Elop’s message was widely mocked as “the worst email ever”, illustrating how corporate bullshit can go wrong when leaders try to use it as a cushion and to distract.

Corporate-speak is, of course, not limited to restructuring memos. Read just about any company’s mission statement or “brand story manifesto” and it’s likely you’ll see a familiar dialect of corporate speak. “30,000 foot view” “moving the needle” “driving alignment”, or one of our favorites, “activating cross-functional collaboration”.

This type of speech is purposefully fancy. It is deployed by executives in collaboration with communications specialists, presumably in the hope of inspiring employees and “energizing stakeholders”.

But far from inspiring and energizing, corporate bullshit, as cognitive psychologist and author of the newsletter Shane Litrell calls it, very often does the opposite. Specifically, it erodes trust, confuses audiences and hinders decision-making.

Bullshit and corporate bullshit

Harry Frankfurt, an American philosopher, famously wrote an irreverent paper entitled “On Bullshit” in which he defined bullshit and distinguished it from lying. He argued that whereas liars intentionally manipulate the truth, bullshitters are indifferent to the truth altogether. In his view, bullshit is:

“A form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.”

Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, corporate leader or a politician, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this, bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are,” said Frankfurt.

In organizations and teams, bullshit can threaten performance and organizational effectiveness by way of eroding trust, communication and decision-making. But many people, including business leaders still try to use corporate bullshit to their advantage. Shane Littrell describes corporate bullshit as a “functionally misleading” style of communication — language designed to sound impressive while saying very little at all.

The corporate bullshit scale

In a new series of studies involving 1,000+ office workers, Littrell developed a Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale — you can try it yourself below — to measure how persuasive people find this style of rhetoric. Participants were asked to evaluate statements generated by a “corporate bullshit generator” e.g., “We will actualize a renewed level of adaptive coherence.” Added to the mix were real quotes from Fortune 500 executives.

Results revealed that employees who rated these sorts of statements as more “business savvy” also scored lower on tests of analytic thinking, cognitive reflection, and effective decision-making.

That said, those who scored higher on corporate bullshit receptivity also tended to feel more inspired by their company’s mission statement and slightly more satisfied with their jobs. They were more likely to view their leaders as visionary and more likely to repeat the same kind of language themselves (see the figure below).

In an intriguing duality, it appears that appreciating corporate-bullshit is associated with more positive perceptions of one’s corporate job, but worse performance!

What corporate bullshit does to organizations and teams

Why is corporate bullshit harmful? Unlike technical jargon, which can clarify and increase precision, corporate bullshit does the opposite. It creates the illusion of meaning without committing to anything concrete and may contribute to a series of unfortunate consequences.

1. Erosion of Trust: Bullshit poisons the foundation of trust within groups and organizations. When members engage in deceptive communication, they undermine the trust necessary for effective collaboration. Bullshit erodes credibility, fosters skepticism, and fractures relationships. Without trust, teamwork crumbles and productivity suffers. Bullshit can also destroy an organization’s reputation with partners and customers.

2. Communication Breakdown: Effective communication is the lifeblood of any group or organization. When bullshit thrives, honest and meaningful dialogue becomes impossible. Bullshitters obscure the truth, diluting the clarity of messages and hindering the exchange of ideas. Misunderstandings and conflicts arise, impeding progress and hindering collective problem-solving.

3. Impaired Decision-making: In the presence of bullshit, decision-making gets harder. When information is distorted, the decision-making process is misguided. This impairment can lead groups and organizations down paths that diverge from their intended goals resulting in wasted time, resources, and opportunities.

To counteract bullshit in the workplace, we need to value the truth and strive for honest, concrete, and meaningful communication. Recognizing and calling out bullshit can help preserve the integrity of discourse and promote genuine understanding. Research in group psychology offers concrete suggestions to make yourself and others less susceptible to bullshit:

1. A Culture of Intellectual Honesty: The first step towards minimizing bullshit within your groups or organizations is to cultivate a culture of intellectual honesty. Encourage open and transparent communication, where members feel safe to express their opinions and ideas without fear of judgment or reprisal (known as psychological safety). Managers and highly-visible organizational leaders should foster an environment where members are encouraged and rewarded to speak up against bullshit and uphold the importance of accurate information.

2. Norms of Critical Thinking and Fact-Checking: Combatting bullshit requires equipping members with the tools of critical thinking and fact-checking. Encourage healthy (but not conspiratorial) norms around skepticism towards information and claims presented within the group or organization. Encourage members to question assumptions, evaluate evidence, and seek diverse perspectives in an open and transparent way (using facts to support assertions). Provide resources and training on how to identify cognitive and logical fallacies, spot misleading information, and verify facts. By promoting a collective commitment to truth, you create a stronghold against the corrosive effects of bullshit.

3. No BS Leadership: Leaders play a pivotal role in setting the tone and standards within a group or organization. Even if you are not technically a supervisor or manager, lead by example in your own communication and actions with your colleagues. Encourage open dialogue, active listening, and the pursuit of truth. When leaders model and uphold a commitment to intellectual integrity, it sets the stage for others to follow suit.

4. Inclusive Language: In addition to replacing corporate bullshit with precise and honest truth, consider increasing the use of inclusive language. In one study, researchers analyzed a century of speeches given by politicians aiming to become the Australian prime minister. They found that the victors in these elections were more likely than the losers to use collective pronouns like “we” and “us” rather than individual pronouns like “I” and “me”. In a more recent study of annual reports written by CEOs of large German companies, researchers found that every extra collective pronoun was associated with a staggering additional 820,000 Euros in their organization’s net profits.

   

Rate yourself on corporate bullshit

You will read several statements from successful business leaders and other relevant sources.

Please rate how much “business savvy” is expressed by each statement on a scale from 1 = “No business savvy at all” to 5 =“A great deal of business savvy.”

1. Working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking, we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing and end-state vision in a world defined by architecting to potentiate on a vertical landscape.

2. Our goal is to engage our capabilities by focusing our efforts on executing the current transmission of our empowerment, driving an innovative liquidity with our change drivers, and coaching energetic frameworks to our shovel-ready alignment.

3. This synergistic look at our thought leadership will ensure that we are de-contenting and avoiding reputational deficits with our key takeaways as effectively as we can in order to sunset our resonating focus.

4. This scalable look at our company will ensure that we are executing and minimizing cross-back impact with our conversations as effectively as we can in order to fundamentally disrupt our ecosystem.

5. We will fundamentally disrupt our conversations in delivering upstream transformational performance-focused key learnings like no other company anywhere in the world.

6. By solving the pain point of customers with our conversations, we will ideate a renewed level of end-state vision and growth-mindset in the market between us and others who are architecting to download on a similar balanced scorecard.

7. Our bandwidth comes from the visionary culture-shifting of several new growth-hacked, integrated networks that capitalize on our heritage to engage our future when building bridges to success.

8. We will cover all the bases of our low hanging fruit by joining with our bleeding-edge, results-driven global partners to better grasp our back-end architecture.

9. By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence and culture fit in the market between us and others who are solutioning to download on a similar, value-centered strategic intent.

10. As an emerging leader grounded in a mission to benchmark and nurture the human spirit, we have always aspired to make upstream connections, drilling down one more click on people and communities around the world.

11. This rigorous look at our business will ensure that we are managing and optimizing our resources as effectively as we can in order to improve the brand experience.

12. We will leverage our extensive business networks, market knowledge, and logistical expertise to produce high-value, bundled products for an increasing number of global customers.

13. By focusing again on the customer experience, we will create a renewed level of meaningful differentiation and separation in the market between us and our competitors.

14. In order to reinvigorate our company, we must continually analyze and review every part of our company operations.

15. Our performance and capabilities cannot be compared to our peers. We have a proven business concept that is eminently scalable in our existing businesses and adaptable enough to extend to new markets.

16. Our success comes from the rigorous execution of several new strategic initiatives that capitalize on our heritage to drive our successful future.

17. We plan to right-size our manufacturing operations to align to the new strategy and take advantage of integration opportunities.

18. We have robust networks of strategic assets that we own or have contractual access to, which give us greater flexibility and speed to reliably deliver widespread logistical solutions.

19. In this ever-changing society, the most powerful and enduring brands are built from the heart. Their foundations are stronger because they are built with the strength of the human spirit, not an ad campaign. The companies that are lasting are those that are authentic.

20. Because of our iconic brands, our unending commitment to premium content, and the innovation of our teams, we have permission from the market to be a world-class, tier-one partner.

Could you guess which ten statements are generated and which were actual corporate speak quotes? Read the open-source pre-print here to find out.

We also created a “A Practical Guide for Leaders & Employees for dealing with Corporate Bullshit” PDF that premium subscribers can download below:

Read more

A couple of years later, Earth Day was created to demonstrate support for the environment. Every April 22nd, over 1 billion people around the globe get together to help with environmental cleanups, tree planting, and advocacy for sustainable policies. To honor earth day, we decided to share our most ambitious research on climate change—it offers some insight into the types of messages the inspire or depress support for climate action.

There is heated debate about how to communicate about climate change. Many experts are yelling that the world is burning. UN Secretary-General António Guterres coined the term “Global boiling” in 2023 to describe the current era of extreme, record-breaking climate change. And a growing body of individuals known as ‘doomers’ now regularly share extremely pessimistic, nihilist or fatalistic views about global problems on social media.

But might this extreme paralyze us into inaction, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? If we are all doomed, maybe it doesn’t matter if I buy a Hummer and skip public transit. I’ll just post catastrophic memes for clicks on social media as the world burns around me. At least I’ll get some klout before it all goes up in flames.

In fact, this is pretty much what we found in a massive study that we published in Science Advances two years ago. To help figure out the precise impact of climate doomerism and compare it with alternative messages, we recently completed one of the largest experiments ever conducted on climate change behavior, with 59,440 participants in 63 countries.

Together with an international team of 255 other behavioral scientists and climate change experts (led by Madalina Vlasceanu & Kim Doell), we tested the effects of the 11 common messages meant to boost climate change beliefs, policy support, and concrete action. These messages were selected by a team of experts, and we consulted with the scientists who had originally created and tested each message to ensure we got it right (you can see a summary of each intervention below).

The messages/interventions ranged from emphasizing scientific consensus (e.g., noting that “99 percent of expert climate scientists” agree on the climate change facts), or the widespread concern of others (e.g., a majority of people in each nation is concerned), to emphasizing the consequences for one’s region (e.g., increased frequency and severity of wildfires and floods) or the effects of climate change on future generations (e.g., asking participants to imagine writing a letter about their actions regarding climate change that would be read by people decades from now).

Imagine how you would feel if you read this message (from the negative emotions intervention), which involved exposure to scientific claims about the impacts of climate change in a doom and gloom messaging style typically used by climate communicators to induce negative emotions:

“Climate change is happening much more quickly and will have a much greater impact than climate scientists previously thought, according to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2022). If your anxiety about climate change is dominated by fears of starving polar bears, glaciers melting, and sea levels rising, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a young adult today. And yet the swelling seas—and the cities they will drown—have so dominated the picture of climate change/global warming that they have blinded us to other threats, many much closer at hand and much more catastrophic…”

Does this inspire you to take action or leave you feeling overwhelmed?

We compared this doom and gloom message to the other climate change messages on a highly diverse sample of participants. Since climate change is a truly global issue, we translated and tested these messages in 63 different countries. This allowed us to see which messages worked best around the globe—as well as within specific countries and cultures.

Our findings revealed that doom and gloom messaging was highly effective for stimulating climate change information sharing, like posting on the internet or social media, where negativity reigns. As you can see in our figure below, doomerism (ie negative emotions) was the single most effective strategy for increasing social media sharing.

However, doom and gloom messaging was the absolute worst for motivating action and among the worst for changing climate change beliefs or support for climate change policies. In fact, negative emotions backfired on effortful behavior—making people significantly less likely to take action for the environment compared to a neutral control condition (shown as the dotted line on the figure below).

It turns out that critics are right to worry that doom and gloom can demoralize the public into inaction. We found that this strategy had no effect on policy support or climate beliefs. For these outcomes, writing a letter to future generations explaining one’s climate actions today or thinking about the consequences of climate change in one’s region were the most effective interventions.

And doom and gloom even backfired when it came to more effortful behavior. When faced with the enormous stakes of the climate crisis, personal actions—and perhaps even policy change—can seem futile. People withdraw or disengage. As Madalina and Jay recently concluded in an article for Scientific American:

“Doom and gloom messaging can do both things: induce helplessness, discourage individual-level action; but also motivate people to spread the word.”

Many other messages also failed or even backfired, underscoring how difficult it is to actually mobilize real, effortful action on climate change. This is why far more research is needed on the topic and why we all need to embrace greater intellectual humility around this issue.

It’s common to see certain messages—and messaging strategies—go viral on social media. But that doesn’t mean they will work in the real world. In fact, they might even backfire. The norms and incentive structures of social media are very different from the real world. The messages that go viral online may be completely counterproductive offline. The incentive structures that drive engagement online might ultimately depress real world climate action.

If we are past the point of no return, why bother taking action or making sacrifices?

We also found that different people responded differently to the various climate messages and that this varies across countries. To design the most effective messages, scientists and policy makers will need to tailor them to the right audience.

To see the effects of our interventions along dimensions such as country of residence, income level, age, ideological leaning, socioeconomic status, gender and also type of climate action targeted, visit our open-access user-friendly web app. Feel free to play around and find out what worked best (or worst) in your home country.

Sadly, we did not find a silver bullet for spurring climate action. But our research found several messages that moved the needle on climate change beliefs and actions. We suspect that similar lessons apply to other issues, from strengthening democracy to public health. In fact, we were recently part of a similar project designed to reduce affective polarization and found that several messages either didn’t work or backfired (thankfully, the optimistic message we created—based on The Power of Us—was the 3rd most effective, from over 252 submissions).

It also suggests that there are very serious downsides to doomerism. It might be fun to get engagement on social media, but the reward system there does not apply very well to the things that drive real policy change or behavior. We should be very wary about leaning on doomerism when the same set of facts can be conveyed in a more powerful message.

This has been well known for some time in the persuasion literature. Messages that appeal to our fears (known as fear appeals) are only really effective when they increase a sense of efficacy and focus on one-time behaviors. Alas, the doom and gloom messages on climate change often undercut a sense of efficacy and require repeated, long term habit change.

Does this mean we should avoid sharing the scientific facts about climate change? No, not at all. In fact, the message about scientific consensus was more effective than negative emotions on every single measure in our study—except sharing on social media. In short, people are highly responsive to scientific messages when they are framed in the right way.

We asked Jamie Hyneman, one of the most prominent science communicators in the media and former co-host of MythBusters for his thoughts on effective climate change messaging. He suggested messaging that provides 1) clarity of action and 2) appeals to morality and ethics.

“Looking at the ethics might be the way to go, more specifically, what is the right or wrong thing to do and what does that look like? The morality aspect of climate change is one thing that stands on its own and transcends identities - like whether you’re conservative or liberal.”

His intuitions were on point: our study confirmed that messages with moral foundations yielded the most motivation for positive climate action. And we have found that framing messages through a moral or ethical lens can make people feel more strongly about almost any action—from riding a bike to studying for a test. This might be a lesson that people should take to heart.

Let us know if you are doing anything for Earth Day in the comments.

News and Updates

Why do two people look at the same evidence and reach completely opposite conclusions? Jay discussed selective attention, sycophantic AI, political tribalism, and how it impacts leadership on the Culture Changers Podcast with Allison Hare:

Ask me Anything

We have one final monthly virtual meeting (Ask Me Anythings) for paid subscribers this spring! This is a chance for you to meet one-on-one or in small groups with Jay and Dom to talk about anything you want (e.g., our book, the topics we cover in this newsletter, our latest research, a problem you’re struggling with, or whatever else you would like). Our summer series will be announced soon.

• May 9th, 2pm EST with Jay

Paid subscribers received an email from powerofusbook@gmail.com with details on how to sign up. Reply to this email with any questions you have about this, or feedback on paid subscriber offerings.

Learn more about THE POWER OF US

If you like our newsletter, we encourage you to check out our award-winning book “The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony”. You can learn more about the book or order it from the links on our website (here or scan the QR code below). We keep the newsletter free, but are extremely grateful if you have a chance to purchase the book or buy it for a friend who wants to learn more about group psychology.

Catch up on the last one…

One more week to join our book giveaway for a free copy of Sonja Lyubomirsky’s newest book, How to Feel Loved.

The Power of Us

How to feel more loved

Love isn’t just something we give or receive, it’s something we communicate. In HOW TO FEEL LOVED: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most, happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky and relationship scientist Harry Reis argue that many of us are already loved, yet still feel unseen and disconnected. The gap isn’t about effort or compatibility, but about how we show up in our relationships…

Read more

17 days ago · 21 likes · 2 comments · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

Drawing on decades of research in psychology and human connection, the authors introduce five practical mindsets designed to transform how we relate to others, which involves embracing vulnerability to expressing genuine curiosity. At the heart of their framework is a simple idea: feeling loved requires being truly known, and allowing others the space to be known in return.

We interviewed Sonja about her new book and she explained why these ideas should reshape the way we think about identity and connection — and why something as small as asking one more thoughtful question might be the key to a more meaningful relationship. You can buy their book HOW TO FEEL LOVED here. We are also giving away a few free copies—see the details at the end of the interview to enter the draw.

What does your book teach us about social identity or group dynamics?

The book teaches us that we can build connections with other people even when we don’t share a common identity with them, and even across political, religious, and cultural divides. In How To Feel Loved, I describe the kinds of questions that are likely to foster meaningful conversations rather than ho-hum responses. For example, rather than staying on the surface, ask questions that dig deeper into what makes the other person a unique, thoughtful human. When you do this, it is more likely that your conversation partner will feel seen and appreciated, and you will have learned something important about them. That's the kind of conversation that builds connections.

What is the most important idea readers will learn from your book?

Many of us ARE loved, but we don’t always FEEL loved. If you want to feel more loved in a particular relationship in your life, you don’t need to broadcast your successes or try to make yourself more lovable. By contrast, feeling loved requires being truly KNOWN to the other person and truly knowing THEM. This means talking to others in a way that takes down the walls between us.

We encourage readers to embrace five mindsets to make this happen:

1. Sharing Mindset (open up, be real, be vulnerable),

2. Listening-to-Learn Mindset (listen like there’s going to be a quiz tomorrow, as opposed to waiting for your turn to respond),

3. Radical Curiosity Mindset (show enthusiastic, authentic interest in the other’s inner world; ask them deep questions),

4. Open-Heart mindset (show warmth, kindness, and a belief in their dreams), and

5. Multiplicity Mindset (be accepting of their flaws, don’t define a person by one trait or one behavior).

What is one factoid, statistic or study in your book that everyone should know?

70% of people don’t feel loved as much or as often as they’d like, and 40% don’t feel loved as much or as often as they’d like by their romantic partners.

In 2024, we gave a survey to a large and representative sample of Americans, asking how much they felt loved in various relationships, and whether they wanted to feel more loved. 70% of people don’t feel loved as much or as often as they’d like, and 40% don’t feel loved as much or as often as they’d like by their romantic partners. The takeaway message from this survey: there’s much room for improvement. A large majority of us want to feel more love in our lives. The 5 mindsets we describe in our book will help people achieve that goal.

What will readers find provocative or controversial about your book?

Not feeling loved isn’t about personal deficiencies or a partner’s behavior--two convenient explanations most of us fall into. When we don’t feel loved, we believe that we should make ourselves more lovable (e.g., by broadcasting our positive qualities and hiding our weaknesses). We argue this is a myth.

Do you have any practical advice for people who want to apply these ideas (e.g., three tips for the real world)?

1. Share something real about yourself, be vulnerable, but start small. Pacing is really important. Start with a small or medium thing to open up about--e.g., instead of saying, “I’m fine,” explain how your day is really going (e.g., “I had a rough morning”)

2. Listen to the other person in order to learn, not to respond. Quiet your voice and your inner chatter, so theirs can be heard. Stay with them instead of mentally rehearsing your next story.

3. Ask the other person one more question than you’d normally ask. Like, “How did that really feel?” or “What was the hardest thing about it?”

The three words that everyone loves to hear? They’re not “I love you.” They’re not “you’ve lost weight” and not “you were right.”

Those three words are “tell me more.” Such questions, when they’re authentic, signal that you’re right there with them. They’re a gift.

🎁 Book Giveaway Details 📖

To enter Sonja’s book giveaway, either…

1. Be a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers are automatically entered into all our monthly book giveaways!

   You can subscribe or upgrade your subscription below.

2. If you are not a paid subscriber yet, make sure you have a free subscription and simply leave a comment answering the question below:

   Which mindset can you embrace to improve your close relationship with someone in your life? (Sharing Mindset, Listening-to-Learn Mindset, Radical Curiosity Mindset, Open-Heart Mindset, Multipicity Mindset)

3. This giveaway is open to U.S. residents only. Enter before April 28th, 12 pm PST. Three winners will be selected at random and will receive an email from powerofusbook@gmail.com on April 29th, 2026.

Notes of the week

We are now sharing several new studies each week as they come out on our Power of Us substack app account. Please follow us on the app if you want to see the latest research on topics related to our newsletter. Here are some sample studies we shared this week:

Ask me Anything

We have one final monthly virtual meeting (Ask Me Anythings) for paid subscribers this spring! This is a chance for you to meet one-on-one or in small groups with Jay and Dom to talk about anything you want (e.g., our book, the topics we cover in this newsletter, our latest research, a problem you’re struggling with, or whatever else you would like). Our summer series will be announced soon.

• May 6th, 2pm EST with Jay

Paid subscribers recieved an email from powerofusbook@gmail.com with details on how to sign up. Reply to this email with any questions you have about this, or feedback on paid subscriber offerings.

Catch up on the last one…

Our last newsletter explained why social media is harming society, drawing on recent court cases, national polls, whistleblower testimony, internal documents, and our own research on the topic—they are all beginning to converge on a clear picture about these technologies.

Last week, juries in two different states delivered multimillion-dollar verdicts against Big Tech. A New Mexico jury handed down a $375 million verdict in a case brought by the state’s attorney general against Meta for enabling child sexual exploitation. The next day, a California jury awarded a young woman a combined $6 million in damages from Meta and YouTube for the allegedly addictive and mentally distressing properties of social media apps, including algorithmic curation and so-called infinite scroll, where the app continually provides you with new content as you scroll down the page.

These verdicts have catalyzed a "tidal cultural shift" toward viewing social media companies not just as content platforms, but as manufacturers of products that require regulation, similar to classic legal cases against "Big Tobacco". In fact, this parallel is exactly how some Meta-employees felt about their attempts to target kids:

The focus of the public has shifted from the content posted on platforms and content moderation policies to the deliberate design decisions made by these platforms—such as infinite scrolling, algorithmic recommendations, and push notifications—that are engineered to maximize engagement, even at the cost of individual or collective well-being.

This is hardly news to us. We have been studying and writing about the challenges posed by social media for the past decade. In this newsletter, we have written about the Facebook papers shared by a prominent whistleblower and why schools should ban smartphones.

This should also come as no surprise to anyone who has been following these issues. A majority of people believe that social media is harming children—and this has now been the case for several years. It is also a rare case of bipartisan consensus, with Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all on the same page.

In many cases, the research and safety teams are deeply aware of these problems. But the senior management in the companies is often unwilling to implement changes. The pursuit of profit is a difficult temptation and they have focused on harvesting the attention of teenagers, rather than ensuring their safety. For instance, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2017 internal memo: “Teen time spent [should] be our top goal of 2017”, even after safety concerns were raised by employees.

Whistleblower Frances Haugen was one of the first employees to bring these concerns to the attention of the public. Her testimony and public interviews provided a better understanding about how Facebook engineers their platform and the consequences this has for spreading misinformation and fostering social conflict.

“Facebook is optimizing for content that gets engagement or reaction. Its own research is showing the content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing—it is easier to inspire people to anger than other emotions.” — Frances Haugen, on 60 Minutes.

A few days after the whistleblower went public, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, spoke with employees about the revelations. According to the New York Times, he claimed that Haugen’s assertions about how Facebook polarizes people were “pretty easy to debunk.”

Two court cases—and numerous studies later—the data is firmly on her side.

Debate about the potential harms caused by Facebook and other social media platforms is still up in the air on some issues, but findings on the spread of divisive and polarizing content (in the United States at least) seem clear. Before the recent interview with Haugen on 60 Minutes or her appearance before Congress, Jay published an analysis of nearly 3 million posts on Facebook and Twitter with his colleagues from Cambridge University, Steve Rathje and Sander van der Linden.

In our research, the single biggest predictor of social media “virality” was dunking on a political foe. Each word referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67% (see figure below). If a post came from a Democrat, a word like “Republican” or “conservative” led to increased virality. And if a post came from a Republican, a word like “Joe Biden” led to the same. And most of these posts were clearly negative.

One example of a viral post that spread in Republican circles was from Breitbart, promoting a video entitled, “Every American needs to see Joe Biden’s latest brain freeze.” Meanwhile, a post that went viral from Democrats came from The Daily Beast, claiming that Mike Pence was blatantly lying about Covid-19.

When Steve, Sander, and Jay published a report about these data in The Washington Post, Facebook published a fierce rebuttal. They argued that “Extremism is bad for our business” and presented a limited set of studies that focused largely on the impact of Facebook in other countries.

Yet their own internal research, shared by this whistle-blower, contradicts their rebuttal. According to a disturbing new analysis of the Facebook Papers by The Atlantic, employees at Facebook have long known that the social media giant amplifies extremism, spears misinformation, and encourages political polarization. And they are growing increasingly angry with the way that company leadership has refused to incorporate these insights.

“Again and again, the Facebook Papers show staffers sounding alarms about the dangers posed by the platform—how Facebook amplifies extremism and misinformation, how it incites violence, how it encourages radicalization and political polarization. Again and again, staffers reckon with the ways in which Facebook’s decisions stoke these harms, and they plead with leadership to do more.

And again and again, staffers say, Facebook’s leaders ignore them.”

It also turns out that people don’t like this type of content. We asked a diverse sample of Americans how they feel about the content that spreads on social media. As you can see below, people believe that divisive content, moral outrage, negative content, high-arousal content, and misinformation are all likely to go viral online. However, they wish this type of content would not go viral on social media. Instead, they want to see far more positive content spreading online, such as accurate, nuanced, uplifting, and educational content.

The aversion to social media extends well beyond specific topics. About half of Gen Z wishes TikTok (47%) and X (50%) didn’t exist. That’s despite—spending four hours a day on social media, as more than half of respondents to a new survey say is normal.

Scholars have been sounding the alarm about these problems for several years. Indeed, we devoted an entire chapter to toxicity online in our book “The Power of Us“. In the book, we describe a clever experiment that offers causal evidence that Facebook increases polarization and reduces well being. A group of economists led by Hunt Allcott decided to find out what would happen if they paid people to leave Facebook for four weeks in advance of the 2018 US midterm elections. They paid more than a thousand volunteers to log off the social network for a few weeks and compared them to a control group of volunteers who continued using Facebook.

This experimental design allowed the researchers to detect the influence of using Facebook on polarization and other potential harms…or, more accurately, whether ceasing to use the platform reduces these problems.

Not only did the volunteers who logged off Facebook report an increase in their psychological well-being, but they became less politically polarized (across a variety of measures). Remarkably, the reduction in polarization from logging off Facebook for a single month was equivalent to nearly half the amount polarization has increased in the US since the mid-1990s!

In defense of Facebook, they are certainly not the only platform exacerbating social conflict by amplifying polarizing content and misinformation. We recently published a review of the research on the topic and found that Twitter/X is even more polarized than Facebook or WhatsApp in some countries. And the effects are mixed—one study in Bosnia, for example, suggests that Facebook might help expose people to different perspectives if their real life social networks are homogenous.

But when this social media technology was introduced to the Marubo tribe deep in the Amazon via access to Elon Musk’s Starlink it revealed the same basic pattern we have seen over and over again in many studies. Members of this small community quickly became obsessed with social media to the extend that the community had to shut down access to the internet each day to ensure they would hunt and gather enough food for their own survival.

More strikingly, it also spurred the kind polarization we saw in our American samples. According to the NYT “Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.” I described this natural experiment a few months ago on Andrew Yang’s podcast, which you can watch below:

In the United States, where antipathy toward out-group partisans is at a 40-year high and often seems like a sectarian conflict, social media amplifies existing disagreements, facilitates the spread of conspiracy theories, and allows for the organization of anti-democratic activities (like the January 6th insurrection). But the Amazon example also illustrates that this technology can have a massive disruptive influence even in a community without these political dynamics.

This technology poses a serious problem for public health, as well. As Biden’s Press Secretary noted in July, twelve people produced 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. At the time, all of them remained active on Facebook despite some being banned on other platforms (including ones that Facebook owns!). Indeed, news exposure from Facebook was one of the single biggest predictors of vaccine hesitancy in the United States—with people who only got their news from Facebook expressing greater vaccine hesitancy than Fox News viewers.

New research suggests that there may be some alternatives. A group of researchers from Stanford developed a novel method for reranking social media feeds. They found that increasing exposure to antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity posts in the newsfeed increases affective polarization and negative emotions, whereas decreasing exposure reduces them (see figure below). These changes were comparable in size to 3 years of change in United States affective polarization.

As political polarization and societal division become increasingly linked to social media activity, these findings provide a potential pathway for platforms to address these challenges through algorithmic interventions. These interventions may result in algorithms that not only reduce partisan animosity but also promote greater social trust and healthier democratic discourse across party lines.

It’s unlikely that everyone would be willing to take a four week vacation from Facebook. But this research suggests that changes to algorithmic feeds can mitigate some of the harms of social media. There is a growing awareness that people need to take this research more seriously and think about the potential costs to society given the impact of Facebook, X, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms.

The problem with social media platforms is that many of their design features and algorithms are optimized for engagement, rather than accuracy, cooperation, or other civic values—including the values that promote a healthy democracy. It is increasingly clear that denying the body of internal and external research about these issues is simply no longer an option for Meta or the rest of us.

Catch up on the last one…

If you missed our live event last month, read on to hear more about our advance screening to the AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist!

The Power of Us

Reflections on The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

“This is the last mistake we’ll ever get to make” — Aza Raskin…

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a month ago · 13 likes · 6 comments · Center for Conflict + Coop., Jay Van Bavel, and Anni Sternisko

“This is the last mistake we’ll ever get to make” — Aza Raskin

This week, we curated a diverse audience of over 150 experts—ranging from academics, journalists, and tech—to join us for a special screening of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (which is now out in theaters!). We also included several newsletter subscribers who joined us in person.

After the screening, Anni hosted a panel discussion with Jay, the author of The Anxious Generation Jonathan Haidt, and Academy Award-winning producer Jonathan Wang. The room was buzzing afterwards and we decided to share a recap of the discussion to share with the rest of the world

While much of today’s conversation focuses on how AI (Artificial Intelligence) will shape the future. We took a step back and asked a different question: How can we guide AI toward a future we want, and how do we keep that future human?

“The rare feeling of being in a room assembled with real purpose, where the aim was not simply to generate more noise around AI, but to think more carefully about what this moment demands of us.” — Event attendee, Paul Gimenez

Our Key Take-aways:

1) Watch the documentary, but don’t watch it alone

Is it a super accessible primer on the promise and perils of AI that your family should see? Yes. — Event attendee

We have been studying the psychology of technology for over a decade, but the documentary rattled many of us in a new way. Watching together, we were on a roller coaster of despair, excitement, and hope. Jay said his first reaction was existential terror. His second reaction was hope—especially when people spoke about collective action.

This is a huge problem that will require a lot of collective action (…) hearing everyone react to it made it feel like we were all (…) reaching a common ground. — Event attendee

2) AI will supercharge the good and the bad

AI can potentially help us solve climate change, find a cure for cancer, and offer children around the globe access to individualized, high-quality tutoring. Yet, the same powerful technology can advance bioweapons, feed children sexualized content, and erode our shared understanding of truth. The two outcomes are intrinsically intertwined.

Jay and Jonathan Haidt have written a lot about how tech companies are incentivized to maximize attention because this keeps users on their platforms and engage more. But this can have a number of downstream consequences, including: polarization, distorted norms, and declining adolescent mental health. Meta just lost two trials this week: A $370 million lawsuit over child sexploitation and another $4.2 million for creating addictive design features that harm users.

I expect it will become essential viewing for anyone trying to think seriously about artificial intelligence and its human consequences.— Event attendee

AI may perpetuate this problem: In a set of studies, led by Steven Rathje, Jay finds that people enjoy interacting more with sycophantic chatbots (chatbots that validate beliefs indiscriminately) vs. more balanced chatbots which led to more extreme political beliefs. And a new study came out this week showing that AI chatbots are 50% more sycophantic than humans. The authors concluded “that seemingly innocuous design and engineering choices can result in consequential harms”. This is a recipe for disaster.

3) Misaligned incentives and the psychology of AI arms races

The documentary explains that there is no good AI vs. bad AI. The promise and peril are inextricably linked and it is therefore the underlying incentive structures that we have to understand and guide. And these incentives are currently steering us in the wrong direction, creating a race similar to the nuclear arms race during the cold war; companies and countries are incentivized to cut corners in AI safety to avoid losing the race.

What future should we thrive for and how do we get there?

The documentary challenged us to reflect on what future we want and what it means to be human.

As we have seen with social media, it is difficult to predict the impact of new technology. Social media played a key role in democratic movements such as the Arab Spring, but it was also linked to the Rohingya genocide. We need to learn from that and design the technology to avoid these risks, rather than dealing with the damage to individuals and society in hindsight.

Jonathan Haidt urged us to create resilient societies with a strong immune system to buffer unpredicted stressors. Societies that have institutions that can react fast and civilians that have moral maturity and wisdom. This is a tall order for our current political leadership so the burden will fall on each of us to advocate for better solutions.

Psychological research can help us get there. For instance, the study by Jay and Steve also found that engaging with sycophantic chatbots did not increase belief extremity among participants who scored high in intellectual humility—these individuals were more receptive to chatbots who gave them critical feedback and a well rounded view of an issue.

The documentary producer, Jonathan Wang, spoke about the need to focus on human beauty and creativity. In a world that gets more and more complex and noisy from the abundance of content, people are craving meaning, beauty, and genuine social connections—uniquely human experiences. Human-made art and story telling rather than synthetic and hyperpersonalized content may be one way to get there.

4) The psychology of collective action

Changing incentives and institutionalizing alternatives requires coordination and collaboration at an unprecedented scale. As the world is entering an era of democratic instability, intergroup conflict, geopolitical isolationism, and distrust this may seem impossible. But psychological research and practical experience can help us come together.

We have studied intergroup conflict for several decades and found that a shared sense of identity and superordinate goals can encourage people to collaborate instead of compete. Research also finds that changing social norms may be a powerful tool to mitigate selfish behavior. For instance, a study conducted in Finland found that Finish students were less susceptible to selfish behavior, likely because Finland scores high on social norms of cooperation.

One of the biggest contribution of the movie is that it gives us a common language and knowledge around AI and how it affects us personally and society at large. Common knowledge is essential for breaking pluralistic ignorance and coordinating action. Jay noted that our own research finds that the overwhelming majority of people want transparent algorithms and they want control over these algorithms (see figure below).

If we are largely on the same page, you may ask how we can possibly rally people? The PhD student in our lab—Danielle Goldwert—is studying this question for her dissertation. She finds that a feeling of collective efficacy is critical to mobilize people. This sentiment is echoed in historic events like the civil rights movement:

Agency and hope

Claiming our agency was one of the biggest themes of the movie and the panel discussion. Hopelessness is the enemy of change. Indeed, one study finds that sense of agency predicted collective action, but only among groups that also scored high in hope.

How do we find hope?

A recent poll finds that 80% of U.S. adults believe the government should maintain rules for AI safety and data security, even if it means developing AI capabilities more slowly. Recently, the U.S. Congress voted 99-to-1 to strike down a bill proposal that would limit state-level regulation of AI In such a deeply polarized country this should give us hope. We can agree on things, we just need to find the same language and collaboration to get things done.

Our panelist Jonathan Haidt said that it is the most exciting time to be a social psychologist. We couldn’t agree more. Our field has all the tools to study these issues. Understanding these dynamics may prove very helpful for taking action. You can build your own understanding by watching the movie, talking about it with your friends and family, and becoming a part of the conversation.

The documentary will be released nationwide in theaters March 27. Catch it in your local theater and find out where you are on the Apocaloptimist Scale.

We thank the NYU Arts and Science Office of Research and Focus Features for their partnership in making this event possible.

Notes of the week

This screening was the first in a broader series of events we’ll be opening up to newsletter subscribers, including online courses for premium subscribers led by Jay and Dom, so keep your eyes peeled for more to come.

In the meantime, Jay was interviewed on NPR's Hidden Brain about the power of social identity. We often think of beliefs and decisions as individual choices. But in many cases, they are shaped by our social identities. When people join groups, they don’t just coordinate behavior—they begin to see the world through a shared lens.

This has profound implications for: leadership & conformity, organizational culture, intergroup polarization, and collective action. The themes we discussed in this very newsletter about AI. But social identity also helps explain why changing minds can be so difficult: you’re often engaging with identity, not just information.

If you’re interested, you can listen to the full discussion here.

Catch up on the last one…

"Success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. But it could also be the last – unless we learn how to avoid the risks".

This quote is from famous physicist, Stephen Hawking, but it almost perfectly sums up the new documentary: THE AI DOC: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. It has been described as the most urgent movie of our time.

We will be hosting an exclusive pre-release screening of the upcoming AI documentary at New York University on Tuesday, March 24 at 6:30 pm. And we are giving away free tickets to subscribers of this newsletter! Yes, that’s you!

Get a sneak preview of what is likely going to be the most talked about documentary of the year then stick around for a conversation we are hosting with the Academy Award winning producer, Jonathan Wang, and NYT # Bestselling author of The Anxious Generation, Jon Haidt. We promise to keep things spicy!

From the Academy Award®-winning filmmakers behind Everything Everywhere All at Once and Navalny; a father-to-be tries to figure out what is happening with all this AI insanity. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a hand-made, eye-opening documentary about the most powerful technology humanity has ever created... and what’s at stake if we get it wrong.

You can watch the trailer here (we watched the movie ourselves and it’s a bit terrifying):

As we mentioned above, the screening will be followed immediately by a panel discussion: The Center for Conflict and Cooperation’s Co-Directors (Jay Van Bavel and Anni Sternisko), will be joined by Jonathan Wang (Academy Award-winning producer) and Jonathan Haidt (NYU Professor and Author of The Anxious Generation).

Much of today’s conversation focuses on how A.I. will shape the future. We will take a step back and ask a different question: How can we guide A.I. toward a future we want, and how do we keep that future human? We have been studying AI in our lab for the past few years and the technology is rapidly developing. Now is the time to have a conversation about what we as individuals and society want from AI.

We will also be taking questions for the audience, so this is a chance for you to be part of the conversation.

If you want to join us, please Register by Sunday, March 22nd, 2026

Paid subscribers: Claim your free ticket here.
Free subscribers: Enter the lottery for a chance to win one of a limited number of tickets here. We will try to give tickets to as many people as possible.

This screening is the first in a broader series of events we’ll be opening up to paid newsletter subscribers, including online courses led by Jay and Dom, so keep your eyes peeled for more to come.

If you can’t make it to our screening, go catch it at your local movie theater. THE AI DOC will be released in U.S. theaters on March 27th. The initial reviews are excellent so we encourage everyone to check it out.

Catch up on the last one…

In a new book, How to Disagree Better, Harvard University public policy professor, Dr. Julia Minson, argues that most of us have been approaching disagreement the wrong way. You can present your case with bulletproof logic. You can share compelling data. You can explain exactly why you’re right. And somehow, the other person digs in even deeper.

She argues that the best frameworks for disagreement that are grounded in scientific evidence are the ones that focus on language. The H.E.A.R. strategy acknowledges the counterpart while making your own point. It’s also important that people increase their use of positive language (rather than words like “don’t”, “never” and “no”) and emphasize agreement. These strategies create a bridge and a sense of empathy and respect.

Click here to learn more about How to Disagree Better and order a copy now! Plus, we are giving away 5 free physical copies to The Power of Us subscribers. To enter the giveaway, check out the details at the bottom of this newsletter.

What does your book teach us about social identity or group dynamics?

My book offers evidence-based approaches for effectively navigating disagreement. People’s beliefs are often correlated with their group identities, with group members sharing particular attitudes and convictions, and making unfounded assumptions about the attitudes and convictions of out-group members. To the extent that we can learn to have thoughtful, engaged, authentic conversations with people whose opinions we don’t share, we can start becoming more comfortable crossing group boundaries and making interesting connections with “the other side.”

What is the most important idea readers will learn from your book?

There are a lot of books out there on navigating conflict and disagreement, but very few of them are based on rigorous empirical science. As a result, we do some things right, but also waste time on ineffective approaches. I want people to know that there is a growing experimental science of conflict and if they follow the research they will save themselves time and drama.

Perhaps the most important thing I have learned from doing research in this area is that our mental efforts in disagreement do very little to improve outcomes. Well intentioned attempts to take our counterparts’ perspective, be more patient, be better listeners, feel more empathy, etc. don’t help as much as we expect because people don’t have access to our internal mental states. In order for a strategy to improve the outcome of a conversation, your counterpart must notice it so they can react appropriately. Instead, we need to use externally visible, easily interpretable behaviors to telegraph our intention to disagree constructively. The most salient and consistently interpreted behavior in disagreement is language. So that’s where we should all be focusing our efforts.

What is one factoid, statistic or study in your book that everyone should know?

Expressing a willingness to learn about your counterpart’s perspective in a way that is transparent and recognizable, is one of the most powerful tools we have found for de-escalating conflict. Yet, people are truly abysmal at doing this in the course of a conversation.

When we put Democrats and Republicans into a chat room and asked them to discuss an upcoming election, the vast majority of them did not express any kind of interest in the opposing view. A handful of people asked questions, but the questions were often rhetorical or sarcastic, not ones than an opposing partisan would interpret as an expression of curiosity. In later studies, we found that getting people to verbally express a desire to learn is incredibly difficult — people seem to see the willingness to learn from opponents as a low status move and they don’t want to sound submissive in a competitive situation. Giving them specific words and phrases to say helps, and so do financial incentives. But a non-trivial proportion of people still won’t do it, and feels proud of it.

What will readers find provocative or controversial about your book?

A common belief in the popular conflict literature is that people are threatened by opposing views and for this reason avoid engaging with them or updating their beliefs. However, my research finds that threat has little to do with it.

People don’t want to engage with opposing views because they think they are right. They have respected sources, experiences, and evidence to support their beliefs. When somebody tries to offer a contradictory perspective, the reaction is not a feeling of threat, but usually a feeling of irritation, anger, or even disgust because we are quite certain in the fundamental correctness of our own beliefs and don’t like our time being wasted. This interpretation is in line with research on Naive Realism and suggests a different approach for navigating disagreement than an approach grounded in the idea that disagreeing others are all feeling threatened by our brilliance.

Do you have any practical advice for people who want to apply these ideas (e.g., three tips for the real world)?

Yes! In a lot of my writing and teaching, I have advocated for the use of “conversational receptiveness” - a communication style that allows us to express our views in disagreement in a way that persuades our counterpart that we are actively engaging with their perspective even as we are making our own point. The easiest way to get started on conversational receptiveness is by using the H.E.A.R. framework.

• H = Hedge your claims, even when you feel very certain about your beliefs. It signals a recognition that there are some cases or some people who might support your opponent’s perspective.

• E = Emphasize agreement. Find some common ground even when you disagree on a particular topic. This does not mean compromising or changing your mind, but rather recognizing that most people in the world can find some broad ideas or values to agree on.

• A = Acknowledge the opposing perspective. Rather than jumping in to your own argument, devote a few seconds to restating the other person’s position to demonstrate that you did indeed hear and understand it.

• R = Reframing to the positive. Avoid negative and contradictory words, such as “no,” “won’t” or “do not.” At the same time, increase your use of positive words to change the tone of the conversation.

News and Updates

Jay is giving a talk at the Stanford Tech Impact & Policy Center on “Morality in the Anthropocene” on May 19th. You can attend in person or via zoom using this link.

🎁 Book Giveaway Details 📖

To enter Julia’s book giveaway for How to Disagree Better, either…

1. Be a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers are automatically entered into all our monthly book giveaways!

   You can subscribe or upgrade your subscription below.

2. If you are not a paid subscriber yet, make sure you have a free subscription and simply leave a comment answering one the questions below:

   Who is someone in your life (e.g., spouse, parent, child, team member) you disagree with often? Which component of H.E.A.R. can you focus on incorporating in your conversations with them?

   Note: Giveaway is open to U.S. residents only. Enter before April 5th, 12 pm PST. Five winners will be selected at random and will recieve an email from powerofusbook@gmail.com on April 6th, 2026.

Catch up on the last one…

By 2001, the once-dominant Buckeyes had slipped into mediocrity. When Jim Tressel was hired to coach the team, he completely revamped how players earned a buckeye. He turned an individual competition into an approach that rewarded teamwork.

Instead of rewarding a player for scoring a touchdown, for instance, every player on the offensive unit would get a sticker if the team scored more than 24 points. And the coaching staff gave every player on the team a sticker after each win. Favoring teamwork over individual performance paid off almost immediately — the team not only won a national championship the following year, but the Buckeyes have been one of the most successful teams in the country ever since and are a threat to win the National Championship almost every year.

Although leaders are concerned with collective success, most organizations — from sports teams to universities to global companies — still focus on rewarding individual performance. General Electric CEO Jack Welch concocted the legendary “Rank and Yank” system to motivate employeers. The majority of Fortune 500 companies reward the most productive individuals, not the most effective groups or indispensable group members.

Rank and Yank guided talent assessments through a 3-step process:

1. Rank every employee’s job performance.

2. Use the rank-ordered list to identify a bottom segment of performers, usually 10%.

3. Fire those in the bottom segment.

Survivors then have their compensation calibrated according to where they fell on the rating curve. Or, as its also known, the Vitality Curve.

This Rank and Yank system uses fear and individual competition as motivators. While it creates a compliant workforce, there is little evidence of its success. If anything, it costs fortune in performance reviews and leads employees to "feel unmotivated and disengaged". We believe that leaders at these organizations are overlooking something fundamental about human nature — our groupish nature.

Human beings evolved in groups, and most of us still work in groups every day. Our affinity for groups is wired deeply into our basic biology. Indeed, humans are unique among primates in that we readily cooperate with in-group members — even if they are completely unknown to us. This is why sports fans can show up to a stadium and immediately share common purpose with 100,000 complete strangers.

Even more striking, research in our labs has found that the simple act of joining a group can produce a dramatic influence on brain function and behavior. At the mere flip of a coin, people readily befriend and place their trust in fellow in-group members. And our research has found that creating mixed-race groups can override implicit racial bias. Group identification is one ingredient that can bring strangers together.

Given that group membership is such a deeply rooted part of human nature and organizational success, a central element of leadership is the management of group identities. In short, great leaders are “Entrepreneurs of Identity”. They embrace our tribal nature and seek to shape the identity of their fellow group members. This social relationship between leaders and followers is at the heart of transformational leadership.

When a person starts to identify with a group, it triggers a fundamental shift in their goals. Events and decisions that were once evaluated with reference to oneself (“what’s in it for me?”) are now evaluated in reference to the group (“what does this mean for us?”). In fact, research shows that even otherwise selfish individuals often become cooperative — and even altruistic — when they identify with a group. Once their self becomes fused with the group, they are motivated to pursue what they understand to be the goals of the group.

Group identity can explain a range of remarkable behaviors, ranging from putting in long hours at work to making the ultimate sacrifice for one’s country. Many experiments have now shown that members will act to benefit to their groups, even when doing so exacts a personal cost. One reason is because we share in the success and rewards of our in-group members — we bask in their reflected glory and feel pleasure when they receive a reward. As such, the key to leading groups is fostering an environment in which individual group members deeply identify with the team.

To cultivate a strong group identity, leaders can take the following steps: (1) ensure the group satisfies basic the psychological needs of individual members, (2) generates super-ordinate goals, (3) rewards individual contributions to the group, and (4) values dissent.

1. Focus on employees’ social needs. Organizations traditionally use financial rewards to motivate employees, but great leaders also fulfill the social needs of their employees. Compelling groups satisfy one or more fundamental human needs, including the need to belong, obtain status, feel distinctive, and maintain certainty or control. By balancing individuals’ need to belong with their desire to stand out, a leader can build a sense of “optimal distinctiveness” among group members. Leaders seeking to increase members’ group identification need to first consider the basic social needs of their members and then determine how the group might do a better job fulfilling them.

2. Set superordinate goals. Recent neuroscience studies suggest that cooperation is inherently rewarding. But many people will only cooperate with fellow in-group members. In many organizations, the loyalty of employees lies with their department or project team, rather than the whole organization. While internal divisions can be useful at times — a bit of healthy competition between departments can drive people to work harder — employees can lose sight of organizational goals or may even sabotage other departments. Visionary leaders communicate the superordinate goals of the organization and explain how all the divisions, departments, and project teams are necessary for achieving these goals.

3. Reward both collective and individual effort. Leaders need to reward behavior that advances the goals of the organization, rather than the individual. Effective leaders provide bonuses, recognition, raises, flexibility, and opportunities, based on the entire team’s performance. To avoid free-riding (when team members shirk their personal responsibility), individual rewards should also be given to individuals who make important contributions to the team’s success. This rewards indispensable team members — the unsung heroes who work late, cover for colleagues, and enhance the success of the group. Combining individual and collective rewards can promote stronger group identity and ensure that individual members are encouraged and motivated (not only financial, but also socially) to pursue the team’s goals and help the team succeed.

Group cohesion can also be a weakness — suppressing dissent and creativity, and creating mindless conformity. How can leaders capitalize on the benefits of group cohesion while avoiding its drawbacks?

4. Avoid the downsides of conformity by valuing dissent. Many people assume that dissenters are trying to damage the group. But our research suggests that committed group members are the ones who are most likely to speak up when things are going badly for the group because they care deeply about group success. Thus, constructive dissent needs to be explicitly valued in organizations to avoid groupthink and bad decision-making. Leaders need to make it easy for group members to speak out against bad ideas. For instance, leaders can designate certain group members to act as devil’s advocate to ensure the group reaches the best possible decision. To create a culture where constructive feedback and innovation flourishes, leaders should also encourage their employees to pursue organizational goals rather than simply follow organizational norms.

The bottom line is that leaders need to understand and harness the tribal psychology that is deeply imprinted onto human nature. The ease with which people categorize the social world into groups speaks to our nature, and provides a powerful potential tool for leaders. Our capacity to identify with groups provides the foundations for cooperation with others — even complete strangers.

Notes of the week

New public opinion survey 🗳️

The U.S. is the only country surveyed where more adults describe the morality of others living in the country as bad than good. Canada is on the opposite end of the spectrum: they overwhelmingly see their neighbors as morally good.

Polarization and social media

The more active people are on social media, the more polarized they are.

The opinions of the these extreme users are filling your newsfeed, but they are not representative of most citizens or even most social media users — who are far less polarized! This creates false perceptions of social norms and stereotypes, creating a funhouse mirror effect.

Catch up on the last one…

Last week, we shared a column from Dr. Mickey Inzlicht’s substack on stereotype threat and its replicability. We received notes from other scholars in the field and have linked a response from Mary Murphy of below from her expert perspective on the topic.

Culture Catalyst with Mary C. Murphy

The Report of Stereotype Threat's Demise Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Today I’m feeling some way about our field of social psychology. This past weekend, we had a terrific disciplinary conference (Society for Personality and Social Psychology- SPSP) in which I felt connected and surrounded by community dedicated to understanding some of the most important problems of our time—and bringing our tools to bear to investigate …

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2 months ago · 32 likes · 7 comments · Mary Murphy

The Power of Us

The Downfall of Stereotype Threat

This week we are hosting a column from one of favorite professors from our graduate school days—Dr. Mickey Inzlicht, the Director of the Work & Play Lab at the University of Toronto. Mickey is an expert on self-regulation, identity, and discrimination, and has some of the most interesting—and provocative—perspectives on the big ideas in our field…

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2 months ago · 13 likes · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel and Michael Inzlicht

One of the reasons we loved Mickey as grad students is because he would share all his opinions and he welcomed disagreement. He was fun to debate and never got defensive. This made science discussions with him a lot of fun. He now writes the “Speak Now, Regret Later” substack where he shares his controversial takes on the field of social psychology and often responds to his critics.

Speak Now Regret Later

An unfiltered exploration of psychology, culture, and the world through the eyes of an impulsive yet remorseful professor

By Michael Inzlicht

We invited him to share his controversial column on the downfall of Stereotype Threat. When he started at the University of Toronto, Mickey was most known for his research on stereotype threat and that line of research was among the most prominent ideas in the field. We remember walking through SPSP during graduate school and seeing countless posters on implicit attitudes, ego depletion, and stereotype threat—it seemed like everyone was studying at least one of those topics.

In the last decade, all of those topics have come under a great deal of scrutiny. A mix of failed replications and methodological criticisms has called into question these bodies of research. (Jay has a chapter on the “replication crisis” in social psychology that you can read here). And, while there is still ongoing debate about the scope and scale of these ideas, we wanted to share Mickey’s perspective on the topic since it touches on the core themes of our newsletter (i.e., identity and group dynamics).

Another day, another idol falls.

This one has been teetering for years, so the collapse didn’t come as a shock. But that doesn’t make it any less painful.

I’m talking about stereotype threat, a once-revolutionary idea that shaped how social psychologists thought about identity, achievement, and inequality. For decades, it inspired research, drove interventions, and promised insights into the invisible forces that constrain human potential.

I still remember seeing its most eloquent advocate, Stanford University’s Claude Steele, deliver a keynote address in 1999 at the annual convention of what was then called the American Psychological Society. It was my first ever conference, my first trip to Denver, and Steele was nothing short of magnetic. Charismatic and at the height of his powers, he commanded the stage like no academic I had ever seen. He delivered his message with the kind of confidence that makes you believe science can change the world. Professor Steele was a rock star, and I was as giddy seeing him on stage as I was seeing Kurt Cobain on stage a few years earlier.

What is Stereotype Threat?

The concept of stereotype threat, first proposed by Claude Steele in the early 1990s, posited that individuals who are part of a negatively stereotyped group can, in certain situations, experience anxiety about confirming those stereotypes, leading paradoxically to underperformance, thus confirming the disparaging stereotype. The initial research was groundbreaking.

In 1995, Steele and his student Joshua Aronson—who went on to become my postdoc supervisor years later—demonstrated that the notorious Black-white gap in academic performance could be partially closed when negative stereotypes impugning Black people’s intelligence were made irrelevant. When Black students at Stanford University were told that a test was diagnostic of intellectual ability, they performed worse than their white counterparts. However, when this stereotype threat was ostensibly removed—by simply framing the test as a measure of problem-solving rather than intelligence—the performance gap between Black and white students nearly vanished.

Suddenly, here was an explanation for why certain groups didn’t perform as well in academic settings. And it wasn’t just race; follow-up studies looked at women in math and science. Women, who dominate men in most academic disciplines, underperform in STEM fields because they were regularly, albeit subtly, reminded of the stereotype that women aren’t good at math, or so the story goes. The idea felt revolutionary, hopeful even, because it suggested that these vexing performance gaps could be addressed by changing people’s immediate environments rather than accepting them as fixed outcomes, inherent to the groups themselves

These findings were exhilarating. Before long, stereotype threat was not only the darling of social psychology, but it also became the darling of the political left who now had an answer to prevailing views of group differences held by the political right. This is partly because shortly before stereotype threat took its turn in the spotlight, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which resulted in a media firestorm that has had repercussions to this day. Not only did the book discuss racial differences in intelligence as real and consequential—and not mere products of culturally biased IQ tests—it suggested that a non-negligible factor in this gap was due to biological differences. This thesis was so toxic that the octogenarian Murray is still considered a pariah, shouted down and deplatformed from talks he tries to deliver at respectable colleges to this day.

Stereotype threat, in contrast, was a breath of fresh air. It promised that group differences were malleable, not fixed. They could be explained as momentary apprehension, akin to the nerves that might cause an elite athlete to choke on competition day. Yes, these group differences still have consequences, but now we have a remedy—change the situation so that stereotypes are less likely to be in the air and watch as all the Black students and female mathematicians rise to the top.

I too was swept up by this mania. I studied stereotype threat as a PhD student and published some of the first papers on the topic. My dissertation and very first publication suggested that subtle aspects of a room—like how many men and women were in a math classroom—could be enough to evoke stereotype threat and undermine performance. Because my field became captivated by stereotype threat, this meant that I was quickly offered jobs, grants, tenure, and acclaim. I edited a book on stereotype threat and was asked to add my name and research to briefs delivered to the US Supreme Court. My career benefitted immensely.

The Replicators are Coming

Then things started going sideways. And not just for stereotype threat.

It’s all very complicated. Lots of strands in old Duder’s head. But here’s the skinny. In the early 2010s, psychology started looking inward, asking hard questions about the robustness of our most cherished findings. This happened because in the early 2000s, our best journals regularly included studies that were ludicrous and hard to believe. For example, researchers made dubious claims about the role of blood glucose and self-control, and found positive evidence for these claims, despite their biological impossibility. A paper was published in social psychology’s most prestigious journal claiming evidence for clairvoyance, essentially offering a ringer for a ringer. Ludicrous. If these impossible ideas were generating support with the standard methods of social psychology, maybe our methods are not what we thought they were.

A small cadre of reformers then started raising awareness that all was not right in how we conducted our science: we did not bother replicating important studies, we were misusing and abusing our statistical tools, and we did not publish all our studies—particularly the failed ones. And when some brave scientists decided to audit the field by closely replicating many studies, only about a quarter from social psychology could be successfully replicated. Since these dark days, the field has changed immensely, and we’re slowly producing more respectable science today.

Nonetheless, the entire field’s evidentiary basis was now suspect. After all, they were produced by methods that we now consider questionable. Stereotype threat was no different. I would love to say that stereotype threat was an exception, that it survived replication attempts and other audits, and that a beloved idea can still be used to counter damaging claims about group differences. But new data now reveal what many of us suspected for at least ten years: stereotype threat does not replicate, and it does not undermine academic performance in the ways we thought.

This new data emerged from what is called a Registered Replication Report. This was no ordinary replication study; it used the gold standard of scientific rigor. Conducted by multiple labs across the U.S. and Europe, and led by Andrea Stoevenbelt this study (still a preprint) was preregistered (meaning all methods and analyses were specified before the data were collected) and involved over 1,500 participants. It replicated the exact procedures of a well-known stereotype threat study published in 2005 by Mike Johns, Toni Schmader, and Andy Martens—all colleagues and friends I deeply respect.

The original study had found that women performed worse on math tests when reminded of gender stereotypes but performed on par with men when they were instead taught about stereotype threat. The idea was that awareness of the phenomenon of stereotype threat helped mitigate its effects, which was why this original paper was so influential: it offered a simple intervention to close the gender-gap in math performance. The replication was designed to be thorough, with consistent methodology across sites and a sample size large enough to detect even small effects.

Despite following these procedures to the letter, the replication found no effect. Women who were ostensibly in a threat condition didn’t perform any worse than those who were instead taught about threat. And the difference between men and women’s math performance remained consistent across the board, regardless of how the test was framed. The stereotype threat effect, once thought to be so robust, just wasn’t there.

What Does This Mean for Stereotype Threat?

Does one failed replication debunk the entire theory of stereotype threat? No, of course not. But it’s not just one study. There are now multiple failed replications, large-sample studies that found no effect, and at least one bias-corrected meta-analysis pointing to the same conclusion: if stereotype threat exists, it is far weaker and more inconsistent than we originally believed. I no longer believe it is real, but you can make up your own mind.

I have seen some people online suggest the reason this failed to replicate is that women are no longer stereotyped as not being good at math. While I do not disagree that cultural stereotypes about women in STEM might have changed since 2005 when the original paper was first published, I’m skeptical this is the main culprit behind this non-replication. First, women remain heavily outnumbered in STEM fields. The latest statistics indicate that women comprise only 25% of STEM workers in Canada and 27% in the US. And, depending on what is counted as STEM—I have heard some argue that psychology should be included—this number might be a lot lower. So, the stereotype about what is and what is not a female job might still be around, as much as we’d like it not to be.

Second, for years, many of us have suspected that something wasn’t right. There were warning signs: tiny sample sizes, flexible analyses, and implausibly large effect sizes given the relatively modest interventions being tested. In some cases, stereotype threat effects were found only in very specific handpicked samples—another red flag. It turns out that many of the original studies were conducted at a time when researchers—and I count myself here—were less stringent about methodological rigor.

Let’s be honest: that last sentence was far too generous. Many of us engaged in practices that, in hindsight, were borderline dishonest. We abused experimenter degrees of freedom, engaged in questionable research practices, p-hacked, massaged our data—you pick the euphemism. In contrast, this new replication study followed the most up-to-date best practices in psychological science, eliminating room for flexibility in analysis or results interpretation.

In my opinion—one that I have shared widely over the years—studies like this do more than demonstrate that stereotype threat is not replicable. They raise unsettling questions about the broader field of social psychology. If stereotype threat is not real, not robust, what else was I taught in my introduction to psychology classes that is also suspect? Despite all our improvements that help us in the present and future, we still have a massive backlog of studies from the past that we need to reckon with. Yes, the future looks bright, but we need to have the courage to put our most cherished findings under the spotlight.

The bill of reckoning for social psychology is past due.

A Reckoning…and a Path Forward

The fall of stereotype threat is not just about one theory collapsing: it’s a moment of reckoning for the entire field of social psychology. Stereotype threat was more than an idea — it was a promise, a way to understand inequality and to imagine solutions. Its failure forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about how science is done and what happens when beloved ideas turn out to be wrong.

But this reckoning, painful as it is, should not lead us to despair. The scientific process thrives on self-correction, on challenging old paradigms and building stronger ones in their place. What we’re experiencing now is science doing what it’s supposed to do: correcting itself. If we care about understanding the human mind and addressing real-world inequalities, we need to keep asking hard questions and demanding better evidence—not just for stereotype threat but for every cherished finding.

For me, letting go of stereotype threat has been both humbling and liberating. It has forced me to recalibrate how I think about research, advocacy, and the stories we tell about human potential. It’s a reminder that science, at its best, is about progress, not protecting idols.

We also had our own experience with Stereotype Threat research as graduate students and thought we’d share it for the first time:

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While some Americans praised Bad Bunny’s performance as a pivotal moment in American culture which expressed the value of connecting with one’s community and celebrating one’s heritage, others were outraged. Backlash following the performance forced Bad Bunny to clear his Instagram account due to the immense volume of online harassment he received.

Many football fans felt that the performance was not traditionally American enough and that a Puerto Rican artist does not belong on stage at the Super Bowl Halftime show. On Truth Social, Donald Trump called the performance a “slap in the face to our country” and added, “nobody understands a word this guy is saying”. (According to U.S. Census data, Spanish is the second most common language spoken in the U.S., with over 41 million speakers.)

Boxer Jake Paul’s call to turn off the halftime show referred to Bad Bunny as a “fake American citizen” and received 125,000 likes on X. These posts and many more fueled animosity towards Bad Bunny and Hispanic Americans in general. Although Bad Bunny is an American citizen, for many he was not “prototypically” American enough and therefore undeserving of the spotlight.

Racial dynamics in the U.S. are complicated and require nuance to understand. However, there are two psychological theories that can help explain some of the reactions to Bad Bunny’s performance.

1. Stereotyping models quantify the ways different groups are perceived in society and visualize the status quo. Researchers have found that there are systematic ways people stereotype based on different traits like foreignness, warmth, and competence.

2. Perceptions of status threat are likely at play. Status threat is the perception that one’s social group is losing status, power, or cultural dominance relative to other groups. Perceived status threat can trigger preferences to maintain the status quo, specifically when a group that is usually dominant in society feels threatened.

Perceptions of status threat can be triggered by a shift in racial demographics, or as in Bad Bunny’s case, greater representation in pop culture and the media. Bad Bunny’s trajectory has made big waves in the entertainment industry as of late — his latest record, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS was the top album globally on Spotify and was awarded album of the year at the 2026 Grammys.

How stereotypes shape what it takes to be considered American

At the end of his performance, Bad Bunny shouted “God Bless America!” before naming countries across the Americas as he and other performers crossed the field carrying their flags. This display has been viewed as a moment of decentering the United States as the default for defining America, and shined a light on all countries in North, Central and South America. This reframing of “America” is rooted in a larger question: who is considered “American” and who belongs?

Within all societies, racial groups are subject to stereotypes that influence how they are viewed and treated. Research finds that when group perceptions are measured by ratings of inferiority-superiority and foreign-American, distinct patterns emerge.

In a set of studies conducted in 2017, researchers asked participants “To what extent are [racial group] seen as foreign or American in U.S. society?” (1 = Very Foreign, 7 = Very American). They found that White Americans were seen as the most American, followed by Black Americans, then Native Americans/American Indians. Hispanic/Latino Americans were viewed as relatively foreign. White Americans were also rated more patriotic than other racial groups.

These group dynamics can, in part, explain why a Puerto Rican artist performing at the Super Bowl felt “not American enough” to some. It challenges the status quo by spotlighting a culture and group of people who are marginalized in U.S. society. A performance on a stage as big as the Super Bowl may imply that Hispanic Americans’ cultural presence is increasing and could threaten other groups’ positions on the social hierarchy.

The role of status threat and implications of a Hispanic population surge

Recent U.S. Census data predict that by the year 2045, people of color will outnumber White individuals. The implications of a majority-minority country are important to understand in order to build a more inclusive future for all, but research in this area has suggested that the future may be difficult to navigate. Turning Point USA’s “All American” halftime show as an alternative to Bad Bunny’s performance foreshadows a deep divide.

This begs the question: Will the future be one where Americans embrace diversity and celebrate the U.S.’s multifaceted identities and cultures, or one marked with heightened conflict, racism, and xenophobia?

A 2019 Pew Research study revealed positive perceptions of racial and ethnic diversity, hinting that amicable attitudes will shape the nation’s future. The nationally representative survey of U.S. adults showed that more than three-fourths of Americans (77%) agreed that racial and ethnic diversity is at least “somewhat good” for the country. The study found some variation in opinion among White (55%), Black (59%) and Hispanic (60%) individuals. However, other psychological studies suggest otherwise…

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The test is also being used to determine our love life. Yes, people actually do put their Myers-Briggs category on their Tinder profiles and funders gave 1 million dollars to develop an app that matches couples based on their Myers-Briggs personality types. The test also makes a pretty regular appearance on dating profiles and NYT Wedding announcements, like a charming young couple below who decided to evaluate their romantic capability:

While the Myers-Briggs test is telling people who to hire and marry, scientists hate it. As Laith Al-Shawaf notes, “any psychologist will tell you, it’s mostly bullshit.”

Then why is it so popular?

We explain why people are suckers for terrible psychology tests—from the Meyers-Briggs to the Zodiac—and how you can assess your personality with a scientific valid measure. We also share our own personality test scores, for the curious.

But let’s start with the MBTI. The test was develop during World War II by an American mother and daughter who were fascinated by Carl Jung’s 1921 book “Psychological Types”. They created a series of 93 forced-choice questions, like the following: “Are you more (a) realistic than speculative or b) speculative than realistic.

Based on these answers, the MBTI categorizes people into a group based on four personality dimensions (the sample question above is used to determine if you are sensing or intuitive):

• Extraversion (E) or introversion (I), which measures whether you get energy from outwardly focused action like socializing or from inwardly focused activities like quiet reflection

• Intuition (N) or sensing (S), which measures how much you see big picture patterns rather than focusing on sensory information from direct experience

• Thinking (T) or feeling (F), which measures whether you make decisions using logic rather than by focusing on feelings

• Judging (J) or perceiving (P), which measures your preference for structure rather than spontaneity

After you complete the Myers-Briggs test, you get sorted into one of 16 categories. Each group is often given an appealing name: the “logical pragmatist”, “compassionate facilitator”, or “insightful visionary” — providing a perfect new title for a professional development seminar or your online dating profile.

Another perk is that you get matched with famous people (most of whom are long since deceased and never completed the test). Are you an “ISFP” like Bob Dylan and Rihanna or an “INTP” like Albert Einstein and Tina Fey?

We (Dom and Jay) both completed the test and were categorized as “Commanders” with an ENTJ personality type. This puts in in prestigious—and tyrannical—company, like Steve Jobs, Margaret Thatcher, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Gordon Ramsay. Our editor, Yvonne, fared a bit better and was categorized as an INFP, like John Lennon and Princess Diana. Here is the MBTI test if you want to try it yourself. And remember that none of these historical figures probably ever completed the MBTI.

Despite the joy of being compared to celebrities, psychologists have repeatedly argued that the Myers-Briggs has dubious predictive ability and is grounded in debunked theory. To make matters worse, it’s unreliable. Which means that if you take the test more than once to learn more about your “true self”, it’s quite likely to give you different answers each time.

Another big problem is that these 16 categories contradict how contemporary psychologists think about personality. Most experts agree that human personality can be boiled down to five traits—the BIG 5: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and neuroticism. Each trait is a continuous dimension, so that someone can score high, low, or anywhere in between. To take the same Big 5 test for yourself, follow this link to take the 120-item measure.

A recent report in Scientific American compared the Meyers-Briggs to other personality scores, ranging from the Big 5 to Astrological signs (see their results in the figure below) to see how each predicted 37 life outcomes (see their full report for details), ranging from how many close friends they had to how often they exercised to how satisfied they were with life.

Here is what they found:

What is it about this scientific mess that people so readily buy into? We believe that one of the bugs that drives psychologists crazy is actually a feature that explains the test’s enduring popularity.

Unfortunately, however, it is quite hard to conceive of yourself in five-dimensional space. It’s also awkward to tell people at a conference, first date, or a job interview that you have a moderate score on extraversion, moderate-to-high on agreeableness and conscientiousness, high on openness, and moderate-to-low on neuroticism. This is hardly sparkling dinner party conversation!

This is why assigning people to Myers-Briggs’ categories is compelling. Scoring low on extraversion and high on openness doesn’t sound particularly impressive, but being a “mastermind” does. People would much rather claim a social identity that includes Sun Tzu, Isaac Newton, Jane Austen and Arthur Ashe (setting aside the absurd fact that several were deceased hundreds of years before the test was even invented).

The use of categories is a great marketing maneuver and a big part of the reason behind the popularity of many dubious personality tests from the Myers-Briggs to the infamous TIME Harry Potter Quiz or Cosmo’s quiz to help you learn what kind of lover you are. The same logic also applies to Astrology signs!

All these tests operate a bit like the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter, slotting us into different groups. People crave self-definition and social identities provide this for us. We are attracted to group memberships that provide both a sense of connection to people just like us and distinction from others—what Marilynn Brewer termed “Optimal Distinctiveness”. These groups fulfill multiple core social needs.

The ease with which people form group identities can be traced back to one of the most important studies in social psychology (we personally think it is the most important experiment in our field). In the minimal group experiments from the 1970s, people were randomly assigned to groups after completing a test of dubious merit, such as their ability to estimate the number of dots in an image or their preference for abstract art (e.g., Klee vs. Kandinsky).

Within minutes, they had created a new sense of identity and were treating their new in-group members very differently from out-group members. In fact, this research revealed that the mere act of being categorized as a member of a group was sufficient to cause discrimination. It also inspired on the of the most important theories in the social sciences—Social Identity Theory.

When we use personality tests that impose categories—like the Meyers Briggs or Astrology—we risk exaggerating the differences between groups and the similarities within them. When this occurs with other types of identities like race or gender, we typically call it “stereotyping” and we try to avoid it. When consultants do it in companies, they are exploiting the same social psychology and doing it on dubious scientific grounds to make a buck.

There is reason for caution when it comes to categorizing others too readily by personality as well. We might well fail to hire, promote, or even marry someone because they fall into a false category about which we make exaggerated assumptions. Even with the Meyers-Briggs, putting people into categories is the weakest use of the test. It is roughly as useful as astrology.

This is why organizations could do much better by creating other meaningful social identities. If you can create a sense of belonging around other social identities, people might feel less of a need to rely on these dubious tests to create a sense of self.

It is also why you should focus less on fictitious identities—like whether you are a Commander or an Aries—and more on real ones that matter. And if you do want to make romantic decisions based on personality, we highly recommend using a scientifically valid personality test like the Big 5.

For both men and women, their partner's conscientiousness predicts their own future job satisfaction, income, and likelihood of promotion, even after accounting for their own conscientiousness. There reason is because conscientious partners (both men and women) perform more household tasks, exhibit more pragmatic behaviors that their spouses are likely to emulate, and promote a more satisfying home life, enabling their spouses to focus more on work.

Choosing a partner is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. And relying on the Meyers-Briggs or the Zodiac is about the worst way you could make that decision.

Learn more about THE POWER OF US

If you like our newsletter, we encourage you to check out our award-winning book “The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony”. You can learn more about the book or order it from the links on our website (here or scan the QR code below). We keep the newsletter free, but are extremely grateful if you have a chance to purchase the book or buy it for a friend who wants to learn more about group psychology.

Catch up on the last one…

Happy 2026 Winter Olympics! We share profound examples of cross-cultural collaboration in last week’s post. With interesting anecdotes about displays of national identity and olympic village hook-ups.

The Power of Us

Competition is what we see. Cooperation is what makes it possible

In a touching display of empathy, the international figure skating community and fans rallied around Maxim Naumov. After a remarkable performance dedicated to his late parents (who were killed in a tragic plane crash in Washington, DC), he dropped to his knees and looked to the sky. The crowd of fans gave him an emotional standing ovation that transcended national team lines, illustrating the shared human experience of the athletes…

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3 months ago · 6 likes · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych received widespread solidarity from other athletes after he used his platform to honor friends killed by the Russian invasion into his home county. While his actions led to a controversial disqualification by officials, many fellow Olympians and fans showed their support for his courage.

In one of the most unique examples of cross-country support involves a community of athletes from nations not traditionally known for winter sports. Cross-country skiers from 40 smaller nations formed a group chat—called Team Avalanche—to share technical tips, resources, and moral support. The members even started cashing in the same bedrooms during events. “For me, it’s like a family, it’s like a team”, said Indian skier Bhavani Thekkada.

These are just some of the examples of cross-national comraderie from the 2026 Milan Olympic Games. With competitors from nearly 100 countries and an estimated audience of 2 billion people around the globe, the Games provide a common experience—a shared moment of inspiration and enjoyment—for a huge swath of humanity. It’s a rare moment when the world stops and celebrates together.

Fostering a sense of solidarity among the world’s peoples is exactly what the Olympics are meant to be about. In fact, they create very explicit social norms around it. As the International Olympic Committee puts it:

Yet, the Olympics are also perhaps humanity’s most elaborate ritual of nationalism. From the Parade of Nations during the opening ceremony to the flags and national anthems that pay tribute to the medalists, national pride is everywhere on display. Many of these same countries competing together have a history of conflict, even war.

With fans draped in the colors of their home nation, flags waving in the air, and Olympic glory riding on every sport, it might trigger images of nationalistic violence. Yet it almost never does. Instead, people cheer together and there are numerous instances of mutual support across national boundaries.

How do the Olympics balance this tug-of-war between national pride and collective celebration? What is the psychological switch that allows people to fiercely compete for scarce resources while embracing their enemy?

This is called “The Olympic paradox” and it reveals how competition and cooperation can coexist in harmony. We think it’s also a powerful lesson for any community, organization or institution that wants to foster competition for excellence while maintaining a overarching sense of shared purpose.

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Over 65,000 fans are willing to spend roughly $4,000 a ticket to watch their favorite players fight for a Super Bowl ring (you can see what all the fuss is about in the image below). And the Super Bowl will generate a billion dollars in revenue (which is just a slice of the $25 Billion dollar industry that is the NFL). The psychology of fans is extremely lucrative.

There is extensive evidence that playing on the same sports team can bind people together in powerful ways. For instance, one study in a war torn region of Northern Iraq found that Christian players on mixed-religion soccer teams were more willing to train with Muslims in the future, vote for a Muslim to win a sportsmanship prize, and sign up for a mixed-religion team the next season. By sharing a group identity and working together, they were able to bridge what had seemed like an impossible divide.

And winning made everything better: Team success amplified these effects. Successful teams forged an especially strong sense of shared identity, and connections between teammates reducing patterns of discrimination for many months. It provided the first steps toward rebuilding a sense of community.

But the impact of the Super Bowl will extend far beyond the field. Fans from around the world will be watching. This singular event will have an impact on the sense of self for countless people. Indeed, it’s one of the rare moments in our society where it’s socially acceptable for grown men to cry in public.

But the Super Bowl might have the biggest impact on kids. Like baby goslings instinctively bonding with the first moving object they see after hatching, many children will become lifelong fans. It turns out the winning team can make an imprint on their soul that lasts a lifetime.

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“International House was my best experience while living in NYC, much better than my studies at Columbia University…”

What kind of institution could possibly provide a better learning experience than one of the most prestigious and well-resourced universities in the world?

We spent the last three years studying the culture of International House and believe it offers a model for how to create community and encourage dialogue across lines of difference. As any team, organization, or business knows, curating culture is key. Yet the culture that many places have created is one which makes difference a dirty word.

Just a few blocks north of Columbia University, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, sits International House. Founded over 100 years ago, International House–affectionately known as I-House by its residents–was the first global community of its kind.

More than a residency program and housing, it provided graduate students and young professionals from around the world a place to connect and learn from each other, as they studied or worked in NYC.

In 2023, we were invited to do an independent evaluation of the residential experience and whether it advances I-House’s mission to install “a lifelong dedication to cultural understanding [and] cultivate individuals who will help bridge the polarization, isolation, and division our world continues to face.“ With decades of experience studying intergroup relations, prejudice and discrimination, and political polarization in a wide range of educational contexts, we were skeptical that a relatively short-lived experience could generate such deep and lasting transformation. But we agreed to run a study of the alumni and report the results back to the I-House trustees.

To uncover what makes I-House special, we spent the past three years interviewing alumni and studying how I-House residents change to determine if I-House indeed transforms residents—and if it might offer a blueprint that we could share with other businesses, organizations, and universities.

A Community that Actually Changes People

We first surveyed 1,600 alumni from I-House, dating back to the 1950s (you can read our full summary of that study here). The alumni scored very high in several prosocial traits, such as emotional intelligence and intellectual humility, empathy, and a sense of global citizenship. When we asked alumni about their prosocial behavior in the past month–using a measure known as the World Giving Index–roughly 80% of I-House alumni had helped a stranger and 60% had donated money. If I-House alumni were its own country, it would rank among the top three most prosocial nations worldwide.

The alumni also showed much lower political polarization compared to the general U.S. population.

As we read through hundreds of survey interviews with alumni, the results were striking. The alumni uniformly raved about the experience, including how it has helped them many decades later in careers ranging from politics to business. They overwhelmingly described their time at I-House as transformative.

One former resident wrote “ In many contexts over the last 20 years I have had to draw on skills learned at the House” and another said “I believe my time at I-House was hugely impactful on my life. I definitely view myself as a global citizen and approach my work that way.”

Others spoke about the specific skills they gain from the experience, noting they gained “Invaluable skills for cultural navigation and communication. Organizational skills for managing events and groups of people. Expanded my heart and mind!”

These testimonials struck us as a remarkable departure from the student experience at many of our leading universities over the past few decades. Perhaps this is why the difference between I-House and Columbia stood out so clearly to the student from Columbia. In an era of echo chambers, I-House stood out as a space that actively fostered dialogue across differences and encouraged discussion of challenging topics.

We reported the positive results to the I-House board of trustee, with the caveat that correlation does not equal causation. Perhaps only the most enthusiastic alumni completed our survey or students from the past had a much rosier view of education than the anxious generation. Or perhaps they simply had a pristine admissions process, effectively weeding out any sociopaths or narcissists.

So I-House invited us back to conduct a longitudinal study with a full cohort of new residents at I-House. We measured their traits and beliefs in the first few days of the academic year (after most of them had moved into I-House) and again at the end of the semester. We warned that the results might not be as impressive.

But low and behold, when we got the results back, they were even more impressive! After just a few months of living at I-House people seemed to become more charitable, trusting of strangers, and emotionally intelligent.

In fact, the results were even more positive than the alumni survey—The current I-House residents outperformed the benchmark samples across every measure of prosociality we measured, even higher than the I-House alumni (as seen in the future below):

As we dug into the data, it became clear that the students who rose the most were those who had the most to gain. Immersing themselves in the I-House community led to an entire suite of positive changes–these residents improved on almost every measure of pro-sociality.

As for the residents who came in already scoring highly on these measures, they could have dropped off since there was nowhere to go but down—in statistical terms, this is known as regression to the mean—but they didn’t. Instead they continued to score highly at the end of the academic year.

The Key Ingredient for Personal Growth

What was the key ingredient that created such a transformative social and intellectual environment?

We found that participation in formal programming that was intentionally designed to cultivate personal and professional growth (like roundtable discussions, a ballroom dance showing different cultural dancing traditions) was linked to improvement on emotional intelligence and global citizenship.

But we also found that simply sharing a meal or talking in the hallway about life, school and politics was also linked to change. We concluded that the main ingredient of I-House’s magic sauce was largely just interacting with people who were fundamentally different in a place where disagreement was not only tolerated, but valued.

It dawned on us that I-House is exceptionally effective in cultivating psychological safety. At I-House, residents feel safe taking “interpersonal risk-taking”, meaning they feel like they can express their true opinions and discuss difficult issues without fearing judgment or exclusion.

This atmosphere creates a sense of belonging and trust which allows residents to explore and share different perspectives and deepen their understanding of one another and the world. For instance, one resident reported that I-House has made them “more confident in expressing [their] views, knowing that people generally mean no harm and that it’s all about understanding [people’s] perspectives”.

Moving Beyond Echo Chambers

In recent years, American colleges have been struggling to maintain a climate of open and respectful discussion of different ideas and beliefs. American college students increasingly feel unsafe to share their opinions and beliefs on campus; two in three report self-censorship during class discussions and educationally valuable conversations on campus.

This creates a kind of echo chamber where everyone retreats into their own silo. It’s not the kind of climate that students want and it’s not conducive to learning new perspectives, engaging in robust debate, or resolving conflicts–skills that are critical when students graduate, enter the workforce, and take on leadership roles in their communities.

More importantly, students are disenchanted with the culture of silence at many universities. The faculty also feel under attack from the government, at odds with university leaders, and sometimes even fear their own students (or at least being reported by their students to the administration or news). These conditions make it very difficult to learn from one another both inside and outside the classroom.

A similar dynamic has occurred in companies who created “affinity groups”— a way for people of an underrepresented background or life experience to find each other and connect. This has the benefit of fostering a sense of belonging, but it cuts off people from cross-group interactions. This eliminates two of the most powerful ways to reduce hostility: intergroup contact and working together towards a common goal.

Instead of worrying about debates between people with different ideas, our leaders and institutions should encourage genuine and constructive disagreements. Even if students or employees ultimately disagree, they can move past the caricatures they see on social media and humanize people with a different perspective. And, more importantly, they might actually learn something.

One of the striking things about I-House is that they have been practicing this for the past century. They embraced diversity and debate before it was in vogue, and stuck with it when it became a political liability. As many major institutions have simply followed the trends, this sincere commitment to these values. Their mission is to create “an open-minded and intellectually challenging community where our residents expand their worldview and form lifelong bonds.”

In an era of heightened polarization and a stretching of our social fabric, I-House is an example of how to build and bind a community as diverse as they come. Smart institutions should pay attention to these lessons if they want to cultivate social and cultural intelligence.

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• February 20 @ 2:00 EST with Dom

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Catch up on the last one…

Last week, we discuss how AI can threaten democracy…

You start to wonder: Am I out of touch? Is this what people really think?

Now imagine that wave wasn’t a wave of people at all.

That’s one of the central risks we outline in our new Science Policy Forum article on malicious AI swarms—coordinated fleets of AI agents that can imitate authentic social opinions and actions at scale.

Why is this dangerous for democracy? No democracy can guarantee perfect truth, but democratic deliberation depends on something more fragile: the independence of voices. The “wisdom of crowds” works only if the crowd is made of distinct individuals; when one actor can speak through thousands of masks—and create the illusion of grassroots agreement—that independence collapses into synthetic consensus.

This is no longer just theory. In July 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it disrupted a Russia-linked, AI-enhanced bot operation involving 968 accounts impersonating Americans. And while estimates vary by platform and method, online discourse about major global events often involves substantial automated activity—on the order of ~20% in one global comparison.

At the same time, the market is beginning to industrialize coordinated synthetic activity: reporting in 2025 described Doublespeed, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, as marketing tools to orchestrate actions across thousands of social accounts, including attempts to mimic “natural” interaction via physical devices.

Concrete signs of industrialization are also emerging: the Vanderbilt Institute of National Security released an archive of documents describing “GoLaxy” as an AI-driven influence machine built around data harvesting, profiling, and AI personas for large-scale operations. And campaign-tech vendors market supporter-mobilization platforms and have begun promoting AI-powered analytics—an example of how “human-in-the-loop” coordination could be scaled even before fully autonomous swarms arrive.

Not all automation is malicious. But the capability jump due to developments in AI matters. What changes when automation can coordinate, infiltrate, adapt, and build trust over time?

What is a “malicious AI swarm”?

We use “malicious AI swarm” to describe a set of AI-controlled agents that can maintain persistent identities and memory, coordinate toward shared objectives while varying tone and content, adapt in real time to feedback, operate with minimal human oversight, and deploy across platforms.

That combination distinguishes swarms from yesterday’s botnets. Older systems often relied on rigid scripts, repetition, and obvious synchronization. AI Swarms can now generate unique, context-aware content while still moving together as a coherent organism. They are less like a megaphone and more like a coordinated social system—and may therefore be much harder to detect and prevent.

Several shifts make swarms especially potent. Coordination can become fluid and hive-like, rather than purely “central command.” Swarms can infiltrate communities by mapping network structure and local cues at scale. They can evade detectors tuned for copy-paste behavior by producing human-level variation. They can also self-optimize through rapid experimentation—testing alternatives, learning what works, and propagating winning strategies quickly. Most importantly, they can persist over long periods, embedding in communities for weeks, months, or longer and shaping discourse gradually.

Why this is dangerous for democracy (it’s not just “misinformation”)

Democracy doesn’t require perfect truth—but it does require something more fragile: independent voices. The “wisdom of crowds” depends on independence between judgments. If a single actor can speak through thousands of inauthentic accounts, the apparent consensus of the crowd stops being informative.

One pathway of harm is synthetic consensus: creating the illusion of a majority opinion. Swarms can seed narratives across niches and amplify them via coordinated liking, replying, and cross-posting until it looks like broad support. People update beliefs partly through social evidence—what seems normal, common, or widely endorsed. Synthetic consensus exploits that cognitive shortcut.

A second pathway is segmented realities. Because swarms can mimic local language, emotion, and identity cues, they can tailor narratives community-by-community, reinforcing polarization and making cross-group cooperation and consensus harder.

A third pathway is poisoning the information substrate for future AI—sometimes described as “LLM grooming.” A long-term strategy is to flood the web with machine-targeted content so future models ingest and reproduce distorted narratives.

A fourth is synthetic harassment: scaling intimidation and smear campaigns until people self-censor. Swarms can generate relentless, tailored abuse that looks like a spontaneous public pile-on, pushing journalists, academics, dissidents, and officials out of the public sphere before defenders can even classify the campaign.

Finally, there is epistemic vertigo: if everything might be fake, why trust anything? Ironically, awareness of manipulation can deepen cynicism. If people believe large portions of discourse are synthetic, trust collapses—and the public sphere can shrink into gated channels and closed groups.

So what do we do? Focus on coordination, provenance, and incentives

We argue for defenses that make manipulation costly and risky—without turning platforms into a “Ministry of Truth.” Instead of trying to adjudicate content (“who decides truth?”), we should prioritize coordination signals, provenance, and incentives.

One priority is always-on detection for statistically unlikely coordination. Rather than episodic cleanups after campaigns go viral, platforms (and regulators) should push for continuous monitoring for anomalous patterns—signals that genuine crowds struggle to reproduce consistently. To reduce misuse, these systems should be paired with transparency measures and independent audits.

A second priority is stress-testing defenses with simulations. Defenders will always lag if they only react to yesterday’s tactics. Agent-based simulations—running swarms in synthetic networks—can help test detectors, uncover failure modes, and evaluate interventions before real attackers exploit them.

A third priority is strengthening provenance without killing anonymity. Real-ID policies can harm dissidents and whistleblowers. The goal is “verified-yet-anonymous” options—strong proof signals that raise the cost of mass impersonation while preserving privacy where it matters.

A fourth priority is building an ecosystem for shared situational awareness—an “AI Influence Observatory” model where researchers, NGOs, and institutions standardize evidence and publish verified incident reporting without centralized censorship.

And finally, we have to change the economics. Even the best detectors will be imperfect. So we should also target the commercial market for manipulation: discount synthetic engagement, enforce no-revenue policies for manipulation campaigns, and publish audited bot-traffic metrics. The goal is to make large-scale manipulation less profitable to sustain.

Bottom line

The point isn’t that AI makes democracy impossible. The point is that democracy becomes brittle when it’s cheap to counterfeit social proof—when it costs little to run a fake crowd and minutes to manufacture “public opinion.”

The mission is straightforward: make large-scale impersonation and coordination harder to run, easier to detect, and less profitable to sustain. If we get that right, the public square does not need a central authority to decide what is true. It needs conditions where authentic human participation is visible—and where engineered consensus collapses the moment it tries to scale.

Key takeaways

• The next wave of influence operations may not look like obvious copy-paste bots. It may look like communities: thousands of AI personas with memory, social identities, distinct styles, and coordinated goals.

• The most dangerous outcome is not a single viral lie—it is synthetic consensus: the illusion that “everyone is saying this,” which can quietly bend beliefs and norms.

• This is already moving from theory to reality. In July 2024, the U.S. DOJ announced it disrupted a Russia-linked AI-enhanced bot operation involving nearly 1,000 accounts impersonating Americans.

• Defenses should not hinge on policing content. They should focus on coordination and provenance: detecting statistically unlikely patterns, stress-testing defenses with simulations, strengthening identity/proof signals, and shifting platform incentives.

This post was drafted by Daniel Thilo Schroeder and Jonas Kunst, with edits from Jay Van Bavel. You can read our full paper here:

• Daniel Thilo Schroeder et al. (2026). How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy. Science, 391, 354-357. DOI:10.1126/science.adz1697

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Check out our new Ask Me Anything sessions for the new year! Paid subscribers can join us for our monthly live Q&A with Jay or Dom where you can ask us anything from workshopping research questions, career advice to opinions and recommendations on pop culture happenings — for paid subscribers only. Upgrade your subscription using the button below. Invites to RSVP have been sent via email from powerofusbook@gmail.com

• February 20 @ 2:00 EST with Dom

• March 4th @ 2:00 EST with Jay

• April 17 @ 2:00 EST with Dom

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Catch up on the last one…

Last week, we discuss how aggressive policing can backfire—by fueling more intense protests.

Jan 8 — Woman Is Killed By Federal Agent: Local Officials Urge ICE To Leave Minnesota

Jan 9 — Dispute Heats Up On Investigation Of ICE Shooting: More Agents On Way

Jan 10 — Local Officials Demand Role In ICE Inquiry: Minnesota Is Wary Of Federal Conclusions

Jan 13 — FBI Searches For Activist Ties In ICE Shooting

Jan 14 — ‘Like A Military Operation’: Clashes Rise With Federal Agents In Minneapolis

Jan 15 — Local Outrage Propels Cities To Resist ICE

Jan 16 — Trump Sharpens Threat As Clashes With Agents Continue In Minnesota: Says Insurrection Act Could Be Invoked

As group dynamics researchers, we are sometimes accused of seeing identity everywhere and in everything. Fair enough. But when it comes to ongoing protests – whether those in Minneapolis (and spreading nationally) in response to the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent or in Iran driven largely by economic dissatisfaction with the regime – social identity is truly relevant around the world right now.

The same basic questions keep resurfacing: who gets to define “us”, who is pushed into “them”, and what happens when those definitions collide?

Focusing on the growing protests in the United States against ICE, we see identity dynamics playing out in three interlocking ways.

1 - Arguments Over the Identity of the Victim

The first move in many tragic, contentious, and tragically contentious episodes like the shooting of Renee Good is a fight over the victim’s identity, over whether the person at the center of the story counts as “one of us” and is therefore worthy of our moral concern.

That is why immediate attempts by ICE and the Trump administration to categorize Renee Good as an activist, a professional agitator, even a deranged lunatic, are not incidental but strategic. If the victim can be recast as an atypical citizen, then this event does not represent the killing of an ordinary American—and thus to ordinary citizens does not reflect something that could happen “to someone like me” or signals the victim is undeserving of their empathy.

This is one of the most basic identity moves in the playbook: narrowing the definition of the harmed ingroup so that the harm does not generalize to others.

2 - Identity Fault Lines

A second fault line has emerged between local and federal authorities. Following the shooting, Minneapolis leaders demanded that ICE leave immediately, framing the federal presence as “chaos” that makes the community less safe. Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension described being cut off from evidence and withdrew from the investigation, arguing it could not meet the investigative standard Minnesotans expect without full access. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office created an evidence portal and publicly solicited information to preserve materials while state officials were blocked from the federal investigation.

Meanwhile, the feds deployed 2,000 additional agents to the Twin Cities and President Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to send in military troops.

This is not just a dispute about jurisdiction, it’s a dispute about “who we are” and “who governs us”. Minneapolis was also the site of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, and in the protests following that event, the community and local law enforcement were markedly not part of the same coalition. Yet, at least for now, there appears to be a degree of common cause between the citizens protesting in the frigid winter streets and the local cops, with both arrayed against an external force (this interview with Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey is worth a listen in this regard).

These tensions may not yet have fully hardened into a local community vs. occupying force dichotomy, but they are headed in that direction. To the degree that this happens, we predict that cooperation by either side will start to look like capitulation and skepticism like defiance.

3 - An Escalation Loop

The third identity dynamic is counter-intuitive to many: protests often grow less because of outrage triggered by an initial spark (Renee Good’s death, in this case), but because of the police response to the protests.

Aggressive protest enforcement doesn’t just manage a crowd, it can actively reorganize how people categorize themselves. In this case, as Minnesota residents experience a heavy federal presence, including masked agents, tear gas, arrests, and detentions, the situation for an ordinary citizen can quickly shift from “I’m an observer” to “I’m on the side of the protestors” to “I’d better get out there myself to defend my community".

This man-on-the-street interview recorded within the past few days captures how this social psychological dynamic unfolds:

Interviewer: Have you ever gone out to these sorts of things before?

Protestor: Never. Never. I’ve never protested in my life… I’m far enough away, but close enough, and I sit in my cushy house and look at shit and get mad… They’re just trying to fucking scare people and, you know, but but but why shoot people? You know what really pisses me off is the fact they detain people, cuff them, and then still beat the shit out of them. They tell you it’s only immigrants. It’s fucking anybody…

Interviewer: Sounds like you don’t fit the definition of the ah…

Protestor: I’m not fucking paid to be here like everybody fucking says… I gotta work in the goddamn morning just like everyone else. I’m just here trying to stand up for my community, dude. We’re all human beings here…

This person is by no means a longtime activist or an ideologue. He embodies movement across categories: from a mere observer in his living room to a morally-outraged community member to a full blown protester, taking to the streets.

Sweeping labels from federal authorities, who call protestors “agitators”, “insurrectionists”, or “domestic terrorists”, deepen the divisions and heighten the tensions. They can create an increasingly hostile crown by pushing an otherwise diverse set of people, folks there for different reasons, into a shared “us” opposed to a threatening “them”.

Making Sense of Protests

The Elaborated Social Identity Model of Crowd Behavior describes the identity dynamics that underlie the response to aggressive policing. Crowds that are initially loosely connected become unified when people who aren’t identified as protestors are made to feel like protestors because they are treated like them—gassed like protesters, arrested like protestors, talked about like protestors, etc. As that happens, their identities shift and a new social identity can emerge with new norms about what is justifiable, what is necessary, and what “one of us” should do.

A recent virtual reality experiment conducted by Julia Becker and colleagues demonstrates these dynamics in action. People who were part of a VR protest were stopped by police either dressed in their regular uniforms or decked out in riot gear (on the right in the image below).

The police in riot gear were perceived as less legitimate than those in their regular uniforms and increased peoples’ intentions to resist the police. Importantly, these effects were strongest among individuals who were less identified with the protest movement to begin with. Like the guy on the street in the interview above, aggressive policing triggered a reaction among those with the least initial involvement.

Another factor is that aggressive policing disrupts non-violent norms among protests. Normally, protests will proceed peaceful and extremists within the community will often be sanctioned socially by fellow protestors. They might be seen as ‘too radical’ or unlikely to help the cause. But once aggressive policing takes place, the radical elements in the crowd are more likely to receive support. This can lead to everything from property damage to violence against authorities.

Thus, police have a vested interest in de-escalating the situation. Indeed, this is why most police recruits are intentionally trained to minimize the conflict in these situations and keep themselves out of harms way. When things escalate, it puts everyone at risk.

The Escalation Loop

Read more

Here are some of our favorite recommendations (with an eye towards the social psychology vibe of this newsletter)!

Jay’s Favorites:

Show: My favorite show was The Studio (watch this hilarious scene to get a taste of it). But lately I’ve been obsessed with Pluribus—a new post-apocalyptic science fiction television series starring Rhea Seehorn and created by Vince Gilligan (who produced Breaking Bad). The title of the series refers to e pluribus unum, the latin motto of the United States which means 'out of many, one'. The show follows an event in which an extraterrestrial virus transforms most of humanity into a peaceful and happy hive mind. The show is funny and enlightening because it violates most of our assumptions about an alien invasion. Instead of an evil borg, the Others in Pluribus are entirely benevolent and aim to please the few remaining humans who are not infected with the virus. This creates a novel moral dilemma: Would you embrace an alien hive mind takeover of the world if it meant the end of suffering around the globe?

Book: My recent favorite was “The Double Helix” by James Watson. I found it discarded in the basement of my apartment building and decided to read it over Christmas vacation. The book is an autobiographical account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA written by James D. Watson published in 1968. It is considered one of the best nonfiction books of the 20th century because it reveals the social dynamics of one of history’s most significant scientific discoveries. The book reveals that discovery of the structure of DNA was ultimately a team effort, with numerous people contributing to the scientific breakthrough, rather then the work of one or two individual geniuses. Watson, who recently died, became a scientific outcast because of his racist views. E.O. Wilson (one of my intellectual heroes) famously called James Watson "the most unpleasant human being I had ever met", and the book reveals why: Watson regularly disparages and insults his colleagues and was criticized for the sexist attitudes towards Rosalind Franklin, whose work was essential to the discovery of DNA structure (in fact, Watson admits that his impressions of Franklin were influenced by the sexism she faced at the very end of the book).

Podcast: I really enjoy the podcast “Search Engine”. My friend Ana Gantman always sends me the best episodes. Two of my favorites are “What if ayahuasca made you stop podcasting?” which is about how an anti-woke podcaster went on an intense drug trip and realized she was operating on a diet of rage fed to her by social media and, in turn, retired from podcasting. A complementary episode is “What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?” which provides a disturbing view into how Gen-Z experiences the internet. It was based on a year-long experience to discover what algorithms are feeding the next generation on social media. Both episodes should give you pause the next time you log onto social media.

Substack Essay: I’m reading far more Substack articles lately and one of my favorites was an essay from the philosopher Dan Williams, entitled “Tribalism Corrupts Politics (Even When One Side Is Worse)”. He dismantles the claim that people who study tribalism or polarization are “fascist enablers”. I don’t always agree with Williams (especially about his takes on social media and misinformation), but he is always interesting to read and he absolutely nails this critique. As he correctly notes, willfully ignoring polarization directly undercuts our understanding of authoritarianism:

“The dangers of polarisation are not a distraction from right-wing authoritarianism. They’re essential for understanding its attractions. Intense affective polarisation often transforms political opponents into existential threats, thereby increasing the appeal of authoritarian politics among a broad public.”

Of course, a more mundane argument is that studying pretty much any topic does not enable fascism. Such critiques of scholarship are absurd—and offensive—on their face. But Williams explains why they are also wrong from a historical and academic perspective. Indeed, I have some research on this myself—the most polarized individuals are the most anti-Democratic. The NYT used our polarization dictionary and found the same thing among Republican members of congress. The politicians who used the most polarizing rhetoric were also the most likely to try and overturn the 2020 election.

Dom’s Favorites:

Books: Partly out of curiosity and partly because it’s my job, I read a great deal about artificial intelligence in 2025. The best book, by some measure in my opinion, was How to Think About AI: A Guide For The Perplexed by Richard Susskind. True to his title, Susskind spends little time on the technical aspects of these rapidly advancing tools and focuses instead on how we can make sense of them and their impact. He suggests that most debates about AI systems (not) replicating human [creativity, empathy, judgment, whatever…] conflate process with outcomes: AI doesn’t do the work in human-like ways, but the results are increasingly hard to distinguish.

My fiction favorite was the novel What We Can Know by the great Ian McEwan. Set roughly a hundred years in the future after decades of calamities, in a world much more waterlogged than our present, a historian searches for a storied love poem written in 2014 but long since lost. It’s a novel about memory and myths, about the stories we tell ourselves to make life intelligible:

“The imagined lords it over the actual – no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.”

Podcasts: My favorite short podcast series this year was Project Unabomb about the 17-year hunt for Ted Kaczynski. Did you know that the name Unabomber is short for “University and Airline Bomber” because his early targets included a university and an airline? Or that his brother who ultimately figured out his identity and turned him in once lived in a hole in the desert, a home even more primitive than Kaczynski’s infamous hut in the woods? Or that a weird 1980s moral panic about the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons led the FBI to suspect a group of nerdy teenagers, kicking off a goose-chase that lasted years? I didn’t!

My go-to long-running podcast was Past Present Future, hosted by political scientist David Runciman. A series of episodes on “The History of Bad Ideas” tackles such juicy topics as charisma, televised leadership debates, genius, Nobel Prizes, the marketplace of ideas, value-free tech, and austerity. I was nervous to listen to the critique of identity and relieved to hear that his views largely align with ours: identity as something deep down and internal that one is born with is, indeed, a bad idea. We agree (as does Spinoza, apparently) that identity is formed through interaction with others.

Music: Rosalía’s album LUX. There’s nothing particularly original about this pick—it topped many best-of lists for the year. But it is gorgeous.

Tech: A wave of nostalgia and an urgent desire to make a mixed tape for a friend caused me to buy this cassette player from We Are Rewind. I love it more than I can justify.

Yvonne’s favorites

Movie: Zootopia 2 was so fun to watch during opening weekend. I watched the first Zootopia when my research focus was stereotyping models and social hierarchies (in undergrad). I appreciate the goofy ah humor in the movie juxtaposed with vast, heavy-hitting sociopolitical and psychological themes. There is so much for social science researchers to identify and analyze.

Music: ’s latest album, Night Owl Envies The Morning Dove has been on heavy rotation since its October release. Caitlyn is a singer-songwriter who blends folk, country and blues and her rich lyrics inspire me to become a better writer. One of my favorite songs on the record, Open The Window depicts a homey scene of dancing in the kitchen with someone you love. And I must link this live performance of her song, Salt Water. It’s so chilling and the song is packed with themes of physical/emotional depletion, vices, intimacy and drifting in an unsustainable relationship. The way she plays her guitar in the beginning of the song is different than the bridge and I felt something shift in my soul the first time I watched her perform it.

Book: (First non-social science book favorite!) Earlier this year I finally got my hands on a reasonably-priced copy of The Art of Makeup by Kevyn Aucoin. He is such a legendary makeup artist and the book is filled with images and explanations on how he created his most iconic looks on supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington. The looks in there make me nostalgic for early 90s style.

Substack: I often feel reflective and grateful after reading ’s Substack newsletters. Lisa is a psychotherapist and writer (Already Enough, When the Ache Remains) and it can honestly feel sad to get to know her because she is very real and honest. But her writing and ideas remind me that despite all the darkness in the world, people are still creating beautiful things. I love the feeling I get after reading her newsletter, taking a pause, then hitting the forward button to send it to a friend.

Human Stuff

A newsletter that explores the spiral of aliveness: the aches, the joys, and the liminal, from a therapist/writer/human. When the Ache Remains is out 4/28/26.

By Lisa Olivera

News and Updates

Check out our new Ask Me Anything sessions for the new year! Paid subscribers can join us for our monthly live Q&A with Jay or Dom where you can ask us anything from workshopping research questions, career advice to opinions and recommendations on pop culture happenings — for paid subscribers only. Upgrade your subscription using the button below. Invites to RSVP have been sent via email from powerofusbook@gmail.com

• January 21st @ 2:00 EST with Jay

• February 20 @ 2:00 EST with Dom

• March 4th @ 2:00 EST with Jay

• April 17 @ 2:00 EST with Dom

• May 6th @ 2:00 EST with Jay

Catch up on the last one…

Last week, we celebrated our newsletter’s growth over the past year and looked back on the top 6 posts of 2025!

The Power of Us

2025 Year in Review: Our most popular and controversial columns

When we created this newsletter a little under five years ago to coincide with the publication of our book, we didn’t anticipate that we would still be producing new content this far out. We now have nearly 10,000 subscribers, 16,000 followers and had roughly 300,000 readers this year. So thanks to everyone for tuning in — and a special thanks to people who recommended our newsletter to others or became paid subscribers this year…

Read more

4 months ago · 4 likes · Center for Conflict + Coop., Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel, and Yvonne Phan

In an interview with the press, President Trump asked his aide to pull up the video. Surely, if we could just see what happened, disagreement would fade. It did not.

Despite watching the exact same video, people reached radically different conclusions.

How can that be?

The myth of the objective camera

Many of us place enormous trust in video evidence. When anything newsworthy happens, people immediately pull out their cameras to document the event. Indeed, this single event was videotaped by numerous bystanders, along with the ICE agent who shot Goode. And in his video, you can see Goode’s wife, Rebecca, taping him in return. Everyone was recording everyone in the video.

With multiple angles of real time video footage and the camera as our neutral witness, we expect people to see events objectively. Surely this is an opportunity to build a shared sense of reality. We assume that justice should follow naturally.

And yet, in an age when nearly every encounter can be recorded in high definition, video evidence often fails to settle our disputes or strip legal decisions of biases. In fact, it sometimes does the opposite.

Why? Because our eyes don’t work like cameras.

An eye captures only about 1-2 degrees of our visual field in high resolution. The rest is blurry. Our eyes are also constantly jumping around, and during these rapid movements (“saccades”), visual input briefly shuts down.

What we confidently have “seen with our own eyes” is not a perfect replica of the world. It is an image that our brain has stitched together from the few bits and pieces that our eyes were able to gather.

And what visual information we gather and how we stitch it together is deeply shaped by who we are.

When we look and still don’t see

Attention is guided by our social identities. We attend differently to people who belong to “us” and those who don’t. For instance, outgroup members tend to capture our attention quicker, but our eyes often linger longer on ingroup members. These patterns can unfold in milliseconds, long before our conscious thought enters the equation.

Missing key moments is therefore not always willful blindness. In a classic study on “inattentional blindness”, many participants didn’t notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of a scene because they were focused on counting basketball tosses. You can show the video (below) to a few friends to measure the accuracy of their attention.

Social identity can shape this blindness: White participants were less likely to notice a Black man than a White man interloping a scene. Group based attentional biases are especially pronounced when people are under perceptual load. Even the most obvious events can fail to register when our minds are somewhere else.

From biased views to biased judgment

Biased attention often means biased judgment.

Decades of research on the weapon (or “shooter”) bias finds that, under time pressure, people are more likely to mistake harmless objects for weapons when they are held by outgroup members, partly because attention is allocated differently. For example, participants are quicker to shoot armed outgroup targets than armed ingroup targets in a mock shooting task. These biases often operate automatically, and researchers have observed them even among trained police officers (though typically attenuated).

In a study led by Yael Granot, we tracked eye movements as participants watched an altercation between a police officer and a civilian. Social identity shaped where viewers looked, and those who focused relatively more on the officer later assigned greater responsibility and harsher punishment.

A similar paper in The Yale Law Journal found that prior attitudes toward police significantly affected participants’ judgments of the officer’s conduct—regardless of whether they saw video evidence or learned in other ways—and the degree of bias did not differ significantly across the different types of evidence (see figure below). Furthermore, people who identified strongly with the police—but not those who identified weakly—became more confident in their judgments when presented with video evidence.

This means that disagreement over video evidence is not always about dishonesty or bad faith. Sometimes, people are simply not watching the same scene. Moreover, it suggests that video evidence can even increase polarization among people who highly identify with the policy compared to those who don’t!

When video evidence challenges what we want to see

When video evidence contradicts what we want to believe about “people like us” or the institutions we trust, our perception can shift to protect those beliefs, and this can happen outside of our awareness.

This dynamic may have played a role in the trial following the killing of Jonathan Ferrell. Jurors reviewed the same video evidence yet saw different events unfold. While a White juror saw “a very aggressive move towards these police officers”, a Black juror saw the opposite. The jury ultimately deadlocked, divided largely along racial lines.

Similar patterns can appear outside the courtroom. In one study, partisanship influenced how participants saw and interpreted footage from the Women’s march. Supporters of President Trump viewed the protest as more extreme and later recalled more violent and fewer peaceful actions than had occurred.

Sometimes, we are seeing the world through group-colored glasses.

Changing our viewpoint

When we watch video evidence, many of us cannot step outside our social identities. But we can change how we engage with it.

Research suggests that when viewers are prompted to watch all parties equally or when the footage they watch includes multiple perspectives, their judgments can become more balanced. This is why we encourage you to watch all angles of the footage before forming an opinion—and you probably shouldn’t trust the opinions of hyperpartisans. Watch all the videos for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Justice isn’t just about what evidence we have, but how we watch it. It is also about the institutions and processes designed to reduce harm and ensure accountability. Core priorities of law enforcement are no loss of life, de-escalation, and an impartial judicial process. Reducing tension and avoiding escalation requires attention, training, and institutional support.

It also requires effective public leadership. Leadership that prioritizes de-escalation and emphasizes thorough investigation matters at all times, and becomes especially important during periods of polarization. Understanding the limits of human psychology reminds us why impartial institutions and an independent justice system are crucial.

If you want to delve deeper into the psychology of visual attention and the justice system, check out the book chapter that Anni co-wrote with Yael Granot and Emily Balcetis.

This newsletter was written by Anni Sternisko and edited by Jay Van Bavel. ChatGPT was used to improve grammar and clarity.

Here is a summary of our most popular posts from the past year: 3 summarizing new scientific papers from the Center for Conflict & Cooperation and 3 riffing on cultural trends and ideas. Check them out below:

Top 3 articles from the Center for Conflict and Cooperation’s Research Bulletin:

Social media doesn’t just reflect public opinion, it distorts it like a funhouse mirror, amplifying extreme opinions and hate. Jay explored this phenomena in this newsletter and in an article he wrote for the Guardian, explaining how seeing these distortions can lead us to develop more extreme beliefs and animosity towards other groups. Research from our lab also finds that we can reduce those harmful effects by changing our online habits, such as unfollowing the most polarizing accounts.

You can also check out our short video summary on this topic.

Having pride in your nation is generally a positive trait and linked to supporting fellow group members. However, ‘national narcissism’ — an image-obsessed, defensive, superficial form of national identity — comes with a host of problems. This newsletter by Anni Sternisko reveals how national narcissism has seeped into political life across many countries, posing a serious threat to democracy, public health, environmental protection, trust in science, and more.

Identifying with a social group—whether that be a political party, your local community, or even a run club—can impact what actions you take to stay healthy. In our most read newsletter of 2025, Raunak Pillai lays out how social identities shape public health by affecting both the beliefs we hold about any given health behavior, and how important those different beliefs are to us. This framework helps explain why health outcomes can diverge so starkly across party lines, as seen in 2020 and 2021 when COVID-19 took the lives of 76% more Republicans than Democrats.

Top 3 articles from The Power of Us:

Yvonne wrote this Cluely case study after seeing Roy Lee’s outrageous content on her social media feeds. She connected with this story in a special way (as a Gen Z Asian who grew up in Silicon Valley) because learning about the Cluely team/culture felt like getting to know the tech bros down the street. Cluely’s tactics revealed that you don’t need a spectacular product to get clout — just an understanding of what social cognitive factors nudge people to click and engage.

A few years ago, we ran a column based on a Netflix show called “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones”. In the show, Dan Buettner travels to areas around the world where people live significantly longer than average, including many who live past 100. Two years later, it turns out that Blue Zones may be a myth! Saul Newman, a postdoctoral researcher in Australia discovered that these Blue Zones do not exist and appear to be a result of shoddy record keeping of vital statistics about births and deaths. However, we do point out that the importance of social support definitely still matters.

Our most popular (controversial) article of the year was about Yvonne’s Zumba class! We had a feeling it would get some traction, but not in the way we expected. Jay, Dom and Yvonne exchanged a bunch of emails the day after this newsletter went live because we received feedback on social media for sharing a meta-analysis about the efficacy of different treatments for major depression. Yvonne subsequently added a note at the top and acknowledged concerns with the study’s data and methods. Despite the questionable study, the overall message about setting healthy norms, demonstrating inclusive identity leadership, and promoting psychological safety is still important for creating healthy groups.

News and Updates

Check out our new Ask Me Anything sessions for the new year! Paid Subscribers can join us for our monthly live Q&A with Jay or Dom where you can ask us anything from workshopping research questions, career advice to opinions and recommendations on pop culture happenings—for paid subscribers only. Upgrade your subscription using the button below. We will send out email RSVP forms soon!

• January 21st @ 2:00 EST with Jay

• March 4th @ 2:00 EST with Jay

• May 6th @ 2:00 EST with Jay

Happy Holidays from the Center for Conflict and Cooperation!

Catch up on the last one…

Need concrete, actionable tips on how to achieve your new year’s resolutions? Our newsletter from last week explains why shared goals, social norms, and smart environments are the real engines of lasting behavior change.

The Power of Us

How Groups Succeed Where Willpower Fails

With a new year on the horizon, many people are thinking about the changes they want to make in their lives. New Year's resolutions are a 4,000 year old tradition dating back to the ancient Babylonians, although they made theirs during Akitu, a 12-day religious festival in March…

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4 months ago · 8 likes · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

A new year represents a new you, a chance to reinvent yourself and create a new identity. As our colleague, Dr. Katy Milkman has found, on new beginnings—dates like New Year’s Day, a birthday and even Mondays—people are extra motivated to tackle their goals because they feel like they can turn the page on past failures and create a new direction.

For many people, new year’s resolutions represent the most important things they want to accomplish. Do you want to save more money? Exercise more? Eat healthier? If so, you are among a majority of Americans, for whom these were three most popular New Year’s resolutions in 2026.

But before you set any resolutions for the coming year, take a moment to remember your goals from last year. How well did you achieve them?

Despite decades of practice, roughly 80% of people fail to keep their resolutions by February, and a mere 9-12% stick with their resolutions for the entire year. This is a pretty dismal record—especially when you consider these are the most important goals we have for the entire year. And we set them for ourselves.

At this time of year, advice columns offer all kinds of recommendations for leveraging your willpower to meet your goals. Dream Big! Commit yourself! Give yourself a medal! (and those are just the tips from Harvard Medical School). As much as we’d like to give ourselves a medal, much of this advice fails rather badly.

This is why we have dedicated this column to our the secret of our own success: The power of collective control! It is why book clubs, writing groups, and workout partners are so effective.

We revisited our resolutions from the past to see how well we lived up to our best intentions. Yes, we wrote them in our newsletter to hold ourselves publicly accountable. Would our own knowledge of behavioral science give us an edge? Let’s dig into the results.

Our results were quite positive overall.

Jay set out to launch the Center for Conflict & Cooperation. Indeed, he managed to pull it off—you can check out the new website here. But Jay and Dom are still chipping away at their book. This is the year! We now include regular posts from the center as past of this newsletter. Yvonne started a new full-time job in January and pledged to achieve greater balance in her professional life. This year, she only said yes to two film productions (record low) and moved on from her role as a case supervisor at a foster youth advocacy agency. She continues to do advocacy work and attend court hearings for her own case, but stopped volunteering to advise other ones.

Although we felt frustrated by our own imperfections, we did a fair bit better than most. You might be wondering: what was the secret to our success?

A couple of years ago we researched how to succeed at keeping your New Year’s Resolutions. We have updated our advice here and added several new examples to help you find a new relationship or make friends, get healthier, drop the distractions, make professional progress, and much more. At the end, we offer our own resolutions for the New Year.

Here is what you can do differently to actually stick to our resolutions:

Psychologists who study self-control have found that the best approach for achieving goals is called "situation change." This means avoiding temptation by changing or modifying your surroundings and environment, rather than relying on our rather flimsy willpower to resist it.

Situation change can involve removing tempting foods from your home if you are trying to diet, deleting social media apps if you are trying to reduce your screen time, keeping your phone in the other room when you are trying to work, or blocking off time on your calendar for specific goals.

Situation change also involves paying attention to your social circumstances and leveraging the influence of those around you to help achieve your goals. For example, joining a writing group can provide accountability and support for aspiring writers.

We did this ourselves when we were writing our book, “The Power of Us.” We set weekly meetings, blocking off time to write together. We met in cafés to argue over stories, studies, and turns of phrase. Working together created both social accountability and social support. In fact, we’ve started doing this again now that we are working on our next book.

This also seems to work nicely for physical activities. For instance, “Runners who had group activities in January 2022 recorded 78 percent more active time than those who ran solo.” Working out with others has at least three significant benefits: accountability, support, and community. In other words, you’ll be in better shape and build friends at the same time!

In New York City, large running groups have also become the hottest place to meet a new date. The rules of run club are simple: Singles wear black. If you’re taken, wear colors. Everyone gets some exercise, meets new people, and they often head to a bars to mingle afterwards.

Larger groups can create social norms that push us in the direction of our goals. For instance, we have joined book clubs and writing clubs to help us read more books and stick to our writing goals. Indeed, the social norms of these groups are an essential ingredient for collective success.

For instance, Jay organizes a monthly writing group with his lab. Everyone writes down their own goals and tracks their progress. They meet over lunch on the first workday of each month to review their success (or failure) at meeting each of their own goals. If everyone hits their goals, Jay buys lunch for the entire group. This incentivizes helping one another to obtain the collective goal, rather than competing for individual success.

In one recent study, researchers compared whether establishing a social norm against using technology in class would help university students resist the temptation to multitask while listening to lectures. They found that students who were in a course with a clear social norm against using technology spent only about 10% of their time multitasking, compared to 24% for students who had personal resolutions not to use technology.

Moreover, students in the course with a social norm against technology even reported fewer urges to use their phones or computers during class and experienced less of a need for willpower to resist temptation. We have found the same thing with cooperation: A group with the right norms makes it easier to achieve your goals.

Social norms clearly trumped willpower!

This is also why we have described social media as a collective trap—we are sucked into using it because others are online. We respond to the various notifications because for many reasons, but one of the biggest forces is the desire to stay connected with our friends, family, colleagues, and communities. This is what makes this technology uniquely difficult to escape: if everyone we know is using it, disengaging feels like a form of social suicide. But if there was a norm among our friends to disconnect, it would be far easier for each of us to keep our resolution to say offline.

In fact, we feel compelled to stay engaged, even if we hate it. A recent paper found that the majority of people would prefer to live in a world without Tik Tok or Instagram (which currently have 3.5 billion users). Indeed, nearly 60% of Instagram users wish the platform wasn’t invented.

So when you create a New Year’s Resolution this year, we suggest that you think more deeply about how your good intentions can be supported (or undermined) by groups and their norms. You might form a running group with friends, start a book club with coworkers, join a local environmental organization, start a luddite club to minimize technology, or attend regular meditation meet-ups. But this is just part of the puzzle of achieving your goals…

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