Pod Insights Something You Should Know Why Winners Often Lose & What Great Teams Do Differently About this episode When you ask someone to recall something from deep in their memory, watch their face — they’ll probably do something that actually helps them remember. You might do it too without realizing it. Listen as I reveal what it is and why it works. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/201110/why-do-you-close-your-eyes-remember
Have you heard of the winner’s curse or the sunk cost theory? These are strange but predictable ways our brains can trick us when we take risks — especially with money. My guest, Alex O. Imas, Professor of Behavioral Science, Economics, and Applied AI at the University of Chicago, has studied these “behavioral anomalies” with Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler. Together they co-authored The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now. (https://amzn.to/48gycBj) . Listen to how these things work, because understanding these anomalies can help keep you from falling victim to them.
We’ve all had to work in groups, whether it’s a team we are assigned to at work, or a neighborhood committee or parents’ group. Sometimes they run beautifully. Often… they don’t. Why do so many groups struggle, and how can we make them more effective? Colin T. Fisher, Associate Professor of Organizations and Innovation at University College London, joins me to share insights that can help any team excel. Colin is author of the book The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups.(https://amzn.to/48WcuCT).
Whether you cook or not, at some point you find yourself in the kitchen putting food away and you run into the problem of – sometimes the plastic wrap clings to the container and sometimes it does not. Listen to hear the secret of how to get it to stick every time. https://lifehacker.com/run-a-wet-finger-across-surfaces-to-make-plastic-wrap-s-1728185077
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Mike Carruthers? Hiring the wrong person is expensive, but it's also exhausting. Because now you haven't solved your problem, you've created a new one. You've spent time interviewing and training somebody, but it's the wrong person. And it's just not working. So when you're hiring, you don't just need a person, you need the right person. And that is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Sponsored Jobs helps you reach candidates with the skills and experience and other qualifications you're looking for, and boosts your job and search results, so the right people are more likely to see it.
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1:23 Mike Carruthers? Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Today on Something You Should Know, a simple technique that can help you remember anything better. Then, why do so many winners end up disappointed? It's called the winner's curse. Lottery winners, for example.
1:59 Speaker 01 With lottery winners, it's on the first day, they're super happy, but then that happiness goes right back to baseline because people don't take into account that their phones are going to be lighting up for the rest of their lives with people asking them for money.
2:13 Mike Carruthers? Also, a little kitchen trick you'll be so glad you heard. Then, being on a team, working in groups. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
2:24 Speaker 02 Groups are the engine of almost all the best stuff in the world. That if you want new scientific discoveries, they're being done by groups. That said, groups are also really hard, and we get them wrong a lot of the time.
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4:22 Mike Carruthers? Have you ever noticed that when you ask someone to recall something, in trying to recall it, they'll sometimes look up or even close their eyes? Why do they do that? I'm going to tell you as we start this episode of Something You Should Know. Hi and welcome. I'm Mike Carruthers. And so it is a common response. You've probably done this too. You ask somebody to remember and they close their eyes in trying to recall, or they look up into the sky or at the ceiling. And the reason they do that, the reason we all do that, is it really helps with recall. It seems that any kind of sensory distraction inhibits our ability to remember things.
5:04 Mike Carruthers? Closing your eyes blocks out the visual distraction. Researchers discovered that any sensory distraction makes remembering more difficult. But what's even more interesting is that visual distractions make it harder to remember what you saw, and audible distractions make it harder to recall what you heard. So if you need to remember something, get away from any kind of distraction, and that greatly improves your odds of remembering it. And that is something you should know.
5:40 Mike Carruthers? You've probably heard those stories about lottery winners who end up broke and miserable just a few years after hitting the jackpot. They win, and somehow they lose at the same time. That's a classic example of something economists call the winner's curse. But this phenomenon goes far beyond lottery tickets. It shows up in auctions, business deals, and even in everyday decisions. And the psychology behind it is fascinating. My guest is Alex Emos. He is a professor of behavioral science, economics, and applied AI at the University of Chicago. And he is co-author, along with Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler, of a book called The Winner's Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies Then and Now.
