How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

THAT “IN-GROUP” FEELING
Whenever we meet people, our brains do some fast work to decide how to react.
Do we recognize their face? Are they a threat to us? What are their most obvious
characteristics? Are they like us, or not?
This last question is critical. In the absence of any other information, we lean
toward seeing strangers as potential threats. “Better safe than sorry,” say our
brain’s survival circuits. But as soon as we get a sense that the other person is
similar to us in some way—politics, background, interests—we begin to relax,
and subconsciously treat them as a potential ally. Scientists describe this as
seeing someone as part of our 
in-group.
And this small shift in social calculus
has major effects on our interactions. First off, we’re no longer in defensive
mode, which makes us altogether more charming to be around. Research has

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also found that seeing someone as part of our in-group means we’re immediately
more likely to feel empathy for that person’s pain, or share in the joy of his or
her success.
3
And in general, brain scans suggest that when we think about
people who seem similar to us, our neural activity looks a lot like we’re thinking
about ourselves.
4
So it’s no wonder that we’re so generous and attentive with
people who seem to be part of our tribe. We’re treating them a little like
extensions of ourselves.
This has a real impact in the workplace. For one thing, we’re more likely to
hire people who look and act like us. Lauren Rivera, a sociologist at
Northwestern University, found that 74 percent of recruiting managers at
prestigious firms reported that their most recent hire had a “personality similar to
mine.”
5
How did they decide they were “similar”? It wasn’t a particularly deep
assessment. One of the most important factors was having familiar leisure
pursuits, such as a shared interest in sports or technology.
And that tees up the good news here, which is that research confirms that it
takes very little to create a tribal sense of “us.” Experiments have shown that it’s
instantly created when people are randomly assigned to be on the same team.
6
Researchers even found that volunteers were more likely to help a stranger after
they’d been asked to tap along in time to the same tune.
7
I’m not suggesting that you walk down the hall picking people at random to
be on your team, or start drumming your fingers on the table in your next
meeting as you hum your favorite song. But you can quickly create powerful in-
group benefits by asking enough questions to find small things in common with
other people—such as a shared interest, taste, goal, or bugbear—and then taking
the time to discuss them a little.
It can be tempting to skip this investment in building a sense of an in-group
when everyone’s busy and under pressure. It can feel like needless small talk.
But that’s often when it matters most, because research suggests that stress
otherwise readily weakens people’s ability to feel empathetic.
8
Under pressure,
other people are more likely to treat us as a potential threat, less likely to care
about what we think, and more likely to resist our ideas or appeals for help. So
when we’re up against a deadline or caught in a drama, it’s even more important
to find ways to connect with the person on the other side of the table.
Francesco is an accountant, and one day he was walking into a meeting where
he would normally have gotten straight down to business—in this case,

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negotiating terms in a contract. He was expecting the discussion to be
challenging. But Francesco and I had recently talked about this in-group
research, so he decided to try something radical: “I started instead by treating the
other guy like a normal person, rather than the enemy.” Francesco asked him
about his work and his background, and quickly found that they’d worked for the
same accounting firm a long while ago. They talked briefly about that. When
they came to the negotiation just a few minutes later, Francesco recounts, his
opposite number said, “Don’t worry, I trust you—your proposals look fine.”
Says Francesco, “I’d tried this approach in other meetings and it had worked
well, but I hadn’t expected it to help in a high-stakes situation like this. I guess
he just needed to know that I wasn’t trying to trick him in some way, and
discovering our common ground seemed enough for him to trust that I wasn’t
trying to undermine his position.”
Here are some suggestions for rapidly creating an in-group feeling with
someone you’re talking to: