Why Winners Often Lose & What Great Teams Do Differently

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Speaker 2 Today, on something you should know, a simple technique that can help you remember anything better.

Speaker 2 Then, why do so many winners end up disappointed? It's called the winner's curse. Lottery winners, for example.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 That said, groups are also really hard and we get them wrong a lot of the time.

Speaker 2 All this today on something you should know.

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Speaker 2 Something you should know. Fascinating intel.
The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life.
Today, Something You Should Know. With Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 2 Have you ever noticed that when you ask someone to recall something,

Speaker 2 in trying to recall it, they'll sometimes look up or even close their eyes. Well, why do they do that? I'm going to tell you as we start this episode of Something You Should Know.
Hi and welcome.

Speaker 2 I'm Mike Carruthers. And so it is a common response.
You've probably done this too.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Closing your eyes blocks out the visual distraction.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Hey, Alex, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 3 Hi, Mike. Thrilled to be here.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 I can go to a bar with a jar of coins and say, all right, whoever bids the highest amount for this jar of coins wins all the money in the jar.

Speaker 3 Systematically, what's going to happen is that the person who ends up winning the jar of coins will pay more for it

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And that's the winner's curse in kind of a very small little scenario.

Speaker 3 But the way that the winner's curse was actually discovered was in the context of very sophisticated oil executives and their engineers trying to bid for wells of where to drill drill the oil.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the oil executives actually coined the winner's curse. And

Speaker 3 behavioral economists have been kind of researching it and uncovering it in a bunch of different places since then.

Speaker 2 And so what's going on there? What's at work? What's at play that makes that so?

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 So some people think there's less money. Some people think there's more money than there actually is.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So the people who are over-optimistic will end up winning the auction, grabbing the jar, and systematically because they're over-optimistic, they're going to end up losing money.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I also have to think about the fact that everybody else is doing the exact same thing, the same calculation, and acting strategically.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 In an auction, what that means is that you need to think

Speaker 3 about this, take the winner's curse into account and decrease your bid systematically. And people just don't do that.

Speaker 2 So when people overbid and they win the jar of coins, are these people, do they, I wonder, do they tend to do this a lot in life or each jar coin thing is its own unique experiment?

Speaker 3 That's a great question.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So it's not like, oh, I lost money. I learned my lesson.
I'm going to bid lower next time.

Speaker 3 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 going to act better next time.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's just a systematic effect where people overbid over and over again.

Speaker 2 And so this is an example of behavioral economics. And what's another one?

Speaker 3 So another example of a behavioral economic anomaly is something that I documented with some colleagues looking at professional investors.

Speaker 3 So these are institutional investors who are managing million, sometimes billion dollar portfolios.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They're getting constant feedback on their decisions. And lo 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.

Speaker 3 Lo and behold, we found that just like regular people, they pay attention to some things and they ignore some things. What do they ignore? They ignore selling.

Speaker 3 In order to buy something, you have to sell something. That's kind of how institutional investing largely works.
And they pay a lot lot of attention on what they want to buy.

Speaker 3 These decisions look great. But when you look at what they're selling,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And we show that this sort of inattention, this behavioral economic anomaly costs them a lot, a lot of money.

Speaker 2 And why are they so blind to their selling mistakes?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And we think that that's part of the reason why this happens over and over again.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because once you sell something, you're literally not invested in it anymore.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, the anomalies were first documented among college students and kind of everyday people.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So a 50% chance of winning $2, 50% chance of losing $1. This is a positive expected value gamble.
They found that people were churning these down.

Speaker 3 And this is an anomaly for standard economic theory, which predicts that over these tiny stakes, people should be

Speaker 3 risk-neutral and should love this gamble, basically.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 process that almost everybody has unless there's some decision aids or learning opportunities for people to make better decisions.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 3 That's a great point. So whenever we're 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And there's some people who are not loss averse. There's some investors who pay a lot of attention to their selling behavior.

Speaker 3 So it's not that everybody has the exact same tendency to fall trap to these things. There are some people who figured it out, as you said.

Speaker 3 So, you know, they realized at some point, hey, my selling sucks. I'm going to fix it.
And then their selling improves.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 I'm not going to fall for this trap.

Speaker 2 So why are our winners, people who do win,

Speaker 2 sometimes so disappointed with what they won?

Speaker 3 Sometimes it's literally the winner's curses and they're disappointed because they're paying more money for something that's worth less money. So that's a clear case of disappointment.

Speaker 3 Other times people just have rosy expectations and are just over-optimistic about, you know, how good a vacation is going to feel or how good you know getting that next promotion is going to feel so a person works nights and weekends and thinks that you know getting that next promotion is going to be

Speaker 3 just going to 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 kind of just another part of the job.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 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.

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Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 As soon as you get it, it loses its sparkle.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 I would be so happy if I won the lottery. Or I would be so happy if I bought that convertible.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I'm imagining top down, wind in my hair, beautiful day. This is amazing.
What's the reality?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But the problem is when it's a sunny day, people aren't imagining that. They're imagining other sunny days.
They buy the convertible and then they end up not being very happy with it.

Speaker 3 This is actually an empirical study by Devin Pope, my colleague at the University of Chicago,

Speaker 3 and some co-authors.

Speaker 3 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 the other things that could be happening.

Speaker 3 You You know, with lottery winners,

Speaker 3 there's really nice papers showing that on the first day, they're super happy, but then that happiness kind of goes right back to baseline, sometimes even less than baseline, because people don't take into account that 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, I imagine everybody thinks a little bit about that.

Speaker 2 But yeah, I mean, that's kind of a universal belief. Boy, if I could win

Speaker 2 $500 million, I mean, life would just be sweet as can be. And yet you hear stories of people where it just isn't.

Speaker 3 And like, you know, lottery winners are incredibly likely to become bankrupt, as many, many news stories have focused on individual incidents.

Speaker 3 But there's actually papers now showing that bankruptcy is a real thing with lottery winners.

Speaker 2 Talk about the sunk cost fallacy and what that is and how it plays out.

Speaker 3 Well, the sunk cost fallacy is basically the idea that uh you know once you buy something or invest in something

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 do that calculus and then decide whether to go or not.

Speaker 3 And it turns out if a person bought the ticket already, it's

Speaker 3 sitting in their pocket, they're a lot more likely to go because

Speaker 3 they're not ignoring the cost of the ticket when making the decision of going to the game. The same kind of thing happens when you're

Speaker 3 a manager or a startup executive thinking about, 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.

Speaker 3 In standard economics, you should ignore the money you've poured into it and say, look,

Speaker 3 is it worth pouring more money into it or not?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That, you know, you see people pouring more and more and more money into these failing projects because they're not ignoring the sunk cost.

Speaker 2 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 that it sucks, you still stay because you can't get up and leave.

Speaker 2 You paid for the movie.

Speaker 3 Oh, Mike, this is the biggest lesson for me from being a behavioral economist is training myself not to do that.

Speaker 3 So I would go to concerts. I'm a big

Speaker 3 concert goer.

Speaker 3 And I would go to a band that sucks and I would sit there.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Well, good for you. But that's very hard to do for most people, I think, because

Speaker 2 of that thing. You know, I paid for it.

Speaker 2 It was my decision. So So

Speaker 2 I'm going to see it through. And

Speaker 2 where else do we trip ourselves up, do you think, in these kind of behavioral economic-y kind of ways

Speaker 2 where we do things, we behave in ways because of this general idea?

Speaker 3 Well, one thing that

Speaker 3 was demonstrated very early on in behavioral economics is this idea that, you know, you

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And then you say, like, look, I'm going to 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.

Speaker 3 Guess what happens when tomorrow arrives? The best day to go to the gym is actually tomorrow.

Speaker 3 Tomorrow arrives again. The best day to go to the gym is once again, tomorrow.

Speaker 3 And you do this for 365 days until, you know, December 31st, you have not gone to the gym or maybe gone once or something like that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And at least by knowing they exist and what they are, you can protect yourself to some extent. My guest is Alex Emos.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 There's a link to his book in the show notes. And Alex, thank you for coming out today.

Speaker 3 Thanks so much.

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Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And let's face it, groups can be tricky. When people come together, something almost chemical happens.
A group dynamic forms.

Speaker 2 Suddenly, it's not just about you, it's about how everyone interacts, who takes the lead, and how things actually get done.

Speaker 2 Understanding that dynamic can make the difference between a group that struggles and one that thrives. My guest, Colin M.
Fisher, studies exactly that.

Speaker 2 He's an associate professor of organization and innovation at University College London, and he's author of a book called The Collective Edge, Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups. Hi, Colin.
Welcome.

Speaker 2 Good to have you on Something You Should Know.

Speaker 4 Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And we hear that teams or groups are important because the collective work of a group can be better than the individual.

Speaker 2 So what is your whole take on groups?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 If you want the world-changing new businesses, those are also almost exclusively the domain of these small teams of

Speaker 4 entrepreneurs. And if you want great art, great music, great sports, you know, most of these things are coming from groups.

Speaker 4 And research is showing that actually the rate of group contributions to knowledge and development of the world is

Speaker 4 higher than it's ever been. That said, groups are also really hard, and we get them wrong a lot of the time.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So I guess. So I just rather do it myself.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean, I think the kinds of tasks that we do and don't do in groups really matters a lot.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And that's because anytime we work in a group,

Speaker 4 there are coordination costs. It's hard for us to just hand something off from one person to another.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And the question really is, what kind of problem is this?

Speaker 4 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 all together?

Speaker 4 Is this something where we don't know how to break it apart at all, or maybe we don't don't even know what the parts of it are?

Speaker 4 And that in that situation, we do need the group to sort of talk about: well, what could we send individuals off to do?

Speaker 4 What is this even? What are we trying to accomplish? And that I think that rubric of saying

Speaker 4 if we know what the parts are, we know 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 have us kind of work in what I would call a modular fashion.

Speaker 4 Whereas if we don't know that, then we do need to have a discussion until we do know that answer.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But that in and of itself is the work of a group to do creative stuff.

Speaker 2 So you sometimes hear people say when they see something, they may say, well, this looks like it it was done by a committee,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I think that that happens a lot.

Speaker 4 I think when people are saying something looks like it was made by a committee, They're sort of saying, this looks like something

Speaker 4 that everybody could sign off on, but nobody really likes and doesn't really express in anyone's best work.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 we usually need

Speaker 4 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, Frankenstein's monster of a project.

Speaker 4 And I think that because we misunderstand how to do group work and that we

Speaker 4 think that

Speaker 4 working in a group means a kind of compromise in the middle rather than a choosing the best from each person,

Speaker 4 that we sometimes end up in these situations.

Speaker 2 So let's talk about how to do the work of a group, because I would imagine, you know,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It would have been two people writing together, but it wouldn't be the Beatles.

Speaker 4 Absolutely. The composition of a group determines a lot of things about the group.
And that

Speaker 4 the most common problems are that, first, we just don't think very hard about who's going to be on the group. And

Speaker 4 a lot of them are overly inclusive.

Speaker 4 And that can be anywhere anywhere from the top management teams of the biggest organizations in the world to a PTA bake sale committee, where the criteria for composing the group is who's available

Speaker 4 and who's going to be upset if we exclude them. So

Speaker 4 we're going to include them anyway. Those are really the wrong criteria.

Speaker 4 What we want is to say, what are the perspectives, knowledge, and skills that we we need to do whatever it is we're trying to do?

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 can we make sure that we have those people?

Speaker 4 And then second, the other thing we get wrong is that most of our groups are too big to get anything done.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And that's because they get too many people into a room to actually have a meaningful discussion of anything.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But if we get 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.

Speaker 4 So we can settle for anywhere from three to seven people.

Speaker 4 Then we've got a real chance.

Speaker 4 So if we're selecting for 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And there was some sort of sweet spot. Are you familiar with what I'm talking about?

Speaker 4 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even when I was getting my PhD, this is essentially what we are taught, which is

Speaker 4 that,

Speaker 4 you know, if everybody knows exactly the same thing and thinks exactly the same thing,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So we don't want groups where everybody is to the same.

Speaker 4 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 understand each other well enough, then they're also not going to do very well.

Speaker 4 But when you actually look at the data, it turns out that the worry about groups being too different and too diverse is overblown.

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 research on work teams shows basically more diverse teams that are doing tasks where they have objective performance criteria. So

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So people are looking at the group and saying, hmm, I get to decide if that's good or bad, that diverse teams are getting penalized.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So, I would say it's pretty safe to actually continue adding more knowledge, more perspectives, more skills to your team.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 It is not uncommon uncommon for a group to get together in the beginning and somebody

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So say, hey, I've noticed we are hearing a lot from Mike and we're not hearing so much from those other members, to have some kind of discussion about how we're making decisions and the process by which we're doing that.

