critical period of their time to understand how to navigate social relationships. And adults lost that, too.

[00:32:32] And I saw and heard so many stories of grown adults, like 30, 40, 50-year-olds also being less socially competent when they went back. Because it's like a muscle. You know, your brain is like a muscle. You've got to work it out, just like you go to the gym and lift weights. And so learning how to navigate those situations is going to pay off in any workplace environment that requires social interaction. And so you need to exercise that muscle. Young people need to train it.

[00:32:57] High schools and universities need to be training it more because it's actually really crucial to your success. Well, and I mean, we've talked about you being an author and you mentioned a little bit about your work at NYU. But you actually run an active lab that looks into things like conflict, group decision making, social media, and kind of like how that impacts, you know, massive social networks.

[00:33:21] How does that play a role in and what's some of the work that you've been doing recently in that space that, you know, plays a role in how you think about all the things that we've been talking about? Okay. Okay. So I do so much on this space. One of the, I run the Center for Conflict and Cooperation at NYU. And I study this, but I also use this to run the center. Like I don't, a lot of psychologists do great research, but then they don't use it when they run their own labs. And it boggles my mind.

[00:33:51] I'm constantly, every time I run a study and I learn something, we have a new paper about how, you know, a recent paper about how the norms increase cooperation. The moment you see other people cooperating, you just automatically start doing it. And so if you can shine a spotlight on people who are cooperators, then other people will start doing it too. You know, I try to avoid things. I care about groups, but a downside of groups is like, we talked about conformity, is groupthink.

[00:34:16] You know, if there's a powerful leader who doesn't take criticism well, if they have an idea, everybody feels pressure to conform with it. And so in my lab meetings, I learned that that happened when we were workshopping a project or a research study. And I said what I thought. Everybody would go around the room coming up with reasons to support what I thought. And I realized that's terrible. Our, our, that's not what I want. So I started shutting up at the start of the meeting when we were workshopping something.

[00:34:44] And then everybody would go around the room and share their own opinion. And then I would be able to hear all kinds of different perspectives and pick the best ones. And our, our research became so much better. We, we are now in the top 0.1% of research labs in the world for what we do. And it's not because I'm any smarter than the other 99.9% of professors in psychology.

[00:35:04] It is because I use all the lessons from all of the research that I do about building a shared identity, fostering cooperation, creating healthy norms, trying to create psychological safety, building relationships. And I also select on relationships. So when we do interviews for PhD students and postdocs for my lab, some people just look at their grades and their GRE and their test scores. I also care.

[00:35:32] And I ask my, my lab, did they, do you think there'll be a cooperative person? And I weigh that in the decision-making. And there's been many times where I wanted somebody, they impressed me, they were good on paper, but to people at their same level of power, it was leaking out that they were hyper-competitive and a bit too aggressive. And I bumped them down the priority list when that happened. Yeah. Multiple, multiple years. So I try to like practice what I preach because I study these things.

[00:35:59] And so I want to use the insights. And I will say, I also study a lot of these dynamics on social media about, you know, toxic and bad use of social media. And so I try to create a healthier environment when I post about evidence and not getting in arguments, not responding to trolls because I now know the psychological profile of a troll. Once you learn that, you realize, okay, I'm not going to be wasting my hours interacting with these people.

[00:36:24] But once I learned how this was making us react badly, piling on people, I realized, oh God, I'm getting drawn into this because of the norms, even though I don't want to. And once I realized that kind of power that was happening over me by that situation, I was able to question it and resist it and withdraw from it. And so all of these things matter for how I work and how my team works. Yeah.

[00:36:49] So have you done any research on to like dark triad or tetrad people in terms of trolling and things like that? I have not, but I have read lots of research on it. One of the things that matters on social media is that the biggest thing is incentive structure, just like any workplace. Right.

[00:37:06] And so if the incentive structure is rewarding people with the dark triad, like, you know, narcissists, sociopaths, Machiavellian type personalities, then they will start to get more followers and more clout and they will become prominent and influential people. And actually a really good example of this is on Twitter. Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge critic of Twitter before. Elon Musk took it over. I have lots of research on that, on the public record.

[00:37:34] But then Elon Musk got it and in many ways made it worse because he incentivized people to make money off of rage bait. And a couple of weeks ago, Nate Silver did an analysis of the most popular accounts on X. And they were like accounts like Cat Turd, who just shares nonsense and rage bait all day long. Now that's one of the most prominent accounts. And it's just other people who are doing the same thing.

[00:37:59] And people who are experts, scientists, celebrities who are just post celebrity stuff, I've all got kind of moved to the fringes or disengaged or left the platform entirely. Like Oprah, you know, you mentioned I'm on Oprah. She had like 50, 60 million followers and she just quit the platform because of this stuff. And now she's just on Instagram and Facebook. So and before there was a before and after who were the biggest accounts before Elon Musk took over.

[00:38:28] It was like LeBron James, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber. A lot of it was just famous people that everybody loves their music or their, you know, Ronaldo, the world's best soccer player. It was people like that who everybody just wants to follow and see what they're up to. And now they've been replaced by Cat Turd. And so that's an incentive structure problem. The algorithm is incentivizing that type of stuff. And the people who have the dark triad of personalities are leaning into that.

[00:38:55] And now they're getting more prominence and clout. And so what I've realized is I'm not going to get sucked into those incentives if they're going to lead to I don't want to like live, make my my profit off of rage baiting people and lying to them and sending them into incendiary, hateful mindsets all day long. I want to come back to something you said when you're talking about your lab.

[00:39:18] And when you're, you know, you're trying to kind of select people to be a part of it and how they need to have kind of cooperation based behaviors. Um, and earlier in the podcast, you talked about, you know, psychological safety and Amy Edmondson actually means that you had like permission to dissent, not just everybody gets along and group think. And in your book, you talked about the virtue and the power of dissent as well.

[00:39:41] How do you balance things like having a psychologically safe place where people can bring dissenting viewpoints with the need for cohesion and cooperation when it comes to social cohesion and groups? Okay, so dissent is one of the most interesting topics and my co author Dominic Packer on my book, when we were office mates in grad school, that's what he was studying for his dissertation. So I was studying inclusive groups and getting rid of bias and cooperation and he was studying dissent.

[00:40:10] So when people dissent throughout history, we treat them terribly. We burn them at the stake. They're called heretics. Look at the history of how we treated heretics. We call them traitors. Um, the other term we have for them in companies is, uh, devil's advocates. Pause for a sec. And I go to companies and I talk about this and they'll say, oh, Jim's the devil's advocate in our group. And they'll kind of like, you know, grin, everybody nods. And, and I often say, pause and think what you just called him.

[00:40:40] An advocate for the devil. Is there a worse thing you could call somebody in society? Um, then the devil's advocate. Yeah, we need a better name for it for sure. We need a better name for it. Right. Okay. So, so this is, this is the term we use and often it's even used in a loving way, but just we don't think twice about the language we're using here. Okay. And, and so devil's advocates get treated badly. They get backlash. People think they're showboating and people often think the devil's advocates or the dissenters,

[00:41:09] the whistleblowers are people who don't care about the group. And so they're just doing their own thing. They're not going along. They're not fitting in. Okay. Here's what the research shows. This is Dominic's research. He found that the people who dissent because it's so hard, the only people who dissent most of the time are people who care the most about the group. They are the most deeply identified with the group and they're worried the group is going wrong and making a bad decision.

[00:41:33] And if you suppress those people, they will eventually either shut up or leave, but then you're missing the, you're losing people who care most about the group and you're losing your most useful voices. So you have to understand a who's dissenting and why. Okay. Now we can't run a group if everybody's just disagreeing all the time. So you have to have norms of how you're going to harness dissent. And I'll give you an example of where this was done very well.

[00:41:58] I was on this panel in San Francisco a few years ago with Maynard Webb. He's an author, but he was the former CFO of eBay in the early days when eBay became the biggest commerce site on, on the web. And he said at their C-suite meetings in the early days, they were worried they would have pressure to conform and a lack of dissent. So they created this tradition where they each member of the team took turns at each meeting wearing a dark, a black helmet.

