“Life in human social groups is regulated by social norms that go beyond cooperation,” writes Harvard professor of evolutionary biology Joseph Henrich in another of the works featured on the Starling Bookshelf this year, Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation.
“Many behaviors are cultural in that they are socially learned by observation and interaction in a social group,” Henrich explains. “Social learning can then be understood as the foundational capacity that underpins what is typically glossed as ‘culture’,” he continues, explaining that “both purely genetic and culture-gene interactions have shaped human social psychology such that people cooperate, help, trust, and punish in highly patterned and often contextually specific ways.” Our behavioral tendencies, that is, follow social rules – predictably.
Appearing alongside Henrich on the Starling Bookshelf is Professor Harvey Whitehouse, Chair of Social Anthropology at Oxford’s Magdalen College. “From infancy, we copy those around us in order to be like others, to be one with the tribe,” he explains in The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity. “The ritual animal longs to belong.”
“Other primates will copy behaviour that leads to transparent benefits,” Whitehouse observes, “but only humans promiscuously copy actions that have no instrumental purpose.” The principal motivator of such mimicry is “the desire to affiliate,” Whitehouse explains, “and we imitate with higher fidelity when ostracism threats are cued, apparently as a re-inclusion behaviour.” Mutual trust is the central imperative here.“
There’s no team without trust,” Google executive Paul Santagata is quoted as observing in a 2017 Harvard Business Review article.1 Key to such is a workplace culture that promotes psychological safety and a sense of belonging which both contributes to and demonstrates an atmosphere of established mutual trust.
Consider the illustration of French luxury group Hermès, which soared to the top of the 2021 Financial Times’ rankings for diversity and inclusion through a focus on belonging.2 And contrast that with findings reported in a 2023 study by Deloitte, revealing that most U.S. workers felt it necessary to ‘cover’ their identities at work.3
Among those surveyed in the Deloitte study, 60% reported that the need to cover their identities both damaged their sense of well-being and left them feeling emotionally drained. Some 56% said that this negatively impacted their commitment to their organization (unsurprisingly), while 58% said they felt it necessary to ‘mirror’ the behavior of certain others if they were to be perceived of as being ‘professional’ – putting testament to the evolutionary dynamics described above: conform, or else…
With this in view, Professor Seabright highlights a grave concern for leaders contending with toxic workplace cultures, and for those who have suffered by such toxicity.
“A toxic workplace culture creates a demand for protection, and those who supply that protection, even if they begin with noble motives, come to be exposed in turn to an awareness of how easy it might be to exploit the weakness of those they are protecting.” As a consequence, he warns, “It’s precisely the people that protect us from abuses by others who leave us most vulnerable to abuse at their own hands.”
“After all, in protecting us,” he explains, these same people “come to have an intimate understanding of our weaknesses.” This has troubling implications for organizations where leadership itself is seen to have contributed to the toxicity that leaves employees injured, even and perhaps especially where such leadership seeks to make amends and to lead corrective change efforts. “It illustrates how careful organizations must be when they are trying to act to clean up a culture of abuse,” Seabright cautions.
“If you’ve been a victim once, you have an entirely reasonable need for help,” Seabright warns, “And your helpers are, statistically, the people most likely to make a victim of you again.” While perhaps non-obvious at first, this makes sense once we’re made aware of it, and it returns our attention to psychological safety and workplace cultures that promote a readiness to speak out about concerns – and those that fail to do so.
“Cultures of secrecy (where some people have information that others don’t) and cultures of silence (where everyone knows what is happening, but it is taboo to talk about it) are damaging in very similar ways across a vast range of organizations in a wide variety of sectors,” Seabright regrets.
In a new book we feature on the Starling Bookshelf, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People, Seabright discusses how the evolutionary drive for belonging plays out in organized religion.
Perhaps more so than almost any other organization, “Religion is about belief and about belonging,” he writes. But there is a parallel that deserves note. “Religious movements are a special kind of business—they are platforms,” Seabright suggests. Platforms, as he describes them, “are organizations that facilitate relationships that could not form, or could not function as effectively, in the platforms’ absence.” Once formed and once joined, we will conform our conduct so as to remain welcome among our platform peers. Notably, that may include remaining silent regarding the rules of membership: ‘the first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.’ Hence the development of cultures of secrecy and silence.
Military organizations offer another profound example of platforms that compel our allegiance, and in a deeply thoughtful Peer Perspectives essay featured here, Lieutenant Colonel (Retd.) Langley Sharp offers views curated through his time directing the UK’s Centre for Army Leadership. “Having served in the British Army for 23 years, including a further 8 operational tours and almost a decade with special forces,” Lt. Col. Sharp writes, “I have reflected at length on what drives individuals and teams to high performance.” [See also the Peer Perspectives article Why We Follow: The Power and Perils of Belonging]
“Stripped to its essentials,” he offers, “the answer so often lies in the intricate social dynamics between leaders and followers in pursuit of a shared objective, for success is a collective endeavor.”
After 400 years as a standing fighting force, the British Army decided to codify its views on leadership, and Lt. Col. Sharp was tasked with the production of that final work – The Habit of Excellence: Why British Army Leadership Works, another item that features on our Starling Bookshelf this year.
“Leadership,” he offers there, “is best understood as a human endeavour whose central concerns are to influence the individual and mould the collective in service of the ultimate mission.” It is expressed most meaningfully through “an accumulation of countless small choices, interventions and demonstrations that set the example required to uphold standards and drive performance,” he writes.
“To set an example is both the most obvious function of leadership and one of the most important.” But this work on leadership inspired in Lt. Col. Sharp a still greater appreciation for the corollary value of followership.
“As defined in the British Army’s recently published Doctrine Note,” he writes here, “followership is, ‘the act of an individual or individuals willingly accepting the influence of others to achieve a shared outcome’.” Key to this idea is recognizing that followership is a choice. “But if followership is a choice, one that requires the ‘willing acceptance’ of a leader’s influence, what compels one to follow?” Sharp asks.
Here again, we are pointed to the importance of belonging. The mindset of belonging as it operates among special forces soldiers, Sharp describes, is “matched by an intense pride in their tribe and trust in one another.” This, in turn, “enables tenacity and endurance in the face of the most complex of challenges.” The result, he suggests, “is a force-multiplying effect, far in excess of the sum of its parts.”
“In short,” Lt. Col. Sharp argues, “we are hard-wired to belong.” And that belonging is experienced through our social networks. These may operate to bring out the best in us, and they may bring out the worst. Light or dark depends on the cultural commandments to which we’re compelled to conform.
So where do these come from?
“Social networks permeate our social and economic lives,” Stanford economist Matthew O. Jackson writes in another of the works featured on our Starling Bookshelf, Social and Economic Networks. “The countless ways in which network structures affect our well-being,” he writes, “make it critical to understand (1) how social network structures affect behavior and (2) which network structures are likely to emerge in a society.”
“Peers exert enormous influence on human behavior,” Jackson reminds. “It is easy to cite examples, ranging from the products we buy, whether we engage in criminal activities, how much education we pursue, to which profession we choose.” As such, the influence of our peer networks warrants attention.
“The perception of social networks begins as soon as an individual enters a new organizational context,” writes David Krackhardt, Professor of Organizations at the Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, in yet another of the works on our Starling Bookshelf, Interpersonal Networks in Organizations: Cognition, Personality, Dynamics, and Culture.
To be an effective leader of a social unit, Krackhardt advises, is thus to be aware of:
Yet, “Even as we talk incessantly about them,” the economic historian Niall Ferguson writes in another of the items on offer on the Starling Bookshelf, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, “the reality is that most of us have only a very limited understanding of how networks function, and almost no knowledge of where they came from.”
“We largely overlook how widespread they are in the natural world, what a key role they have played in our evolution as a species, and how integral a part of the human past they have been,” Ferguson criticizes. He points here to the significance of this for the historian. “Often, the biggest changes in history are the achievements of thinly-documented, informally organized groups of people,” Ferguson writes. “For the historian, then, the insights of network theory, in all its forms, have profound implications.”
Also on our Starling Bookshelf, in Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds, and the Rise of Modern Finance, the Carnegie Endowment’s Ian Klaus explains how trust networks shaped the history of the 18th century. “If new forms of finance, commerce, and risk management were essential to [18th century] capitalism's vitality,” he writes, “new forms of trust were needed to safeguard that vitality in a world of strangers and speed.”
“Trust, to be simple with our definition, is an expectation of behavior built upon norms and cultural habits,” Klaus stipulates, “It is often dependent upon a shared set of ethics or values,” he allows but, perhaps of greater importance, “It is also a process orchestrated through communities and institutions.” Any attempt to chronicle the history of vice and capitalism, therefore, “must also be a study of trust – or at least its absence.”
What these authors collectively emphasize and illustrate is that social and economic networks can and do form spontaneously. Once established, they serve as platforms that facilitate collective action towards the shared aims of their members, and they assert rules for membership that demand normative compliance under threat of ostracism – being ‘deplatformed’ or ‘canceled,’ in today’s common parlance. Of critical significance here, while these platforms may feature individuals of particularly marked influence, it is regularly the case that no one single individual ‘controls’ the platform. This presents an accountability problem for those who would seek out linear, top-down chains of command: when everyone is responsible, no one is. And of further critical significance, these diaphanous structures can and do challenge more concrete powers.
In another of the works pulled from the Starling Bookshelf, Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought, Yale Professor Emily Erikson describes how inchoate groups of merchant-writers successfully challenged the power of the 17th century crown and ruling classes through the promulgation of competing ideas popularized by their writings. Again, this was an organic, largely leaderless phenomenon.
In the medieval era, writings that today might be filed under ‘economics’ struck an overtly religious and moral tone. In hopes of persuading the crown and 17th century nobility to adopt policies favored by the politically powerless merchant class, merchant-writers began to couch their arguments in terms of ‘productivity’ and ‘economic growth’ that would generate returns to the benefit the political classes. These writings, which in time would form the basis of today’s orthodox economics, were successful in shifting policy and practice.
“For a reader familiar with the economic literature two centuries prior to the publication of The Wealth of Nations,” Erikson writes, “what is most striking about Smith was his reincorporation of philosophical and moral concerns into a literature on trade that had largely left these matters by the wayside.”
More immediately overtly so in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith “was trying to reintroduce the moral framework of justice, equity, and benevolence that had dominated the literature in the medieval era but had been discarded by seventeenth-century merchant authors,” Erikson suggests. Smith, that is, was pushing back on the network effects achieved by a loosely organized platform of merchant authors who successfully shifted the established political powers of their day.4
Erikson brings this story to life fascinatingly, describing how machine learning tools and social network analytics helped to identify 17th century merchant class “influencers,” as we might describe them today, and to visualize their patterns of connectedness and the ‘contagion effects’ inspired by their writings. It’s a brilliant application of modern computing power to otherwise largely inscrutable historical forces of tremendous continuing significance: these ideas are with us still, discernably shaping contemporary economic debates.
In another of the essays from The Academy that features here, Professor Erikson provides further illustration of how these methodologies can make ‘intangible’ forces – like Smith’s “Invisible Hand” – scrutable. “The division of labor remains a primary engine of economic growth and central to firm productivity,” she writes. It is therefore important to ask, “do we have to rely entirely upon an invisible hand to bring it about?” [See also The Academy article Network Structure, Culture & the Division of Labor]
“Smith conceptualized the division of labor as a problem of decentralization — the original ‘emergent effect’ — a mysterious, heavenly harmony produced as if ‘led by an invisible hand’,” Erikson writes here. But with the availability of today’s data and computing power, the sinews and workings of this invisible hand are made visible and, more significantly, Erikson shows that they can even be directed.
“By using our newly achieved understandings of network structure and culture, we can create environments that encourage the creation of effective and diversified teams,” Erikson argues enticingly. The invisible hand, that is, can be tipped. And this should immediately fire the imagination of anyone interested in discovering how ‘invisible’ and ‘intangible’ organizational cultural dynamics can be made visible and operable.
“How Is Flocking Like Computing?” Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz5 asks in an article/interview that appeared in March this year.6 “Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school,” he observes. “Within assemblies of organisms that seem as though they could get chaotic, order somehow emerges.”
In yet another item that appears on this year’s Starling Bookshelf, Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, Strogatz stirs a compelling sense of mystery. “For reasons we don't yet understand,” he writes, “the tendency to synchronize is one of the most pervasive drives in the universe, extending from atoms to animals, from people to planets…” On the surface, Strogatz allows, these various phenomena may seem unrelated. But he finds in them a deeper connection – “one that transcends the details of any particular mechanism.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a deeply studied mathematician, for Strogatz, that connection is mathematics. “All the examples are variations on the same mathematical theme,” he writes, “self-organization; the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos.” These diverse phenomena are guided, as it were, by some invisible hand.
The example of a flock of birds (starlings, no less) is cited again in a 2022 article summarizing research into the nature of human behavior across online social media.7 As long ago as 2010, Yale’s Nicholas Christakis8 and his co-author, the University of California (San Diego) Professor James Fowler, observed that cooperative behavior “cascades” in social networks, in another example of the spontaneous order that Strogatz describes.9
To illustrate, even as I type, the management of the trading platform, E*Trade, is forced to contemplate ‘deplatforming’ so-called ‘meme-stock’ leader, Keith Gill – better known to his legion of followers on social news platform Reddit10 as ‘Roaring Kitty.’11 Such is his influence that Gill appears able to move markets in a manner that E*Trade (and its owner Morgan Stanley) fear may constitute illegal market manipulation.
In yet another example, a Harvard Business Review article explains that “hidden teams” in the workplace, not appearing on formal org charts, may in fact have the greatest impact on company performance outcomes.12 Depending on the degree of social connectedness and informal influence enjoyed across a workplace social network, even one employee can drive group dynamics in undesired directions, the authors argue.13
Other Articles in the 2024 Compendium Comments and Contributions Series
Introduction to the 2024 Comments and Contributions
Turmoil of '23: An Introduction
Turmoil of '23: Risk Governance Failures
Turmoil of '23: Supervisory Culture
Culture Matters: An Introduction
Enigma Machines: An Introduction
Enigma Machines: Part 2
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