Everything is identity
“Why are we so fixated on the individual self? It was a big con. The individual self is a relatively modern invention. The idea that human psychology is about the individual self was really an analytical fiction that was devised in the 20th century.” Professor Alex Haslam
This is the first part of a wide-ranging discussion with Professor Alex Haslam. He talks us why our group identities are so essential to us and define who we are as adults. He quotes his mentor John Turner who said, ‘Social identity is what makes group behaviour possible’. By the time you’ve finished with this episode I’m sure you’ll agree.
Check out an utterly brilliant talk by Alex – consider this the best training you could send yourself on:
Alex mentions his partner Cath Haslam, who is also a psychologist.
Full transcript and notes are on the website – along with an Identity playlist of episodes.
If you’re interested in exploring Alex’s recent contributions to discussions on leadership and culture these papers are a great place to start:
Alex Haslam is Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology at the University of Queensland. He is one of the world’s leading researchers on group dynamics, leadership, and identity. Over the past three decades, Alex has helped reshape our understanding of how people think, feel, and behave as members of groups, and why social identity is central to motivation, resilience, and effective teamwork.
Alex is co-author of The New Psychology of Leadership and The New Psychology of Sport and Exercise, and his work has been applied widely—from health and education to business, politics, and the military. With over 300 research articles and multiple international awards to his name, Alex is recognised as a pioneer of social identity theory in practice, showing how a sense of “us” can unlock extraordinary human potential.
Men’s Sheds: this is the creation of a group where men (normally retired) come together to work on craft projects together. Or at least that’s the overt objective. The covert objective is to enable older men to make new friends and feel part of a group.
Read more about men’s sheds (they are sometimes non-gender specific, although there’s been slightly less success with those groups).
**Episode 2 coming next week**
Transcript
Bruce Daisley: To kick off, I wonder if you could introduce who you are and what you do.
Alex Haslam: Yeah. Hi I am Alex Haslam and I’m a professor of social and organizational psychology in the school of Psychology at the University of Queensland. And I do research and teaching around the. Issues of group process, but particularly as they pertain to collective dynamics in organizations, in society as a whole in a range of different types of groups.
And I look, I guess particularly at issues of performance and wellbeing and health. And then I’m particularly interested in the role and the dynamics of leadership around those things.
Bruce Daisley: go into them if I want you to do something that I think holistically illustrates to me the power of what you generally. Have talk about and have [00:01:00] discovered, it’s that confounding thing where when people are asked what are the biggest contributors to their health, and they’re maybe given a series of options of their exercise regime or the food they consume or the alcohol consumption they’ve got, or whether they smoke or the social connections that they’ve got in their life.
Most people, when they’re presented with a series of options like that, immediately go for something like maybe exercise or or alcohol consumption. And they completely miss the one that seems to be very heavily evidenced as transforming our whole lived experience. I just wonder if you could, you, you
Alex Haslam: Yeah. Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: What
Alex Haslam: Talk me through it.
Bruce Daisley: and maybe
Alex Haslam: Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: the mechanism.
Alex Haslam: Yeah. Yeah. So just, yeah, so that con the context for that was,
Bruce Daisley: to the
Alex Haslam: yeah. My colleagues and I,
Bruce Daisley: What’s the thing that’s most
Alex Haslam: yeah. Oh,
Bruce Daisley: us?
Alex Haslam: okay. Yeah. So yeah okay. We, I’m stealing my own thunder here, but yeah. The answer [00:02:00] is social relations and human connection. And the point about that is that re, that particular study that you’re alluding to came out, there’s a lot of research around, predictors of mortality.
A lot of stuff in the health space about, yeah, trying to get people to stop smoking, exercise more all things which are incredibly sensible. Wear, sunscreen, all that sort of stuff. Go take the right medicines. And of course all of those things are important for your health. But yet. A number of very significant analyses and very one very influential meta-analysis by Julian Lundstedt and her colleagues.
Points to the fact that actually social integration and social support are the two biggest things that protect you from dying. They’re the things that stop you from dying. Now when you, yeah, as you say, when you go out in the world and you ask people about that, they list all those traditional physical things and they put it at the very bottom of it.
They don’t just put it in the middle, they put it at the very [00:03:00] bottom. They put social connection and social integration. Interestingly too, we’ve just got another study, which is in a very, somewhat different domain, which is looking at predictors of. Adjustment in retirement. So what predicts whether you have a happy retirement?
When you ask people, they say having a lot of money and being healthy actually being healthy is a very good predictor, but just as good is is the quality of your social relations. And actually, more specifically, it’s not just social relations in the abstract, it’s basically the number of groups, meaningful groups that you are a member of.
And that really goes to the first point too. So we talk loosely about social integration and social support, but. What we’re really talking about is being a functional member of multiple social groups. One or more, ideally more. And again, in retirement, if [00:04:00] you don’t have meaningful group based activities, what, and that can take any form.
You’re gonna be pretty miserable and you’re not going to have the kind of retirement that you’d hoped for. And what’s interesting about that, of course, is that when we’re planning for retirement, firstly and indeed when we’re planning for health, we’re bombarded with messaging around the physical things.
And in the case of retirement, about the importance of finances. Again, our study shows that actually the number of groups you’re in is about four times more important for your adjustment post-retirement than your than your financial state providing of course that you are not in, abject poverty or penny.
Yeah, that money is very good at getting you if you like to, allowing you to, keep body and soul together. But beyond that, it has l very little value other than allowing you to actually live out value group membership. Obviously if you wanna be a member of the golf club, but you want to be in your book club or your your [00:05:00] dinner club or whatever, or your movie club you’re gonna need some resources to do those things.
And some things are more expensive than others but the best thing you can do with your money is invest it in functional, meaningful group memberships that make you feel good.
Bruce Daisley: that really vividly brought that to life for me, which you might remember the details of, which was a Scandinavian Care home. And they had a group of the members of the care home who were attending some sort of aerobics class or Zumba class or some sort of thing, and they decided they wanted to benchmark the effectiveness of that exercise.
So they laid it side by side because they said, look, there’s two things going on here. The Zumba class is. Zumba it’s a class, it’s a group of people getting together each week and it’s a class, and they did another one, which is I think in another adjacent classroom or another time they had a reminiscent class or a stories class and it had the same benefit.
It had the exact same benefit. And a, for me, if you wanted a vivid example of sometimes how we see something and we
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: what we [00:06:00] wanna believe, actually the social element was as effective. You must know much more detail of that from than I do.
Alex Haslam: Y Yeah. Yeah. And actually we did a study, this was with Ilka Gleibs at LSE and my colleague and partner Cath (Catherine Haslam) many years ago, which was down in Devon. And we did this study in a care home in Devon. And there was an article on BBC News, and it was about this care home. And they said, oh, they’ve discovered this thing and they’ve set up this.
Water club. And the idea in the water club was that they just met once a week and they just talked about water and how much they were drinking. And of course the point there in you when you’re older, it’s very important not to dehydrate. So drinking water’s a good thing. In this water club, they talked about all the benefits of water and blah, blah, blah.
And they had recounted all their experiences of drinking water, just about the most boring thing on the planet, right? Drinking water almost by definition. And it had all these remarkable benefits. And the paper that we wrote, the research we did is published, I think British Journal of Psychology was, is [00:07:00] it the water or is it the club?
And yeah, we had one group of people who just went into a room and drank water and talked about water on their own or wrote, made notes about it. They were consuming the same amount of water. Another group that did the water club and did the clubby thing, and then another group in a control group who were in a, just a newspaper club and they just got together and talked about the news.
There was no difference between the two clubs, but they were both massively better than the water. And that’s a, that study you could do a million times. ’cause again, look, you watch the news every night and someone’s saying, oh, the value of dance, the value of music, the value of trombone playing, the value of tiddlywinks, whatever it is.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s got value. But if you do it on your own, it doesn’t have the value. So the value is created by actually, here’s the thing, right? Most, okay, I, so I’m in Australia and I moved to Australia a long time ago, 1986. And one of the first things that. When, when I was starting to socialize and meet new people, some some friends or, took me to [00:08:00] an A FL game.
Okay? Australian rules Football anybody’s ever been to an A FL game. This is just a stupid game. You have these, you have four posts at one end of a pitch. You just kick it in any direction. There’s no offside, there’s millions of players on the pitch. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s, it’s as games go, it is pretty daft.
It’s bloody hard to play and blah, blah, blah, but the and you play it for whatever it is, two and a half hours, it goes on forever. Okay? Every week, hun. 80,000 people in Melbourne go to pretty much every game. It’s got massive following, a FL is central to the lifeblood of, Australian society.
And the point of. A theme like a FL is not to kick a ball around. It’s to get a lot of people together to enjoy themselves and to find meaning in something that’s utterly meaningless. And that’s really, so much of what we do is actually inherently of negligible value. And it’s pretty meaningless in a particular sense.
But by being members of groups we’ve, first [00:09:00] of all, we. Impute meaning to it. We give it meaning, we imbue it with meaning. And we and we extract value from it in a form of enjoy, enjoyment, wellbeing and fundamentally health. So again, these activities, whatever they are, and all societies, all cultures, all things find ways, mysterious ways to bring people together.
And we call that culture or something else. And, but the point of those things is to allow people to live out their collective identities and to develop that. Really important aspect of their self. And again, if you are not doing those things, there’s a sense in which you’re gonna be unhappy, but you’re not gonna be like properly human in a particular sense.
I’d say. And again, lots of work I think on, by sociologists, anthropologists, evolutionary scholars really pointing to the fact that it’s our ability to congregate and find meaning in collective activity. And it’s the psychological processes that allow us to do those things.
That is, what’s makes us distinctly human. [00:10:00] And it’s also what gives us an advantage or has given us an advantage as a species, our ability to organize and work collectively towards, a range of tasks and to, again. Develop that collective sense of meaning and purpose and agency and efficacy, and then to bring about forms of collective change, which can be very banal or they can be, hugely meaningful.
Bruce Daisley: at work? Because, it’s one thing to say, being part of something and these brilliant charts that I’ve linked in the show notes to the presentation that I’m must have watched four times, which is you talking to the British Psychological Association and you show these charts of people being hospitalized for mental a mental health episode or for people being hospitalized for various different things.
And the biggest predictor of their wellbeing after two years and five years is how many social groups they report feeling part of. It’s just astonishing to see it laid
In such powerful
What’s at work, why I get it. I get that we’re social beings. I get that we are [00:11:00] wired
Alex Haslam: yeah. Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: what’s it, why on earth would that be so protective of us?
Alex Haslam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so just, that just, you, just, that, just as that thing you just said also is really worth underlining. You’ve got an illness, you’ve got, and it could be mental illness or physical illness. And actually there’s some research in Denmark around this. The key to recovery is social connection.
Actually. It’s incredibly difficult to recover from things on your own. But so groups are an amazing recovery mechanism. The work in Danish hospitals, one of the things they discovered was they traditionally had a medical model of recovery, which was where, and you wanna keep all the family and everything away from the recovery space because, they just interfere with the medical treatment.
But actually they did these really big control tests and they found actually that. That not only that actually involving the family in the recovery process, but also in planning for recovery and treatment was massively predictive of whether the re whether recovery happened, but also it speeded it up by a factor of about three.
So if [00:12:00] you are not doing those things, you are wasting, two thirds of your health budget because you are, because people aren’t recovering. So again, it is, it’s, it is the fundamental point here is it’s not just an add-on. That’s the what people say oh yeah, we can do it in a group if you like.
That might save a bit of time. Rather than doing everybody individually, no, you wanna do it in a group. Because if we get a group that locks it in, that builds it in, that does, that allows people to do all the sense making there. So again. You can say to people, have this regime of taking your drugs or doing exercise or whatever.
If they do it on their own, they just give up when they’re in a group. Other people encourage them to continue and they wanted to do it because they are, they want to, they wanna be part of the group. But again, and I think you see that all the time, how difficult, and here’s just a little thing, c and I both work in the same area, and every so often she has, we’re separated, she goes off to a comments or I or whatever.
But when she goes away, I just realize like, how. How just difficult it is to do really basic things like the laundry because you just don’t, you’re not doing it as part of some sort of collective enterprise. And that’s also [00:13:00] why when you have couples who’ve been married for a long time, when one of them dies, the other, dies within a month.
I mean my, that’s such a common story because it’s just and of course people, I’m getting to the age where I go to probably more funerals and weddings and and that’s just such a common story. What’s the mechanism? What’s the mechanism? Obviously the point is, that’s just about the biggest question in social science.
If you ask me, it’s probably, for me, the biggest question in science is at the heart of our humanity, and there’s an answer. The answer is depersonalization. What that means is that we understand the self and we act. Not just in terms of our personal identities, our individuality as I important as those things are in, in very range of context.
But we are able to self categorize as a member of a group. So we, so what that just in [00:14:00] very basic terms means is that the self is not all about iron me. It’s about us. And we, and depersonalization just means that we orient to social situations to the world. We act in the world as members of groups. So the self is an expanded self that encompasses other people.
And actually that very simple idea has just. Just amazing, explanatory power and you can pretty much, I think I’m a, in a I’m a very workaday academic, but I’ve made a career just out of that basic point and saying, hang on a minute here. I think there might be a group thing that you’re not tapping into, you’re not recognizing and you isolate that experimentally or whatever.
And lo and behold, it does the work and all the studies that we’ve been talking about, and you can see how you can, pretty much I could watch a news every night and there’d be something and where someone is talking about the value of something that people do individually and in the background, oh, 30 other people who they’re not talking about, and you’re going, hang on a minute here.
Like, why are we so fixated on the individual self? And my. The short story, I think is that it was a big con. I think that it was, I think that the individual self is a relatively modern sort of invention of a particular form. But the ramification of it, the valorisation of it, and the idea that human psychology is about the individual self was really an analytical fiction that was devised in the 20th century.
And but it became absolutely central to North American social psychology and the politics that was wrapped around that. The politics of organizational psychology and society as a whole, and. Which, which saw which for which there was value in atomization of people and undermining or blocking their capacity to act collectively.
And that’s really to do with issues of politics and power. And the idea that high status groups are, the thing that worries the most is the collectivity of lower status groups. And so wherever you’re talking about the workplace or the world at [00:16:00] large, you want to neutralize that collective power.
And you want to also get people to imagine that the best version of themselves is themselves as an individual, not withstanding the fact that, you, the evidence. And we have whole theories, which are really about that. If you know there’s, I’m sure, I don’t know, there’s people listening to this, as an organizational psychologist or someone, when you.
If there’s, there’s quite a lot of things that make me virtually wretch. Okay. But Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of them. Where you’ve got self-actualization at the top. Interestingly, of course, Maslow never said that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is his self of fiction.
That’s not what he, if you read his writing, so that’s not what he was talking about. But but we’ve come to imagine as some sort of hierarchy. And down the bottom we’ve got these sort of physical things like staying alive and in the middle you’ve got a bit of connection and stuff, but at the very top, the, is self-actualization.
No, not really. I.
Bruce Daisley: You because you’re talking about that depersonalization and the separation of, of our own [00:17:00] identity from fixation on ourself. It comes to something that was gonna come to later, but it’s got a direct application for the way we think about work.
’cause a lot of work now has been about the celebration of the self. In fact, I was reading something today that you sent to me, which is about lead and narcissism and the quotation from the paper that you could, you contributed to is quote. Nevertheless, we argue that hyper competitive leadership selection practices have the capacity to catalyze and amplify narcissistic tendencies for those who are selected into leadership positions. And effectively you talk in that paper about how, whether it’s highly competitive promotion rounds or the thing very common in American companies of stack ranking organizations and your end of quarter review will be based on how you have performed individually versus your peers. And those
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: individualized practices you say leads to a form of. Narcissism inside the [00:18:00] workplace. And as a result of that, they actually are to the detriment of overall business performance. And I’d just love to think about that. ’cause that is, it’s just such a norm of most businesses to try and set people up competing against each in somehow to Each other. love you to give me what’s going wrong there.
Alex Haslam: Yeah. Yeah, I think I dunno, I’m sure your listeners have got reflections on this, but I, I remember when, to all through my career, actually the thing I enjoy about work is the, what the teams I work in. I’ve worked with fabulous teams and in all the places I’ve been at, and I, I, I it’s the people that you work, it’s the people make the place.
That’s a platitude really. But again, we say that all the time. We don’t really think what it means. But I remember in all these things, a lot of these things, particularly in academia, all the kind of. All this performance stuff and all the prizes and awards and all the bonuses and all those types of things are relatively new.
And I can remember when [00:19:00] I, this was a long time ago when I was at the University of Exeter, they introduced a, they were gonna introduce a sort of scheme where they had a sort of bonuses for academics based on sort of performance. And it was and it was a, anyway, there’s question marks about how good an idea that is.
I don’t, this isn’t really what motivates us. Nice as it might be to get some sort of bonus. And anyway, we had, there was this process we had to go through. He didn’t really have any choice. He start, he was part of the appraisal thing and we said, this is my colleagues. And I said, this is ridiculous.
Like it, we work in a team. Everything we do is collective. And the idea that you would just pick one of us out and give them the award is. Does violence to that reality. Moreover, of course it’s worse than that is, right? So we’ve got six of us, and then they’ve somehow on some basis say, oh, actually this one person is better than everybody else.
And so they’re gonna get the whatever it was, a thousand pound bonus or something, or, a hundred pounds of maybe five. What does that do [00:20:00] to team dynamics and what does and the reality is firstly, they wouldn’t let us do it. It was the first thing, and they, and we lodged and we presented a, we felt pretty indignant about it.
And we presented a sort of ac an intellectual case for why. This wasn’t a good idea and if you were gonna do it you should recognize teams. I think actually something they subsequently did because the evidence was, it wasn’t very, people didn’t like it. But the it, these things are destructive.
But of course there’s a whole walks range of spheres of activity where we just take them for granted. I think, and we think, oh yeah, that’s right, you’re gonna do that. But I think and I think it can be very uncomfortable being on the receiving end of those things. And it’s really uncomfortable not being on the receiving end.
You pleasant doesn’t get the prize when you’ve done all the work. And obviously there’s o other things built into that, like power asymmetries. And I think, at some level, part of leadership is overcoming those. Differences and creating a sense of cohesion. And so these kinds of things just drive a wedge into that.
And actually, as we say in the paper, there’s just a whole stack of organizational [00:21:00] practices, which people pretty much take for granted and think, oh, that’s the way the world is. It was hand, it was the 11th commandment. You shall subject yourself to individual level performance appraisal. No, not really.
And that, and if you were designing the system from scratch based on the data, that’s not what you would do. Hey, I just wanted to go back to one thing because because it’s a important and it, and again, like if, we work in our research team I guess there’s lots of, we gonna learn a lot about kind of methods and we focus a lot on theory and stuff.
But one of the very first things that I always say to students is just to reflect on the way that you use the term. Self. So if you replay this interview and you say that when you use the terms the self, you were talking about the individual. So you are saying so, and that just is the way we’ve normalized it in everyday discourse, the self is me.
That’s it. The self is me. So if I’m self-actualization, self-determination, self-aggrandizement, whatever you’re talking about, it’s the individual self, but actually the self. We do, I we’re interested in the self. [00:22:00] It’s just not the personal self, it’s the social self, the collective self, the wiener spear and personal self act.
Sorry. So collective self-actualization, collective self-determination. Collective self-efficacy are every bit as important as those individual level things. And they’re just as much a part of the self. So it’s not about the self versus the group. That’s a false dichotomy. And the first kind of barrier to recognizing that’s false is just the language we have around this.
So again I spend, I, I know, you know me well enough to know I’m, I’ve, I’m a bit of a pendant. The first thing that I, you know I do when I’m, having discussions around this with students is can we just be a little bit more forensic about the way we use the term, the self? And I just think that’s a bit of discipline.
I’d encourage everybody to think about when you are using the term, the self or the self in your theorizing or as informs your practice, what is your model of self and how limited is it? And how limiting is it of what you are doing and thinking,
Bruce Daisley: when you think of the self of the self, first and foremost of the social self, do you think there’s something different to between the individual self and the social self? The way I always construe it is that. The the, our individual model of ourselves gives us access to the other people around us.
It’s the way that we connect with others. But I was really intrigued. I’ve read a book recently and I’m gonna quote something be to you because it’s very adjacent to some of the stuff you talk about. And it’s by a writer called Will Store. He’s written loads of books about how to write stories, storytelling, and the, one of the things he talks about in his most recent book, which is I think the story is a deal.
It’s about using stories to to sell ourselves to people. But he’s talking specifically about suicide. He’s, he works on a suicide helpline and he says this quotation, he says I’ve wor, I’ve found, so he works on a suicide helpline, and he says, I’ve found the suicidal tend to be suffering. Either from chronic pain, recent [00:24:00] bereavement, or most commonly identity failure. They’re seriously in persistently lacking in connection or status. Usually both. They feel the character they’re playing in the story of their lives has failed they’re trapped in that failure. Now that’s interesting.
’cause for me, that gives a bridge from this I idea of the individual self, seeing that the individual self is effectively our access point to connections with other people. And you might have a fully realized version of your individual self, but unless you can connect with others, it’s meaningless.
And I just, it feels so adjacent
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: everything you are talking about, but feels quite an a,
Alex Haslam: Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: sort of relevant
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: love your thoughts on it.
Alex Haslam: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, look, again, I just reflect on the conversation. There’s each of these questions there’s three in my mind, there’s three or four paths out of it. There’s really multiple things. Firstly this thing about suicide. Yeah. I, and we Kath and Tegan and other Tegan Cruz and other colleagues of our, who we got [00:25:00] starting to do more walk on that.
But, I think that idea of that, that that if you are locked in the personal self and you can’t see that, you can’t make that connection to the group, to the collective you, that there is, that, you feel an adjunct to the world rather than a part of it as a member of a group.
So you don’t have that sense of social identity as a basis for a sense of connection and meaning and purpose and agency on all those things. Yeah. That’s a, firstly, that’s very damaging for your. Mental health. But as you say, actually it has a footprint in very much in, in this suicidal space.
And actually you all aspects of the sorts of prevailing models of suicide can be, come, be traced to that like feeling. One of them is feeling that you are a burden. So you feel that, that you are that, you the, you are not helping the group in the way that you’d want to.
And again, do you have the idea. Of the world bearing down on you as an [00:26:00] individual and you, and again, I the other bit there too, which really is, comes through. And actually one of the studies that you alluded to earlier is, the biggest, what’s a bit, there’s the two biggest predictors of depression are, at a global level, are one of poverty.
Don’t talk enough about that. And secondly, identity loss. So if I, actually making you depressed or me depressed is a relatively easy thing to do. I’m just gonna take away your valued group memberships, whatever they are, your family, your religion your sports club your job. Again, actually from a lot of people working age people, the best way to make ’em depressed is make ’em unemployed.
Like at no with given no notice type thing. Why? Because you’re taking away a valued social identity and not replacing it with anything. And again, that goes back to that the. The career transitions retirement piece, but Kath and others have done big meta analysis around next year. Social identity loss is a huge [00:27:00] risk factor for just about everything.
Radicalization, you name it. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a, an ever present kind of feature of the world that the other, but the question you asked embedded in there too, is around this, how does the personal self relate to the collective self? Now that’s a. That’s a really big question.
And again, our, a lot of our work and our colleagues work and the work that kind of, the historical work in this field is really around that. So the theory that animates our work is really social identity theory, self categorization theory, and they’re fundamentally concerned with those things.
And the point to there, a very simple kind of observation, is the social, the group is personal. And similarly the personal is social. And those two things are, so they’re not actually in the world. They’re not. And you can add, you can break them up experimentally in various kinds of ways and privilege or prioritize one over the other.
But in the world at large they’re intermeshed. So again, my football team or my family. They’re [00:28:00] personal to me, and if you hurt them, you hurt me. And I feel it personally. But at the same time, our sense of the personal is actually hugely contingent on the social. The example I give around that is I think, you know what I think, if you wanna, I, one of the things I often say to students is, just tell me about the best version of yourself.
When do you think you are at your best? And pretty much always, people will, nobody ever says, I’m at my best sitting in a sofa, watching TV on my own or whatever. Everybody will say the best version. If you wanna see the best version of me, you wanna see me in some sort of social setting with a lot of other people, like at a football match or at a conference or in my work team or whatever it might be.
Or with my family having a really nice meal, that’s quite a common thing for people to say. The, in those moments I think, like I, I sometimes think if I give a talk, which, I to do, like I, you get really, so you get a bit of a rush, you, and you you [00:29:00] feel validated as a, as an individual through your participation in those collective activities.
And especially if you are valued by the group, if they’ve asked you to come and do some talk or whatever it is, you feel good about that. And then I always think I, I walk out into the street after the conference or whatever, walk down the street. And you’re nobody. And I think, and I just, and you just have that I, you just have that thing and you just, for a moment, you just have that sense.
And I find those junctures those sort of fault lines of our lives, am I an important person? Not really. And only to some people, to some groups at some point in time. And I think coming to grips with that is very hard. Going back to the retirement piece, people who perceive, who are see themselves as important, they make the mistake of thinking that it’s all about them.
’cause they’re just great people. And of course when they retire or they move away from the group, they find that the group goes on fine without them and forgets about them. And that’s pretty matched, but that’s,
Bruce Daisley: But here’s a provo, here’s a provocation for you then because
Alex Haslam: Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: something
Alex Haslam: Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: online [00:30:00] recently by a guy called Nick Chapton Jones. And he applied exactly that prism that you brought there to why bosses want workers back in the office. ’cause he said bosses are in, when bosses are at home, they’re just another guy on a Zoom calling a t-shirt.
Alex Haslam: Yep,
Bruce Daisley: one in their household
Alex Haslam: yep,
Bruce Daisley: attention. Their wife’s complaining that the recycling hasn’t been collected and she’s got something to do. They’ve got no status when they’re in the office. Their identity and their perception in the group is very vividly felt
Alex Haslam: yep.
Bruce Daisley: so what they effectively
Alex Haslam: Absolutely.
Bruce Daisley: By working from home is they feel identity theft. In the same way that you’ve articulated, the most powerful way you can have to
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: someone of any sense of wellbeing is stripped their identity from these people who’ve been stripped of their identity. What do you think of that? I loved that.
Alex Haslam: Yeah, absolutely. And I saw that podcast because I saw your thing through it and I was thinking, [00:31:00] yeah. And actually a colleague of ours, the University of Leipzig Hannah Zucker has data on exactly that in the pandemic. And one of the things that you see, and it was really clear in his data ’cause, and it was longitudinal tracking people, daily diary type stuff, was that in the pandemic rank.
And file workers were very happy ’cause they could just get on with their work and they could self-organize collectively, self-organize. They were very productive, more productive than they, you look at academic production during the. Pandemic was through the roof. Okay. Because they were animated by a whole set of social problems.
They wanted to challenge, but also they were free of the burden of managerialism. And so they were able, they were like, they really were able to get on with what they wanted to do. And yes, in, in Hannah’s data, what is that middle upper management, they were like in a state.
They were, apoplectic. But also they were pretty wretched and miserable. And they also, they engaged they engaged in a certain amount of catastrophic thinking around the idea of God, imagine what would happen if if if this were to go [00:32:00] on forever. And actually the workers were empowered and discovered they didn’t really need us to do all the stuff that we do.
What would we do for a living? And where would our big fat paychecks come from? That was a, there was a bit of existential threat in there too. And I think there was that moment of realization, and I think what you saw on the back of that too was a huge reaction where they came back stronger, like management with the stuff and all these return to work things were not just about exerting authority and wanting to feel important and throw your weight around, which I think absolutely I think they were animated by that desire to kinda restore normal service as it were, but with bells on.
And I, so I feel that was absolutely, and part of that process. And of course it was hugely misguided and is hugely problematic and is not in any way supported by the data, but yet those in my organizational class. It is actually, which is brilliant, a [00:33:00] fourth year honors class for students.
The students every year do absolutely fantastic presentations. And maybe, and for the last two or three years, I would say 50% of them have been around this kind of topic. And actually. And, their tech and these younger students and their sort of take on it as people are on the receiving end of that, whatever it is.
I’m never quite on top of this gen thing, but are they Gen Y or Z or something or whatever. But that thing, that they’re this and a lot of their stuff is around. The ways in which they feel, that the other the managerial class and the managerial generation has got it in for them and is abso and is punishing them for these kinds of for, in, in this way.
And that again, and they’re very interested to look at the data and say no, we shouldn’t be. We shouldn’t be doing that. Just another thing there, like another thing that I know you’ve touched on other places. A colleague of mine here at uq, John Queen, done a lot of res economists, very well respected [00:34:00] economists, done a lot of stuff around things like the four day week and the value of the four day week, which I’m pretty persuaded by.
And I think huge benefits, wellbeing, benefits for people, actually very good benefits for organizations that implement it in terms of job satisfaction, commitment, lack of turnover, reputational stuff. So real big benefits but absolute total pushback from, the sort of managerial class and the owners of corporations.
And somehow suggesting that we’re one to introduce that would be basically the beginning of the end of the world type thing. And again, what’s that about? It’s not really about the data, but it’s about wanting to create a world in which they are able to exert their power and their identities and their way of being on others because yeah, that it’s not just, it makes ’em important, but it allows them to create a world that fits with their ideologies, their ethos, and their broader political objectives.
Bruce Daisley: talk about that there, the leadership and [00:35:00] the specifics of leaders. Some of the most applicable research I’ve seen from you and the people who work in your area with regards to work is this notion of asking workers. If the boss is a good example of the sort of people who work here, that notion that the boss is in some way emblematic of being the in-group is of a
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: of the sort of people who work here.
And so you occasionally see I, I did, I I went to London Fire Brigade about 12 months ago, and it was a real point of pride. The leader of the London Fire Brigade working class man who’s come through the ranks. And so when he stands up there and he speaks in the accent that the, all of the colleagues speak and he looks like one of them who’s has ascended and he behaves in that way.
He’s a very vivid, clear example of the boss is a good example of the people who work here. Now, there’s a couple of things along the way where we’ve lost sight of that, [00:36:00] where. Increasingly with a growing CEO pay gap, maybe the bosses no longer look like they’re one of us and that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious path, but also adjacent to what we were talking about earlier when we’ve got these sort of narcissistic sense that the boss think that they’re better than everyone who works there because they’ve prevailed in a very individualized system. It’s not in service of
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: feeling like they’re a good representation of the people who work there. And I’d just love to think about that this idea of identity leadership. How can
Alex Haslam: Yep yep.
Bruce Daisley: the idea of being an
Alex Haslam: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Just to underline the point, so absolutely. Everything you said is just absolutely right, and it’s not just like right in a sort of interesting peripheral kind of way. It’s right in a major way. It’s absolutely front and center of the leadership space. If you wanna say what’s the best predictor of a person’s leadership or perceived leadership, and that is, that’s their ability [00:37:00] to influence other people.
So that’s what we’re understanding leadership to be. It’s an influence process. Can you influence me? Can you tell me what to do? Can you mobilize me and channel my energies in partic particular ways? That’s what leadership is. So what’s the biggest predictor of your ability to do that?
Okay. And if you said to me, Alex, I’m gonna give you a million dollars. And I want you to put all your money on one horse, like as a predictor of that outcome. Okay. And whatever it is, and I’m gonna do that. I would put all my money on the item. This leader is a model member of my group.
Okay. Now there, there’s variance on that and, and the different contexts. Not quite that but yeah, as you say this, I, identity leadership is about mobilizing that sense of social identity that we’ve been talking about. It’s about catalyzing it within your groups, cultivating it, and then channeling it towards collective outcomes.
So leadership is about. [00:38:00] Social identity management. Fundamentally, that’s what leaders are. They’re people who bring us into groups, who keep the groups together and direct the group forward. And that’s all of our research is around that. So identity leadership, which is this idea that leaders are people who create advance, represent the thing you are talking about, and embed a sense of shared identity.
Huge amounts of data. Now supporting the importance of that. And we’ve got this global identity leadership development project layered by some colleagues. Ours, Ralph Vanik and his colleagues at Gerie University in Frankfurt led out that I dunno, 42 countries all over the world. Everywhere is it’s a cross-cultural thing.
Yeah, this leader is a model member of my group. Is the thing. And if the answer to that is no, they’re not. And there’s 1,000,001 ways not to be a model member of the group. Yeah. And you’ve alluded to some of them, then you are gonna have a problem leading and but being a model member of the group can, leading by example takes many [00:39:00] kinds of different forms.
So are other. Components of identity leadership that I’ve talked about as well, like making us feel like we’re a part of a group. But yeah, that, that connection, that psychological connection between the leader and the other team members, you might call ’em followers, but the people who are doing the followership that makes the leadership work is absolutely critical to team, group organizational success.
Absolutely critical. And without that you’re not gonna be very effective. But fundamentally, the point is you’re not gonna be doing leadership. You might be, you can do other things. You can throw your weight around and you can hold a gun to people’s head or a, a stick or a carrot or all those things.
And that will, that will achieve certain types of things. But again, the data’s very clear. If you are really interested in leveraging. Human capital, then you have to absolutely be in the business of working with social identities and representing us and being perceived to embody what the group is about so that you represent the sort of [00:40:00] aspirational state for group members is absolutely critical.
And the technical term for that is identity prototypicality. So you’re seen as a prototypical group member and a prototypicality is hugely problematic for one’s leadership credentials and efficacy. Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: that might come with that. Like the CEO pay gap is the one that immediately springs to mind ’cause it’s just front and center.
But
Alex Haslam: yeah.
Bruce Daisley: sense if people are thinking, okay, that I wanna be, I want to embody this idea of identity leadership.
Alex Haslam: Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: about reading what the group currently represents or is it trying to articulate a version of where the group is going?
Alex Haslam: Yeah. It’s both of those things. A lot of our stuff we do in leadership development space is about precise, exactly what you just said. Like it’s about you have to understand where we are, you have to understand where we want to get to, and then you have to help the group chart a course to it.
So those really, those, it’s about bring those things together. So abs Yeah. And that’s the business, that’s the, if you are not doing that, like [00:41:00] I can, I, again, and I’ve worked, long enough to have been exposed to some very good models of leadership and some very average models of leadership.
And the average ones are all about the leader being completely physically and psychologically absent, like missing in action and actually having no interest in or engagement with the group. So you just feel forgotten about languishing. And in many ways I, I think that kind of indifference is sometimes worse than being treated badly.
But if your boss bullies you, at least you think they care about you. But if they just don’t even acknowledge you exist, I think that’s just. Terrible, so that, but yeah. What are the components, right? It’s a, it’s an easy acronym to remember. Just leaders have to care for their groups. They have to care about their groups.
They have to what? See, they have to create a sense of group membership. So this leader brings people together, makes people feel as if they are part of a team of something important. Okay? So you create the group. If you think about some of those studies we were talking [00:42:00] about earlier, we’re doing a lot of research in the health space at the moment.
Leadership in that space. What’s that? It’s about creating a water club or what was the thing you did? A Zumba class or the thing, that’s leadership is about bringing people together to do something together that they find meaningful. And then through that you’re there accessing all these other benefits that, and they would say they’re that person.
We’ve done a lot of work in Australia, around Australia with men’s sheds. Really fascinating. I love working there and okay. And it’s really fa really interesting. There’s we a lot in Western Australia and they’ve got about 250 sheds there. And we’ve got a lot of data from these sheds. You might and they’re really interesting.
A little men shed you, these are often older people who retired. Not all. But they come along and they do their stuff. Metal work, a bit of woodwork, they do some community stuff. Sometimes they do really interesting kind of projects as well. What’s the difference between a good men shed and a band?
Men shed? The bad men shed are the ones which, where someone is come in to a leadership position. Typically on the basis of the fact that they were a great leader in a former [00:43:00] life and they have a very strong sense of themselves as a great leader, and they are now going to give the shed the benefit of their great leadership.
And so they, and it’s basically no, I’ll tell you how to do this because I’m a great leader. So they, and they impose themselves on the group the group sheds that are run effectively. Ones in which the person comes along and works with the team, creates the team, does the thing that brings new members on board.
When they come in, they welcome them into the group. They, they go to trouble to make people feel they belong there and that they’re at home there. And that, and if they do that, they’re perceived as doing leadership regardless of whether or not they’ve got a formal leader role. So that’s, you’ve gotta create the group.
You’ve also gotta advance the group. You’ve gotta move the group forward. So towards some goal that it values. So yeah, just getting us all together and sitting around the circle, doing nothing that’s no good for anybody. No, we what? If we’re a, and we do [00:44:00] a lot of stuff in sports teams, what we wanna do is.
Get better as a football team or as a netball team or whatever it is that we do. Okay. A good leader is gonna try to find ways to advance the group. And that might be about bringing in people who’ve got particular skills or doing blah, blah, blah, but they’re interested in promoting the group and they promote the, there’s two things they do.
They promote the group over themselves. And again, what bad leaders do is actually what the group is just a vehicle for their own personal self-aggrandizement. Notice I said personal self-aggrandizement, not self-aggrandizement. Okay. ’cause there’s collective self-aggrandizement. That’s fine. That’s what groups do in a particular, anyway, anyway.
So there’s a, the r is what we just said. Represent, you’ve gotta represent and embody what the group is about. You’ve gotta capture it. You’ve gotta be the epitome of what the group is about and what the group wants to be. Okay. So that people can look up to you as and as emblematic and aspirational someone, yeah. That’s the sort of person that I wanna be. And the more I’m like that the better I’m gonna feel about [00:45:00] myself. And that’s the basis for influence. And the final thing. And is the e that’s embedding now that’s really important. Really important in the leadership space because an awful lot of the leadership literature, scholarship writing is around the idea that kind of leader and the psychology of leadership is around the idea of what type of person you need to be.
Maybe what traits or attributes or things, behaviors even that you do in the abstract or but it’s what type of person are you? And that’s not really the question in leadership. The question in leadership is, what are we doing? What are, what’s actually, what are the material dimensions of this?
And again, part of what good leaders do is create structures, physical material, other things that bring people together and allow them to live out their group membership. So they embed that, that identity, that collective identity in everyday in, in the [00:46:00] group’s life and allow people to live it out. Now that’s really such an important part of the leadership landscape.
It speaks to lots of classic data in organizational psychology and leadership about the importance of initiation of structure. So leaders are indeed people who structure and restructure things. Where it goes wrong and it really goes wrong a lot is that people misunderstand that. The logic the logic of that proposition, they do what philosophers refer to as or logicians.
They affirm the consequence, which is to say they assume that, so leaders, effective, good leaders create change, create positive forms of change for the group, right? But the point there is they do it for the group and on the group’s terms and in ways that make sense to the group. So they work with the identities to embed them.
An effective change leverages existing identities, [00:47:00] ineffective change in which we see. A lot and most change as most organizational psychologists will tell you is ineffective and will probably say something like, 70 to 80% of things fail. Although there’s some question mark about whether that’s really true, but, and doesn’t matter.
A lot of change fails. Why? Because it rides roughshod over social identities. It destroys them. Again, a lot of our research there is actually no I’m a great leader and now I’m gonna, I’ve got my spreadsheet here and I, and it shows that if I were to reorganize the organization this way, we’d save this, and this.
How, honestly, like the number of times I’ve heard that in my career, the number of times I’ve been on the receiving end of that is too many. Okay. And it and just yeah. Management by spreadsheet and what you see when people do that is you see. People’s identities being, burnt at the stake, are going up in smoke.
And of course, that’s what drives resistance to and the po negative outcomes of change, is actually you [00:48:00] take valued identities and then you trample ’em under foot and give people nothing in return. And as we’ve been saying all the way through, it’s bad for people’s health, it’s bad for their wellbeing, it’s bad for their performance, but that’s, you go and do your MBA and that’s gonna be what your number one thing is.
Come up with a, come up with your master plan. How are you gonna re redesign? I’ve gotta be careful. I don’t start channeling Jonathan Pie here like it’s, it’s like, how stupid can you be?
Bruce Daisley: this, so you’ve articulated there the care model for leaders to think about channeling identity, create, advance, represent, and embed. I saw you talking online or you responded to someone online and you were talking about culture and you said culture and as much as you believe it exists is an instantiated example of identity. And I was really taken with
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: it down and look, it would be no surprise after the conversation that we’ve just had that you’ve really believe that identity is right at the car core of human experience. But what you’re describing there, that care model [00:49:00] is basically the boss is in charge of creating this culture and embodying it and sustaining it.
And I see almost everything that the boss is doing there, the leader there is about creating this culture. And I just, maybe I’ve misinterpreted that. I’d love to get your take on how you perceive leaders in culture and
Alex Haslam: Yeah. So I think, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So firstly, yeah, that’s right. I think yeah, you’ve got the point that yeah, I think it’s about identity. Yeah. That’s, yeah, that’s good. Yeah. So yes, I do. And yeah. And so what is culture? Yeah. And I do, and culture is hugely important. So I’m not poo-pooing culture as a concept.
It’s incredibly important. But what is the culture? What is the culture of an organization? Yeah. It’s instantiated social identity. It’s who we are and all the things that indicate who we are. It’s our values. It’s the structures that we have, it’s the things that we do the. The way that we live this identity out.
And it can be very small things up to very big things. And actually I, we, I’ve never really written anything on that, but that’s I’ve never read anything about culture, [00:50:00] which has disabused me of that view. But fundamentally what you’re talking about is instantiated social identity and when you’re talking about leadership and culture, we’re talking about in that way.
But the answer to that other thing you said is I think quite straightforward. I never said the boss, I said the leader. And I don’t think the boss is always the lead. I said any in in, in a group. Anybody the leader is the, are the people who, the leaders are the people who represent us.
Now, they may not be called the leaders. They may not have paid a lot of money. They’re the people, but they are the people who are leading us, the people who are influencing us. Now what you so firstly, if you restrict leadership to people who are the bosses or the people with, fancy titles on their names and getting paid lots of money you got that wrong mate.
That’s just you they, there’s your problem type thing. So that’s what in effective organizations is everybody’s doing leadership and everybody is doing the things that I’ve talked about. Everybody is trying to embody what the group is about. Everybody is coming up with activities and structures that embed the groups Actually just think about, let me just think about [00:51:00] my work team.
We, we had a big meeting. I say we’re all, we all try to come in like once a week on a Wednesday and we were all there. There was maybe 20 of us I think, talking about all of our plans. I think. I think pretty much everybody around the table volunteered something that they were gonna be doing that was going to take the group forward in some way.
Someone was saying, oh, what are we gonna do for a social activity next Friday? And this was some postgraduate students. I’ll call ’em out. Hannah and Sophie, thank you very much. Okay. That they’ve organized, we’re going temp in bowling. Okay. Not everybody wants to do that, we’re gonna, that was a thing.
We had a bit of a thing. They said, let’s do that. And they do other things. We are gonna have a writing retreat in October. Who are we gonna invite to that? What are we gonna do? What’s the subject goal? Ask the students. All these things. Everybody around the table is is making a contribution and all of our, the stuff we’ve done in sport and our colleagues in the sporting ar arena who do all this.
And again, people like Katrina, France and Philip Bowen, Sean Figgins, Matt Slate, Jamie Barker, a whole range of people. Working in this, [00:52:00] what’s the difference between a winning sports team and a poor sports team? In a poor sports team, the only people who do leadership are the people, are the leaders in a, in an, in a good sports team.
Everybody does leadership in the ways that I’ve described. So the diff so the real goal of that space is to create leaderful teams. So that’s really the goal is leader fullness. And again, I think a lot of our stuff in organizations is around saying, hang on a minute, you’ve got a leadership development program, but the only people who get on that are the senior management or something.
Or you’ve got $200 per for a rank and file employee for development and you’re spending 20,000 on your senior executives. Okay. There’s a couple of problems with that. I thought you employed them because they had those leadership skills. I thought that’s why you did them. So the idea that somehow they need, that doesn’t make any, in your own terms, that doesn’t make any sense.
But surely this is something that everybody should be [00:53:00] doing and wanting to do. And if they and I think going back to the men’s sheds again, one of the really interesting things about effective men’s sheds is that they really apply themselves to the question of how they bring on members and allow them to develop that sort of sense of agency and that sense of leadership.
And some of them, for example, they do things like they have rehabilitation. Programs for young offenders who they, struggling to find a way in the world. And what they do is they bring ’em into the shed and they and just make ’em feel good about themselves and feel there’s a place in the world for them and help them to develop self-confidence and some sorts of skills around that, that make them not just effective group members, but potentially leaders.
And again, I think those, that’s a kind of natural crucible for leadership. I would say and if I really want to understand leadership, I’d go to a men’s shed rather than to a, top footsie 100 company or whatever. I think there’s but we, again, one of the fictions of contemporary organizational and managerial science is that the only place that leadership has done is in elite [00:54:00] organizations.
And that the only people who do it are the elites at the top of those organizations. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Bruce Daisley: if anyone is diagnosing, and I was at an event today where someone came over to me and said, look, the dynamic in my team isn’t great. Most people, if I ask them to come along to a social event, even if I’m doing it in the afternoon, they don’t want to come along.
They don’t wanna they, they did the temping bowling wince that you’ve just done there. They didn’t wanna do those
Alex Haslam: Yeah
Bruce Daisley: if we’re gonna, sometimes sport isn’t a direct parallel, but it helps ’cause it’s, it paints a vivid image for us to see that. If we’re seeing a team that isn’t working well, is it in your contention that it’s because they haven’t got a clear sense of collective identity about who they are, what they mean to each other, and the importance of the group? And sometimes that might be because of leadership
Might be because the
Alex Haslam: yeah,
Bruce Daisley: of collective accountability or collective thinking. Is that what you’d say? If you are thinking about your group culture
Alex Haslam: yeah. Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: The question you might ask yourself
Alex Haslam: [00:55:00] Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: is this a meaningful group to the people who are part of it?
Alex Haslam: Yeah. So look, yeah, absolutely. So here’s the thing. What’s the most kind of, so in our field, the, huge amounts has been written and studied. And if I was to say what’s the single most important like line that’s ever been written in social identity research was written in 1982.
Paper by my PhD supervisor, John Turner is really the with Omni, one of the main founders of social identity research and social identity, self casualization theories. And in that paper he makes this basic, very basic observation, which is social identity is what makes group behavior possible. Okay. You’ve really gotta think about that and really just, but again, the point there is if we don’t have a shared internalized sense of ness, we can’t behave as a group.
Okay. That we to act. And again, I’m thinking there’s great work by cultural anthropologists around that too. Around and people like [00:56:00] Richardson working in the US around how culture actually developed and culture’s only made possible because people have internalized or able to internalize that sense of the collective, the idea that I could do some cave painting on a wall and have the idea that this would be valuable to my group and that my group would see some value in it and I’d want to communicate with them in this kind of way.
That was, and his answer to that question is, what is, what makes culture possible is social identity. So yes. Okay. Now, sometimes that might be a problem of leadership, but there’s a whole range of other things, reasons why people might not have a sense of shared social entity. Your friends, this person’s example, right?
Yeah. Might be something to do with their leadership. Did you ask ’em whether they wanted to do 10 pin bowling? What did you ask ’em what they wanted to do? That’s a pretty basic thing. Did you ask ’em what they can do? Maybe they’ve got so much work that they, that actually the idea of taking an afternoon off to do it would be a complete nightmare for them.
The other thing too is maybe they’d done a much experience of those things. So they’re we were saying we’ve got this writing retreat in September or [00:57:00] October and we were talking about, how many people coming along and the student reps were saying, oh there’s a couple of students who are who a bit afraid or scared of going to that.
We were, and I think our first thing was, oh, okay. What’s that about them? Why? Why would someone be, we are not trying to make it scary but once you know that someone does, then that’s a problem you’ve gotta try to solve. We’ve got to then work out, okay, what’s going on there?
What are we doing wrong that’s making this, aversive for some people? Is that because they haven’t had much experience of it? Is do we need to have a bit more of a gentle on ramp? On ramp rather than just send, going off to an island for three days, which might be a bit, a bit confronting, but they, presumably they might also have other things, family commitments, other things people have, other groups, other lives, so how do you bring those things together?
What I would say and is, I’ve never really, in my experience, never really ever had a group that couldn’t. Solve those problems. But the key to being able to solve them was [00:58:00] that they had to be helped to solve them themselves. And far too often we just, just look to impose solutions on groups.
Actually co-designing, co-developing solutions to things is absolutely
Bruce Daisley: It. It,
Alex Haslam: critical. Without that. So again, I, and I also think maybe that person is just carrying that bit. It’s not just their responsibility to solve that. Let’s talk about this in the leadership team. Let’s say, why isn’t this going?
What are we gonna do? But just coming and saying you will play bowls on Friday, that’s probably not gonna work. And but the, what I would say is that is something that could be done to make that group more effective. But it’s, but sometimes it’s hard to work out what that is, and it’s hard to, and it’s hard to help people to work that out.
But some, we saw too in things like the pandemic, one of the things about the pandemic was how, it could really transform the way people related to each other actually often in very positive ways. Okay. So there can be things which. Suddenly, suddenly people can see the light.