Speaker 4 And again, ideally, this would have been done in the first meeting, not waiting for this problem to emerge.

Speaker 4 But that, and that you can tell, probably tell I'm hesitant to say, oh, there's a problem with somebody, somebody's behavior.

Speaker 4 That means that person is the problem and we should intervene by trying to get them to behave differently. Although sometimes that's necessary.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 it's really tough. And that's why I put so much emphasis on think about the structure of your group even before it ever meets.

Speaker 4 Think about launching your group well in that first meeting to prevent these kinds of problems from ever occurring.

Speaker 4 And that those tend to be the healthiest groups rather than the ones that are constantly fighting fires and saying, hey, we're having having this dysfunction that's now emerged, which again is usually a sign there's something deeper wrong.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 What is that psychology of the group?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Groups tend to be what we call inertial, that, you know, whoever talks the most in the first meeting is going to tend to talk the most in the second, third, and fourth meeting.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 bit every time.

Speaker 4 That it tends to be much more sudden than that. And so we really need to take those early moments seriously.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 relatively transferable.

Speaker 4 But,

Speaker 4 you know, every group is

Speaker 4 different in that they're all in new situations and that the real key is that we learn together and we stay on the same page.

Speaker 4 The biggest danger in any group is that we have slightly different visions of

Speaker 4 what we're trying to achieve.

Speaker 2 So if there's a group within, say, a workplace, you know, it's Bob's group.

Speaker 2 We put Bob and his group on this problem and they nailed it. Is it a good idea? Has anyone ever studied this?

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 that's not a safe assumption?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And it helps us kind of continue to collaborate over time. And that the research does show that this kind of conventional wisdom that

Speaker 4 groups get stale and that we want to mix them up turns out to be a bit overblown.

Speaker 4 that they're that for the most part if you have a successful group you want to keep them together as long as everybody's happy to continue working together and they're doing good work. We should

Speaker 4 leave Bob's group together to do the next project again.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 that most of our life are spent in these small groups and that the dynamics of them are really unique.

Speaker 4 That the way you feel at home with your family and the way you feel in the work team are quite different. The way you behave is quite different in all likelihood.

Speaker 4 And so we really underestimate how important groups are.

Speaker 4 And I think this kind of overemphasis on individual leaders, individual geniuses, has caused us to really sort of mismanage the world in a lot of ways.

Speaker 4 I'm not trying to argue that no, there aren't great individuals, but I think that

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 Well, I've enjoyed this discussion because, as I said earlier, I've always been one of those people that thinks,

Speaker 2 you know, why take five people to do something when one person could probably do it better and faster?

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 groups are part of life. I mean, 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.

Speaker 2 I've been speaking with Colin Fisher.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Colin, thanks.

Speaker 4 Okay, well, thanks so much for having me on, Mike.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 almost every episode to please tell someone about this podcast and i ask so often because it really does help 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

Speaker 2 the infinite monkey cage returns imminently. I am Robin Ince, and I'm sat next to Brian Cox, who has so much to tell you about what's on the new series.
Primarily eels.

Speaker 4 And what else?

Speaker 2 That it was fascinating, the eels. But we're not just doing eels, are we? We're doing a bit.

Speaker 3 Brain-computer interfaces, timekeeping, fusion, monkey business, cloud signs of the North Pole, and eels. Did I mention the eels?

Speaker 2 Is this ever since you bought that timeshare underneath the Sagaso C?

Speaker 3 Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 Oh, the Regency Era.

Speaker 1 You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place, or the time when Jane Austen wrote her books.

Speaker 1 But the Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history.

Speaker 1 And on the Vulgar History podcast, we're going to be looking at the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal of the Regency era.

Speaker 1 Vulgar History is a women's history podcast, and our Regency Era series will be focusing on the most rebellious women of this time.

Speaker 1 That includes Jane Austen herself, who is maybe maybe more radical than you might have thought.

Speaker 1 We'll also be talking about queer icons like Anne Lister, scientists like Mary Anning and Ada Lovelace, as well as other scandalous actresses, royal mistresses, rebellious princesses, and other lesser-known figures who made history happen in England in the Regency era.

Speaker 1 Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get podcasts.