Join us virtually and globally November 12-13 to explore the topics of habit science, AI collaboration, proactive accountability, modern DEI, and more
Read More →
FEATURED INSIGHT
Join us virtually and globally November 12-13 to explore the topics of habit science, AI collaboration, proactive accountability, modern DEI, and more
Read More →
Facts are facts — except that they’re not. In a session on idea propagation and influence at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit, Wil Cunningham, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, explained that getting through to people is about more than simply getting things right. What we really need to focus on, he says, are assumptions about the world that they have about how things work. “We treat the world as facts,” he said, “without understanding the structure of belief system the fact operates in.” If we want to reach someone, the research indicates that there are different conceptual gatekeepers to get by. You can convince someone if they think a fact will better their wellbeing. That’s step one. Next, you have to satisfy what’s technically called “the expressive function,” or how a new fact fits within their sense of self and existing web of knowledge. That’s because Cunningham says a lot of the “facts” that we’re trying to impress upon one another are social facts, a concept identified by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim a century ago. Social facts are true to the extent that everybody in a group agrees that they’re true, like that cash has a monetary value rather than being illustrated scraps of paper. “We sometimes hold beliefs to signify the groups we belong to,” Cunningham said. So if you’re pitching someone on a social fact — like that your product solves a common pain point — and it doesn’t blend with their sense of self and group identity, there’s a good chance they’ll reject it. The whole latticework of facts, preferences, and assumptions they’ve long internalized won’t mesh with the new information or argument. If you pass that self-belief test, then you can actually add new fact to their personal web of knowledge, Cunningham says. The takeaway: Get to know your audience — and what they believe about the world — and describe things in those terms, not necessarily your own. That way, you can actually influence people and add insight to their lives. For more, watch the NeuroLeadership Summit livestream, broadcasting Thursday and Friday.
It’s tempting to blame toxic work cultures on an unknowable set of factors, but often the answer is much simpler. In an article for Fast Company, author Meghan E. Butler, partner at Frame+Function, noted that toxic workplace cultures are consistently the product of poor leadership. Specifically, toxic behavior often stems from leaders missing (or ignoring) key warning signs in how teams function. Perhaps they see aggressive work styles as signs of passion, or label cases of bullying as harmless fun. Meanwhile, employees get hurt and the culture turns toxic. Understanding SCARF As Butler points out, there are five key social domains that demand leaders’ attention: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. We call it the SCARF Model. It relies on the widespread neuroscience finding that social threats register in the brain in a similar way as physical threats: Cognitive function suffers and people’s quality of work declines. Toxic behavior can affect any SCARF domain, or several in combination. For instance, it’s threatening to a person’s status when their co-worker openly calls out a recent mistake in a team meeting. And it damages people’s sense of fairness and relatedness (or sense of belonging) when a manager plays favorites by assigning projects only to certain people. Leaders who stay aware of these domains can actively take steps to fix them, in turn creating more psychological safety at work. That means bestowing employees not with social threats, but rewards. Here are examples for each SCARF domain: Status — Leaders can celebrate employees’ contributions to the wider team, and they can celebrate team wins to the larger department or organization. Certainty — Before starting a meeting, leaders can lay out the agenda and clarify the goals he or she wishes to achieve by the end. Autonomy — Leaders can raise employees’ sense of control and ownership over their work by delegating projects across the team, rather than hoarding information and keeping people out of the loop. Relatedness — Inclusive leaders help their employees recognize shared goals, such as hitting sales targets or wrapping a big project. (Contrary to popular belief, highlighting differences may only further divide people.) Fairness — Leaders can create a sense of equality by mitigating biases, such as seeking diverse opinions around the office to reduce what psychologists call “experience bias.” The takeaway Ultimately, toxic cultures form when leaders practice the same unhelpful behaviors over and over again. These actions are seldom intentionally destructive, but unless leaders actively try to develop the correct habits — and create psychological safety for everyone — social threats are bound to arise. As Butler notes, “All of these signs can generally be whittled down to one key factor: Fear. And fear corrodes mental health and productivity.”
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″]
Leaders naturally want their employees to bounce back from failures and strive toward improvement — the hallmarks of a growth mindset. But how to cultivate that reality is seldom easy or obvious. Our research at the NeuroLeadership Institute finds better feedback conversations mark the smartest place to start. We define growth mindset as the dual belief that employees’ skills can be improved and that improving those skills is the point of the work people do. The trouble many companies run into, however, is getting people to seek out improvement. Growth mindset is uncomfortable. It requires people to confront their weaknesses, which may feel like personal shortcomings. Regular feedback conversations, in which people ask for feedback rather than give it unsolicited, may help people see challenges as opportunities, not threats. Real lessons from fake negotiations NLI recently published a study that included 62 people from a major consultancy, who were asked to engage in a mock negotiation. Each negotiation was one on one. Researchers behind the study hooked subjects up to heart rate monitors. During the negotiation and in feedback conversations afterward, the heart rate monitors tracked people’s physiological responses. Findings indicated that feedback-givers were just as stressed out as askers. However, those givers who were asked for feedback showed less heart-rate reactivity than givers made to give feedback unprompted. We draw a lot of conclusions from the study. In terms of growth mindset, the biggest one is that asker-led feedback conversations are a lower-stress way for teams to discuss performance. If leaders can encourage team members to ask for explicit feedback on a regular basis, we contend that employees will gradually begin to view critiques as less threatening. They’ll focus less on failures and more on growth. They’ll welcome challenges, not shy away from them. Start small to go broad Leaders play a crucial role in modeling this behavior. According to NYU psychologist Tessa West, an NLI senior scientist and the study’s lead author, it’s still threatening to start asking for feedback. So leaders can use small-stakes questions to get people thinking in terms of improvement, rather than pure wins or losses. For instance, a manager can ask her team what they thought of her eye contact during the last meeting. Performed over and over again, across departments, asking for feedback could hold the power to send a growth mindset rippling across an entire organization. And it all begins with the decision to ask the right questions. [action hash=”6cd538cd-54dd-4b69-a152-d85ebcd24518″]
Due to the effects of bias, managers may be conducting performance reviews in such a way that sets employees on unwanted career paths for years.
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
Think back to your last feedback conversation at work — how did it go? Chances are, you and your partner felt uneasy, maybe even threatened. The reason is hardly a mystery. Feedback conversations as they exist today activate a deep-seated threat response in the human brain. Even if it’s just a chat, our brains want us to flee. According to a recent article in the NeuroLeadership Journal, research may be able to fix this broken aspect of professional life. In a study led by NYU psychologist and NLI senior scientist Tessa West, 62 participants at a major consultancy engaged in a mock one-on-one negotiation over the price of a biotechnology plant. Then they gave each other feedback on the other’s performance. Heart rate monitors listened all the while. In follow-up analyses, West and her colleague, fellow NYU psychologist Kate Thorson, discovered that giving feedback and receiving feedback were equally anxiety-producing. This was big news: It signaled managers, too, feel the pain of criticism. Even bigger news, however, was that people who responded to a request for feedback — rather than give feedback unprompted, as per typical conversations — experienced significantly lower heart rate reactivity and reported feeling much less anxious. According to West, asking for feedback is better for long-term improvement because it gives people more control over the conversation and certainty in what will be discussed. If people can start small, she says, the initial pain of inviting criticism will eventually lose its sting. “When you ask for feedback, you’re licensing people to be critical of you,” West recently told NLI for Strategy+Business. “It may feel a little more uncomfortable, but you’re going to get honest, more constructive feedback.” Leaders can use the new study as a tool to create more of a growth mindset at work. If everyone begins seeking out ways to improve, instead of shying away from them, entire organizations can adapt more quickly and edge out the competition.
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
Everyone knows the pain of feeling left out, but fewer discuss the dread of needlessly being left in. This is what we at the NeuroLeadership Institute call over-inclusion, and the downsides are massive. In the rightful pursuit of lifting up diverse voices and opinions in recent years, leaders have started over-correcting. In order to reach a happy middle ground, they must pay attention not just to moments of exclusion, but over-inclusion — cc’ing more people than necessary in emails, jam-packing meeting rooms, and creating multi-armed project teams. According to our research, the way to create that efficiency is through a careful process of expectation matching. Swinging into the danger zone At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we think of inclusion as a pendulum. It can swing from under-inclusion, where people fail to loop in the right team members in meetings, projects, and emails; to optimal inclusion, where the right people know the right info at the right time; to over-inclusion, where people sit in meetings wondering “What am I doing here?” We recently discussed this phenomenon in a Quartz article entitled “It’s possible (and dangerous) to be over-inclusive.” Most people know from personal experience that over-inclusion is possible. But the science of why it’s dangerous is perhaps less well-known. Research has shown that humans naturally want to empathize with others, which is why we do our best to be fair and include everyone. The downside is we may unknowingly burden their cognitive load and create decision fatigue, leading them to develop an unhealthy, “always-on” attitude toward work. Getting everyone on the same page We find the solution to over-inclusion is thoughtfully excluding. It’s about leaving people out of meetings and emails because you recognize their time and energy are better spent on other things. Based on the leading brain science, we contend the way to do that is through expectation matching. When we run into something that violates our expectations, it causes our brain to do some heavy lifting. With a finite amount of cognitive resources at our disposal, the more those expectations are violated, the less focus and thought we can give to other matters. Leaders who want to thoughtfully exclude can follow the wisdom of science by laying out expectations ahead of time. They can explain who needs to be involved and for what purposes. If everyone is on the same page around those priorities, those who are left out will better understand why. The certainty and fairness will feel rewarding, and they may even thank you for excluding them, as they can now use their cognitive surplus for more productive ends.
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
Only about a third of US employees qualify as “engaged.” It’s up to management to create the habits that can boost that figure.
This year has turned ‘conventional wisdom’ on its head. Join us at the 2020 Summit to learn what science says about building a better normal.
In a world that seems divided over any topic you can think of, a bit of laughter can bridge even the widest gaps. You already knew that intuitively; now learn some of the science to validate it.
If leaders can make their organization a psychologically safe place to speak up, they can tap into a wellspring of new ideas from otherwise quiet folks.
Uncertainty can spark new opportunities to reimagine culture. Learn to build a better normal with strategies from today’s leading scientists and executives.
Join millions of employees in creating culture change at scale by reaching out today.
In 2007, David and Lisa Rock and their team had been working in leadership development and executive coaching for ten years, when David coined the term “NeuroLeadership.”ef
North America
Africa
South America
Asia
Europe
Australia
© NeuroLeadership Institute 2025. All Rights Reserved