Thank you so much for having me.

There were a number of things that got me interested in it. One, I'm a huge fan of sports, and so I had the experience of playing competitive sports at a young age and feeling immediately immersed with my teammates. I remember growing up and having this one friend, and if ever he was on my team when we were playing pickup sports at the field, we were the best of friends. And if by coin flip, we end up on the other team, we were like arch enemies because we were both very competitive and we just quickly identified with whatever team we were on.

Then I started my PhD and I was studying things like racial bias and implicit bias, and I wanted to understand what you could do to get rid of these things. My research for my PhD looked at the effect of putting people on a mixed race team was often sufficient to get rid of their biases, at least for the short time that we had them in the study. One of the things it did was it just made them develop in that moment a different identity that was more inclusive. When they had that more inclusive, even these things that were triggered automatically in their mind, these other biases that they built up through years and years of media exposure and living in the world, went away. When I got those data in the first few studies, I was really blown away by that and it really reaffirmed my own experiences playing sports and how the psychology of identity actually worked.

No, I haven't. I've always wanted to go.

Yeah. That's really profound. That's part of the power of contact. What happens when you have negative stereotypes of groups and I can imagine this was particularly bad in apartheid South Africa, is that the white South Africans wouldn't have wanted to interact with black South Africans because they would have heard all these horrible things. But the fact of those types of stereotypes is, if you don't interact with another group, you can't overcome those stereotypes. You cling to them because you don't have the chance to contradict them. That's why a contact, especially if it's done well, can help erode those types of false beliefs and create the potential for more cohesion and cooperative contact.

Yeah. The key is that contact has to operate in the right way. I think people who travel, who take the opportunity to explore other cultures, there's research showing that it tends to give them a more cosmopolitan, open minded way of thinking about the world and interacting with other people. Of course, there's a bit of a self-selection bias, right? The type of people who opt, like yourself, to travel to South Africa, are often people who are more open minded to begin with. What you want to do to create positive contact, actually have pretty equal status if you can, which is sometimes hard to do and you want them to be working towards something they're cooperating for. Because if you have contact and people are in competition and they have unequal status and stereotypes, that contact can actually make things worse and it can backfire. And so you really want to have people interacting and I think this is what a lot of travel does, especially where you have an opportunity to try different foods and be exposed to different cultures, meet different people, be really open minded about it. Those are the types of rich cultural experiences that give you a more open minded perspective about different people like yourself.

I think that's one of the things that were being marinated in that all the time, right? When we're exposed to media, books, TV, and stories that we hear from other people, if those are tainted with bias, then we start to internalize that and normalize it, and often don't question it until we have the chance to be exposed to something different.

One of the things we try to show with our book is that when you have a biased perspective and if you're clinging to a certain identity that becomes a lens that you filter, the way that you interpret things from other people, especially ambiguous things. So, if you see something ambiguous that's neither good nor bad, if it looks like something from another group that you don't like, then you interpret it in the darkest possible way. If it's from a member of your own group, you spin it and interpret it in a positive light. That's one way that we can filter cultural practices with other groups. If we have existing positive stereotypes, we see something, we might see it as an opportunity to embrace difference and learn something, enrich our view of the world. But if we see it through the lens of negative stereotypes, or we see it as a threat to our identity, we can actually see it as a really bad thing.

This is the story that we use to open our whole book. It was these two cobblers in Germany before World War II. They started building shoes in their mother's basement. Eventually, they became so successful that they made the track shoes that Jesse Owens wore at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In Germany, Jesse Owens was an African American athlete and he was basically the star of the Olympics. He went and he completely dominated the sprinting events. I think he won 3 gold medals at the games. This was a massive rebuke to Hitler, who was in power at the time and saw the games as a way to showcase the power of Germany and his Aryan worldview. And, this black American comes in and completely dominates the 100 meter sprint and the relay. His shoes were actually created by two Germans. Now, a couple of years later, obviously, Hitler started World War II and a few years later, the Allies were bombing South Germany and these two Dassler brothers, Adi and Rudy, were their names. One of them was hiding in a bunker with his family and the other brother came running to jump into the bunker. There are many stories about why this rivalry started. But one of them was that, as he jumped into the bunker, he said, “The bastards are here.” He may have been talking about the warplanes coming to bomb Southern Germany, but his brother thought he was talking about him and his family. And so, this set in motion a rift that lasted decades and tore apart this little town that they were in. So up until that point, they had a shoe company that they worked at together; before the war that had become very famous. But after that point, they decided to part ways.