[00:42:26] And if you were wearing the black helmet for that C-suite meeting, it was your job to poke holes in every idea and be dissenter. But that job sucked. So they took turns at the next meeting, someone else had to wear the helmet. But when you saw someone criticizing you and they're wearing the black helmet, it was easier not to get defensive because you knew it was a role that everybody decided was critical for team success. And that person was doing their duty. That was a role for that meeting. And here's what the research on teams shows.

[00:42:55] I always cite this study in every talk I give in every organization. Um, teams where someone dissents reach better decisions, even if the dissenter is wrong. I always have to say that twice. How can teams reach better decisions if the dissenter is wrong? It's because it's hard to be the first person to speak up. But once you do other people who actually might have better ideas, speak up to you. So it's not the power of the first dissenter.

[00:43:23] It's the power of the second or the third that gets you to the best decision. It's the first person who speaks up changes the norm in the room. Yeah. They make it. And the research shows us that all the conformity studies, people conform, they will say a line is longer than another line. Even if it's untrue, they will lie about what they're seeing in front of them. What's in their own eyes. If everybody else is conforming around them, the moment that there's one dissenter, they will dissent and say the truth.

[00:43:49] And so you need that one dissenter for other people to point out the truth and, and be creative and innovative. And so the easier as a leader that you can make that, that meeting for one person, that first person to dissent, it unlocks everybody else's creativity, but also you want to reinforce when dissent is useful or not. And it's not based on whether they disagree with you as the boss or challenge the status quo. It's whether they're contributing something constructive.

[00:44:17] Are they just pushing their own agenda or are they actually thinking deeply and really engaging and trying to help you reach a better destination? And if they are, then you better value that person. You better find ways to shine a light and say, thanks for that criticism. That was good. And even if we don't go in that direction, I appreciate you having the nerve to do it. Again, when I give keynotes, it's often hard for people to be the first person to put up their hand and ask a question.

[00:44:43] And so when someone, and there's often awkward pauses when I ask for questions, especially if it's a sensitive issue in the room at the company. And when someone puts their hand up first, I say, thank you for setting the norm of speaking up. And I shine a spotlight on them and praise them publicly. And then boom, five hands go up the next time I ask. So if you have control of the room, you have to create a culture where people are doing that. Finding a great career has always been a challenge.

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[00:46:09] Well, you mentioned conformity. And I know in the book, you talk about like the Ash and the Milgram experiments, which happened quite a long time ago. We've kind of given some examples throughout the conversation of where there was overconformity. And then after the fact, we were like, oh yeah, we were wrong. You know, shoulder pads might not have been the best look. No. What are we getting wrong right now from a conformity perspective? Like where are organizations going wrong? Where is society going wrong?

[00:46:36] Where when we go five years into the future and we say, oh, there was too much conformity and there was not enough dissent. Where are we seeing that right now? Okay. So I would say there's lots of things. Like the DEI debate is a really good example of we were conforming too far and biting our tongue when it was doing bad decisions. I was biting my tongue too because it felt uncomfortable. It felt in that case, that topic was moralized. And once something feels moralized, it feels wrong to critique it. And I saw this in my own department.

[00:47:04] People had criticisms of policies that they thought were bad and they just didn't say anything. But now we've swung too far in the other direction. And companies have now biting their tongue when they think these things are wrong. So again, you're going to have to speak up. It takes some courage and leadership to do it. I'm trying to be more vocal about it myself because I do think it's really critical that you are creating a space for that by inviting it. So I think that's a big problem. I think there's also an issue with AI.

[00:47:35] So I have a collaborator student who's part of my lab and she had a recent paper where she finds that people are moralizing AI. So part of the problem where you lose conformity is when things start to become a moral issue. Because when things become a moral issue, people see it through black and white. And if you don't agree with them, you're not only wrong, but evil. And that's very hard to speak up against when people call you evil, especially at a work setting or in a public place where it could destroy your reputation. It's like the ultimate outgrouping, right?

[00:48:04] It is the ultimate outgrouping. Again, you're putting people with the devil. Yeah. So that was happening with DEI. It got moralized and therefore became evil to disagree. And it's the same thing now. Okay. Now, AI. People, and I see this even with academics, they will say AI is going to solve all our problems or AI is evil and anybody who uses it is cheating or something. You know, I'm a professor, so professor, anybody who uses it as cheating.

[00:48:32] The reality of it is or violating stealing people's ideas, you know, because content was put in, fed into the AI. And so you're just plagiarizing by using it. That's evil to steal someone else's ideas. Okay. And then when they use that language over and over again, they say it's destroying the environment. But, you know, when I do a Google search, it uses the same amount of energy as when I do an AI search. As long as I'm not creating a video. So the power by using it is not any worse for the environment from stuff everybody else

[00:49:02] is doing all day long. So, but the moment we talk that way and we're putting in that moral right or wrong, good or evil bin, it's hard to have an open conversation. So this is a problem in my world that I see this in some companies where people see it really threatening. It's really evil or virtuous is going to solve all our problems. Unfortunately, the company leaders make money by selling all this virtue and by hyping it. And, and maybe if you don't trust those people, then you see that as evil. And I see people also doing this.

[00:49:30] I don't like the CEO of this company. Therefore, the product's evil. And so I think it's, we're going to have to pull those apart. If we actually have clear, want to have clear eyes about how this can be used, not only ethically, but productively in organizations and groups and in science and academia. And so I think like, when you see this happening, once you see something getting moralized and people shutting down because it's moralized, that's where you're going to have a lack of descent.

[00:50:00] And that's where there's a very good chance that things could go off the rails very quickly because it makes it unsafe for people to share their perspective. When the moralization can sometimes become like a Rorschach test of you see the thing that you want to see, one of the areas that this has come up for me in the analytics space and in HR is this concept of culture fit. Whereas organizations obviously want to select people and promote people who fit with their culture.

[00:50:30] But also there's this notion that that creates homogeneity in your organization and then therefore prejudice, bias, discrimination at the same time. And so simultaneously, when you say something like culture fit to certain people, it reeks of, you know, you're evil and other people it reeks of, this is very practical. This is good. This isn't what we're trying to achieve. How do you adjudicate that or unwind that for organizations that are thinking about things like culture fit?

[00:50:59] That's an awesome example. I've been in these conversations too, where at one point it was like culture fit was, oh, great. We got to find people who fit our culture. Then it became evil, like you're discriminating. That's why it was seen as evil. And it's going to be an old boys club or whatever kind of club. And so here's why the culture fit thing is actually, I actually think if you discuss it in a smart, nuanced way, you can actually find the optimal decision. The optimal decision with culture fit is not to accept people who look like me or dress

[00:51:27] like me or come from the same university as me or the same socioeconomic class as me. They have the mannerisms of status that I want because then you're going to get, that's essentially just different forms of discrimination right there. Yeah. What you want is you actually have to do the work of defining your culture and you have to define it in ways about like values and principles. And you should be willing to accept people into your culture if they don't look like you,

[00:51:54] if they don't talk like you, if they don't dress like you, because your culture could be like, we want people who care deeply about excellence and are going to be uncompromising about it. Um, or are willing to be, you know, in my culture, I care about excellence, scientific excellence and cooperation. If you can come in and you can cooperate with other people and push for scientific excellence, those are the two principles I value over everything else. I make those crystal clear and you have to have things you value over everything else.

[00:52:23] You can't just have 84 priorities. Some companies do that. You see these missions, seen some mission statements with like 25 principles, throw it all out of the trash. Yeah, too many because people forget it. I have two and I make it clear in my, my lab manual. I give to everybody who joins my lab that those are the things I value and they take priority over everything else. And so when we're interviewing people, we're, we're, we're all talking about those things and we're selecting on those things and we will accept someone of any age or ethnicity

[00:52:51] or body shape or sexual preference. That stuff doesn't matter to us if you are high on the other two things. Um, and guess what? People love that. And guess what? Who you attract. Once you are clear about your culture, people who are high on those things want to be part of it. You start getting the best people from, and I get talent now from all over the world because we have a long track record of not only doing great work, but then promoting the people from our lab to be successful in their next career stage.

[00:53:18] And once you get a reputation for, for the, being a cooperative place that promotes excellence, people who are into that just come. And then guess what? I don't have to micromanage anybody. The more that the culture has been created because people are opting into it and people buy into those values. I don't have to micromanage them because they want to be excellent and they're pushing themselves harder than I ever would push them. And we just focus on outcomes and cooperating to get them. And so once you have that culture, it is a flywheel.

[00:53:48] It is just a virtuous cycle and everybody helps. Once they're brought in, they help pick those people. They help recruit them. People, they spread the word. They become evangelists for the research lab environment that we have here. And then people come and love it. And so that is culture. That is the kind of DNA of culture you need to be thinking about. Not appearances. You shouldn't be able to see it on somebody. It should be in these values that they have and that they bring to work every day. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:54:17] And almost what's funny to me sometimes is when it comes to things like identity or group membership or even culture, there's a level of arbitrariness to it. Like what you show up as. And there was a story from the book about the genesis of Adidas and Puma and how that plays a role. And like, it's just happened to be in the same town and the same village and they happen to be brothers that, you know, had a falling out or something like that. I don't know. Can you talk at all about like the arbitrariness of it as well?

[00:54:48] Yeah. So I'll tell you the Puma story. This is the opening story of our book. And it explains discrimination and how silly and arbitrary it can be. So there's these two cobblers, you know, shoemakers. They made, they famously made the shoes for Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics where he was a black athlete from America. He went and won, dominated, won all the major Olympic medals in sprinting in front of Adolf Hitler. So it was like seen as this rebuke of, of, of Nazism.

[00:55:17] And he had the shoes. These were these famous shoes. They're in a museum now, these shoes. Because Jesse Owens is such a, he's one of the most famous track athletes in the history of the Olympics. So these shoes were made by these two brothers. And then World War II happened and they had a falling out during the war. And by the way, there's these, these guys from, by all accounts were not Nazis themselves. Just to put that there. It was Rudy and, and Addy, Adolf, were their names. And they had a falling out.

[00:55:46] There's legends about why it is. And they moved to opposite sides of the small town they lived in, in Southern Germany. And they built their own little shoe factories there. And there's a river that cut across the town. And if you were on one, it was, it became known as the town of Bentnecks. Because you walked around town all day long, looking to see what shoes someone was wearing. If they was wearing the wrong, wearing the wrong shoes, you did not serve them in your restaurant. They were not allowed to go into a bar. They were not allowed to date your daughter or your friend. It was extreme discrimination. And these people shared every appearance.

[00:56:16] They looked the same. They had the same nationality, same religion, same jobs, same socioeconomic status. They had everything in common, same values, same religion. And they hated each other because of these shoes. The great story was that, and this went until the brothers died. And they were buried even after they died. They did not want to be close for eternity. So they were buried on opposite sides of the town cemetery. That's my favorite detail. My other favorite detail is the two shoe companies they created when they broke off became

[00:56:45] two of the leading sports shoe companies in the world, Puma and Adidas. And so the discrimination was awful. And it shows how trivial it can be. But I think the competition between the brothers fueled an enormous amount of energy. And sometimes competition can, at least from a company perspective, as long as it's not within the company, can fuel you to be great because you're trying to out-compete the other company across the river. And so there can be benefits.

[00:57:13] And that can really amplify your identity in ways that can be positive within the company. So identity has these kind of two sides, has this virtue of fueling competition and energizing you and motivating you. And then on the other hand, can lead to discrimination. Absolutely. Well, Jay, you've been fantastic as a guest today. For the Hardcore Directionly Correct fans, sorry we skipped Cole's Corner today, but Jay has a hard out coming at the end of this.

[00:57:39] But for those who want to learn more about you, your lab, your book, anything about you, where can they find out more? Yeah, I would say the best place is we have a substack, Power of Us substack. You can find it at my book website, powerofus.online. And then I also have a research center I run called the Center for Conflict and Cooperation at NYU and has links to all our papers. If you really want to nerd out on this, you can go there and download all our papers for free.

[00:58:09] And we have videos and workshops. We've done all kinds of things you can use. Awesome. Well, you've been listening to Directionly Correct, a People Outlooks podcast with your host, Cole Knapper. Today's guest, Jay Van Babel. Thanks for joining me, Jay. Thank you so much, Cole. It's a pleasure.