This week we look at how the stories we tell about ourselves shape the collective

Research Roundup

Borders Don't Protect You

For many, borders imply protection. Too often, borders are a trap.

Children experiencing low intergenerational mobility predict increased “violent crime and homicide” in that same county 20 years later when those kids become young adults. In fact it’s a stronger predictor than “poverty, inequality, unemployment, and law enforcement presence”. Moving to communities with greater opportunity dramatically changes these results, but these are the very counties with the lowest levels of interstate mobility.

In fact, even people with few constraints show a “home state bias”, consistently undervaluing “out-of-state moves, independent of whether social ties are present”. “People are 3 times as likely to move to a county 15 miles away, but in the same state, than to an equally-distant county across state lines.” Even simple work commuting drops across state borders. All of this leads to “local labor markets that are less dynamic after negative economic shocks”.

People crossing borders escape stagnation and bring dynamism to their adoptive communities. Why do we so frequently choose to stay? Where are the explorers

Caste Out

When we’re “in sync” with another person, our brains literally sync up. What happens, however, when that syncing fails to happen?

In India, there is very little evidence of caste-based hiring bias until the “final round, comprising non-technical personal interviews that screen on family background, neighborhood, and ‘cultural fit’.” At that point a lower-caste candidate must have earned “a full standard deviation increase in college GPA” to beat a higher caste candidate for the job. This is a direct parallel to my Tax on Being Different research. The preference is so strong that researchers suggest that just paying a “hiring subsidy” for lower-caste candidates would be cheaper than other policy alternatives.

But why would rational actors prefer less qualified employees? Now we’re in the space of my other research on the neuroscience of trust. When we interact with people in social contexts, “activation in brain regions associated with reward processing—including the nucleus accumbens”—increases when strangers match our social expectations. This effect is so strong that in an experiment, people “were willing to forgo money to encounter an expectation-consistent target and avoid an expectation-violating target”.

Our brain withholds rewards if we interact with people that violate our stereotypes. Read more about this dismal truth..and how to overcome it when The Tax on Being Different finally comes out.

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Weekly Indulgence

I talk about Everything with the Future of Work Hub, a podcast based in the UK. Yes, we talked about how AI is transforming the workforce—good, bad, and ugly—but most exciting…I talk about the launch of my new book, How to Robot-Proof Your Kids! 

Listen Here

Then head over to www.socos.org to sign up for an annual subscription and get a pre-order of the book included in your membership.

Stage & Screen

• October 9-10, NYC: 2 events in one–I'm back at the UN speaking at GlobalMindED
  • then receiving StartOut's Trailblazer Award – Buy at ticket!!!
• October 23, Toronto: Let's spend the day together at Metropolitan University's Future of Work conference
• October 28-19, Rome: Are you as shocked as I that this is my first ever visit to Italy? I'll be talking AI and Humans for the UN.
• November 4, Copenhagen: Novo Nordisk Innovation Day!

If your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

I just listened to John Scalzi’s novella, “Constituent Service: A Third District Story”. It’s free with an Audible account and fun without too much attention to spare. So, consider this a recommendation. It’s also a quick observation on an entire class of genre stories: fantasy or scifi satirically mashed up another genre. In this case it’s office sitcom + American melting pot + aliens. In the Andrea Vernon novels it’s office sitcom meets superheroes. Netflix’s Inside Job happily marries corporate politics with pan-genre conspiracy theory. It’s a lightweight niche but fun. If you want a 3-way mashup try bureaucratic purgatory meets James Bond substituting Lovecraftian horrors for Blofeld and Michael Scott: the Laundry Files by Charles Stross.

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming