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:

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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

1. You don’t need to have the last word — in fact, it’s usually best not to.

2. Everything will take longer than you think it should, and that’s ok. Keep chipping away and most things eventually hit a tipping point toward success.

3. The person who writes the first draft has inordinate influence.

   

4. If you understand and play within the hard (non-negotiable) rules, you have a ton of discretion to do what you want.

5. People will surprise you everyday — with their self-centeredness and, more importantly, their generosity.

6. Transparency is easy to espouse and hard to create. It takes creativity and effort to keep busy people in the loop.

7. P…

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Gen Z is using micro-retirement to avoid burnout, find greater fulfillment in their work, and enhance their overall well-being. However, it’s not just Gen-Z: according to a survey from Side Hustles, 10% of workers are considering taking a micro-retirement and 75% thought employers should offer micro-retirement policies such as unpaid sabbaticals.

But keep reading and you’ll discover the big disruption: micro-retirements are annual one week leaves. Or as, the Merriam Webster Dictionary account wryly pointed out—these are quite simply vacations.

As absurd as this article sounds, it captures a deeper problem with American life that expands well beyond Gen Z. Americans are quite literally, the worst at taking vacation time. According to Expedia, Americans not only receive the fewest vacation days each year, averaging just 11 days, but only half of them even plan to use all their allotted time off. France won the spot as the country that gets the most days off, at about a month.

It isn’t merely a matter of vacation days. Very few US employees even used their very limited earned time off! This suggests the difference between Americans and Europeans is less about policy, than it is about social norms. When your peers take time off, you do too. When they don’t, you feel compelled to stare at a computer screen rather than the beach.

Among academics, it gets even more ironic. Instead of unplugging, we humblebrag with beachside laptop selfies—“Look! I’m revising my article and enjoying the ocean breeze!” (Rest assured, the sand got everywhere and the Wi-Fi was terrible.)

These cultural differences are so stark that they have become a popular punch line on social media. Our favorite is this observation about the Out of Office messages:

We think the issue is not merely a matter of norms, but identity. It’s one thing to go on vacation, quite another to put away work and truly embrace it.

Of course, sometimes we don’t just take vacations, we perform them. These days, even rest is curated. Travel has become content, a way to signal status, taste, and a cosmopolitan self—one Instagram story at a time.

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Whether you are just starting to consider graduate school or preparing your tenure materials, this is a roadmap for success. Academia is a unique field that requires many different hats and lots of unspoken knowledge–which is often described as the “hidden curriculum”. In an effort to demystify the Ivory Tower, Jay and some other colleagues wrote a series of columns for Science Magazine. In this week’s newsletter, we summarize each one and provide links to the short articles so you can find advice you need for whatever challenge you face!

To re…

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The coin, we learn, was minted to commemorate what the CIA account dryly described as “an anticipated (but never realized) Bay of Pigs victory”.

Never realized, indeed. This military action, undertaken in 1961, was not only a foreign policy disaster for the United States and a major embarrassment for President John F. Kennedy, but it also become synonymous with one of the most misunderstood concepts in social and organizational psychology—groupthink.

The Bay of Pigs operation, planned by the CIA and authorized by John F. Kennedy’s fledgling administration, was an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime by landing a group of roughly 1,400 expatriate Cuban fighters at the Bay of Pigs on the southern side of the island of Cuba. The fighters were immediately confronted by much larger Cuban military forces. Within four days, more than sixty of the US-supported fighters were killed and over 11 hundred were captured.

It was particularly striking how Kennedy’s brilliant team with Ivy-league pedigrees could fail this badly. The Bay of Pigs incident was such a disaster that when psychologist Irving Janis later developed his hugely influential theory of groupthink, he used the botched invasion as his archetypal example of the phenomenon.

According to Irving Janis, groupthink emerges in tightly knit groups when pressures for unanimity and conformity override individual members’ better judgment. A desire for group cohesion causes people to self-censor their doubts. Unexpressed, the absence of divergent views causes groups to become too confident in the wisdom of their choices.

Looking at Kennedy’s leadership team, Janis saw an overly-confident group of advisors among whom doubts about the mission were suppressed in the presence of a charismatic young president. Viewed through this lens, the commemorative coin seems to perfectly symbolize their groupthink—so assured were they of success, the administration had cast into silver an image of victory before a single fighter set foot on Cuban soil.

This is the groupthink origin story. Grounded in case-studies like the Bay of Pigs and escalation of the Vietnam War, the groupthink idea took off. Big time. The notion that conformity pressures cause groups to make poor decisions is now a common wisdom, routinely invoked to account for bad outcomes (and sometimes just choices that people disagree with).

It’s a powerful story.

Unfortunately, however, it is incomplete—and Janis’ analysis of events like the botched Bay of Pigs invasion is in need of significant revision. It turns out that things didn’t happen quite as we’ve always been told! And in the retelling, people have created a myth of groupthink.

By the 1990s, significantly more information about JFK’s team’s decision-making was available than had been accessible to Janis. Psychologist Roderick Kramer reanalyzed how JFK and his advisors had reasoned about the Bay of Pigs invasion and he came to radically different conclusions about what had actually happened.

Far from being overconfident, JFK had significant reservations about the operation. Planning for the invasion of Cuba had begun under the previous administration of Dwight Eisenhower. JFK felt that he had inherited an awkward and potentially dangerous “hot potato”.

Asked what he thought about “this damned invasion idea”, JFK said, “I think about it as little as possible.”

JFK and his team did make some faulty assumptions. Among them may have been placing too much faith in the military acumen of Eisenhower, under whom the operation had been conceived. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, Eisenhower had led the successful invasion of Normandy in 1944, the most logistically complex military campaign in US history. Despite his misgivings, Kennedy believed in Eisenhower’s instincts.

More importantly, however, Kramer concluded that JFK’s team hadn’t fallen prey to groupthink at all—but instead to a phenomenon he called “politicothink”.

Rather than trying and failing to make optimal choices in terms of military strategy, JFK and his team were focused on the political consequences of their decisions. This focus led them to make choices they thought would minimize political risks even if they were not the best options for military success. They were too focused on public relations—which was the wrong goal.

This was a very different process than groupthink. And a very different type of leadership failure.

Richard Nixon, JFK’s opponent in the 1960 presidential election, played a key part in this political calculus. Nixon had been Eisenhower’s Vice-President and JFK realized that Nixon knew about the plans to invade and liberate Cuba from communism. He reasoned that if he cancelled the operation, Nixon would hammer him in public as indecisive and an irresolute defender of democracy. Despite his misgivings, he felt that the politics meant he had to move ahead with at least some kind of invasion/ Rather than being overconfident, JFK felt cornered politically.

Kramer’s reanalysis changes how we should think about groupthink. Certainly, poor group decisions can be produced by the desire to maintain cohesion. But bad decision-making can result just as well from other types of goals. Understanding the underlying root of the problem is critical to finding the right solution.

Sometimes a group may be trying to protect what they understand as their political interests. Sometimes they may be trying to maintain a certain positive reputation or perhaps reinforce boundaries between themselves and another group. In each case, a group is making choices that might be suboptimal for addressing important issues at hand, but that they believe will advance some other element of their agenda.

Rethinking Consensus & Strong Leadership

The central villain in the standard groupthink story is cohesion—groups that are too tightly-knit are thought to be most susceptible to poor decisions. The reality, however, seems to be more nuanced than that.

The myth of groupthink leads many people to assume that a longstanding team of collaborators should be especially vulnerable to groupthink. However, it is often groups of new acquaintances who suffer from groupthink. Eager to make a good impression, new coworkers are often the most hesitant to rock the boat or express too much criticism. They are playing a political game of their own—eager to fit in.

This is at odds with conventional wisdom and, indeed, the conclusions of some groupthink researchers. Testing the hypothesis that more cohesion would produce more groupthink, experimenters had observed that when group members were led to believe that they were similar and would like each other, they exhibited more of the symptoms of groupthink. However, these experiments usually took place with new groups, in which people were meeting each other for the first time.

But when researchers studied groups of longer-term friends, they found that friendship was associated with less, not more, groupthink. People in new groups have a strong desire to fit in and feel a sense of camaraderie, but this is different from real cohesion brought about by personal bonds developed over time in long term groups. It is these deeper relationships that allow for less posturing and more honesty.

Similarly, while bringing in outsiders (like expensive consultants) seems an obvious antidote to groupthink, it also has the potential to backfire. External perspectives can certainly reveal flaws in groups’ assumptions or provide new information, but this is only useful if groups engage with and incorporate those insights into their decisions. Unfortunately, research suggests that feeling that they are being observed by outsiders is often threatening and can create resistance rather than openness to new and different ideas.

Similarly, while overly-directive or charismatic leaders have long been blamed for creating the conditions for groupthink, this too warrants reconsideration. While we agree that leaders can certainly set the conditions for groupthink or politicothink, the solution for avoiding this problem is not less leadership, but more.

As we have written elsewhere:

Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, has studied the importance of psychological safety in many groups, including cardiac surgical teams. At the time of one study, these teams were learning new procedures for operating on patients’ hearts, procedures which required perfectly-tuned coordination among surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and technicians. With lives on the line, their ability to work together truly mattered, and it wasn’t necessarily made easy by differences in training, disciplinary assumptions, and status.  

Edmondson found that the surgical teams whose members were comfortable speaking up were more successful at adopting the new procedures. Crucially, successful environments were fostered by team leaders who made sure their people understood the importance of their contribution to the mission. They were attentive to the potential for power disparities to disrupt communication. And they worked hard to attenuate status differences within their teams, careful to listen to and act on the suggestions of others.

A large study at Google (“Project Aristotle”) likewise found that psychological safety was critical to team success. After studying over a hundred groups for more than a year, their researchers concluded that group norms were the key to strong group performance–and teams that reported high levels of psychological safety were the most effective.

Psychological safety is often misunderstood to imply that we should create environments where people don’t critique each other. In fact, the opposite is required. People experience psychological safety when they know they are free to articulate contradictory opinions or divergent views because their group welcomes healthy debate and it won’t be held against them. Psychologically safe groups are places where people feel empowered to respectfully disagree with one another about the best ways to pursue their common goals.

Building the Right Norms

One of the lessons of the science of social identity is that people who identify strongly with their groups, who care and feel invested, typically conform more ardently to group norms. Sometimes these norms foster insularity, specifying in great detail what “we” believe about an issue or the only right way to think about things. But they do not have to.

It turns out that groups can form identities and find cohesion around just about anything. What seems like a threat to one group can, with the right leadership, be perceived as an opportunity in another. 

Sometimes it is essential, for example, that a group embraces outside critique. Strong and effective leadership can help a team understand that outsider input is not a threat to their cohesion, but as a source of strength and an opportunity to grow. If this is genuine, it can become central to who we are: “We are the sort of people who seek all available information and learn from it.”

These are the conditions for making effective decisions in groups. It requires moving beyond the myth of groupthink and reaching a deeper understanding of what is motivating groups and how they reach decisions.

This is the third column in a series where we debunk popular psychology myths. You can read the first column that reinterprets the Bystander Effect (both the story of Kitty Genovese and the wrong impression that many have received from the original bystander studies) and the second column that discusses the Stanford Prison Experiment. We will debunk several other popular myths in the coming weeks.

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News & Events

Jay recently hosted a weekend workshop on “The Power of Us: Lessons for Effective Leadership” for the Mongolian national chamber of commerce and industry’s member companies executives. We had a lot of fun and are planning around workshop in 2025!

In addition to attending the workshop, they have translated the book into Mongolian. Our book is now available in 10 countries (you can see the full list here)—here are some of the examples sitting around our offices right now:

Catch up on the last one…

Last week’s newsletter was an interview with Hahrie Han about hew new book “UNDIVIDED” and how to build solidarity across divides

Since publishing our book and starting this newsletter, we have been welcomed by a wonderful community of kind and smart fellow authors. With the purpose of increasing the cross-fertilization of ideas and sharing some of their brilliance with our audience, we have decided to publish an occasional post by other thinkers and writers who we think are doing great work related to smart groups and effective identities.

This week, we are pleased to publish a guest post by Dr. Todd Kashdan, Professor of Psychology and Director of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University. Todd is author of the recent book, “The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively”, as well as the very popular “The Provoked Newsletter”. We encourage you to check out his book and sign up for his newsletter.

As Todd notes, “Even when the dissenter’s idea is wrong, other group members are stimulated to think differently. By thinking differently, on balance, groups gener…

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I have both been grappling with these challenges in my work as well as my personal life. After a lot of discussion and reflection, I have decided to make some major changes to the way I work. Instead of constantly adding to my workload, I have decided to try something different and remove a few things (if you want to read about the power of subtraction, I recommend this recent interview on Hidden Brain with Leidy Klotz or our interview on Quitting with Annie Duke).

I am not advocating for “quiet quitting” because I genuinely love my job (and if you hate yours, I’d strongly recommend finding a new one rather than lingering in quiet misery). But I often feel like I am running on an academic hamster wheel. It gets faster and faster, but I feel stuck in place.

Therefore, I am proposing something different: I’m calling it “the 10% retirement”. I decided to critically examine everything I do and try to remove tasks and activities that take up 10% of my time. But my goal wasn’t to simply make my life easier, but to remove the distractions that take me away from the parts of me job that I’m most passionate about and where I think I can have the most impact.

There are a lot of good reasons for doing this:

1. Feeling overwhelmed is simply exhausting. As we wrote about in a previous newsletter, burnout impacts mental health and makes it harder to get things done. Removing the clutter is a long-term recipe for feeling better, helping the people we care about, and achieving our goals.

2. It’s a perfect time to create new norms. The pandemic disrupted a lot of our lives. For the most part it was a stressful—if not a tragic—experience. But by disrupting our daily routines and breaking us from old norms and habits, it gave us all a chance to reflect on what really matters.

3. Quitting is hard, but necessary. We often overlook the value of removing things that get in our way. This means we should spent a lot more time thinking about what to remove from our lives, rather than continually adding responsibilities.

4. Many aspects of our jobs are full of these activities that have absolutely zero impact on the world—or even our careers. Yet we pursue them because someone asked us to or because we are simply in the habit of doing it. Getting rid of the clutter allows us to focus on the essential aspects of our work and life.

I have decided to share my thoughts on what the “new normal” looks like for me and some of the trends I see on the horizon. I would also love to hear about the challenges you’ve faced and changes you’ve made in the comments—tell me about your own plans for a 10% retirement.

Then track your progress. Do you feel less frenzied? Do you have more time and energy for your core priorities? For your health? Your family and friends? Are you any less effective? Please tell us how this works out in a year or two. Maybe if we all decided to retire from the most meaningless 10% we'd find that there were a lot of things that none of us truly enjoyed, and were quite unnecessary to begin with. Then we could stop pressuring one another to do it. Stop feeling an existential sense of dread wash over us when we miss out on some opportunity.

My 10% Retirement:

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Professional burnout results when chronic workplace stress is left unmanaged. This is painful to individuals, and costly to organizations. Workplace stress amounts to over $500 billion dollars and more than 550 million work days per year. An APA report further found that burned-out employees are over two times more likely to look for other work, 63% more likely to call in sick, and 23% more likely to need an emergency room visit. In short, it sucks.

Global levels of stress and burnout in the workplace have been on the rise for more than a decade–and hit a record high–according to a Gallup survey on the state of the global workplace in 116 countries. 61% of workers say they feel exhausted at the end of each. day. The recent peak is, in p…

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A big part of this transition for both of us involves greater responsibility in leadership positions. As we move into these new roles, we find ourselves giving more thought to what it means to be an effective leader. There is no shortage of cutting-edge research out there on leadership, not to mention good (and often not-so-good) advice from management gurus. Today we wanted to share some of the best advice we’ve seen.

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Bad bosses are a common problem for employees. A study of 35 European nations found that 13% of employees are stuck with a bad boss and one in seven US workers feel that their manager engages in hostile behaviors towards them. Bad bosses are also a major predictor of employee dissatisfaction and talent exodus. In fact, A toxic corporate culture is over ten times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company's attrition rate!

But what makes a great boss?

In our book, we report that there are two types of leaders: individually-oriented leaders who focus on building a personal bond with the individuals on their team and group-oriented leaders who spend more time building a vision and a sense of ca…

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How can leaders communicate more effectively?

Nelson Mandela was a hero whose tremendous influence led him to become South Africa's first Black president at the overthrow of apartheid. As president, Mandela sought to unify the divided identities of his country to bring his people together.

The year after Mandela’s election, South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup. During the apartheid era, South Africa had been banned from competition, so this was a symbolic event. But Mandela recognized that it could be more meaningful still. The South African team, the Springboks, were beloved by White South Africans and widely despised by the Black population.

So when the Springboks competed for—and eventually won—the Rugby World Cup on their home turf, Mandela seized the moment. In a gesture immortalized in the film Invictus, he stepped out to the podium not just as president of the country but also as a fan—wearing the distinctive green Springbok cap and jersey. To Black and White South Africans alike, Mandela’s action was a simple but profound statement: We are one team and we are one country. In this moment, Mandela was able to co-opt a symbol of colonial oppression and use it to bring his country a bit closer together.

Social psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher have called leaders ‘entrepreneurs of identity’. Leaders are members of groups who help us define who we are, often by telling stories and using symbols much as Nelson Mandela did.

One of the hottest concepts in the leadership literature over the last 20+ years has been the idea of transformational leadership. When researchers looked into what is being assessed, they noted that there are two components to transformational leadership.

One aspect has to do with how well leaders relate to their followers as individuals — how much, for instance, a leader cares about you and your professional development. But another crucial part of it reflects how well leaders manage and mobilize groups, attuned to the well-being not just of every individual but of the community as a whole.

In complex organizations, many senior leaders are also leaders of leaders who must help the people who work for them be better at supporting and building their own groups’ identities. Effective leaders operate in group mode all of the time, which is reflected in their behavior and even the language that they use.

We and us, not I and me

How leaders engage followers with language contributes to their success. In a startling example of this, 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 Euro in their organization's net profits.

Leaders can use symbols and language to crystallize a shared sense of identity, but truly iconic leaders like Nelson Mandela understand that much more is necessary to mobilize a group of followers around a shared sense of purpose for the long term. They create the conditions and institutions (like, in South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) that are necessary to rally people together in support of common goals.

Leveraging a sense of national identity

Leaders who can authentically rally their people around a shared identity have a hugely powerful tool at their disposal. We observed evidence for the power of national identities in the pandemic when we teamed up with about 250 other researchers from around the world to collect data in 67 countries. We found that in nations where people had a stronger sense of national identity, people were more willing to rally in response to the pandemic and engage in the positive behaviors needed to stop the spread of the COVID-19. We suggest that a sense of national identity was a tool that the leaders in those societies could draw upon to rally their people in a coordinated way.

This research gives us three clear lessons about effective leadership:

1. If you aspire to change and improve a group, it’s not enough to simply think of yourself as managing a bunch of individuals. Effective leaders work hard to create a collective sense of purpose — excitement about who we are and where we are going.

2. Leaders who genuinely think of themselves in terms of the group are more likely to use language that is collective in nature — and this language is often associated with success, in organizations and even at the national level.

3. But language isn’t everything. Effective leaders must authentically embody the identities of their groups and create the conditions and structures necessary to turn “our vision” for the future into “our reality”.

Click here to watch the fourth episode, “How can leaders communicate more effectively?” — and please let us know what you learned or what stood out to you!

News and Updates

Dom appeared on Two Pages with MBS — in which he was asked to read and discuss two pages from a favorite book. Dom chose to read from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics and talked about finding one’s own identity through dissent.

Last week, Jay guested on the Rational Reminder podcast! Some topics covered include:

• How to foster social cohesion, using America as an example.

• How group identities affect how people learn new information.

• Whether people can change or broaden their identities to improve decision-making.

Catch up on the last one…

In case you missed our previous newsletter on cooperation, improving performance and overcoming the bystander effect, you can read it here or watch Episode Three on YouTube!

This week’s newsletter was drafted by Yvonne Phan, the ‘Power of Us’ science communicator.