CONTACT US

Tag: Summit

Thank you for searching the NeuroLeadership Institute archives. Here’s what we were able to find for you.

Still having difficulty finding what you’re looking for? Contact us.
Blog

Summit 2022: The Nitty Gritty of Forming Habits

What’s the best way to make new habits stick? To shed light on this complex question, we turned to Elliot Berkman, a psychologist at the University of Oregon and the associate managing director of the Center for Translational Neuroscience.

Explore »
January 20, 2022
woman against yellow background carried away by umbrella
Blog

Summit Q&A: NYU Psychologist Batia Wiesenfeld On How Adaptive Thinking Drives Better Decisions

Adaptation requires flexibility, both in mind and behavior. Batia Wiesenfeld knows this firsthand. As the Andre J.L. Koo Professor of Management at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Wiesenfeld has made a career out of looking at the ways employees can change their thinking to max out their productivity, especially when in a state of flux. We recently chatted with Wiesenfeld, a speaker at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit, about the cutting-edge blend of business and science. NLI: What early interests did you have that led you to your long-term research on organizational change? Batia Wiesenfeld: What has been an abiding interest for me is how people adapt to the challenges of organizational life, having witnessed people who failed to adapt and whose lives were ruined. A friend’s father committed suicide because of a loss of meaning and identity after he was laid off, so there can be serious consequences when you get challenged at work. Work is so important, especially in America. It’s so important given our modern society and how we think about other people. It’s replacing the role of community. It’s replacing the role that family used to play. Now, work is where we feel like we get support, where we define our identity. We often disclose more to people we work with than our family members. So there are these extraordinary challenges and I’m interested to know how people respond to them. That’s what brought me to look at organizational change. I started out with research about things like self-esteem, self-identity, where there is a lot of emotion. And over time, I’ve started to be more and more interested in cognition. NLI: What is your research showing you now? BW: What I’ve realized is that the brain is still so much more in flux than any part of us. At some point, we’ve grown up, we’re not changing, we look the same, but our brains are still changing. Our brain tries to understand the world and adapt to it using mental representations that can range from being very abstract to very concrete. And even that — just thinking about things abstractly or concretely — is an adaptation. If you’re trying to jump beyond the here and now, or think far into the future, you have to be more abstract because the details of the here and now are like tethers that pull you down. They prevent you from making that jump, so even those mental representations are adaptations. On the other hand, all of the concrete details are incredibly helpful for getting things done. When I think of making a presentation today, instead of “I have to present at the Neuroleadership Summit in October,” I can think very abstractly, “Why do I want to do this?” As the Summit date gets closer my thinking gets very concrete. The ability to move in this agile way between more abstract and more concrete thinking is crucial to being able to adapt to our context. In my current research, I’m looking at things like how leaders and followers in organizations that are going through a change have to collaborate because they come in to the change with very different mental representations. The leaders of the organization think big picture, broad vision, way in the future. The followers — the folks who are having to carry this stuff out — they’re thinking about specifics and they’re often somewhat fearful. There has to be collaboration to get the best of both. So I’m seeing that the way we represent our world is so crucial to this phenomenon of adaptation that I’ve been studying for so long. NLI: Where do you see research in this space going in the near future? BW: One is recognizing this confluence of the body and the mind and being much more informed by physiology — neuroscience reflects physiology. It is giving us new insight and we are starting to understand how we can draw from those insights and allow them to inform what we really care about, which are behaviors, especially social behaviors. How are people interacting with one another when they’ve got to get a job done? So now we’re able to see connections. We can draw a line from social behaviors all the way back to the physiological. I see social science and natural science coming together. Data and the ability to process it is part of what’s changing organizations. We have access to so much more information, so much data, and we’re able to do so much more with it such as using it to build theory. I think we used to start from theory and only use data to test it. People are really interested in understanding the future of work, how work is changing, the work experience, and organizations. All of those are changing largely because of technology, and technology is also changing the way we study those things. Vivian Giang contributed reporting for this article. [action hash=”6cd538cd-54dd-4b69-a152-d85ebcd24518″]

Explore »
September 27, 2018
symphony rehearsal
Blog

Summit Q&A: The Motivation Science Behind Weight Loss, Learning, and Leadership

Art Markman is a renaissance man of psychological science: He holds a professorship at the University of Texas-Austin, where he’s also the director of the program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. He co-hosts the podcast Two Guys On Your Head. He’s authored many books, including Smart Change: Five Tools to Create New and Sustainable Habits in Yourself and Others. And he’s also a panelist on the Networking and Building Alliances session at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit in October. We recently spoke with Art to learn about how immersing himself in motivation and decision science has shaped his life, and came away with some practice advice on how to get more good stuff done in our own lives. NeuroLeadership Institute: How has being in this field change the way you make decisions in your everyday life? Art Markman: There’s a lot of things I’ve done as a result of knowing more. Some of them have been pretty straight-forward. So for example, in my mid-30s I took up the saxophone because there’s all this data that suggests if you look at people’s regrets, the thing that old people regret more than anything else is not the dumb things they did but the important things they didn’t do. And so, I always recommend to people, periodically project yourself mentally to the end of your life and look back and ask yourself, is there anything I wish I would’ve done? And at some point, I thought, “Gosh I always wanted to learn to play a saxophone and I didn’t.” So about  a week after that, I went out and found a teacher and bought a saxophone and learned to play. I think I also am better at seeing different sides of situations that I’m involved in. For example, there are broad tendencies to look at other people’s behaviors and assume that it’s being driven by their characteristics, their traits, and individual goals rather than the situation that they’re in. Whereas with our own life, we pay a lot of attention to, “Oh I was forced to do this in this situation.” So I think I’ve become more tolerant of things other people have done by routinely asking myself, “Well, what’s the situation? Did they do this just because they didn’t have a choice? As a result, should I be trying to focus on how to help, how to make that situation better rather than chastising them for some kind of fundamental limitation that they themselves have?” I spend a lot of time writing about behavior change. And so in my own life, like if I want to lose weight, I’m more effective at that because I understand how motivation works. I run this program. I have a staff of 6 people. I have 35 faculty who I work with and I feel like I can work more effectively with people because I have a better understanding of what factors influence behavior change and so we can set up what we do in ways that get people to do things a little bit different, not a manipulative way, but sharing a vision people can get on board with and also structuring a plan where people not only think this is a vision they can be a part of but also something that they can accomplish. NLI: I read somewhere that you lost 40 pounds — how did you do that, and how did your study on motivation help you achieve your goal? When it comes to weight loss, people think to themselves, “I don’t feel right. I don’t look right.” For me, I didn’t like the way I looked and felt anymore. I think that, for one thing, the formula for weight loss is not a carefully guarded secret. Everyone wants some special diet, but at the end of the day, if you’re going to engage in some kind of weight loss activity, you’ve got to burn more calories than you take in and you have to do that consistently. Then the question is, how do you structure your world to facilitate getting more exercise and eating less? It turns out the eating less is probably more important than the exercise. Because you can work really hard, but if you eat too much, you will overwhelm any amount of calories that you burned. There’s a great quote from Jack LaLanne that I love to use, and it’s “The best exercise is pushing yourself away from the table.” But I think what’s important is to structure that environment. One of the things I did was that I became a vegetarian when I wanted to lose weight in part because I figured, rather than just trying to do less than what I was already doing, I thought, “If I completely change the diet that I’m eating, then I have a chance to institute a new set of behaviors.” NLI: You broke the frame, so you’d have to keep paying attention. AM: That was one piece of it. One piece of it was planning a little bit better. If I cooked too much food, then putting the rest away in advance. Some of it was figuring out what to do when I’m faced with a buffet where you want to throw everything onto your plate. It’s really helpful sometime to find dessert plates that are lying around somewhere. They’re smaller plates so you put less stuff on your plate, and then you eat less. So I think there are a lot of ways of messing around with your environment that can help. When I made the decision to lose weight, I let everybody know. People don’t like to do that, because if they fail, it’s embarrassing. But actually when you let everybody know, then they help you. Maybe they choose not to have an ice cream right in front of you. Or they’re a little more sensitive to how they dole food out in front of you if you’re having lunch with them or something. You

Explore »
September 18, 2018
two people shaking hands at diverse office
Blog

How to Create Cultures of Cooperation — A Summit Q&A with Neuroscientist Jay Van Bavel

Jay Van Bavel is a social neuroscientist who studies unconscious bias, group identity, and cooperation, specializing in understanding the neural mechanisms by which a sense of belonging to a group influence our thoughts and behavior. His most recent study found that increasing a group’s sense of common identity leads to greater cooperation, coordination, and collective intelligence — all topics he will be discussing at the upcoming NeuroLeadership Summit. We reached him at his lab at New York University, where he is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science and an affiliate at the Stern School of Business. He is also editor-in-chief of the NeuroLeadership Journal and serves as one of our senior scientists.  NLI: What are you working on that’s most exciting to you right now? Jay Van Bavel: I’m working on how to understand group coordination and cooperation. We’ve found that when you build a sense of common identity in a group, that leads to greater cooperation, and people are willing to sacrifice more to make the group succeed. They’re also more collectively intelligent. NLI: Can you define collective intelligence? JVB: Groups that perform better than the sum of their parts are considered collectively intelligent. Great groups outperform groups that might have a smarter person or a higher average intelligence. They’re really good at problem-solving tasks and creativity tasks. What’s going is that they’re communicating very well, making sure everybody’s insights are considered. This allows them to brainstorm and come up with different ways to solve the problem. NLI: Can you tell me how group identity fits into your recent study? JVB: We measured group identity and found that groups with the most pride and common connection to their team perform best at cooperation games. In one condition, we tell people they’re all competing against each other and the best individual is going to win. When we do that, they don’t work well together. Their performance isn’t very good. But when we tell people they’re working as a team to compete with other teams, it’s in that condition that they work best with the group they’re with and cooperate the most. Those teams end up having the best problem-solving. NLI: You’ve designed these tasks where cooperating increases the team’s performance as a whole. Is that the kind of task that best reflects what people typically have to do in organizations in the real world? Are business tasks generally tasks where a group cooperating is does better than individuals working independently and solo? JVB: Yes. In science, the best papers are driven by teams of great people working together. Even though we have this notion of Einstein, that’s not how science works. The most impactful science is done by teams, not by a single genius. In Hollywood, Pixar is famous for having these incredible creative teams that go off and do their bits and then come back and share knowledge and give each other critical feedback. Some tasks, like sales, are individualistic — you have people out in the field knocking on doors or making calls one-on-one. NLI: Yes! And salespeople need support, too.  JVB: Most work nowadays — especially really complex high-impact work or creative work — is done in groups or teams. NLI: What can organizations do to increase cooperation in their teams? JVB: There’s a couple of things. One, they need to build a common sense of identity on teams that are working together. What we’ve found is that (A) you can measure it, so you can see which teams already have that kind of identity. And (B), you can manipulate it — managers and leaders can be empowered to create that sense of identity. Research has found that diverse teams benefit the most from having a group identity, because it helps them get on the same page and put aside their differences. Then they can use their different insights to solve a problem together, without the conflict that normally would come from that — and without breaking into a bunch of individuals. NLI: How can organizations create a culture of cooperation? JVB: Cooperation is hard. It takes a lot of prefrontal cortex activity to overcome your impulse to be selfish and instead engage in cooperation. We found that people who have damaged their prefrontal cortex can’t do it. That same logic probably also applies if you’re distracted — it might make cooperation hard. But if you’re working with a group of cooperative people — if you’re in a cooperative team or an organization with a cooperative culture — all of a sudden cooperation becomes easy. It no longer requires your lateral prefrontal cortex, your working memory, or executive function — and it seems to feel good. Once you turn the corner and create a culture of cooperation, people get a reward signal when they make decisions to cooperate, so it becomes easier. It doesn’t require as much self-control and regulation, and they can do it without thinking. We’ve looked at data from around the world from thousands of people, and we’ve found that in places where cooperation is common, people do it automatically. Whereas if they’re coming from places where cooperation is not common, like Manhattan, then it’s hard for them, and it takes them longer to come to the decision to cooperate. NLI: What are people responding to exactly? Is it the norms of the group they’re in? JVB: Yup, exactly. Norms. Of course, some people pick up on norms and other people don’t. This really only applies to people who are paying attention to the norms around them. When the norms are good, they cooperate. NLI: So how can an organization create a norm of cooperation? JVB: Several things. First, they can hire cooperators. Hire people who are cooperative and don’t hire people with sharp elbows. Second, promote and reward people — especially in public ways — who show that they value cooperation and collaboration. Third, leadership can send signals by being role models. If you put people in a group with somebody

Explore »
September 14, 2018
woman standing with train zooming past her
Blog

The Science of How ‘Benevolent Sexism’ Undermines Women: A Summit Q&A with Peter Glick

Peter Glick is a psychologist who studies benevolent sexism — the paternalistic belief that women are pure, fragile flowers in need of men’s protection. Benevolent sexism, unlike hostile sexism, feels positive and well-intentioned. But Glick and his colleagues have found that it actually undermines women’s careers by excluding them from challenging assignments and depriving them of honest, critical feedback. We reached Dr. Glick at his lab at Lawrence University, where he’s the Henry Merritt Wriston Professor in the Social Sciences, to ask him what insights he’ll be bringing to the NeuroLeadership Summit. NLI: At the Summit you’ll be talking about your work on benevolent sexism. Tell me about that work. Peter Glick: It’s collaborative work I started with [Princeton psychologist] Susan Fiske on reconceptualizing sexism. Prior to our work, when you talked about sexism, people immediately thought about hostility toward women. I mean, that’s how we define prejudice. And sexism is a form of prejudice. Right? Historically, and even today, men have more power and status. But they’re intimately interdependent with women, if they’re heterosexual. So this theory is rooted in the idea that heterosexual intimacy is part of it, combined with the power and status difference. I call this the “Central Gender Relations Paradox.” It’s a very weird situation when you start to think about it! You’ve got a group that’s more powerful and has more status. And when groups have more power and status, they like to maintain their privileges and tend to view themselves as superior. But at the same time, this powerful group is intimately interdependent on the subordinated group! NLI: And what’s the effect of that? PG: It creates this ambivalence toward women. On the one hand, men want to maintain control over them and keep women in their place. But at the same time, they want to maintain positive relationships in intimate relationships with women. So how do you resolve this paradox? The power difference creates hostile sexism that demeans women, but the intimate interdependence necessitates “benevolent” sexism, which is this paternalistic, protective attitude toward women. Because men are intimately interdependent on them. It’s basically, “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” Benevolent sexism is this view that women are wonderful, pure, fragile flowers in need of men’s protection and provision and being cherished and adored. There’s this classic Motown song that goes, “I would kiss the ground she walks on, cause it’s my word, my word she’ll obey.” NLI: “It’s my word she’ll obey”? Wow. PG: We have some fantastic research that documents the many surprising and insidious ways in which benevolent sexism undermines women’s equality and undermines women — sometimes more than hostile sexism. It’s harder to get a handle on too because subjectively it’s really nice. This is not some plot men hatched. It’s just the natural, almost inevitable outcome of this heterosexual interdependence coupled with the power difference. We found that across nations, benevolent sexism and hostile sexism go hand in hand. They tend to go together. They’re not conflicted. Hostile sexism and benevolent sexism go hand-in-hand. It’s the carrot and the stick. Hostile sexism is the stick. If you get out of line, the hammer comes down. But if you stay in line, we’ll take care of you. NLI: Can you give me some examples of beliefs that characterize each? PG: For the hostile sexism scale, there are anti-feminist items like, “Feminists are demanding too much of men,” “Women complain about things at work,” “Women use sex to manipulate men and gain power over men.” So that’s about all the “conniving” ways basically that women “try to gain power over men,” or the idea that women compete with men in ways that aren’t fair. This is the modern version of hostile sexism. If it were 200 years ago, it would have been, “Women are incompetent and stupid.” But things have changed, so hostile sexism now is subtle hostility in an environment where there’s more competition. Whereas with benevolent sexism, you could translate it into Ancient Greek and Homer would have recognized it. It’s stuff like, “Women are more pure and moral than men,” and “Women deserve and need men’s protection.” NLI: You were saying that hostile sexism and benevolent sexism go hand in hand. PG: Right. The hostile sexist nations are also the benevolently sexist nations. But if you compare men’s and women’s scores on benevolent sexism, we don’t find as big a gap. Because benevolent sexism sounds really nice — and it is, by the way, subjectively positive on the part of men who hold these attitudes. They’re not being sneaky. Their mom told them, “Don’t ever hit a girl,” and, “You’ve got to protect women.” Romantic scripts tell them that! Benevolent sexism and romance are very hand-in-glove too. So they’re feeling like, “Hey, I’m treating the ladies like they need to be treated.” It’s a very subjectively positive thing. Yet we find these objectively negative outcomes. NLI: When you say that women score high on benevolent sexism — they’re scoring high on benevolently sexist beliefs about women, not men, right? PG: Right. It’s “Women should be cherished and protected by men, do you agree or disagree?” Women can say, “Oh yeah, men should cherish and protect women, for sure.” “Women are more pure and moral.” “A man needs a woman he can adore.” “He’s not complete without a woman.” Women can endorse that stuff as well. I’m not real militant. In romantic relationships, you’ve got to figure out what you want. But when it comes to work, we’ve found that benevolent sexism is related to things like not giving women challenging assignments — because maybe it will be too stressful for them or too demanding. But challenging assignments are how you get promoted! And how you develop your skills! Women often get softer feedback. It’s, “Oh, you’re so wonderful,” and often that praise is on more feminine dimensions, like “Clients love you because you’re so warm and nurturing.” But then when it comes to promotions

Explore »
September 5, 2018
binoculars over scenery
Blog

The Benefits — and Risks — of Thinking Big Picture: A Summit Q&A with Marlone Henderson