So they created two shoe factories in the same small town in Southern Germany. One was in the south of town and there was a river that cut through the middle of the town. The other factory was in the north of town. Essentially what happened is, it divided the town. You formed an alliance with one shoe company or the other, and it became known as the town of Bent Necks, because as people walked around the town, they were constantly looking over and seeing what shoes you were wearing to judge whether they should interact with you. And if you were wearing the wrong pair of shoes, it meant that they couldn't date you, that you weren't allowed into the restaurants and bars on that side of town. So it became the signature social identity of that town. It lasted until the two brothers died, till Adi and Rudy both died. And the end of the story is; they both insisted on being put in the local town graveyard on opposite ends of the graveyard. Even in their death, they continued this rivalry.

The other part of the story is; these shoe companies went on to become world famous. This is Adidas, which was Adi’s Company and Puma, which is Rudy's company. Now they're two of the world's behemoths, corporations in shoe and sports manufacturing. But, this was the identity that divided this town. It's a really powerful story about identity, right? Because, if you went to that town and you joined one of these companies, you were loyal for life. Even if you didn't work at the company, if you lived on that side of the river, you served only people from that shoe manufacturer.

These were people who had really no differences in terms of their religion, their ethnicity, their value system or belief system. Their socioeconomic status was very similar because they're in the same small town and same nationality. All of these things we normally think of as part of identities being divided apart and creating conflict, were not apparent in this situation. All it was, what random side of the river you were born on or whether or not you had a parent who worked at one of these shoe manufacturers. That set in motion all of these things that we think of as part of like sectarian intergroup identity based conflict, including, like I said, who you could date or who you could marry, where you could eat.

It really just goes to show you the power of identity and that it doesn't often have to be attached to these other types of value laden things that we think of as related to identity.

I'm glad you brought that up. We never actually mentioned that in our book, but I think you're exactly right. A lot of organizations are focused on rank ordering their employees. Even at where I work, at New York University, every year, they rank order all the faculty based on our productivity and give us a raise determined by how many publications we got or grants we got that year. But that's almost a perfectly designed way to just get people thinking in terms of their individual identity and their competition with their colleagues. What this does when you have group level competition is, it actually induces cooperation among all your employees because you're trying to outcompete this other company. We have to think of what a shock it is that this one small town in southern Germany produced two of the biggest brands in all of sports manufacturing in the world. What is the cultural ingredient there? And I think you're right, part of it must have been that they had these powerful identities. They were constantly cooperating because they were so focused on outcompeting the shoe company across town; that made probably a big part of their cultural excellence, their cohesion and willingness to cooperate, work together, be innovative, and build a really coherent sense of brand identity that they could then export throughout the country and around the world. That's the type of thing that can often compel all kinds of groups forward, whether we're talking about companies and brands or as I said, I got into this in part because I'm interested in sports teams, too.

If you think about great sports teams, this is the cauldron that they live in. Winning championships isn't about often having the best players. It's finding a way to get those players to cooperate so that they can beat other teams with great players. That is often the key that coaches and general managers and organizations look to figure out.

I think that is the optimal way to think about it. I think competition can push us to try to achieve these types of things that can be beneficial. But you don't need it. There's lots of research on this in the group's literature; that groups can come together and cooperate as long as they have a higher order goal. That higher order goal can be something like helping humanity. I'll go outside the sport domain for a second and say, you can have groups like Doctors without Borders, which are very mission driven and attract mission driven people. The more you identify as a member of Doctors without Borders, the more that you're willing to sacrifice your own life to help people all around the world and benefit them in some way. That's the type of thing I think that would be optimal, and that's a really powerful form of identity.

You can also have competition and I don't know if we mentioned this in our book, but I've written about it before, the Olympics. The Olympics are actually like the height of competition. It's very intense. For people, it's often their life's dream to be in the Olympics, and often Olympic athletes aren't making a lot of money. They're doing it because they care about it. But the Olympics are also incredibly peaceful. In fact, I remember reading this story about the Olympic village, and so many people were having sex with one another. All these athletes from different countries that are really attractive and in great shape had to hand out thousands of condoms in the Olympic Village because it's such a hook-up environment. And so, why are you hooking up with someone that you're competing against from another country or trying to compete to win medals against them? It's because there's this special identity as being an Olympian. Part of what it means to be an Olympian is not just competing to your very best, but also having the sense of sportsmanship that you get along and support one another, that you're trying to transcend the lower level aspects of sports, that it's not purely about competition. It's about coming together and doing something even bigger than that.

I think there are ways to create identities that are inclusive, that people are working towards something but also bring out the best of us. I think that's the type of environment that is optimal. It sounds like John Wooden, he was a coach at UCLA when they were the best team in the country. To my knowledge, he's the best coach in the history of NCAA basketball or close to it. When you think of truly great coaches, college sports is a really good example because it's not like professional sports where you might get lucky and have a couple of superstars for 10 or 15 years on the team. You're constantly turning over players and the coaches that succeed at the college level often are ones who have a great system and are great mentors and create a great sense of cohesion year after year despite all their stars graduating each year and going on to leave or play in the pros. I think that's often like a really good place to look for great forms of leadership because that's often how it works in organizations, that you do have turnover and yet you get people to show up and work together and be excellent each day. I think that's a great model and way to think about it for sure.

Yeah. I'll go through my day. I am a dad. I got up, I had to get my kids to summer camp. I'm not thinking at all about work or anything else. I'm trying to get their lunch and get them off to school. Then, I come back and now I'm on this podcast and thinking about myself as an author. Then, when I get off this, I'm going to have to meet with some of my students. I'm thinking about myself as professor and then later as a lab director because I have to coordinate some things for my lab and then I run our social psychology program, and that's a different identity. I have to think about how to optimize outcomes for the whole graduate program and faculty. Even in a single day, I go through six or seven identities and then at night maybe I turn on the sports and I'm cheering for my favorite baseball team and I'm not thinking about any of the other identities I have in my mind.

Most of us go through this in the course of a day, and each time we shift into another identity, a different set of concerns and goals float to the front of our mind. We have a different lens about thinking about what's important and how to navigate that situation. All of us are doing this all the time. It really is an illusion to think that we are just one thing. I think the way it really is an illusion is that, we think when we see somebody, they are just one thing. Often we chunk them and this is the social psychology of stereotyping. We quickly categorize them based on their gender, their age, their ethnicity or skin color, and we quickly lump them into something and we attach a stereotype to it. But almost every single person is vastly more complex than that. They contain multitudes, and once you get talking to them, they almost never exactly fit what your stereotype is. They often have these other rich identities and you might look like you are different from them in many ways, but the moment you have a conversation and engage with them, you find out you actually share a lot of identities and beliefs and values.

I think that groups’ stereotypes serve to obscure us from the complexity and fluidity, especially of other people's identities and even our own identities sometimes.

I think you nailed it. It was a beautiful summary. Once we activate an identity in our mind, it brings forward all our goals and values associated with that identity. So, again, when I'm thinking of myself as a father, I'm thinking of myself as making sure I take care of my kids, protecting them, nourishing them. The moment I'm thinking about myself as an author, it's really not any of those goals anymore. I’m thinking about how I can communicate this well? How can I connect it to different audiences? When I'm thinking about myself as a professor, I'm thinking about how I can do rigorous scientific research. How can I make sure that my students are flourishing? And so you're worried about and thinking about different concerns in each different audience. Those are triggers in large part by the identities that are at the front of our mind.

I think a big part of our responsibility as humans is to figure out what identities we actually care about and we actually want to lean into. So it might be like a member of my community, might be a member of my religious community. For some people, it might be my parenting role or work role. Then we can think of how do you want to change those? If we're in identity groups, what we care about is what can we do to change the norms and help those identities flourish and other people in those identities flourish? And then the last thing and this is the big one, if you have a position of power or leadership, is that leaders play a huge role in shaping the identities of groups they belong to.

We have a whole chapter on leadership and in particular, what's known as identity leadership. We argue and we borrow from Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam, who have said leaders are entrepreneurs of identity. What that means is, they're constantly, creatively thinking of ways to build a sense of us so that people all feel on the same page and are excited and motivated to work towards something together.

I'll just say from my own experience of running a lab at NYU. When I first arrived, I tried to have all of my graduate students, PhD students and postdocs. I'd have a different project with each of them, and I was mentoring each of them. I actually think I'm a pretty good mentor, lots of positive feedback, lots of successes. But where I went wrong was, I never built a shared sense of purpose, a shared sense of identity about what our lab was doing. And so occasionally they would feel like they were competing against one another and in a race to get their papers out from one another. At one point, it kind of boiled over and three of them came to my office and said, “We feel like we're all competing or doing stuff that's too similar.” And I realized, even though their projects seemed different enough to me, they felt like they were competing because I'd created a context where they felt like they were at odds, and so they weren't cooperating and helping each other with little things that make the whole lab flourish. From then on, in the last ten years, I've really focused on creating a sense of us and that comes through all kinds of things; the language that I use, having people work on different projects together so they feel like they're collaborating and their shared goals, talking about our lab vision every year, making them a part of that conversation about what do they think the lab vision should be? Talking about our community that goes beyond who's in the lab now.

This is something I learned from the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team, which is the best team in the world. They have these great traditions that are about identity. One of them is that there's a no dickheads rule, which basically means no matter how good you are, you're not better than anybody else on the team. You can't mistreat anybody else no matter how good you are. There's no one above the team. Another thing they have is; they call it leaving the jersey in a better place. What this means is that, you're not just part of a group on the team right now, your identity as an All Black precedes you coming onto this team and continues after you've left, that your goal is to make the organization better so that when the next group of players comes on next year or five years or 20 years from now, they have a better chance of success because of what you did now. You did something to make the organization and culture better. That's really the environment I have tried to create.

Now my lab is really flourishing. We're about five times as productive as we were when I first started, and we have people who continue to come back and visit us, who are gone and collaborate with us and spread the word about our lab. It becomes really easy to recruit top talent once you have this reputation and retain top talent. We almost never, ever lose anybody. When you have this type of environment, it pays off and it becomes easy. It's like, I can work half as hard and be three times as successful because there's a great culture that just self-perpetuates. But I was never thinking through that lens before, and I was always running and working extra hard and even then having these conflicts between people in my group.

Once you become a leader, you really have to step outside that lens. It took me several years to figure that out.

I would love to read it. I love the story of what you're trying to do with the youth. And I would say, the story that he builds these off the principles of the Maori is actually part of how the New Zealand All Blacks culture is built. Before every game they have a Haka dance which is a Maori ritual to bring its physical synchrony. It's the ritual that you mentioned before and how important those are to groups. It actually is incredibly intimidating, but it also binds and bonds all the players together before each game. It's really beautiful too. It's also an homage to that traditional ritual in New Zealand culture.

When I think of traditional rituals, there's something that is really powerful about it. Because, the ones that have survived are the ones that probably through cultural evolution, worked best for binding groups together. Those groups succeeded in part because they had rituals that made cooperation easier for them to do in environments that are often really precarious and dangerous. I think there's a lot of insights to be learned from those rituals. And the other thing I'd say is that those rituals often come from environments in which our brain evolved. I take an evolutionary biology understanding of human psychology, which is that our brains evolved almost through the entirety of human history in small groups where we needed to cooperate. We told stories in small groups to communicate things. We didn't communicate using technology like we are here.

That's one of the reasons that we packed our book with stories. Because we knew the science and we wanted to find stories that helped transmit the science, because stories are how the brain is designed to share and understand the world, because that's what it has been doing almost through the entirety of human history. It has been doing those in small groups and so understanding that, that's part of our natural social environment is us cooperating, communicating in small groups. When we can activate that psychology, not only does it motivate people to work together, but often feels really good.

Have you ever been on a successful team, whether it's at work or in sports or in your youth? It feels good and you often feel a bond with those people for years after. I can still stay in touch with people who are former teammates. When I see them, it's like a decade has not passed because we built a bond that persists across time through those shared experiences and working together. You know, you can trust them and you know, they have your back. That's also part of why psychology is also really effective among military groups, because they have to defend one another in incredibly dangerous situations, sacrificing their life to do it.

I've read interviews with people who've been in war. My grandfather was a veteran. What they say is that they actually do it, often, not even for their country. They do the things they do to defend and protect the people that are in the trenches with them. Because they have such a sense of bond with those individuals.

I think that's the psychology that actually can be leveraged to do good things. I love that you're using these insights to do this. I would say, if you're going to train these youth who are going to go out and try to change the world in some way, one of the things that's going to help them over a long period of time is that they have a community because they're going to hit roadblocks. They're going to need to brainstorm, they're going to need fresh ideas and if they have a sense of cohesion and they go back out into the world after this training, they can lean on this team for insights, support, connections, networking ideas that will allow them to be vastly more powerful and expand their reach.

I loved how you talked about things like collective language. That's one of the things that leaders do. Leaders that are successful use collective pronouns twice as often. There's also a new study that I didn't have time to put in my book because it came out after our book. It was based in Germany. Organizations that used a lot of collective language in their annual reports were vastly more profitable than those that didn't. I would say, that's the type of language that you want to use to create a sense that you're not competing with one another. We're bringing in all these individuals because you're passionate for different projects. But we're going to train you together and you're going to be a team that's going to go out in the world and change the world in some way. So they have a vision, a common goal, a sense of shared purpose, and that they're going to work and support one another rather than compete against one another to make that come to life. I think that would be the way to do it.

I also love the idea of thinking about what are some of those rituals. I say that another thing about leadership is that; it's not just top down, it's channeling the thoughts and ideas and creativity of the group. So, when it comes to ritual, I would ask them what rituals they want to make as part of their group, or that it kind of emerge naturally and then try to find ways to foster and sustain them, because that also shows that you're as a leader listening to them and embodying the things that they care about and are bringing forward into the conversation.

I think it's absolutely critical. When I go around and talk about groups, that's one of the first critiques people have and the terms for it are things like groupthink or blind conformity, and they're often right. That does happen sometimes in cohesive groups. My co-author, Dominic Packer, on our book, The Power of US, is actually an expert on the psychology of dissent. He's written many papers and has many theories about it. So we have a chapter on where it goes wrong, where you have cult psychology and groups where they all are pressured to think the same thing. But we also have a chapter on healthy norms of dissent and things like psychological safety. We talk about how groups can go wrong, but also how groups can go right.

I'll say a few things about how it can go right. There's lots of research on this in the organizational literature and I'm studying this now in my own lab. One is, you have to create conditions of psychological safety. My favorite study on this was done at Google with 200 teams or so, and they wanted to see what made some teams flourish and some teams flounder. What they found was nothing predicted group success, almost nothing. Google is famous for crunching numbers and being very data driven. I think the quote from the study was like, we looked at personality types, leadership structure, whether it's hierarchical or horizontal, whether teams are known for drinks before or after work. None of those things predicted group success. The only thing they found was psychological safety, which is a term popularized by Amy Edmondson, who's a business professor at Harvard. What that means is not what many people think it means. It doesn't mean that you just need your emotional support dog or it's a safe space where no one gets to challenge anybody. It's the opposite. It means everybody can challenge the ideas and the status quo and the leadership. Everybody can throw out new ideas and take risks. Who this particularly benefits, it is not only the team, but it creates context where it gives voice to people who might not otherwise have a voice. These might be newcomers to the team, diverse perspectives, or people from diverse backgrounds who otherwise might not quite feel comfortable speaking up because they might not be invited to lunch tomorrow if they say the wrong thing or take a risk and fail. Suddenly, you get harnessed to all the perspectives and ideas and creativity of those people, which is often the types of ideas that are different from the status quo.

What the research on dissent finds is that even if you have one dissenter, even if they're wrong in their idea, it actually leads to better group decisions because other people who were biting their tongue suddenly feel comfortable speaking up. And that leads to better decisions. This is where Dominic's research comes in. He finds that the people who dissent are often the people who are most identified with the group because they can see the group going down the wrong path. So, if you have somebody in the group who is dissenting, you should really think carefully about giving them a voice, making sure they're heard, because if you suppress them, they're often the people who care the most about the group and other people won't speak up if you suppress that dissent. So you really have to be careful about it if you want to have a healthy group that's successful.

I'll give you an example of how I do this in my own lab group. I found that when I'm presenting a paper or something to the group that I want critical feedback, I don't say my opinion first. I actually try to bite my tongue until everybody else has spoken because I'm in a position of power. If I have a very strong opinion, other people will only speak up if they agree with me. But, if I give them space to share their opinion, they share all these interesting perspectives and critiques. Then I can hear from them and realize maybe what the blind spots are in my thinking and incorporate them into the project. I've learned not to speak first.

Another thing is that, I was on a panel with Maynard Webb, who is the former COO of eBay in their early days when eBay was exploding. He said in their C-suite meetings of executive leaders, they had a black hat and everybody had to take a different turn wearing it. And if you were wearing the black hat for that meeting, your job was to poke holes in all the ideas being proposed, even if you agreed with them. That was just to free up other people to feel comfortable challenging it and expressing their dissent. So there's lots of ways you can take this into your group processes and team meetings that make psychological safety more real and fosters a healthy form of dissent.

That's aspirational. Those are some of your all time heroes and mine too. I've been studying social media for the last seven or eight years in my lab. What we found is that, the type of rhetoric that people can use on, like Twitter or Facebook, that spreads quickly and gets a lot of attention and likes and reinforcement is moral emotions. When people put a single moral emotional word in a tweet, it gets spread 15 to 20% more. If you want to spread your message, you can just load up on something like, “I'm disgusted. I'm so full of contempt right now. I really am raging with anger” and it will get liked more. But when we analyzed about half a million messages that did this, what we found is that when you use that language, suddenly it looks like two echo chambers. All of a sudden, people who might otherwise engage with you, don't. We ran studies in the lab to find out why and when we showed the exact same message, just using one of those words makes people who disagree with you think you're close minded and it basically just serves the bad signal to fellow members of your group who you are. It doesn't really convince or persuade anybody. In fact, it makes them disengage with you.

We have to think carefully about whether our goal is to mobilize people or is our goal to persuade people. Because if you want to persuade them and you want to build a bigger coalition, you're going to have to use a different language. If you just want to mobilize people who already agree with you, that language actually is pretty effective, at least at spreading the message online. What we need to do is think a little bit more long term. And again, it depends on what your goal is, but if your goal is to build a bigger coalition, you don't want people to see you as closed minded or disengaged from others who disagree with them. You probably want to find ways to bring those people to the table.

Most movements, starting with Gandhi who eventually built a massive movement that was able to pretty much overthrow British colonialism. He did that by building an increasingly diverse coalition of people who were mobilized. In my understanding of it, and it's admittedly naive, I'm not an expert and I'm not a historian, but it's also eventually about convincing British citizens to stop and to force their government to no longer impose colonialist rule on India. So at some point you need to expand your coalition. I think there's something really important about mobilizing true believers at the beginning. But I also think you need to think about how we can make our message optimally convincing for the broadest possible coalition of people that is sufficient to actually make change in the world in a substantive, policy based way that will persist.

Here's the other thing about building broad coalitions. You often need them. If you're going to make change, it's going to last after you step out of your role and you take the spotlight off them. Right now, the world reminds me of the marshmallow task where we're very focused on just getting what's in front of us and not thinking maybe two or three steps ahead. We want to win now. A lot of organizations are willing to make a concession now because the spotlight or pressure is on them, but they'll just often go back to the old way of doing things, unless you can actually convince them that it's in their interest to sustain that change. You really have to move from pressuring people to make a change to probably convincing them that actually the change is in their interest because that's how you actually create sustained long term impact.

You talked about Roosevelt, the social welfare system was built and sustained for 80, 90 years now based on convincing people that things like Social Security are good. Once you have Social Security, people don't want to get rid of it. I mean, some people want to get rid of it, but enough people will not because it affects so many people in a positive way that it will stick around. At that point, it is just a matter of how you can make it better and make it sustainable. But I think that's the ultimate change most activists want to make, it is not just, “Can we put the spotlight on them now?”

I'll give you an example of how this failed, because I was looking at this data this week. It was during the Black Lives Matter movement. There was huge pressure on every organization in society to improve their racial justice. One example was in the fashion industry. They're using too many white models, not enough black or dark skinned models. If you look at the Instagram feeds, there's a really good journalistic analysis of Instagram feeds, of fashion houses over two years. What happened from Black Lives Matter, a lot of them had black squares on that blackout day on Instagram. They often made public statements about how they're going to do better and then you look and for a month or two, they actually diversified their models. But if you look over the last two years, they just went back to what they were doing before because the spotlight is off them, the movement has moved away or fizzled, or other movements have moved the spotlight off that issue and these fashionistas have just reverted to what they've already been doing. I think not enough was done probably to think about what are you to do to hold them accountable, or what are you going to do to convince them maybe that this is in their interest, that they should care about these communities, these populations, if they want to have a long term global impact and have people buy into these types of fashion and buy into these fashion houses long term other than alienating them.

I think those are the little bits of conversation that we need to think of on the back end of activism, what is going to be our long term plan for sustainability and that's hard to put on the activist, but hopefully that's part of the conversation I think that you want to ultimately lead to sustainable change.

I think you nailed something really important, which is that when we think back in history of great leaders, they were often tapping into something that is universal, that is a human desire that most humans, given the opportunity, would aspire towards. Lincoln was one of those people, obviously, Gandhi, Mother Teresa. Another one that comes to my mind is Martin Luther King. We talk about in our book how his approval ratings nationally, when he was alive around the time he gave the “I Have a Dream speech” were in the 30% or so. He wasn't a popular figure in his time and he was pushing for change.

I think of a couple of things. One is that he actually was critical. Obviously, there was a movement of black activists, who pushed forward and convinced LBJ to sign the Civil Rights Act, which was a major change in the living conditions of African Americans in this country for many years and reshuffled politics for 60 years now. But it was also something that the message was so universal that if you do national surveys now with Martin Luther King, his approval rating is like 97-98%. There's a monument being built about him in his life, 40-50 years after his death in Washington. His messages were sufficiently universal that future generations would resonate with them and find them inspiring and keep moving forward in his name, because they were aspirational, they were universal. And this goes back to my comment about the marshmallow task. He wasn't thinking about a win right now. He was thinking about a win in policy that would affect people, especially black Americans, for 20, 30, 50, 100 years. That's why that type of messaging, I think, is so powerful, if you can tap into it in the right way. It's because of those reasons that he was able to look beyond the horizon and see something much bigger than the moment.

I think of it like any type of change. I'll go back to my lab because it's where I have leadership and power. I often think of it as very incremental. In fact, when I think about changes in my lab, I think about cultural innovations, trying out changes in the culture, a policy or practice. I want to see if it works. And if it works, I want to sustain it and embed it in our rituals and our future practices. But I'm thinking of it often like a draft of a manuscript when I'm writing a book or writing a paper. I go through 50 rounds of edits for everything I write. I can try to write a good first draft, but I never try to write a perfect first draft. I just try to get something on paper that's better than what I have, and then I try to think more, read more, edit more, share it with other people, get their feedback and make it better. The way I think of leadership is very much through revising drafts rather than trying to arrive at your optimal end solution, because it's almost impossible to get to the optimal solution. People often won't go along with you. They're going to resist it, or it's too much uncertainty. To try to get something that people can work on, get their input, improve it, and make it a little bit better. Another metaphor for it would be like, passing the baton in a relay race.

In my lifespan, I'm only going to get it so far, but I want to get my department, my community, my country in a better situation than before I was here and then pass it on to the next generation to make it better, they have energy and ideas that are going to be better than mine and they are more informed because there's going to be more science, more information, more technology. But I want to make it a little bit better and then pass it on to them. So, we don't have to put all this burden on ourselves all the time. The research backs this up. I'm a big group psychology person, but I use group psychology in the groups I run, I crowdsource things. Crowdsourcing makes our decision making way better because you leverage the insights of many other people and you adjust some of your own blind spots. So let's crowdsource things but we should be doing the job of moving things better, creating the conversation, but also leveraging the insights and diverse perspectives of people around us to move the ball forward.

I think that's the goal. We are two and a half years into this pandemic, there's enormous amounts of burnout. Burnout often happens among people who are passionate, who are trying to make a difference at work or in their community or in society. Those are the people who burn out. We had a huge burnout of caregivers, the people who are already doing the most to care for people in the world and care for their loved ones. Putting all of this on anyone's shoulders is going to likely lead to these types of outcomes where you're going to try really hard and then you burn out and then maybe you never come back to it.

I think it's much more powerful to think of what kind of change can we do right now that is sustainable and then we'll pick up later and keep moving forward or other people are going to help us move forward the next part of the way, because putting it all in on any one or any small group of people’s shoulders is probably not sustainable either.

The replication crisis is something that really has been roiling in psychology, but it's also in all sciences. It's everything from medical science, cancer research, and biological sciences in the last ten years. There's really a revolution underway to figure out how we can have better methods and how we can create better incentives in the field and in our journals to publish more rigorous, replicable work rather than just stuff that's really exciting. So there's been a huge effort to replicate a number of findings and some have replicated, but many have not. We've been sorting through the wheat versus the chaff.

But, the main lesson is, I think of three folds. One is that, there is a really healthy and necessary dissent that needs to happen in any organization, including in science. I think that's baked into the DNA of science that we should constantly be criticizing ourselves and getting better. Science doesn't believe that we know everything. This is where we're different from religion or politics. We think of always learning more and getting better. It's a natural thing for science to constantly be criticizing and trying to replicate stuff and find out what works and what doesn't work. So that's good.

Then I think the big lesson for us is that we need to run larger, more powerful studies. We need to be transparent about our materials, our data and share it. We need to use modern tools like preregistration, where we lay out all our predictions in print so everybody can see them before we collect our study. What most people have been doing, certainly what my lab has been doing over the last 15 years now, we've been slowly scaling this up in our lab, is leaning into the reforms that we think the evidence backs up. We've been sharing data now for around 15 years. We share all our preprints only to get comments before we publish them. We make all our data publicly available now whenever it's ethical to do so, which is 99% of the time. And now we pre-register a lot of predictions and run replications and other studies.

The other thing that we've been doing is not really part of the replication crisis, but I think it's an outgrowth of it. We're trying to get more diverse samples and not only that, but look around the world. I just published a paper on Covid. We had data from 67 countries, so we teamed up with 255 other scientists. If you want to talk about the science of groups and teamwork? Well, I had to apply it because I ran this project during Covid. Now I'm doing a version of that in 80 countries looking at climate change interventions. Next fall, we're planning a study in 50 or more countries to look at the effects of social media on people's polarization and mental health. So, what we're trying to do is use the science from our book to create teams to run better science so that when we draw conclusions, it's no longer just based on undergrad students at a North American university, it’s based on the broadest possible sample of humans. So, when we get insights now, people around the world can understand them and use them, or they can at least look at the data from their own country and see what works there.

I think that's what the replication crisis has brought us. All these better methods, bigger studies. I just published a paper with 50 million people moving around the world. I have 500,000 of these studies on social media. We just published one of 2.7 million messages. Before, my early studies were sometimes with 20 people and now, the scale, scope and ambition of the research is so much better, it’s so much more exciting, it's so much more trustworthy, it's so much more pragmatically useful to humanity. The direction that we're going that I'm excited about is these global studies, looking at real behavior around the world and teaming up with people who have perspectives and insights into those countries so that they can use it. I'm Canadian, I'm not even American. But so much of science is run out of the top 20 American universities. We're trying to expand the scope and bring other people into the conversation. And we want to get data that's representative, not just of 300 million Americans, but of 7, 8 billion people around the globe eventually. That's our vision.

I will say, this is another project I'm doing. I have a grant that we're studying the concept of intellectual humility, and we're trying to figure out the best way to measure it. That is a mindset that is embracing the truth, this understanding that I might know a lot. I have my PhD, I'm a professor, but I don't know, even more. And so I have to walk through the world with an understanding that each new study hopefully will help me understand something a little bit better. The conversation we had where you made me rethink the implications of Puma and Adidas from the story I had. I hadn't even thought about that. It was really insightful. Now I'm going to walk away with that and probably carry that story and think forward and dig into it a bit more.

My goal is, each conversation I go into, I want to walk away with a little bit smarter, a little bit more insightful, because I have that approach that we should all just kind of have a little bit of humility. No matter how much we know, there's always a lot more to learn. To me, because I care about truth a lot, that's probably the most exciting part of my job. Engaging with people, engaging with data and learning more and slowly getting a little bit smarter about how I think about the world.

I'm working now on a second book proposal with Dominic Packer, my co-author. He's going to take the lead on this one. It's really on the dark side of groups. We have a draft of the seven deadly sins of groups and organizations. What ways do groups go wrong? We've kind of hinted at a couple of them here and then what can you do to make them right? One of the things that people often want to know after they read my book is, they want to know, how can I use this to make groups better?

We hint at that in our book, but we're not super prescriptive. So our next book is going to be getting more prescriptive and talking not only about how to make groups better, but one of the elements of it, at least in our current proposal, is how to make them better, not only internally, but how to make them better so they impact the world better. Because some groups are great, but they're raping the world. So, we want them to think at multiple levels of how can you be better internally to create a better workplace, a better culture? It's really about culture change, I think. Culture change within organizations and groups and then how can they spill over and impact the culture around them more positively?

The best place to go to learn about our book and our speaking engagements and sign up for our newsletter is, https://www.powerofus.online/. If you want to find any of my publications, I also have a monthly newsletter. Of course, all these are free. It is https://www.jayvanbavel.com/.

All of that stuff is free and you can stay abreast of our research and be part of the conversation with us about all these issues going forward.

Thank you so much for having me. Thanks to everybody who listened to this.