We speak a fair bit on the topics herein for audiences interested in learning how behavioral science and computational social science techniques come together in the context of culture and conduct risk management (and supervision). Nearly always someone asks, "Where can I learn more?"
So we've complemented our Compendium with reference to some of the works that sit dog-eared on our bookshelves, yellow highlighter marks competing with coffee stains and notes in the margins. We hope our readers will be inspired to give one or two of these terrific books a glance—and most particularly that by our advisor, Amy Edmondson, below.
For more, please see our 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2020 Bookshelves.
"Every person is a compulsive group-seeker, hence an intensely tribal animal."
"People must have a tribe. It gives them a name in addition to their own and social meaning in a chaotic world. It makes the environment less disorienting and dangerous. The social world of each modern human is not a single tribe, but rather a system of interlocking tribes, among which it is often difficult to find a single compass."
"To an unprecedented degree, homo sapiens are adapted for acting and thinking cooperatively in cultural groups." "The problem is how we can get ourselves to join forces. This is not a trivial task since what I do depends on what I think you will do and vice versa, recursively, which means that we must be able to communicate and trust one another sufficiently."
"One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others."
"Culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people. It is as a people that they arrange their rules with each other, their moralities, their modes of communication."
"Much of what passes for economic motivation is … actually rooted in the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means."
"It is not enough that I have a sense of my own worth if other people do not publicly acknowledge it or, worse yet, if they denigrate me or don't recognize my existence. Self-esteem arises out of esteem by others."
"Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able — even obligated — to be candid."
"[It] is mission critical when knowledge is a crucial source of value."
"People at work are not only failing to speak up with potentially threatening or embarassing content, they are also witholding ideas for improvement."
"Just as psychological safety is contagious, so is negativity. Anger, anxiety, loneliness and fear are all contagious. They propagate through networks."
"Humans have a profound need to feel seen, heard and understood. But it is a privilege we are not frequently granted." "If we are going to have a society where people understand people who are different from them, work is where that is most likely to take root."
"People are both creators and carriers of culture."
"The premise of this book is that individual behavior cannot be understood without taking into account the organizational and environmental context of that behavior."
"Practices do not follow rules; rather, rules follow practices."
"Deviance from accepted practice is often essential to the ongoing enterprise, even when it appears to conflict with official goals."
"We need to consider how beliefs and behaviours arise, and how they can spread."
"From innovations to infections, contagion is often a social process."
"If we improve our understanding of how something is spreading, we can come up with more effective control measures. We may be able to target interventions at high-risk groups, or identify other weak links in the chain of transmission."
"People do not make choices in isolation: the pay attention to what other people do, and what others disapprove of. But who are these other people that individuals observe before acting themselves? In other words, who belongs to each person's main reference network?"
"Mapping the reference network is an essential part of understanding social norms and how to change them, because the norm has to change within the reference network..."
"The vast majority of the time, the social influences altering people's behavior takes place beyond their field of vision — in their blind spot."
"Our modern communication infrastructure has revealed, for the first time, the precise pathways that behaviors follow as they move through populations."
"Social networks are not merely pipes that spread information ... but prisms that color how people receive new ideas and innovations."
"Wicked problems refuse to cooperate. The are messy, ill-defined, open to many competing interpretations, more complex than we understand, and lacking correct answers."
"Facing such an impossible or intractable problem, we usually choose one of three options, each of them flawed. We attempt to ignore or deny it, wishing that it would go away; we repeat the same attempts to solve it as we have always done in the past; or we simply hope for a miracle."
"In studying the evolution of human organizations, it is not always advantageous to consider the individual members of the organization merely as simplified generic agents."
"All around us are facts that are related to one another. Of course, they can be regarded as separate entities and learned that way. But what a difference it makes when we see them as part of a pattern!"
"Complexity economics builds upon the proposition that the economy is not necessarily in equilibrium: economic agents (firms, consumers, investors) constantly change their actions and strategies in response to the outcome they mutually create."
"Complexity, in other words, asks how individual behaviors might react to the pattern they together create and how that pattern would alter itself as a result."
"Adam Smith had a deep, intuitive understanding of emergence and was arguably the first complexity economist. Smith and other early economists were aware that aggregate patterns emerge from individual behavior and interactions, and that individual behavior responds to these aggregate patterns. There is thus a recursive, reflexive loop at the heart of the economy. Complexity economics asks how this loop drives behavior of the system over time."
"Prediction takes information you have, often called "data," and uses it to generate information you don't have."
"Prediction machines enable managers to move beyond optimizing individual components to optimizing higher-level goals and thus make decisions closer to the objectives of the organization."
"Each new prediction has an indirect effect: it makes choices feasible that you would not have considered before."
"Architectural innovations change the relationship between the components of a system — the system's architecture — without changing the components themselves. And because most people in most organizations are focused on the components of the system they're embedded in, rather than the relationship between them, architectural innovations are hard to spot and hard to react to."
"Firms are at the core of capitalism. The mass contempt in which capitalism is held — as greedy, selfish, corrupt — is largely due to their deteriorating behavior."
"The dangerous leaders are those who rely only on enforcement. The valuable ones are those who use their position as communicator-in-chief at the hub of their networked group — they achieve influence through crafting narratives and actions."
"Social capital refers to connections among individuals — social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them."
"The core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value."
"Civic engagement and social connectedness can be found inside the workplace, not only outside it. Thus our workplace agenda should include new means of social-capital formation on the job."
"The relationship addressed by the social license is that between society as a whole and those of its members that engage in financial market activity. That is expressed, in practice, in a myriad of individual and group relationships."
"Individuals do not act in isolation… [F]inancial markets are an ecosystem of individuals and groups — places of social interaction."
"Trust is derived from the reality of relationships and is implicit in the idea of a license."
"Time and again, defendant corporations receive substantial sentencing credit for a compliance plan that was a dismal failure and that missed misconduct that continued for years."
"Continuing failure begins to call into question the legitimacy of our legal system."
"The unavoidable policy implication then is that corporate prosecutions need to be supplemented by individual prosecutions in order to generate minimally adequate deterrence."