The human brain can think about objects and events at various “levels of construal” — from the abstract, high-level, and conceptual all the way down to the low-level and concrete. Marlone Henderson is a psychologist who studies how level of construal affects problem-solving. Among other surprising findings, Henderson has shown that physical distance can lead negotiators to more successful outcomes by prompting them to think about the big picture. We reached him at his lab at the University of Texas at Austin in advance of the NeuroLeadership Summit in October, where he’ll be speaking. NLI: Let’s do a tour of your work on construal and negotiation. Marlone Henderson: When I was coming out of grad school, I was interested in understanding how people’s cognitive style would impact how they would approach problem-solving and negotiation. One of the big issues you deal with in negotiation is when parties have differing priorities. Negotiators tend to come to the table trying to fight out and hash out every little thing, trying to get everything they want, without realizing they may be able to identify key trade-offs where they can sacrifice things that are less important in order to gain things that are more important. I showed that if you push people to think in a more abstract manner — to take a step back from the details and look at things in a broader, more inclusive manner — they’re able to focus on what’s more important to them. When people do that, it increases the likelihood they’ll deal with multiple issues at the same time. When you’re dealing with one issue at a time, it’s harder to recognize that one is more important than another. But if you deal with multiple issues at the same time, you’re more likely to see how different priorities emerge. When you push people to think more abstractly, they’re more likely to deal with multiple issues at a time, and that increases the likelihood that they’ll recognize where different priorities lie. And that then increases the likelihood that they’ll trade off on things that are less important and ultimately come up with more win-win agreements. NLI: What are the implications for organizations? MH: It’s possible to think about this in terms of personality. There are certain people who just naturally think more abstractly. Those might be your more gifted negotiators from the get-go. So the lesson would be, maybe hire people who naturally think more abstractly. But even if you’re not that kind of person, there are situational variables that will push you to think more abstractly. The two variables I looked at were time and space. First, there’s time. If people are negotiating over issues that are more distant in the future, that increases the likelihood that people will construe the issues more abstractly — which will then foster more win-win agreements, through considering multiple issues at a time. The other variable is space. I showed that when people are negotiating with someone they think is physically farther away from them, it works the same way as time: People are more likely to identify areas where they have trade-offs, and therefore recognize they have different priorities, and are more likely to come up with win-win agreements. NLI: What if I’m negotiating with somebody face-to-face — we don’t have distance — and negotiating about something that’s happening now, not distant in time? Is there a way for me to trigger them to elevate their level of construal? MH: That’s a good question. I published one study where we directly manipulated people’s level of construal. Before people start negotiating, we show them the issues they’re going to be negotiating about. With one group, we have them look at the issues and think about how to categorize them or think about them in a broader context. Let’s say you’re negotiating over salary and vacation time. We might say, “Well, if you think about those issues, what do they really represent if you had to think about a bigger category?” They might respond, “They both deal with my lifestyle satisfaction.” With the other group, we have people take the issues and come up with specific examples. We found that when you have people take the issues and lump them together and think about them in a broader category, as opposed to generating specific examples, it works the same way as having people think about distant time. Even though they’re getting ready to do that negotiation in a few minutes and the issues are right there, relevant to them at that moment, having them broaden their horizons by categorizing them in a broader way did the same trick. I have not directly tested this, but the implication would be that even if your issues are relevant now, you might see these benefits just by having people —it almost sounds like a meditative exercise — take a moment to envision their life in the distant future. NLI: What if I have a mildly adversarial posture toward my negotiating partner? Say I walk into my boss’s office and I want to ask for a raise. I’m not saying, “Hey boss, if you don’t mind, close your eyes and I want you to meditate for ten minutes.” Is there something I can say to raise their level of construal that would be appropriate in a negotiation context? MH: Good question. That’s something that as far as I know there’s research on. In our studies, we always control the cognitive style of both negotiating partners — and the two people negotiating are always on the same level. NLI: Let’s imagine a specific situation — I’m going to a low-level construal now to talk about it, using an example. Say my boss says, “OK, how much do you want?” And I say, “Well before I answer that, let’s take a step back. Let’s think about the future. Let’s think about the overarching goal. Our organization wants to grow. Ten years down the line, we want to be

Explore »
August 20, 2018

Making Organizations More Human Through Science

Over the last 25 years, we’ve cracked the code for culture change at scale. Discover what science-backed habit activation can do for your organization.

CONTACT US

This site uses cookies to provide you with a personalized browsing experience. By using this site you agree to our use of cookies as explained in our Privacy Policy. Please read our Privacy Policy for more information.