The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior
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I used to think about my life and where I am right now as mostly the result of decisions that I made. Of course, my upbringing played a big role, but once I became an adult, I called the shots. For better or worse, I chose my path, sometimes more carefully than other times. Everything from where I live to what I do for a living to the clothes I wear.

But then I had a conversation with social scientist Brian Lowry, and it changed my mind. To be you, to make sense of who you are requires other people. I mean, your preferences don't come from nowhere.

Almost certainly you're being influenced in a number of ways by other people. Brian is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. And here's the big question he's interested in. Just trying to understand how we end up where we end up and how we become who we become. Brian argues that our identities, our sense of self, our behaviors and decisions are far more influenced by the people around us than we would like to admit.

not just by important people in our lives like family and good friends, but by all of the interactions, big and small, that we have with others all around us. We talked when Brian's book came out last year. It's called Selfless, The Social Creation of You. I want to go to a portion of your book where you...

Ask the reader to do a little experiment, right? And then you say, think about the little finger on your right hand and wiggle it a little bit, which of course, immediately, I did. Because you said so, right? So I wiggled my finger, and then you go on and you say, we just shared a moment, a little dance across time and space. So you had the idea, you wrote it down, and then here I am reading your lines, and I

I do it. So to you, what does that little experiment say about the self and how we're all connected? Well, first, I have a question for you. What did it feel like for you? When I said like, hey, I just said this thing and you did it. What did it mean to you? What did it feel like for you?

It felt like, huh, you know, that's true. And then I thought about how I have a thousand little moments or a million moments like this in every given day where I do something in reaction to somebody else's input. But I don't think about, oh, I'm just reacting, right?

And then I started thinking about myself as basically I'm a pinball. And at the beginning of my day, I just start rolling and then I get shot all over the place. And sometimes I said other things in motion. So it just set off a lot of thoughts in my head.

Yeah, so I mean, for me, it just suggests the degree of connection. That example is really small, obviously. And you chose, and I would say this in the book, you can obviously say that you chose to move your finger. I didn't force you to do it, but you certainly wouldn't have done it had I not written it. And what does that say? What does that say about the relationship between, in that case, me and you, right? And, you know, at that point, we'd never met, we'd never spoken, but what I write is affecting you.

Right. And it's showing up in how you behave. There's something about that that is profound and also so mundane that we don't pay attention to it.

This was a really small example, but it made me think about bigger and more life-changing situations. This conversation made me reconsider how much control I really have over my decisions and my life. And it felt unsettling. But Brian said that's the point. It's important to examine how we exist in the world.

And at the same time, when we get off this conversation, you're going to continue to behave like you're in complete control of your destiny. And I will do the same. I mean, it's I think it's the way we're designed, but it's it's useful to examine that and see where it takes you. It's useful to wonder, like, who am I really and how much control do I have? I mean, that might take you to an interesting place.

So let's look at some of the hidden forces that shape our behaviors and decisions in ways that we often leave unexamined. On this episode, an exploration of why we do what we do. First up, a story about friendship, personality changes, and a strange explanation.

Have you ever had a friend who changed completely, like they're not even recognizable to you? Maybe for the better. They're suddenly getting their act together, they have a great job. Or for the worse, where they seem to be spiraling into a dark place. Our producer, Nicole Curry, had a friend like this. Her name is Jasmine Jones. They met in elementary school in a small rural town in North Carolina. She was a teacher and a teacher of the arts.

Jasmine was a bookworm, a great student, more often than not, top of her class. And she was very direct. If she didn't like somebody, they knew. Nicole and Jasmine stayed friends. They even started college together. But then the studious Jasmine completely changed. She started hanging out with people who partied all the time and even dropped out of school. Years later, they reconnected.

And when Nicole asked her about why she had changed so much, Jasmine said something really confusing, that she just didn't have a sense of self, a personality. Here's Nicole. Jasmine's statement was a bit jarring. Sure, she had changed over time, but she still had a personality. Yet she stuck to her guns and said it would all make sense if she just explained what happened instead.

She took me back to when she moved to Houston with her family after both of us had completed our freshman year of college. So when I first got to Texas, I would say like I was pretty much like the old Jasmine that you remember. Like I was reading a lot. I was doing my schoolwork. Jasmine had her loving family around her and she was attending college. I was really happy about

But I never necessarily thought of the whole social aspect of it all. It honestly never crossed my brain until I realized like, wow, like I don't have any friends here and I'm very alone. But things begin to change.

when I started working at Topgolf. It's one of those fancy sports entertainment centers. Guests can order food and expensive cocktails, all while hitting golf balls into a huge field with neon-colored targets. She waited tables, but the company had specific expectations of its employees. The whole point was to create an environment that kind of seemed like

And familial and like kind of like a party environment. So with that, they wanted you to talk to your your coworkers and to have that sense of camaraderie so that when you're at work, it would just feel like one big conversation.

And Jasmine quickly realized her co-workers were nothing like her. They were thrill-seekers, often looking for the next rave or drug to experiment with. But I noticed that, like, I would always get along with everybody. And when I say different types of people, like, even people, like, I didn't necessarily care for. Like, I definitely found myself...

in rooms with people and hanging out with people that I didn't necessarily like. But they liked her a lot. It was kind of like a moth to a flame type situation. Me being the flame and the moths being like, people being like, oh, she's awesome. Let me hang out with her. She's cool. Or I like the way she said that. I like the way she dresses. And regardless of how Jasmine felt about her co-workers, it felt really good to be liked.

That outside validation of hearing how much people liked me or how they enjoyed my company or them wanting to hang out with me, that definitely gave me a confidence boost. Like, oh, wow, I'm a great person. Quickly, Jasmine had a large group of new friends. She started partying almost every night, eager to try the next thrill. And eventually, she dropped out of school. I stopped going to school in 20,

So I had been in school for two years before I stopped going to school. And I remember...

Leading up to me just completely stopped going altogether. I would sit in my car for like hours and take naps. Another year went by and Jasmine began to feel lost and overwhelmed with all of the attention from her work friends. Then she quit her job. She didn't understand what had happened to her or why she had lost her way.

until she found a video describing a behavior called mirroring.

It's when someone subconsciously imitates the gestures, speech patterns, or behaviors of another person. Do you have the tendency to take on other people's phrases? Like, let's say they have, like, sayings that they say, or even, like, accents. Like, do you have the tendency to, like, take on other people's accents when you're speaking to them? Or do you have the tendency to just consider yourself to be, like, a go-with-the-flow person, so you like whatever...

the person that you're with, like whatever they like. The questions really hit home. Jasmine paused the video. She thought about it for a while and she began to realize she did do these things. There was this one coworker that people didn't necessarily like. If I was on a shift with her, there was always something wrong. When I was speaking to her like, oh, well, this is going wrong for me too. And I don't like this either. And like, she would say certain things like,

Oh, well, you know, I don't like it when people do this. And I would say, oh, I don't like that either. For years, she just agreed with everyone else from food choices to political beliefs. And maybe that's why everyone liked her so much. I guess the bad part about that was, is like those people didn't know who they were friends with. It was kind of like they were being lied to.

Jasmine resumed the video, hoping to find out more. And I didn't really get like the butt of the joke to the end. They're just like, well, you're probably a person that mirrors other people. And as far as like your personality is concerned, like you don't have one.

Mirroring is a way for us to connect with people. And research shows that we mimic others to show that we admire them. But for Jasmine, it was the opposite. People admired her instead. And that was fueling me to want to get more of that. Even if it was from people I didn't like, it just kind of became something like in a way I was kind of addicted to.

The whole time at this job, she had mirrored her coworkers to the point where absorbing their behavior had swallowed her up whole, leaving no trace of who she used to be. Now, on her own, she felt antsy without people to essentially guide her life. Now I'm having to, like, overthink something as small as food. Like, it's not rocket science. But at that point, it did feel like rocket science because I didn't have, like, the

Those outside forces to like guide me to what I wanted, it was more so like I had to take the reins and figure it out. And because I hadn't been doing that for so long, it was kind of like I lost the muscle memory as far as how to do it. So it was more like confused. Like I was just like, what is going on? I finally understood what Jasmine meant with the whole not having a personality thing.

