How Not to Leadership [RR]

In my paid newsletter this week, “How to Leadership”, I explore what to do about each of the cultural weaknesses I explore in this week’s Research Roundup.

Uncertain Societies Discriminate

Why do teams retreat into silos and tribes, especially under pressure? Beyond character flaws, new research suggests a more fundamental cause: tribalism grows with uncertainty.

In a series of cross-cultural experiments, in-group favoritism—a nice way of saying discrimination—increased when people felt their futures were insecure or the rules were inconsistent. They retreat to the safety of their known group.

This means many initiatives to improve culture are doomed if they focus on the symptom (bias) instead of the disease (uncertainty). A "one-size-fits-all" approach is particularly ineffective, as it ignores both local context and individual differences.

The most hopeful finding? Resistance to this bias is a stable individual trait. Your most valuable cultural assets are the people who remain "colorblind" under pressure. Find them and build your collaborative teams around them.

I've written before about how uncertainty reduces cognitive exploration. This suggests it also triggers a retreat into reduced social exploration—a dangerous feedback loop for any innovative organization.

For the geeks: The coolest part was the methodology. They used webcams to track who people were literally paying attention to as they played the Dictator game. A powerful reminder that our deepest biases are written in our behavior, not just our words.

Negative-Sum Leadership

Ever wondered how toxic leaders gain power? They feed us our own biases.

A new computational model shows that extractive authorities can “actively profit by amplifying individuals’ biases” to carve out a zero-sum enclave in a positive-sum world.

While there are natural individual differences in positive-sum vs negative-sum worldview, the model identifies two conditions that make a business or community vulnerable to this manipulation: “strong peer conformity and high responsiveness to authority”.

This is the dark heart of the work I'm doing on my next book, "Small Sacrifices". Leaders like this rise because we, the community, are induced to empower them, often against our own long-term interests.

The self-interested leader doesn't just see the world as a competition; they actively promote the idea that the world is a brutal, fixed-pie environment where one person's gain must be another's loss.

(While toxic leaders can in fact promote a positive-sum world view in the same way, it’s harder, though not impossible, to maintain an in-group enclave with a positive-sum worldview.)

The Evil of Willful Ignorance

Do we act better when we think we're being watched? A massive new study across 20 countries suggests... not really. But that’s not the whole story.

In a “preregistered experiment with 7,978 participants across 20 culturally diverse countries”, prosocial behavior wasn't driven by the “shame” of being observed. It came from knowledge of one’s impact on others. We become our better selves not when others might see our selfishness but when we see its consequences.

But there’s a fascinating and damning twist: when given the chance, people will choose "willful ignorance", literally paying a price to avoid learning of the harm our selfishness might cause.

The paper’s definition of "guilt" is a bit strange. I see it more as the cognitive cost of empathy. The rewards for being good are often abstract and distal, while the reward for being selfish is immediate and concrete.

We design our cultural and sociotechnological systems on layers of abstraction—complex supply chains, layered financial markets, shareholder obsessed corporate policy—that allow us the luxury of not knowing the consequences of our actions.

The leadership challenge isn't just to incentivize good behavior. It's to make the consequences of our actions so transparent that willful ignorance is no longer an option.

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming