Curious Minds at Work

Do you really know your neighbors or coworkers?

To understand human behavior, we need research participants who act and respond truthfully. But that is a tall order when it comes to topics that are embarrassing or even incriminating. Social scientists have found it hard to get honest answers when asked about topics that might reveal racism, sexism, gluttony or a slew of other socially unacceptable traits.

Researchers like Seth Stephens-Davidowitz have found a way around that problem by analyzing data from our over 3.5 billion daily Google searches. And it turns out that the candid words, phrases, and questions we type in reveal a whole lot about us.

Seth is the author of the bestselling book, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are. He is also a New York Times op-ed contributor, a visiting lecturer at The Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist.

In this interview we discuss:

How Internet datasets help us ask bigger questions than ever before

How word and picture data expand the kinds of questions we can ask and yield unexpected insights

How data from our over 3.5 billion daily Google searches serves as a digital truth serum for learning more about what we actually think and do

How big data is giving researchers insights into small groups of people we rarely had before  

How big data is helping researchers engage in rapid experimentation and conduct quick tests to see how people respond

How horse racing analytics data scientists like Jeff Seder help us think beyond traditional data sets to uncover game-changing findings

How night lights in India revealed key insights regarding economic activity

Just how much creativity is involved in data science research

How researchers studied big data in the hopes of helping political leaders shift hate group behaviors

What Google search analysts learned about gender from searches on children and intelligence

What we are learning about poverty and economic mobility from big data

The connection between the health of poor people and the number of rich people living nearby

The connection between the number of tax accountants and how many people cheat on their taxes

How data scientists are using our doppelgangers to anticipate what we might want to buy

How the healthcare industry can use doppelgangers to personalize treatment

The fact that Google conducts more experiments in one day than the FDA does in one year

How your love of curly fries may signal high intelligence to prospective employers

How it is becoming harder than ever for regulators to stay ahead of all the things companies can know about us as the number of variables keeps on growing

How researchers may use big data to figure out, once and for all, which foods are nutritious -- and whether we really should be eating broccoli

Links to Episode Topics

@SethS_D

http://sethsd.com/

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Jeff Seder

American Pharoah

Night Lights and Economic Activity in India

2015 San Bernardino Attack

The Rise of Hate Search New York Times article

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What's behind the extraordinary experiences that stay with us? Are they as random as we're led to believe or is there a pattern to them that, if we understood it, would allow us to create them ourselves?

In his research, Dan Heath, co-author of the book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, uncovers four key elements that characterize these kinds of moments. And he explains how we can create them not only for ourselves, but for our family, our friends, and the people in our organizations.

Dan is a Senior Fellow at the CASE Center at Duke University and co-author of the bestselling books, Made to Stick, Switch, and Decisive. In this interview we discuss:

The important role that elevation, insight, pride, and connection play in defining moments

How we can tap into defining moments to celebrate and inspire employees at work

Ways to spot opportunities, like important work and life transitions, to design defining moments

How our brains hold onto the peaks and endings of defining moments

The fact that great experiences are mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable

What it looks like when we break the script to create unforgettable moments

Why we need to beware of the soul-sucking force of reasonableness to create defining moments

How defaulting to ease and efficiency can turn peak moments into speed bumps

How social moments of shared meaning and responsiveness build connection

The key roles that understanding, validation, and caring play in connecting with others

Why we build deeper connections more quickly when we work together on something bigger than ourselves

How creating the right mission and conditions can get people to take on difficult challenges

The fact that purpose has a greater impact on our performance than passion

Why purpose is central in making us more effective in our roles

How we can learn to cultivate purpose

How just one hour visiting student families in their homes completely changed the culture of a low-performing elementary school

Why 36 simple questions can help us deepen our relationships in less than an hour

When people experience crystallizing experiences that cause them to rethink their work and their lives

Links to Episode Topics

http://heathbrothers.com/

https://centers.fuqua.duke.edu/case/team_profiles/dan-heath/

John Deere and CEO Sam Allen

Magic Castle Hotel

Images of Joshee on vacation

Simply Brilliant by Bill Taylor

Harry Reis

Sharp HealthCare

Morten Hansen

Flamboyan Foundation

Carlie John Fisherow

Arthur Aron and his 36 questions

Post-traumatic growth

Option B by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg

SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal

Roy Baumeister and the crystallization of discontent

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Maybe performing under pressure is easier than we think.

In those moments before an interview, an exam, or a presentation, we often feel our worst. Yet Daniel McGinn, author of the book, Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed believes we can decrease and even repurpose those anxious feelings to up our performance.

Senior Editor of Harvard Business Review, Dan has written for Wired, Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine, and Newsweek. In this book, he draws on the fields of performance and sports psychology and shares quick and simple techniques we all can use.

In this interview we discuss:

Why we should take a page from pre-performance rituals of top athletes

How we can leverage stress before a high-stakes event and maximize our performance

What it means to fine-tune our emotions before a high-stakes event

The role that centering plays to enhance high-level performance

How pre-performance routines distract us from feeling anxious and prime us for the event

Why that lucky pen, ring, or tie really can make a difference in our performance

How the words we choose and the connections we make to something bigger than ourselves can help us psych up our teams

Why a highly experienced, highly motivated team may not need a pep talk

How listening to certain kinds of music can improve our performance in all kinds of tasks

How a sports DJ is impacting two of the top sports teams in the U.S.

Two factors that make a song motivational - how its musicality -- beats, tempo - resonate with us and how emotionally connected we feel to it

How our self talk, our visualizations, and our mental rehearsals before an important event can improve our performance

The important role priming -- physical and emotional - plays before a high-stakes event

Why we should reflect back on past successes to increase our confidence in a new performance task

How we can sit there feeling worried or we can develop a set of practices to give us confidence before a high-stakes event

Links to Topics Mentioned

@danmcginn

http://www.psychedupthebook.com/

Improving Acute Stress Responses: The Power of Reappraisal

Yuri Hanan and the Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning

Don Greene and centering

The River and Laura Donnelly and Hugh Jackman

Malcolm Gladwell

Peak by Anders Ericsson

Stanley A. McChrystal

Sports DJ TJ Connelly

Eye of the Tiger

Nate Zinsser

The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

When you hear the word power, what comes to mind? For most of us, we imagine power-hungry leaders or think of phrases like power corrupts. But when my guest, Eric Liu, considers power, he sees something different. He views power as a positive force. In fact, he believes it is a gift each of us can use to shape society.

At a time when many of us feel powerless, Eric offers a simple set of instructions for seizing power and using it to help shape our communities, our nation, and the world. He is Founder and CEO of the non-profit, Citizen University and author of the book, You’re More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen. His TED Talk on citizen power and voting has been viewed over 2 million times.

In this interview we discuss:

How power is an important literacy

Why power is about who gets to decide

How power is a gift we are continuously giving away

How our citizenship endows us with unearned power and privilege that we should share with intention

Why we need to ask ourselves, to whom am I giving my power, my might, and my imagination?

The myth of rugged individualism in the face of game-changing collective action and collaboration we have seen across history

How we are part of a collective web of relationship, obligation, and mutual aid

The fact that power compounds as people with voice and connections amass it

The fact that power justifies itself as incumbents spin narratives to maintain it

The realization that many rely on intimidation and self-justifying narratives to maintain their power

How power is infinite as demonstrated by movements to push back and reinforce pockets of power

How we can reframe power by changing the game, the story, and the equation

The fact that we are all better off when we are all better off

The power of story in organizing for change -- the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now

How a civic collaboratory taps into the shared need and wisdom of organizations to amplify their impact

How we are strong in our ideals of citizenship but weak in practicing them

Why citizenship is about power plus character - working on behalf of a greater good

How we accuse others in order to excuse ourselves

How taking responsibility sets in motion a cycle of responsibility that is contagious

Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast

@ericpliu

http://www.citizenuniversity.us/

The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner

Nick Hanauer

Marshall Ganz

Jose Antonio Vargas

Bonds that Make Us Free by C Terry Warner

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Few of us realize how dependent we are on the people and objects around us for our knowledge. But Steven Sloman does.

He reveals that we are constantly accessing expertise stored in our communities, our technologies, and in our environment. In fact, research reveals that many of us adopt positions on issues like climate change and health care from certain experts, without even realizing it. These findings have enormous implications for our increasingly polarized society, including the fact that educating people about issues is probably not the most effective way to change their minds.

Steven Sloman is co-author of the book, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.  He is a Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Cognition. His work has been featured in publications like the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and the Wall Street Journal.

In this interview we discuss:

The fact that we tend to think we understand how things work better than we actually do

How we fail to distinguish what we know from what others know

How complexity prevents us from understanding many of the things we think we do

The fact that knowledge must be collective to offset all the complexity in our lives

When we want to understand how the government or our car works, we figure out enough causal structure to solve our problems

What the deliberative mind is good at, which is coming to causal conclusions

How deliberation depends on a community of knowledge and connects us to other people

The unique ability of human beings to share intentionality, that is, to engage in tasks with other people

The limitations of understanding that comes from someone else

How understanding is contagious and community based

Much of our understanding comes  from having access to knowledge rather than actually knowing

Why it is important to help people see that they do not understand -- that they cannot explain something they think they understand well

Our conviction that we understand or know something comes from the trust we place in certain experts

The fact that we cannot convince people by making them experts but by convincing them to  believe in a different set of experts

That we tend to stick with our first explanation or conclusion, even if it is found to be incorrect

The fact that most of our beliefs are formed independent of data -- they tend to be shaped by our culture and what our community thinks

The fact that the thought leaders we look to actually determine what we believe

How we actually vote for what our communities judge to be the right things, not what the right things might actually be

The fact that group intelligence is derived from how well team members communicate with and relate to one another rather than individual intelligence

How many VCs make investment decisions based on the team and their collective intelligence

That what should spend more time on collective or team intelligence over individual intelligence

A question we can ask individuals whom we hire: How have you contributed to group performance in the past?

How engaging in the activity is key to helping us learn and to gaining causal knowledge

Why it is so important to be aware of what we do not know -- to reduce our pride in what we think we know

How intelligent nudges can guide people toward better decision making

Why focusing on policy consequences is preferable to the values associated with those policies yet is much harder to do

Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast

Steven Sloman

Frank Keil

Clark Glymour

Michael Tomasello

Herbert Clark and common ground

Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo

Anita Woolley

Pixar

Disney

Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Most of us are aware of the negative effects of income inequality on health and well-being. But few of us realize that just seeing yourself as unequal can produce the same results.

Keith Payne, author of the book, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die, and Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an international leader in the psychology of inequality and discrimination, and his work has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times and on NPR. His research helps us understand how inequality is the public health problem of the 21st century.

In this interview we discuss:

How we see ourselves compared to others is a better predictor of health and well-being than income and education

How inequality is a better predictor of drug use, health outcomes, crime, and other self-defeating behaviors than poverty in advanced economies

The false dichotomy of blaming the system or the individual when it comes to understanding inequality rather than understanding how individuals respond to their environments

How bees engaged in high risk, high reward behavior after they lost some of their honey supply and how this mirrors how humans behave when they have less

How people living in areas of greater inequality search Google on more high risk, high reward topics like payday loans and lottery tickets

Why how we feel about our status in relation to others can have a greater impact on how we vote than our actual status

How the poor do not actually tend to vote against their own self interest -- how there is more to that story than meets the eye

The fact that there is a strong correlation between the rise in income inequality and the rise in political partisanship

The fact that parts of the world with greater equality are less religious

How pay incentives works well for individual performers but less so for collaboration and teams

Does your organization value teamwork and collaboration? Then think twice about incentivizing individuals with big payouts for performance.

How we often overlook the fact that inequality is driven more by the wealthiest than by the poorest

How solving the problem of inequality by adopting a public health mindset can help develop bigger, more impactful solutions

How moving to a zip code with less inequality can potentially have a more positive impact on future outcomes than moving to a wealthier zip code

Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast

@UNCPsych

http://bkpayne.web.unc.edu/

Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram Kendi

Nancy Adler

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy ONeil

Angus Deaton

Anne Case

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Could our code be making us more human?

When most of us hear the word code, we think of computer code -- the digital instructions that drive our devices. But when Philip Auerswald hears the word code, he sees the instructions that drive the human race.

Phil is the author of the book, The Code Economy: A Forty-thousand Year History. He is an Associate Professor at the School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, and Executive Director of the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network. He is also the co-founder of Innovations, a journal on entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges.

Phil believes that as machines and algorithms play ever bigger roles in our lives, we will actually become more human. This long view of automation--a 40,000-year view--also gives us insight into a different, more innovative perspective on how to think about the future of work.

In this interview we discuss:

A broader definition of code as the DNA of human society from the simple to the complex

The importance of getting beyond singularity vs dystopian views of humans vs machines

How humans will redefine their own value -- as they have done repeatedly -- as robots, machines and algorithms play a bigger role in our world

The fact our ability to learn -- to experiment and share what we learn -- is what sets us apart

How human beings are constantly exploring spaces of possibility

How evolving understanding, knowledge, and knowhow results from finding the adjacent possible

The fact that cities are actual platforms in that they stand on problems solved in literal ways -- sewage and electric power and subway transport

How platforms of today are increasingly digital

The concepts of bifurcation and substitution where a product is split over time into cheap and high volume vs expensive and low volume, as in watches and clocks

How high volume and low cost items typically lend themselves to automation

The fact that we are trying to recapture a 1960s way of living and working that is no longer viable

How we need to rewire rather than retire

The concept of a job has only been around for about 150 years due to the introduction and growth of large-scale institutions that needed people serve in a role and act on specific routines

Why subsidizing higher education and retirement are not the right ways to think about the problem of machines, robots, and automation

Why the evolutionary nature of ideas and actions opens us up to abundance and new opportunities

How it is almost irrational to think our creative processes will come to an end

How the inequality that exists within cities and between cities and rural parts of the U.S. are the driver of political discord

Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast

@auerswald

http://auerswald.org/

Stuart Kauffman

Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford

Shinola

Nexus by Ramez Naam

Milton Friedman

Permanent income hypothesis

Otto von Bismarck

Larry Harvey and Burning Man

The Absence of Design in Nature

Scale by Geoffrey West

Jose Lobo

Progress and Poverty by Henry George

The Origin of Populist Surges Everywhere by Philip Auerswald

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Why are high-school memories of popularity so strong? Because they still shape our lives today.

Mitch Prinstein, author of the book, Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-obsessed World and Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explains how teen popularity impacts adult happiness, our health, and our relationships. And surprisingly, not just for unpopular, but for popular people, too.

And, according to Mitch, if you thought there was only one kind of popularity -- the high status kind -- then you are seeing only half the picture. There is actually another kind -- one based on likability -- that plays a key role in our lives. In fact, understanding what sets these two kinds of popularity apart -- for ourselves and our organizations -- can mean the difference between being a mediocre and an outstanding leader.

In this interview we discuss:

The connection between adolescent brain development and our desire for popularity

How memories of our popularity as teens stays with us in adulthood, for better or worse

The difference between likability and high-status popularity and why it matters

How and why high-status teens can suffer from relationship, mental health, and addiction problems as adults

How bosses who bully may have achieved high-status popularity as teens

The ill health effects low likeability, low status teens experience as adults

How our bodies are attuned to our experience with popularity as teens

Why likeability and kindness trumps high status when it comes to popularity

How our brains get a signal for social pain when we perceive we are excluded or unpopular

How perceived unpopularity can trigger in our bodies an unhealthy inflammation response

How the more sensitive we are to physical pain the more sensitive we can be to social pain and rejection

How likeable people tend to hang back and observe before talking

How likeable people say things like: I wonder if . . . , rather than: We should . . .

The fact that our memories of popularity from our teenage years influence how we see the world, including what we attribute actions of others to

When someone stands you up or shows up late, do you blame yourself or blame them?

Our popularity when we were younger influences how we view popularity for our children

Anxious and insecure mothers often have popular children because they pay attention to how their children interact with peers and tend to coach their children in proactive ways

How parents can help their children to achieve likeable popularity by modeling what it looks like and scaffolding support through young adulthood

How our likability as young people has a greater influence than many other factors when it comes to our health and well-being as adults

How the kind of popularity we associate with social media, like likes,is not the kind of popularity that serves us well as social human beings

How the extent to which others like something online can lead us to engage in more risky behavior

How the ways we interact with social media are changing what we value and care about

Why the more we connect online for status, the lonelier and more isolated we can feel

Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast

@mitchprinstein

http://www.mitchprinstein.com/

Naomi Eisenberger

Take Pride by Jessica Tracy

Martha Putallaz

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

When it comes to economic growth, why are some countries and companies better than others?

While many experts look to factors in geography, finance, or psychology for the answers, César Hidalgo asks us to look instead at information and networks. Cesar is the author of the book, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. He is also an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Collective Learning Group.

Cesar wants us to think about the amount of knowledge and knowhow people accumulate and the kinds of organizations where this information is stored. He and his team work on collective learning — that is, the learning of teams, organizations, cities, and nations. And he wants us to understand why building these kinds of networks and organizations can be challenging.

In this interview we discuss:

What it means to describe the objects around us as crystallized imagination

What distinguishes wealth from income and why it matters

Why the challenges of economic growth are tied to the challenges of learning in individuals and teams

Why individual skills, knowledge, and ability do not scale well and how this impacts economic growth

Why group or team knowledge trumps individual knowledge

Why it is not about knowing what needs to be done but about creating a team of people who have the knowledge and knowhow to do it

Why we can view products as alternative channels of communication in that they endow us with their knowledge -- we cannot build a phone but we can communicate with one or we cannot build a plane but we can be transported by one

Our capacity as individuals is augmented and expanded by the products and tools we have access to, from running water to smartphones -- channels of knowledge and comfort are transmitted through products

Economies are amplifiers of our knowledge and knowhow -- just look at how few people make toothpaste yet how many use it

Our ability to create products is limited by our knowledge and knowhow which is influenced by our social networks

How learning from experts, through experience, helps us learn and get better faster

The key differences between knowledge and knowhow and how this influences economic growth

How Ford Motor Company in 1928 experienced the challenges of transporting knowledge and knowhow through their failed experiment in Brazil called Fordlandia

The importance of asking, what are the channels that drive collective learning?

Episode Links

@cesifoti

http://www.chidalgo.com/ where you can find all the data tools her mentions in the podcast

Pep Guardiola

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Doug Rushkoff

Wernher von Braun

Fordlandia

Ricardian Trade Theory

Steven Pinker

Richard Dawkins

Jonathan Haidt

Joseph Henrich

Kurt Vonnegut

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Does our obsession with the myth of the lone genius cause us to miss out on opportunities for high-impact innovation?

Scott Page helps us see how diverse teams repeatedly outperform not only smart individuals, but also teams of talented individuals with similar backgrounds and cognitive tools. Scott is the author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, and Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan. His findings have deep implications for what we teach students, how we evaluate employees, and how we make some of our biggest decisions.

In this interview we discuss:

How cognitive diversity includes how we think about the world, how we solve problems, and how we search for creative solutions

How we can help others innovate by asking them to come up with adjacent possibles or ideas similar to the ones we are talking about

How people who are successful in their fields accumulate skills in subtle ways over time

The marked impact team diversity can have on the accuracy of its predictions

How leaders can compile data on employee competencies and experiences to inform which people they place on which teams and to determine when they may need outside perspectives

Why we should gather data on which team members made the most accurate predictions on the most important projects

Why we want to consider the most important aspects of the work we are trying to do in order to determine which people to put on which teams

Why we should ask ourselves, do we have diversity on the dimensions that matter most? If not, then find members outside of the organization who do.

Given a certain competency threshold, randomness of team members may trump ability

The fact that research shows we are always better off including some diversity as opposed to forming teams of all the best, most similar people

Why even very small improvements due to difference accumulate in big ways over time

The fact that team diversity allows us to make continual improvements

How we suffer from a siren call of sameness where we want to work with and hire people who look like us, attended the same schools, and travel in the same social circles, yet those are some of the people we should most avoid when we want to solve complex problems

How quants are giving us clear insights into the impact of diverse teams

How complexity is driving us to work in teams yet how we are still evaluating most people in our organizations only as individuals

The fact that we want both deep talent and diverse talent in our organizations and on our teams

The fact that with people from only one identity group, we have a limited set of life experiences and ways of seeing the world that limits our creativity and problem-solving abilities

When it comes to social policy work we want to be sure we have people in the room who can assess the policy from a multitude of perspectives and experiences

Why young people should be thinking about depth and difference and the tools and skills they need to learn to demonstrate either or both

What skills, tools, and behaviors are we helping young people accumulate?

Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast

@ScottPage4

http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/

John Taylor

Lu Hong

Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox by Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten

Jon Kleinberg

Maithra Raghu

Steven Johnson

Stuart Kauffman

The Great Courses

Jack B. Soll

Ray Dalio

Juliet Bourke

Whiplash by Joi Ito

Rule of 72

Sheen S. Levine

Radical Candor by Kim Scott

Leigh Thompson

Verna Myers

Steve Jurvetson

Barbara Mellers and Philip Tetlock

Malcolm Gladwell

Kimberly Crenshaw

Tim A. McKay

Reid Hoffman

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!