6:29 Mike Carruthers? Hey Alex, welcome to Something You Should Know.
6:31 Speaker 01 Hi Mike, thrilled to be here.
6:33 Mike Carruthers? So I just used that lottery example to illustrate the winner's curse, but take us down the road a little farther. What is the winner's curse?
6:42 Speaker 01 The winner's curse is the idea that, let's say I want to make some money today. What's the easiest thing I can do other than, you know, something illegal? I can go to a bar with a jar of coins and say, alright, whoever bids the highest amount for this jar of coins wins all the money in the jar. Systematically, what's going to happen is that the person who ends up winning the jar of coins will pay more for it than the amount of money in the jar. So by winning, they actually end up losing because they pay a certain amount for their bid, but they actually end up losing money on it. And that's the winner's curse in kind of a very small little scenario. But the way that the winner's curse was actually discovered was in the context of very sophisticated oil executives and their engineers
7:26 Speaker 01 trying to bid for wells of where to drill the oil. And what they found is whenever they won the rights to basically drill a well, they found that the amount of oil in the actual well was less systematically than what they had anticipated and calculated, which meant that by winning the actual bids, they were systematically losing money. And the oil executives actually coined the winner's curse and behavioral economists have been kind of researching it and uncovering it in a bunch of different places since then.
7:58 Mike Carruthers? And so what's going on there? What's at work, what's at play that makes that so?
8:05 Speaker 01 Well, think about the jar example. Everybody kind of looks at the jar and they think, how much money is in that jar? And nobody's really correct necessarily, right? So some people think there's less money. Some people think there's more money than there actually is. And the people who have some sort of idea, let's say there's $15 in the jar. Some people think there's 18, some people think there's 12. And everybody kind of bids a little bit less than they actually think is in there just, you know, because they're risk averse and things like that. But the thing is, who's going to end up winning the actual auction? Well, it's the people who think there's more money in the jar than there actually is, the people who are over optimistic. So the people who are over optimistic will end up winning the auction, grabbing the jar,
8:50 Speaker 01 and systematically, because they're over optimistic, they're gonna end up losing money. The way that it kind of works is the fact that when you're participating in an auction, you don't just have to think about, okay, this is what I think this object is worth. I also have to think about the fact that everybody else is doing the exact same thing, the same calculation, and acting strategically. So I not only have to think about what it's worth to me, I have to think about what it's worth to everybody else and how everybody else is behaving. In an auction, what that means is that you need to think about this, take the winner's curse into account, and decrease your bid systematically. And people just don't do that.
9:30 Mike Carruthers? So when people overbid and they win the jar of coins, are these people, I wonder, do they tend to do this a lot in life? Or each jar coin thing is its own unique experiment?
9:44 Speaker 01 That's a great question. So in the case where the winner's curse was originally discovered, it seems like this is kind of a systematic problem that keeps happening to the same companies that are bidding. So it's not like, oh, I lost money, I learned my lesson, I'm gonna bid lower next time. So it doesn't seem like it's something that is kind of a one-off to an individual where, you know, I lost money from this auction, I learned I'm gonna act better next time. And, you know, there's examples not just from oil executives, there's examples in, you know, professional sports teams when they're bidding for first-round picks. It's just a systematic effect where people overbid over and over again.
10:25 Mike Carruthers? And so this is an example of behavioral economics. And what's another one?
10:31 Speaker 01 So another example of a behavioral economic anomaly is something that I documented with some colleagues, looking at professional investors. So these are, you know, institutional investors who are managing million, sometimes billion-dollar portfolios. And you would think that these are the people who are least likely to exhibit behavioral economic anomalies, because all of the incentives are there, they're getting constant feedback on their decisions. And low and behold, when we got a data set of something like 900 of these folks over 13 years or more, we see their daily trading decisions. Low and behold, we found that, just like regular people, they pay attention to some things and they ignore some
11:15 Speaker 01 things. What do they ignore? They ignore selling. In order to buy something, you have to sell something. That's kind of how institutional investing largely works. And they pay a lot of attention on what they want to buy. These decisions look great. But when you look at what they're selling, they do worse than random. I could actually throw a dart at that portfolio, which is an empirically empirical strategy we use in the paper. And my dart does better than what they do. They do worse than random because essentially they're not really paying attention to what they're selling. They just kind of want to sell something in order to buy. And then they end up selling the thing that they most recently bought, which is still earning value for them. That's why they bought it in the first place. And
11:59 Speaker 01 we show that this sort of inattention, this behavioral economic anomaly, costs them a lot, a lot of money.
12:06 Mike Carruthers? And why are they so blind to their selling mistakes?
12:11 Speaker 01 The thing about anomalies where they happen over and over, a lot of the time, the reason is that there's no kind of clear opportunities for learning to happen in the first place. So in this case, when I buy something, it's in my portfolio, I'm tracking it all the time. When I sell it, unless I'm selling, sorry, tracking everything I've sold, I don't really learn that this was a bad decision. So it's a lot harder to learn about my mistakes in selling than it is for buying. And we think that that's part of the reason why this happens over and over again.
12:44 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, because once you sell something, you're literally not invested in it anymore. You don't see what, you don't pay attention as much to what happens to it because you don't, you have nothing to do with it. But it happens not only in investing, it happens in everyday life, right?
13:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, for sure. So I mean, the anomalies were first documented among college students and kind of everyday people. So the famous anomalies that people are loss averse, which is essentially means that they're too risk averse relative to the standard economic models, which predicts that people should largely be risk neutral over low stakes. Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky have a famous paper, kind of one of the big early behavioral economic papers called Prospect Theory, showing that people are actually risk averse over tiny gambles. So a 50% chance of winning $2, 50% chance of losing a dollar. This is a positive expected value gamble. They found that people were churning these down. And
13:41 Speaker 01 this is an anomaly for standard economic theory, which predicts that over these tiny stakes, people should be risk neutral and should love this gamble, basically. And this has been shown amongst, you know, not just college students, which was the original paper, but amongst everyday people in all walks of life, cross-country, cross-culturally, very, very replicable phenomenon. So a lot of these anomalies, like the ones that we've been talking about, are not just investors, it's not just oil executives. It's just a basic psychological process that almost everybody has unless there's some decision aids or learning opportunities for people to make better decisions.
14:25 Mike Carruthers? Is this inevitable? Is it human nature? Or do some people figure this out and then change their behavior so they don't fall victim to this?
14:35 Speaker 01 That's a great point. So whenever we are talking about an effect such as, you know, loss aversion or winner's curse, when you actually look at the data, there's an average, which is, or the mean of the, of the process, which is the effect. So let's say there's a winner's curse. On average, people overbid, right? But if you look at the data, there's certainly some people who don't. And there's some people who are not loss averse. There's some investors who pay a lot of attention to their selling behavior. So it's not that everybody has the exact same tendency to fall trapped to these things. There are some people who figured it out, as you said, so, you know, they realized at some point, hey, my selling sucks, I'm gonna fix it, and then their selling improves.
15:19 Speaker 01 Or there's people who just have a predisposition, their personality is such that they're not loss-averse, or they, from the very beginning, were like, look, selling is just as important as buying, and I'm not gonna fall for this trap.
15:33 Mike Carruthers? So why are winners, people who do win, sometimes so disappointed with what they won?
15:41 Speaker 01 Sometimes it's literally the winner's curse, as in, they're disappointed because they're paying more money for something that's worth less money, so that's a clear case of disappointment. Other times, people just have rosy expectations, and they're just over-optimistic about, you know, how good a vacation is gonna feel, or how good, you know, getting that next promotion is gonna feel. So a person works nights and weekends, and thinks that, you know, getting that next promotion is gonna be, just gonna be generating all this happiness for them, and all of a sudden, they get it, they paid all of this time and effort and time away from their family to get it, and then, now what? It's
16:22 Speaker 01 kind of just another part of the job. Sometimes it's not like that, and it's everything it was cracked out to be, but a lot of times, we do see disappointment, and this has to do with the fact that people's beliefs are often miscalibrated in the direction of either being too pessimistic, depending on the setting, or too optimistic in other settings.
16:40 Mike Carruthers? We're talking about these interesting behavioral anomalies, and my guest is Alex Emos. He's author of the book, The Winner's Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies Then and Now.
16:53 Speaker 03 Hey, Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge, with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In-flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi, sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy, from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.
17:21 Speaker 04 Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.
17:48 Mike Carruthers? So Alex, I've always found it interesting, and yeah, I guess I've fallen victim to this myself, where people want something so bad. They've got to have that car, that house, that video game. But pretty soon you get habituated to it, and it's just, it's just your house. It's just a car. It's just a video game. As soon as you get it, it loses its sparkle.
18:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, so this idea of habituation and adaptation is a classic case of a forecasting error. This is a type of anomaly where your beliefs are miscalibrated, where you think, you know what, I would be so happy if I won the lottery, or I would be so happy if I bought that convertible. And it's because of the fact that when we're imagining the future and imagining something, that something happens to us. We're not imagining everything that's going to be happening to us. We're imagining a subset. So when I'm thinking about a convertible, when am I thinking about driving it? So let's say I buy a convertible in Minnesota in the summer. I'm imagining top-down, wind in my hair, beautiful day. This is amazing. What's the
19:00 Speaker 01 reality? It's called, you know, September through May in Minnesota. It's cold, and I have a car that I have to close the roof and the wind is getting in. And it kind of sucks. But the problem is when it's a sunny day, people aren't imagining that. They're imagining all their sunny days. They buy the convertible and then they end up not being very happy with it. This is actually an empirical study by Devon Pope, my colleague at University of Chicago, and some co-authors. They show that on sunny days, people are a lot more likely to buy convertibles. And then they end up kind of less happy with it because they didn't take into account all of the other things that could be happening. You know, with lottery winners, there's really nice papers showing that, you know, on the first day, they're super happy.
19:45 Speaker 01 But then that happiness kind of goes right back to baseline, sometimes even less than baseline, because people don't take into account that, you know, they have a lot of family and friends and their phones are going to be lighting up for the rest of their lives with people asking them for money.
19:59 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, well, I imagine everybody thinks a little bit about that. But, but yeah, I mean, that's kind of a universal belief that, boy, if I could win $500 million, I mean, life would just be sweet as can be. And yet you hear stories of people where it just isn't.
20:18 Speaker 01 And like, you know, lottery winners are incredibly likely to become bankrupt. As many, many news stories have focused on individual incidents, but there's actually papers now showing that bankruptcy is a real thing with lottery winners.
20:32 Mike Carruthers? Talk about the sunk cost fallacy and what that is and how it plays out.
20:37 Speaker 01 Well, the sunk cost fallacy is basically the idea that, you know, once you buy something or invest in something, in standard economics, that becomes a sunk cost. When you're trying to make a decision of whether, let's say I bought a ticket to go to a basketball game and it's pouring rain, it's, it's, you know, snow, it's dangerous for me to go there. Should I go? Well, economists would say, look, it doesn't matter whether I've already bought a ticket or not. You should make a decision of how much am I going to enjoy the game? What are the costs of going to the game? And make, do that calculus and then decide whether to go or not. And it turns out, if a person bought the ticket already, it's sitting in their, it's sitting in their pocket, they're a lot more likely to go because it's, they're not ignoring
21:22 Speaker 01 the cost of the ticket when making the decision of going to the game. The same kind of thing happens when you're, you know, a manager or a startup executive thinking about, you know, I invested in this project and let's say it's going poorly and I have to decide whether I want to put more money into it or not. In standard economics, you should ignore the money you've poured into it and say, "Look, is it worth pouring more money into it or not?" And just ignore the past. That's a sunk cost. But in fact, this is called an escalation of commitment, which is a form of the sunk cost fallacy, that you see people pouring more and more and more money into these failing projects because they're not ignoring the sunk cost.
22:05 Mike Carruthers? Well, like an everyday example that I've noticed is, like, if you buy a ticket to a movie and you go and you just think it sucks, you still stay. Because you can't get up and leave. You paid for the movie.
22:18 Speaker 01 Oh, Mike, this is the biggest lesson for me from being a behavioral economist, is training myself not to do that. So, I would go to concerts. I'm a big concert goer. And I would go to a band that sucks. And I would sit there. And I have so many things to do in my everyday life. But I would sit there and I'd be uncomfortable, buy the expensive beers, just because I bought the ticket. But on Friday, for the first time of my life, I went to a concert. It was not good. And I left after three songs. And I was incredibly proud of myself.
22:54 Mike Carruthers? Well, good for you. But that's very hard to do for most people, I think, because
23:01 Speaker 01 It's very hard to do.
23:02 Mike Carruthers? Because of that thing. You know, I paid for it. It was my decision, so I'm gonna see it through. And where else do we trip ourselves up, do you think, in these kind of behavioral economic-y kind of ways, where we do things, we behave in ways because of this general idea?
23:25 Speaker 01 Well, one thing that was demonstrated very early on in behavioral economics is this idea that, you know, you say you want to do something today, and you really should do it today, but then you say, "Look, you know what? Tomorrow is better." And then you say, "Look, I'm gonna go to the gym tomorrow. I really want to get in shape. I have a real goal of getting in shape. Tomorrow is a good day for me to go to the gym." Guess what happens when tomorrow arrives? The best day to go to the gym is actually tomorrow. Tomorrow arrives again. The best day to go to the gym is once again tomorrow. And you do this for 365 days until, you know, December 31st.
24:10 Speaker 01 You have not gone to the gym or maybe gone once or something like that.
24:13 Mike Carruthers? Well, this is important to pay attention to because we're all affected. We all fall victim to these anomalies, some or all of them. And at least by knowing they exist and what they are, you can protect yourself to some extent. My guest is Alex Emos. He's a professor of behavioral science, economics and applied AI at the University of Chicago. And he's co-author of the book, "The Winner's Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now." There's a link to his book in the show notes. And Alex, thank you for coming on today.
24:46 Speaker 01 Thanks so much.
24:48 Speaker 03 Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi, sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.
25:15 Speaker 04 Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.
25:45 Mike Carruthers? No matter who you are or what you do, at some point, you've had to work in a group, on a team, at your job, on a committee, a board, even a neighborhood project. And let's face it, groups can be tricky. When people come together, something almost chemical happens. A group dynamic forms. Suddenly, it's not just about you. It's about how everyone interacts, who takes the lead and how things actually get done. Understanding that dynamic can make the difference between a group that struggles and one that thrives. My guest, Colin M. Fisher, studies exactly that. He's an Associate Professor of Organization and Innovation at University College London,
26:30 Mike Carruthers? and he's author of a book called The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups. Hi Colin, welcome. Glad to have you on Something You Should Know.
26:39 Speaker 02 Hi Mike, thanks so much for having me.
26:41 Mike Carruthers? So all of us have been on teams at work, or we've worked in groups. And sometimes it's a good experience. Sometimes it's not such a good experience. And we hear that teams or groups are important because the collective work of a group can be better than the individual. So what is your whole take on groups?
27:03 Speaker 02 We need groups. And I think groups are the engine of almost all the best stuff in the world. That if you want new scientific discoveries, they're being done by groups. If you want the world-changing new businesses, those are also almost exclusively the domain of these small teams of entrepreneurs. And if you want great art, great music, great sports, you know, most of these things are coming from groups. And research is showing that actually the rate of group contributions to knowledge and development of the world is, you know, higher than it's ever been.
27:45 Speaker 02 That said, groups are also really hard, and we get them wrong a lot of the time. And so I think the kind of dual associations we have with group and teamwork, where it feels so necessary and it feels like such a good thing, but on the other hand, so many of them can be boring or ineffective, is a product of these kind of two faces of groups and teams.
28:11 Mike Carruthers? So I've never really thought of myself as, I guess, as a good team player, group participant, in part because I'm never really sure, like, how does the group work together?
28:23 Mike Carruthers? Do we each go off and do our thing and come back and talk about what we did on our own? Do we sit down and, you know, okay, let's write this thing. Bob, you handle the first paragraph and Fred, you take the second. I never, I'm never really sure how it's supposed to work. So I guess, so I'd just rather do it myself.
28:42 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, I think the kinds of tasks that we do and don't do in groups really matters a lot. And that you're absolutely right, that if we try to like alternate words or alternate sentences as we're writing something, that's not going to work very well. And that's because, you know, anytime we work in a group, there, there are coordination costs. It's hard for us to just hand something off from one person to another. And so we're always balancing these coordination costs against the benefit we get from, you know, having usually two minds on the problems or sometimes, you know, two pairs of hands.
29:24 Speaker 02 And the question really is, what kind of problem is this? Is this something where we already know how to break it apart and we can have individuals go off and, you know, do their little piece and then we can put it back together when we're, when we're all together? Is this something where we don't know how to break it apart at all? Or maybe we don't even know what the parts of it are? And that in that situation, we do need the group to sort of talk about, well, what could we send individuals off to do? What, what is this even? What are we trying to accomplish? And that I think that rubric of saying, if we, if we know what the parts are, we know
30:06 Speaker 02 how to break them up and we know how to put them back together, then it makes sense to delegate these things to individuals and, and have us kind of work in what I would call a modular fashion. Whereas if we don't know that, then we do need to have a discussion until we do know that answer. And sometimes what we discover is we never find it out and we have to do everything as a group, although I think that's rare. But.
30:32 Speaker 02 But that in and of itself is the work of a group to do creative stuff.
30:38 Mike Carruthers? So you sometimes hear people say, when they see something, they may say, oh, this looks like it was done by a committee, implying that here's something that probably could have been simple, that one person perhaps could have done, and instead it was given to a group of people, and they collectively screwed it up so bad that it's worthless. And I think that that happens a lot.
31:05 Speaker 02 I think when people are saying something looks like it was made by a committee, they're sort of saying, this looks like something that everybody could sign off on, but nobody really likes and doesn't really express in anyone's best work. And that that's not the way I would hope the best groups would sort of resolve tensions and disagreements within the group, that it's not by saying, oh, you want 10 and I want one, so we should settle on five. And especially when we're talking about, you know, ideas and knowledge work, we usually
31:46 Speaker 02 need to say, well, which idea is the best? And let's pick that one and let's build on it, rather than let's always compromise and find the average between two different pieces, or let's take a little bit of everybody's idea and kind of stick them together into a Frankenstein's monster of a project. And I think that because we misunderstand how to do group work, and that we think that working in a group means a kind of compromise in the middle, rather than a choosing the best from each person, that we sometimes end up in these situations.
32:33 Mike Carruthers? So let's talk about how to do the work of a group because I would imagine, you know, one of the big issues is who's in this group? You know, Lennon and McCartney wrote some great songs, but if it was Lennon and Smith, we would have had very different songs. It would have been two people writing together, but it wouldn't be the Beatles.
32:54 Speaker 02 Absolutely. The composition of a group determines a lot of things about the group in that the most common problems are that first, we just don't think very hard about who's going to be on the group. And a lot of, a lot of them are overly inclusive. And that can be anywhere from the top management teams of the biggest organizations in the world to, you know, a PTA bake sale committee where the criteria for composing the group is who's available and who's going to be upset if we exclude them, so we're gonna, we're going to include them anyway. Those are really the wrong criteria.
33:38 Speaker 02 That what we want is to say, what are the perspectives, knowledge and skills that we need to do whatever it is we're trying to do? And have, can we make sure that we have those people? And then second, the other thing we get wrong is that most of our groups are too big to get anything done. And I think this is where we get this sense of things being created by a committee or that groups are kind of doing mediocre work. And that's because they get too many people into a room to actually have a meaningful discussion of anything. So if we have 20 people in a room and we have an hour, the chance that we're going to really learn what everybody thinks is very, very low.
34:22 Speaker 02 But if we get, you know, this optimal number of people, which research shows is about 4.5, which is pretty tough to do. It's hard to get 4.5 people in a room, so we can settle for anywhere from three to seven people. Then we've got a real chance. So if we're selecting for, you know, the best knowledge and skills that are appropriate to the task, if we have a small group where we can have real meaningful discussions, know what everybody thinks, know what their opinions are, to find out what they really know, then we've got a much better chance.
34:55 Mike Carruthers? I remember hearing about some research about putting groups together where if the group members were too much alike, it was a problem. And if the group members were too diverse, it was a problem. And there was some sort of sweet spot. Are you familiar with what I'm talking about?
35:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even when I was getting my PhD, this is essentially what we were taught, which is that, you know, if if everybody knows exactly the same thing and thinks exactly the same thing, then the chances that groups are going to make good decisions, come up with creative ideas, or be able to even divide labor effectively, are very low. So we don't want groups where everybody's too the same. But, you know, on the other hand, if everybody's so different that they can't understand each other, that they can't agree on anything, or at an extreme, they don't even speak the same language and
35:53 Speaker 02 understand each other well enough, then they're also not going to do very well. But when you actually look at the data, it turns out that the worry about groups being too different and too diverse is overblown. That research on work teams shows basically more diverse teams that are doing tasks where they have objective performance criteria. So there, you know, you can just say that it's black and white, whether they did better or worse. More diverse teams tend to do better. And it's only when we have subjective evaluation of performance by outsiders. So people are looking at the group and saying, hmm, I get
36:37 Speaker 02 to decide if that's good or bad, that diverse teams are getting penalized. And so what that says is it's probably more about outsiders biases and their theory that diverse groups are going to struggle than it is that diverse groups actually truly have trouble collaborating. So I would say it's pretty safe to actually continue adding more knowledge, more perspectives, more skills to your team. And that research suggests that it's pretty unlikely we're going to get to that tipping point of being so different, we can't understand each other.
37:13 Mike Carruthers? It is not uncommon for a group to get together in the beginning and somebody more or less takes over. They kind of hijack the group. They designate themselves as the leader of the group and it's his way is the best way. And how do you deal with that guy?
37:32 Speaker 02 So if one person is dominating for any reason, that's a sign again that the group needs leadership. I think the best things you can do are first, if there's a problem, to call it out. So say, hey, I've noticed we are hearing a lot from Mike and we're not hearing so much from, you know, those other members. To have some kind of discussion about how we're making decisions and the process by which we're doing that. And again, ideally, this would have been done in the first meeting, not waiting for this problem to emerge. But that, and that you can tell, probably tell, I'm hesitant to say, oh,
38:15 Speaker 02 there's a problem with somebody, somebody's behavior. That means that person is the problem and we should intervene by trying to get them to behave differently. Although sometimes that's necessary. Usually, that's a symptom that the group hasn't been set up well. That we didn't set these norms in the first place. That we're not clear on what we're trying to accomplish and how we're trying to accomplish it. But better than all of this is prevention. Prevention is much better than curing group dynamics because once we get to these difficult situations and these problems, it's true, it's really, it's really tough. And that's why I put so much emphasis on, think about the structure of your group, even before
38:59 Speaker 02 it ever meets. Think about launching your group well in that first meeting to prevent these kinds of problems from ever occurring. And that those tend to be the healthiest groups rather than the ones that are constantly fighting fires and saying, hey, we're having this dysfunction that's now emerged, which again is usually a sign there's something deeper wrong.
39:20 Mike Carruthers? I'm sure that groups have been studied to death and there must be like a, the psychology of the group says that when a group forms and it gets to work on a project, this is what's going to happen. What is that psychology of the group?
39:37 Speaker 02 Well, most of what's going to happen, most of a group's fate is determined in those kind of early moments of its existence. Groups tend to be what we call inertial, that whoever talks the most in the first meeting is going to tend to talk the most in the second, third and fourth meeting. If somebody gets into that role of kind of sitting back and not contributing much in the first meeting, they're probably going to keep doing that. And so because we know that these social norms are so sticky, we need to really work hard to have productive ones right from the start and not have this attitude that, oh, you know, groups are going to kind of gradually figure things out and get better a little
40:22 Speaker 02 bit every time. That it tends to be much more sudden than that. And so we really need to take those early moments seriously.
40:30 Mike Carruthers? Is working in a group a skill and the more you do it, the better you get at it? Or it's all based on the group? The group determines how good the group is and it's more of in a vacuum?
40:44 Speaker 02 I mean, it's a little bit of both. There's certainly skills like communication, like listening, like asking questions that can help you across different groups. There's knowledge, like the things that we're talking about, the condition, knowing about what's important to get right in a group and when you can intervene that are likely to be relatively transferable. But, you know, every group is different in that they're all in new situations. And that the real key is that we, we learn together and we stay on the same page.
41:23 Speaker 02 The biggest danger in any group is that we have slightly different visions of where we're trying to, what we're trying to achieve.
41:33 Mike Carruthers? So if, if there's a group within, say, a workplace, you know, it's Bob's group. We, we put Bob and his group on this problem and they nailed it. Is it a good idea, has anyone ever studied this? Is it a good idea to take that very same group and give them another problem and they'll do just as well? Or is the problem such a big factor that you, that's, that's not a safe assumption?
41:58 Speaker 02 So there is some pretty good research on this and that keeping successful groups together is a good strategy. And that too often that's not what we do. And part of that is when we work together with people, we learn about their preferences. We learn about what they know, what they're good at, what they're not so good at. And that knowledge is useful and it helps us kind of keep, continue to collaborate over time. And that the research does show that, you know, this kind of conventional wisdom, that group, groups get stale and that we want to mix them up, turns out to be a bit overblown. That there, that for the most part, if you have a successful group, you want to keep them together.
42:43 Speaker 02 As long as everybody's happy to continue working together and they're doing good work. We should leave, leave Bob's group together to do the next project again.
42:53 Mike Carruthers? What is it you find in talking with people that they just don't really understand about groups and how they work and how to make them work?
43:04 Speaker 02 That really small groups are the unit that society is built on. That, you know, whether it's roommates or families or friends or work teams, bands or whatever it is, that most of our life are spent in these small groups. And that the dynamics of them are really unique. That the way you feel at home with your family and the way you feel in a work team are quite different. The way you behave is quite different in all likelihood. And so, and so we really underestimate how important groups are. And I, I think that this kind of overemphasis on individual leaders,
43:47 Speaker 02 individual geniuses has caused us to really sort of mismanage the world in a lot of ways. I'm not trying to argue that, no, there aren't great individuals. But I think that with thinking that the way we're going to get change in the world is to be saved by some great individual, rather than to build better groups, is kind of what's holding us back here.
44:15 Mike Carruthers? Well, I, I've enjoyed this discussion because as I said earlier, I, I've always been one of those people that thinks, you know, why take five people to do something when one person could probably do it better and faster? But groups are, groups are part of life. I mean, you, you're going to be in one sooner or later, probably sooner. And understanding the dynamics of how they work and how they change and what they do is really interesting. I've been speaking with Colin Fisher. He's an associate professor of organizations and innovation at University College London, and his book is called The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Colin, thanks.
44:58 Speaker 02 Okay. Well, thanks so much for having me on, Mike.
45:04 Mike Carruthers? If you spend any time in the kitchen, not just cooking, just even if you're just in the kitchen cleaning up and putting food away, you've noticed that when you put plastic wrap over a bowl or a container, sometimes it sticks and sometimes it doesn't. Well, there is a remedy for this. It's to wet your finger with water and run it along the outside edge of the bowl or container. Then the plastic wrap should stick. Plastic wrap has a substance in it. It's kind of like gelatin. And since gelatin becomes sticky and gooey on contact with water, a similar reaction seems to take place here.
45:45 Mike Carruthers? The one tricky part is you don't want to wet your fingers too much. Plastic wrap is very hard to work with when your hands are wet. It can get all tangled and messed up. And when that does happen, don't throw the plastic wrap away. You just stick it in the fridge for a while, and when you take it out, it will be easy to handle again. In fact, keeping plastic wrap in the fridge all the time is actually a good idea as it is easier to handle. And that is something you should know. You've heard me ask a million times at the end of almost every episode to please tell someone about this podcast. And I ask so often because it really does help.
46:27 Mike Carruthers? It really helps grow our audience and spread the word. And so again, I would ask you to please tell someone you know about this podcast and ask them to give a listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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