But I do think she was being a little hard on herself. Most of us mirror others at some point, but the real question was, why had Jasmine done this so excessively? What drove her? Through more reflection, she narrowed it down to a few reasons. First, she admitted that there was a lot of pressure to be academically excellent when she was a child, and she felt a need to make people feel proud of her, accept her.

That may have shaped the need for peers to like her. That kind of created like an opening, I feel like, to just...

She was also just really lonely when she moved to Houston. I was always, I guess, trying to look for looking for that kindred spirit. And I was going through just rounds and rounds of people.

There would be times when I didn't want to be around those people, but I just put myself in those situations because it was just a lot easier than just being alone. My conversation with Jasmine was insightful and a huge relief.

For several years, I had always wondered why her world had turned upside down. And now I completely understand. Loneliness drives us to connect to the people around us. But when we have nothing in common with those people and we're a little desperate, faking it can seem like the only option. Jasmine and I are still friends today, and she's back to being the assertive person I knew from before.

even though she has lost friends in the process. In marrying people, they don't know who you are. So when you show them who you are, if they don't like you, you can't really take that personally. I've gotten to a point where I know who I am. I'm happy with who I am. And I surround myself with people that relate to me on a level that I understand myself to be. That story was reported by Nicole Curry.

Jasmine's case was extreme, but mirroring is something we all do. So why do we mirror? When do we do it? And in what situations is it helpful? Liz Tang looked into the research on this. When it comes to research on mirroring, few scientists have been as prolific as Wojciech Kulesza, a social psychologist at SWPS University in Warsaw, Poland.

He first got interested in mimicry around 20 years ago, when he was a third-year psychology student. I was eating breakfast with my brother. He was starting his first serious relationships, and he said, you know, Wojciech, I'm going to fall in love with a person with whom we resonate each other. We feel chemistry. We are having a flow. We are on the same wavelength.

And I thought, wow, this is great definition of falling in love, deep connection. The conversation got Wojciech curious. What exactly is chemistry? What are the social psychological mechanisms that make two people feel in sync with one another?

So he asked some of his professors, and one of them told him about this paper written by two NYU researchers in 1999 entitled The Chameleon Effect. The Chameleon Effect is automatic unconscious tendency to imitate or mimic others. It's something, Vocek says, we see throughout the animal world.

From birds flying in flocks to fish swimming after each other in schools. Like they say, monkey see, monkey do. So we as humans, we are doing just the same. We imitate each other. And we imitate various areas of our behavior, but also mannerisms, body movements, facial expressions of emotions, and even moods.

What the original 1999 paper showed was that mimicry is often unintentional and unconscious, which begs the question, why do we do it? ♪

On a biological level, it seems like we're wired to imitate. In the early 90s, a team of Italian researchers observed that specific neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys fired both when the monkeys grabbed an object and when the monkeys saw another primate grab that same object.

This experiment led to the discovery of mirror neurons, which scientists think develop within the first year of life to help babies learn through observation.

But there's also a social theory about why we imitate one another. The social glue theory. Mimicry helps in creating social bonds and then in maintaining social bonds between people. As we heard in Jasmine's story, constant mirroring can make us feel kind of gross. Like we're selling out our true selves in order to fit in.

But there's a reason most of us default to mirroring. It's incredibly powerful at forging those social bonds we need to get ahead. For an illustration, let's take a look at a scene from the super popular 90s sitcom Seinfeld.

In this episode, George, who works for the New York Yankees, has to strike a deal with some guys from the Houston Astros. They're up visiting in New York, so George takes them out to a bar. And at first, George doesn't exactly hit it off with them. They're loud, fast-talking, and they curse a lot. Till this bastard over here says, let's call the sons of bitches, go visit them in New York.

At the start, George, ever the neurotic New Yorker, is reserved. We certainly was glad that you could make it. But over time, George starts mirroring the way his guests talk. Finish your drink? Oh, yeah, almost, almost. Let's get that bastard to bring us another round, huh? You a big drinker, George? Maybe not as much as this bastard. I'm on my own.

After a few days, George is firing off curses and insults like an old pro. Now, you might think that watching someone adopt a mannerism or way of speaking that isn't natural to them would make them seem inauthentic or even weak, like a follower. But according to Vocek, just the opposite is true. Mimiker is perceived as more persuasive, more intelligent, more knowledgeable.

So in the Seinfeld example, once George starts yelling and cursing up a storm, he might suddenly seem smarter, more trustworthy and reliable to the Houston Astros guys. Mimicker is perceived as more authoritative. George is showing that he's one of them, part of their in-group, which of course they trust.

Mirroring also works as a kind of shortcut to intimacy. And, Vocek says, the benefits don't stop there. The mimicry increases sales. In fact, mirroring is often touted as a strategy for people in sales to connect better with their customers and hopefully close more deals.

But the effect also extends beyond the person doing the mimicking. It creates prosocial behaviors. We provide help. We donate more money to charity. It elicits trust. So that's a snapshot of why we mirror, especially at work. It not only helps us fit in, it creates goodwill, trust and respect.

But mirroring isn't all roses and sunshine. It can also create costs for both the mimicker and the person being mimicked in ways that, for me at least, were totally unexpected.

Let's start with a cost to the people being mimicked. You know that saying, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"? That made me expect that the people being mimicked would feel good about themselves. But that is not the case. Your self-esteem is lower in mimicry condition. So you like me more, but you like yourself less.

This has been demonstrated in studies. People being mimicked are more likely to embody negative stereotypes about themselves. So, for example, women who have been mimicked tend to do worse on math problems. Another drawback of mirroring is that it can take up a lot of headspace for the person doing it, leaving less mental capacity for other things. People who were asked to imitate made more mistakes.

Being aware that I have to imitate is a cognitively depleting state. The vast majority of the time we mirror without realizing it. And we do it the most with people we're most similar to and who we already like. Liking creates tendency to mimic, so it's a mimicry loop.

Mimicry creates liking, but liking creates mimicry. If I like you, I will start to mimic you more, which will create liking in you. So when you like me, you will mimic me more. So the next time you're feeling weird about telling a co-worker you'll circle back or ping them later, just remember that you're not being fake. You're just fortifying the social glue that holds us all together.

That story was reported by Liz Tang. Coming up, a lot of companies and organizations are investing in implicit bias trainings. But now researchers are questioning how effective they are. One day of experience, no matter how wonderful, is a drop in the bucket compared to the fact that we have many days in our lives and there are a lot of other things that are influencing us. That's next on The Pulse.

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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about hidden forces that shape our behavior. When Jennifer Eberhardt's son was five years old, they were traveling together on a plane.

He was just really excited about being on this airplane with mommy. And we got on the plane and he's like looking all around and he's checking things out. He's checking people out. Jennifer and her son were the only black people on the plane except for one other passenger. Her son pointed at him. And he sees this man and he looks at him and he says, hey, that guy looks like daddy. So I look at the man and

And he doesn't look anything at all like my husband. So I thought, all right, you know, I'm going to have to have a little talk with my son about how not all black people look alike. But before I could say anything to him, he looks up at me and he says, I hope he doesn't rob the plane. And I said, what? What did you say? And he said it again. He says, well, I hope that man doesn't rob the plane. And I said, well, you know, why would you say that? You know, daddy wouldn't rob a plane.

And he said, yeah, yeah, I know. And I said, well, why would you say that? And he looked at me with this really sad face and he said, I don't know why I said that. I don't know why I was thinking that.

To Jennifer, the answer is implicit bias. Implicit bias can be defined as the beliefs and feelings we have about social groups that can influence our decision making and our actions even when we're not aware of it. And even when it's your intention to be fair. So this is something that is kind of working sort of outside of your conscious awareness.

Jennifer is a social psychologist and she has written Biased, uncovering the hidden prejudice that shapes what we see, think and do. And these were messages that he soaked up somehow from the outside, obviously, from what he saw on television, from what he was hearing.

You know, it's interesting. I mean, he did soak that message up, I think, in a variety of ways. But I feel like we're too quick to point to the media as the culprit here because I feel like there's a lot that we do in our everyday interactions that can lead to that message, right?

The way we see other people act, the way we talk about each other and treat each other. And where does it come from? I mean, you mentioned a few things, but on a more sort of evolutionary level, I guess in some ways it relates to our need to always sort things into different categories.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, so that's how our brain is built, right? Because we have so much information, so much stimuli, you know, coming at us from the environment and we need a way to manage that. And one is categorization, where we are sorting like things together, grouping things into categories so that we can

manage it better. And once we have something grouped in the same category, we might develop beliefs. So we're talking about social groups. We might develop beliefs about that social group. We might develop feelings about that social group.

and the beliefs are called stereotypes and the feelings, that's called prejudice. And if you think about bias, bias basically is the beliefs and the feelings. It's the stereotypes and the prejudices that we might have about social groups. The research on implicit bias has grown in recent decades and it has led to different trainings that suggest that we can detect and unlearn these ingrained behaviors.

Many companies and organizations offer these trainings. They're usually mandatory for employees, often under the umbrella of diversity training. They've become a lot more prevalent after the murder of George Floyd, but that popularity was followed by backlash. Opponents felt that these trainings were creating division and tensions among people. But for researchers, there is a different question at stake.

Do these trainings actually work? Can you bring about real change in this setting? Alan Yu looked into it. Clarence Hunter has been in law enforcement for over 30 years. He worked in an organized crime unit, a SWAT team, and became an assistant chief of police. He started as an officer in Richmond, Virginia in 1990, when the crack epidemic was still ongoing in the U.S.,

Back then, Richmond had open-air drug dealing, and the city's murder rate was at a record high. The police had their work cut out for them. I had a very good supervisor when I started in law enforcement, but I remember his direction. You know, go out there and get the crack and get the guns off the street. Clarence says when some officers hear that, they just go to what they think of as a high crime area and stop or arrest people. There was a time when a

You know, someone had an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. That would be probable cause and we would stop cars that had that. Now he trains police officers to slow down before they approach someone, get more information and get to know communities outside of arresting people. And that means addressing the issue of implicit bias.

He has been doing day-long trainings on this issue for police officers for the past few years.

Clarence goes over the science of implicit bias, how the general public sees the police, and skills that people can use to check their biases, like not making rushed decisions or asking for more information. And every time he leads a training session, he thinks back to a time when he was training the Michigan State Police a few years ago.

He showed the group a video about the widely cited research from the 1940s that young black children prefer to play with white dolls rather than black ones. The children said the black dolls are bad, that they don't want to play with those dolls.

One officer came up to him during a break. He was a little shaken by that video. And when he approached me, his comment was, was that my fault? He was looking, has he done things that may have made people feel that particular way? I said, no, this isn't your fault at all. It's almost hard to talk about because I could see the emotion on his face. And I think to this day, every time I teach this program, I think about that particular trooper.

Clarence says the training is not about telling police officers that they are bad people. It is to help them see the world in a way they may not have considered before. Clarence thinks of this trooper often. But the question is, does the trooper still think about that training? Can one day of learning teach people to act differently? Can it lead to real change?

Social psychologist Calvin Lai used to think it could. But after doing more research, he recently reached the opposite conclusion. He studied the training that the Anti-Defamation League offered police departments from 2019 to 2021. One day of experience, no matter how wonderful and how intensely thought through it has been.

is a drop in the bucket compared to the fact that we have many days in our lives and there are a lot of other things that are influencing us. During the training, the officers learned strategies like trying to imagine another person's point of view and getting to know people as humans and not as suspects. They answered several questions directly after the training and then again a month later. The research showed that the officers intended to use these strategies they learned,

But a month later, they reported that they had not actually done it. The Department of Justice funds Calvin's research to see what it would take to bring about lasting change. It is going to require enduring commitment, right? Not just a single moment of persuasion. One important issue is who is getting trained and how much power they have.

Criminologist Lori Friedel runs the training program called Fair and Impartial Policing. She says their program can lead to enduring commitments because they do not just train cops, they train police officials who could make real policy changes. For instance, some agencies have been reconsidering aggressive stop and frisk and aggressive traffic stops.

Some agencies are reconsidering whether or not they need to do pedestrian stops for low-level drug offenses or traffic stops for low-level violations. She gave an example, the Suffolk County Police Department in New York, which covers most of Long Island. Around 10 years ago, the police department settled a case with the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.

That came after a group of teenagers murdered an Ecuadorian man. Prosecutors said the teens had made it a sport to threaten or jump immigrants, and the incident that ended in murder was not the first time they had done so.

The victim's family filed a civil rights lawsuit against the county, saying officials and police failed to prevent the killing. That led immigrants to come forward and say officials regularly discouraged them from filing complaints about abuse and harassment. The Justice Department took up the case. They reached a settlement in 2014.

Part of that settlement required the Suffolk County Police to get trained on bias-free policing. More recently, the Suffolk County Police brought Laurie's group in for training to add to that work. Now they release data on traffic and pedestrian stops, broken down by precinct and squad. They also compare that with census data about the neighborhoods to see if they are disproportionately targeting any particular group.

So in this example, the training comes with policy changes, which reinforces the messages and leads to real action. Social psychologist Neil Lewis Jr. echoes that idea, that training needs to be reinforced with policies.

He pointed to what one school district in Florida did with their gifted and talented program in the early 2000s. Under the old system, teachers had to recommend students for gifted and talented programs. And what ended up happening under that recommender system is that teachers were less likely to recommend poor kids, they're less likely to recommend minority kids, presumably because they have these stereotypes that those kids aren't very smart.

But when the district changed their policy and started screening all students, the policy change significantly increased the proportion of poor kids and minority kids in the gifted program. It turns out there are lots of smart poor kids and minority kids. They just weren't getting the same opportunities. A few years afterwards, the district suspended their universal screening programs as part of budget cuts.

They brought the program back later, but modified it in a way that did not achieve the same results when it came to leveling the playing field. Another factor in reducing implicit bias is to foster meaningful contact with people from lots of backgrounds. Ivy Oneado is a social psychologist at the Kellogg School of Management, the business school at Northwestern University.

She says that sometimes training providers promise a little too much. She did research on how trainers advertise their services. And we saw a lot of in these trainings, a lot of claims about shifting attitudes and, you know, reducing bias. And a lot of the research literature is a bit mixed on whether diversity trainings can actually reduce biases and shift attitudes. She

She says when organizations offer training, they can expect that participants will learn what implicit bias is, how we can measure it, how it expresses itself, and so on. But real change requires real interactions.

For example, one of her earlier articles looked at non-black medical school students and factors that could reduce their racial bias towards black people. She found that diversity training was less impactful than regular meaningful contact with black people.

Ivy is also trying to create opportunities for more meaningful interactions. I'm a black social psychologist, and the percentage of black social psychologists is something around 2, 3, 4, 5 percent. So she started a retreat for black social psychologists, including graduate students, to meet up after conferences.

They would have panels about research proposals, how to navigate academic life, how to find a job. We could have had a training where we have all the Black people come together and

learn something or talk for two hours and hope that that changes the numbers of black professors in our field. But instead, what was required is more hands-on mentoring, networking, and actual resources and feedback. Ivy hopes that this mentoring and opening of doors could lead to more lasting change than any one-day training could.

That story was reported by Alan Yu. You're listening to The Pulse. I'm Mike and Scott. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up, having a boss who doesn't enforce any rules might seem like a great situation, but... Really what we ended up with was the Hunger Games. Always uncertain, always looking over your shoulder. That's next on The Pulse.

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Adjusting to power structures is part of our lives from the early days of our existence. When we're toddlers, we learn all about the rules and who gets to enforce them. And we try to exert our own power by screaming, throwing tantrums, or having to be dragged out of the candy aisle. But at work, power structures are more subtle, and they can be challenging to navigate.

Maybe there's one person who has to call the shots on everything. Or nobody is calling the shots at all. That happened to writer Joseph DiIorio with his first job after college. He was a daily reporter at a local newspaper in Connecticut. He was supposed to cover organized labor as his beat, but his editor didn't really enforce who wrote about what.

So one day, another reporter published a story about a union, and Joseph complained to his editor. Hey, that's really supposed to be my beat, isn't it? And his response was a very gruff, I'm not going to enforce beats. I'm just going to let people get the best stories they can.

But Joseph says the lack of hierarchy and clear structure didn't lead to good work. Really what we ended up with was the Hunger Games. And everybody was just jumping in to try to get a story of everyone else. It also made for a tense work environment where nobody trusted their co-workers. Always uncertain, always looking over your shoulder.

Katie Dubow had to rethink power structures at her family business after her mother retired, and Katie became president of the company. It's called Garden Media Group, a small PR firm that specializes in horticulture. Her mom had a classic power structure. She was the boss, and then she had people under her who managed different accounts. Katie took over during the pandemic. Gardening was huge, and they hired more people to keep up.

But now Katie couldn't keep up with managing everybody. Our regular meetings would get pushed and postponed. And I wasn't able to dedicate the time to helping them grow and helping them see the big picture, even creating the big picture for the company. Like, I wasn't able to do any of that. And so I was certainly a bottleneck.

So she created a different kind of power structure where she delegated a lot of her responsibilities to other employees and gave them their own teams to manage. To me, what a hierarchy shows is a roadmap for success or for growth. Power structures at work can help employees feel like they know what's expected of them, allowing them to do their best work while also feeling supported, like they have a safety net.

Or they can leave people feeling scared, unsure, and totally unmotivated. So what's the right balance in creating hierarchies that foster the most productive behavior? Grant Hill looked into it.

When it comes to hierarchy, some of the really popular business influencers on social media seem to only have one mode. Top dog. Alpha male. Total domination. You want your team to be fire-breathing dragons. Every day. Hungry. Just chewing people's faces off. His favorite whiskey, Johnny Walker. What do I do at Duty Free? Johnny Walker. That night, sipping Johnny Walker in the war room by myself with him, chilling. Why? I studied real hard. I literally want to die instead of face.

I do not know how to live in life. I do not know how to live in life. Live in life. A cross between self-help gurus with a finance bro grind set who make it clear that when it comes to their business, they make the rules and their employees follow the orders. Take your shirt off for a second. Come on. Let's go.

A car salesman influencer named Andy Elliott, with 2.5 million followers, got famous for saying that, quote, if you don't have a six pack, you don't work for us. We're not going to be a f***ing pretender. We're going to quit coming into these meetings. We're going to quit disrespecting the f***ing leader.

"I will demand it and you will do it" is one way to approach power structures in a company, but Ari Weinzweig was looking for something different. For many years I would joke that I was a lapsed anarchist because I still believed in it, but I didn't really practice. Instead, Ari practiced making delicious food. He started Zingerman's Community of Businesses, which includes Zingerman's Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

He speaks about his business approach all over the country. "When I reference anarchism at business conferences where I was speaking, people would just sort of chuckle nervously because their understanding of anarchism is the inverse of what it actually is. They think it's all rock throwing and chaos and violence, which it's not." Ari's take on power structures and hierarchy is shaped by studying Russian history in college.

and his experience is being on the bottom rung of the ladder, washing dishes at a restaurant in Ann Arbor. He says his anarchist roots show up in his companies in a different way, by treating all people within the organization with dignity and truly incorporating their views into the decision-making process, then iterating on that process over and over again. It's

It's really trying to get out of thinking hierarchically and to honor that everything matters and everyone matters. So what actually works better in companies? The gentle and perhaps slightly chaotic approach to hearing everybody out or the clear cut top dog speaks, everybody listens way? There's a lot of pseudoscience, pseudopsychology. I mean, people talk about teams a lot, but there are decades of research on teams and how people interact with each other.

That's Mike Kuchenberger. He is an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of New Hampshire's College of Business. And I think one of our interests is how do you apply that science and how do we help build that science? Because there really is a science for this. And I think that's a big motivating factor for us.

His research partner is Lauren DiNincenzo, a professor of organizational behavior at Drexel University in Philadelphia. So rather than throwing spaghetti at the wall and kind of seeing what sticks, we actually approach problems using a scientific approach.

The concept of collective leadership, talking things out, might sound a little too feel-good to be realistic. But in Lauren and Mike's studies, teams that talk more about how they work together do better. And that accounts for a ton of the variance in success, right? As much as 30 to 40 percent. And so almost half.

Mike says this is something he's seen over and over again.

The more leaders empower their employees, the more agency the employees have, the better organizations do. He and Lauren have researched this in all kinds of settings. One of the studies that we had done was with folks that are fixing copy machines. Could a machine be fixed or did it have to be replaced? Each team member had to check in with their manager to decide. Then Mike and Lauren asked team members to call the shots themselves.

It had a very positive impact on the employees. And we saw a big impact on learning and team commitment for making that change. And so we might say, well, that's kind of a simple thing. That's a small thing. But for these folks, this was a big part of their world. And then empowering them to make that decision had a really big effect. Lauren says their findings call into question what's been assumed about hierarchy at work.

That success hinges all on some visionary at the top of the org chart. It's really about shifting the mindset of having the formal leader know everything and being in control and being in charge to taking on more of a supportive role, more of a coaching role. Mike and Lauren say it's more about experimenting and coming up with a process rather than simply incorporating strategies without real analysis.

They also worked with surgical teams who wanted to boost efficiencies in the OR.

Surgeons thought that working again and again with the same scrub techs and nurses would make everything more efficient. That familiarity would translate to success. Mike and Lauren dug into the data and found that wasn't true, or at least not permanently. When teams first got into a groove, they worked well together. They were more efficient. They got better at it. But then at a certain point, that started to drop.

And the more time you spent with that team, the worse you performed. When Lauren and Mike asked nurses and scrub techs why they thought this was happening, they said the more routine operations became, the less attention was paid to formal procedures put in place to prevent mistakes.

Their findings are often at odds with what leaders believe will produce results. Like when a Fortune 500 company wanted to foster competition among individual teams on the manufacturing floor. What they did was they set teams up against each other.

And so these teams were fighting for resources and they were competing with each other. And that can create some, you know, pretty good within team performance, except for they have to hand off their work to each other. I mean, they worked in shifts, right? And so you want these teams not to be competing against each other. You want them to be working together. And we saw that there was a problem with that handoff.

And that has a long-term implication for the actual performance of the overall manufacturing plant or the overall organization.

Some of Mike and Lauren's research will now make their way into the place known for its ironclad power structures, the U.S. Army. They recently received a million-dollar grant from the Army to better understand how teams can improve their performance when members leave or new members join. And their message is simple. Success comes from empowerment.

not control. The way I would think about choosing a leader is someone that is willing to put together a group of experts and then be humble within the room and listen to those experts. And I think that results, and all the evidence suggests that results in really good things. Really what we want are leaders that are good teammates and are willing to learn as opposed to being right. That story was reported by Grant Hill.

That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland Family, and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu, Liz Tang, and Grant Hill. Lauren Tran-Muchowski is our intern. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski.

I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening. Shortwave thinks of science as an invisible force showing up in your everyday life, powering the food you eat, the medicine you use, the tech in your pocket. Science is approachable because it's already part of your life. Come explore these connections on the Shortwave podcast from NPR.

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