And I, and again, I don’t know [00:59:00] I’ve worked in lots of different places and sometimes they’re dead and you don’t really wanna take part in stuff. I get it. Okay. And that’s hard, that’s not where you’d necessarily wanna start as a leader, but if you can take a group that isn’t working and work with its members to make it work, then your leadership will be fated and celebrated.
Bruce Daisley: sort of the social loafing story and the disusing of that is an interesting
Alex Haslam: Yep,
Bruce Daisley: for that there, which, and maybe you’re a far
Alex Haslam: yep.
Bruce Daisley: To articulate it than me, but I guess social loafing to some extent is still with some managers a belief that they believe that that people don’t necessarily work hard in
Alex Haslam: Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: And that was a long established belief that, okay, I’ve got exactly that book here, but go on,
Alex Haslam: yeah. Exactly.
Bruce Daisley: social loafing
Alex Haslam: Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: The
Alex Haslam: Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: The the reevaluation of it.
Alex Haslam: Yeah, the sort of it. So yeah, so you are right. I mean that the the, and when in my sort of in my lectures on group productivity, I always start with the observation that for a lot of people, and for a [01:00:00] social and organizational psychologist for a long time, the idea of group productivity was like an oxymoron.
So the idea that, groups could be productive, only individuals could be productive, and there was really a whole series, a long progression of studies dating back to 1920s, some studies by a guy called Ringman which seemed to bear that point out. One of, just, one of the, his studies were about a rope pulling task, right?
And you had a tug of war type thing. And these, there were young men had to pull on the rope. And if, should we say, if one person pulled on the rope, they’d pull a hundred kilograms. If two pulled on it, they’d pull 180. If three pulled on it, they’d pull 250. And so every, what you saw then was the more people a were added, the more the group as a whole pulled, but individually they pulled less.
And that’s, there’s lots of replications of that kind of effect. And they seem to bear out this thing that, yeah yeah, I’m gonna pull, but I’m not gonna pull as hard as I’d pull if I was on my own. Okay. And that’s [01:01:00] very clear evidence of what is called social loafing. There’s two points to make about that paradigm, which are broadly relevant.
One is there are kind of coordination problems, like part of the reason that they don’t pull so well on the rope. Is because actually you all have to pull at the same time and you have to have rhythm to it. And if you don’t, then it becomes not suboptimal, where if you’re on your own, you don’t have that problem.
So there’s a bit of a mechanical problem issue there, and you’ve gotta iron that out. Okay. And that’s also present in some group context. If you are, how does it take one man to dig a one square foot hole? A certain amount of time, but 10 men they can’t do it 10 times quicker.
Or women for that matter. The other problem though is in those studies, and this is what in the classic studies book the work of Steve Carow and Kip Williams and others, is that the issue in those studies was that when you got a the group of people, it was not a [01:02:00] psychological group, they were just random other people who turned up, pull on the rope.
A guy called Jeremy Holt, who’s at who did his PhD at the University of Kent is now a kind of sports psychologist again. He, for his honors thesis a long time ago, did a brilliant replication and extension of the Ringman study. And it was this simple. He got the people who are pulling on the rope before they got onto the rope.
He got ’em to engage in a bit of team building activity, think about a name for themselves, and just to get to know each other and to do and to think of a slogan for themselves as a team. So just did some very basic work to make them not perceive themselves as individuals pulling on the rope, but as a team.
And lo and behold, what did you find? They pulled as much as the individuals. Okay. And the problem with those social loafing studies is that the groups are not psychological. [01:03:00] Real, they’re just nominal groups. IE just as an assembly of groups. They’re a sociological group in the sense that these are people who we’ve deemed to be part of the same category.
They’re working on the task. It’s not a psychological group in the sense implied by turner and self categorization theory in the sense that people have internalized it. When people internalize a sense of shared identity and are working on a task, actually the norm is you’ve you can sometimes get loafing because of those coordination effects, but it’s actually much more common to get something called social laboring or sometimes which is where people actually work harder.
So often the groups, the, they will, you two plus two will equal five because they will develop a norm to be more productive and indeed. That’s the, see this, that’s basically the secret of economic success around the world in the last a hundred years. Is that where people have been able to build that sense of collective identity, whether in startup companies or in organizations, that’s been the pathway to progress.
And that’s allowed, [01:04:00] the, that’s also been a core mechanism or thing for, as it were, exploitation of workers is getting people to feel that they’re part of a team and then getting ’em to work hard on that basis and then them somewhere down the track discovering they weren’t really a team. ’cause actually I’m gonna fire you and I don’t really care about you.
Which of course some people found out early on in the pandemic. And then you wonder why maybe post pandemic, some people are a bit cynical about some of those things.
Bruce Daisley: we reflect on the post pandemic change if groups are so important to us and this sense of being part of a cohesive. Iden collective identity, so important to us. Do you think there has been an impact of the pandemic in making groups less important? And I’m going to draw reference to it.
A couple of things that have been reported this year that I think they’re the nascent data points that we’re just starting to see. There’s a fabulous writer in the US called Derek Thompson, and he suggested that he’s described a situation where people are spending about a hundred minutes a day.
Extra alone. [01:05:00] And he says, the interesting thing about this is that, people frequently post online about the delight of their plans canceling or their friends bailing on them. And he described the phrase the phrase elective isolation that people are somehow choosing to spend some time alone. And it’s been backed up John by Murdoch, who has done some analysis for the Financial Times. And, people have quibbled a little bit around the fringes of it, but broadly the trend, we can argue about the scale of it, but
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: The extent of it. But the
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: is that people are trending a degree less extroverted, they’re trending a degree, less conscientious. And so you might in aggregate, say that people, for one reason or another are choosing to enjoy their own company. Lean into that individualism over the collective. if the origin of everything we’ve discussed so far is that groups are the things that give us life, we might be in a situation where even though that [01:06:00] is unequivocally demonstrably the case, people are for other reasons, whether it’s distraction, whether it’s re reducing in extroversion, they’re spending more time alone.
And
Alex Haslam: Yep.
Bruce Daisley: wonder holistically what that looks like if it’s extrapolated, and secondly,
Alex Haslam: Yep. Yep.
Bruce Daisley: push back against it.
Alex Haslam: Yeah. Firstly, yeah so I believe that’s absolutely true. The, goes back to the Robert Putnam book, I think Bowling Alone in which he’s just, he, he basically charts the decline of social clubs and the title is about the demise of that bowling clubs in the us. But his observation, yeah, that, that actually, that kind of social infrastructure is decayed over time.
And I think you’re absolutely right. There’s lots of books, around there’s a book Kun, the Lonely Century, the idea that, you know and also, yeah, the idea that we’ve got this kind of pandemic of loneliness at mean lots of data, really speaking to that, the interesting I and I think the pandemic was part of that.
I think one of the things that doesn’t seem to be [01:07:00] much evidence that the pandemic actually increased loneliness per se, but it certainly increased people’s awareness of it, which is, interesting. But I think the general trajectory that’s described as absolutely right, and I. I think there’s many, firstly, there’s many reasons for that.
I I think, again, I think of my parents who my parents were like, they were like. They were like groupies, like in, in a full on thing. They, my father was in the army, but he was in the, and then he was in the territorial army and he was and they were in the, they in the village that they lived.
They were in the gardening club and they, and he did all these other things, I think people don’t round table all this other sorts of things that he was always, every night in a week he was out doing something, and he would and a lot of charitable stuff and things like that.
And my mom too, yeah. They, and they found, and again, actually one of the, my, they. They were in groups that they didn’t even like the thing like, they, they did gardening as it happens, but they would join a gardening group, just the gardening club.
’cause it was in the village. It seemed like a good thing to do. And there’s plenty of things like that they did. Okay. And [01:08:00] that was village life, for me growing up and great really because, you develop a lot of social skills and you’re put in lots of awkward situations that you have to work your way out of.
I thought it was like, again, I very grateful for my parents for taking me along to these things that I found utterly confronting and alienating. You really, we were thrown in the deep end and you just had to like, talk your way out of it type thing. So I think that, I do think that’s a thing.
And I think that going back to that men’s shed thing that’s trying to recapture some of that and to lock it into communities, especially where it’s needed. And that I think is in, is part of the answer is and is that, so Kath and Tegan, the kind of intervention they have around the loneliness space, I’d say too, a lot of people talk about loneliness.
Not a lot of people do much about it, right? The stuff that we’ve done and the stuff that Kath and Tegan have led on, that’s really the only ever really, I think, full on evidence-based treat intervention for loneliness. And it’s, [01:09:00] and it’s allied with other bits and pieces, but again, it’s a well evidenced now intervention around, around the world.
And it’s called, this is Group for Health. I was gonna say I was gonna say to the listeners can you guess what it’s called based on this conversation? It’s called Groups for Health. Very simple. Does what it says on the tin is like and basically what’s that about? It’s about working with people, working with where wherever you find them and trying to help them.
Either reconnect with old groups that they’ve lost contact with, or to develop meaningful new group memberships and they can be many in different forms. And basically that’s the sort of where people now do sort of social prescribing, which is quite a big thing in the uk, increasingly in Australia and from other places.
Basically, that’s the thing is that you are trying to plug people into a social matrix, but Abit is, it’s not just saying, oh, go and do this. Go and join this choir, or go and do this thing. It’s about working with people to find the group membership that matters to them. It’s [01:10:00] actually about then doing identity leadership with them and obviously.
In some ways, that’s what parenting is about in, in a very particular way, is about trying to help your children find the groups that are gonna let them be the best versions of themselves. And lots of parents agonize about that process. What do, how do you do that? And it’s hard that, that’s the point, parenting these things are hard.
But yeah I think if we don’t recognize that’s incredibly important work and that we need to invest in our time. So if I, if you’re going back to why this doesn’t happen, I think one is. I think in people are very time poor, people are stretched. I, people, a lot of people, holding down lots of jobs.
They don’t, and they’re just, that, that’s not a, that’s not condu. That’s another reason, going back to my thing for the four day week, is I think it would create more space for people to do these things, but they won’t just happen on their own. They’ve gotta be encouraged to do it. I think there’s other things like.
Technology and the ways in which technology atomizes us, but doesn’t have to. So actually colleagues of our, in the U uk, Juliet [01:11:00] Wakefield and her colleagues at Nottingham Trent University have done a lot of work about people playing on multi gaming platform type things. And they’re really very good for developing a sense of social identity.
And you can be parts of chess communities, other types of things where you do things online and they’re very positive for people. So aga again, I think working with people to find out what their interests are and to turn those into, leverage them into things that can be shared and lived out with other people is the solution.
But as I said, one thing is time and the other. Is just public, is just policy. I think we, you know what, we’ve gone through what nearly 20 years of austerity in Western world like and often the first things that get cut are community services where we are in West London the local libraries are closing down or the, the community drop-in center, all those things.
There’s no funding for those things. Those things are hugely important and based on the data, they should be the last thing that you would cut. They should be the last thing that you would cut. [01:12:00] And yet they’re seen as just a luxury and added something that has no consequence. I think things like free transport, I think.
In one of the really good initiatives in Brisbane recently was that the government introduced a flat fare on all public transport of 50 cents, basically nothing. Okay. That just allows people to get and do things. I see in London, as the price of buses has gone up and up, and the tube that makes it harder for people to just get out and do things and who, yeah.
If you’ve got money, that’s not a problem. As I said earlier, money you have, the good thing is allows you to go and do those things. If you don’t have it, it’s very hard to do those connection things. So again, prioritizing that in our policy and make and making and seeing the raising that to the status of first priority and valorizing the people who deliver those services is, to say those people do those things in the face of, real challenges and that it is pretty thankless is a bit of an understatement.
I think that I, and I think. The [01:13:00] people who do those community services, the people who run those libraries, those help groups, those support groups, they are the absolute troopers. They are the frontline of society. They’re the people who are really delivering the value for all of us, and we need to do more to celebrate them.
And things like inequality, pay inequality and other things and o and other things that implicitly deval those things. Are very problematic and they need to be rooted out in is in, in, in my view. And I think those are, yeah, I think that’s a massive project. And yet I see and I think that’s an answer to, on all sorts of problems.
I was just in a, I was a conference in London recently on community policing and mental health, and the data on is, it’s all around. If you look at where you have really good community policing that’s linked in with local support groups and a really good shared understanding within a given community.
Actually mental health is much better in that community. There’s far fewer mental health problems, but also there’s less crime, the whole stack, it’s, so it’s a recipe for sort of everything in a way. But what’s fascinating is the ways in which we.
Conspired to get it wrong and to imagine that in getting it wrong, we’re getting it right.
Bruce Daisley: I’d love to as we wrap up I’d love to ask you a question, really just about your own personal involvement in this study, the field that you’ve done. Because, down to the fact that the surgeon in general of the US has talked about loneliness being one of the biggest killers the rise of social identity work or social identity. Identity adjacent work is just growing exponentially. The number of citations on academic papers is growing really strongly. You mentioned John Turner writing that really important phrase, and I just wondered whether, from my perspective as like an a lay person studying this, I wondered whether your own work on that BBC show, the experiment and the tracking of stress responsibilities and the tracking, not just the of what was happened there.
This was a repeat of that famous Stanford prison experiment, but. I wondered whether that wasn’t of equal value to that John turn Turner comment. ’cause it seemed to produce
That accelerated the whole study of groups beyond something that was just like self-organization into Oh, this seems to have a bodily response on the people involved.
I just wondered if you could give a perspective on the development of
Alex Haslam: Yeah.
Bruce Daisley: And whether you think that was like a pivot point.
Alex Haslam: Yeah. Yeah I think for, so the, I did that with Steve Reicher in 2001 now, so quite a long time ago. And the B, B, C, no, it was a moment in time. I don’t think that would ever be done again, something like that. But yeah, I think for us, and Steve had also done his PhD with John and and had been working this tradition longer than me.
And for us it, yeah, it was absolutely, it was a sort of, it was a bit of an epiphany in the sense that. We’d always done experiments and groups and some, but we never really studied them in that kind of intensive way over a long period of time. And we’d gone into that study with one set of understandings of various processes.
And we and I think the two big things that study brought home to us and that in the publications and things that came from it one, this thing about leadership, all of that stuff about leadership really came out of that because we, you could see the people who did the leadership. There were the people who worked with the groups, not the people who had, were, successful in other walks of life or whatever.
And that, to the extent they did the things that we talked about, they were able to get the groups to do things and to make a difference in good and bad ways. The other thing though was, and we had not really gone into this with thinking about this, but we just thought, oh we’re doing this, look, we got these groups in this prison and we got the prisoners and regards let’s, and we were we had a sort of steering committee of people [01:17:00] around the projects, advisors.
And I remember we had a lot at the University of Exter where I was at the time, and including Cath and some other clinical psychologists on there and saying if you’re doing that, it’s gonna, and we also had some. Clinical psychologists who were overseeing the project to just check for health and safety kind of reasons.
And they were saying I think you should be looking at these things. So we put in these raft of these measures, as you say we had measures of stress, we had measures of depression, we had measures of paranoia and anxiety. And we took daily measures of cortisol, just as a and part of that was just, it was something to do, right?
But so we did it. And again, Steve and I, we and again, what jumped at us and we hadn’t really anticipated at all, was the way in which the health and mental health. Of the participants was tracked the state of their group. So as the prisoner group became more emboldened and developed a strong sense of social identity, their sense of support, their sense of efficacy, their improved, their depression reduced.
Their paranoia reduced. Whereas for the guards, as they, as their identity collapsed, you saw exactly the opposite. They became depressed, they became paranoid, they were disengaged. And again, this was not because they were, this is not about who they were as individuals, right? They were all pretested to be psychologically very healthy, and they of, and subsequently were too, but buy.
Changing those group dynamics and creating particular kind of trajectories for those groups in that study, you had those massive consequences. And I think what we had never done prior to that point was put all those things together and see how the social, the organizational and the clinical kind of interact with each other.
And I think and this is another one of my little bug bears, is, I think at the start I said, I’m a social and organizational psychologist, but I prefer just to call myself a psychologist. ’cause I, I think disciplinary or subdisciplinary. Boundaries in psychology are very unhelpful.
I think, we have theories, we have social, psychological theories of things, and then we have this organizational thing, and then we have the clinical health things, and never the twain will meet and there’s very little dialogue across those things. I think a lot of the theorizing across them is pretty banal and pretty low rent and isn’t very good.
So actually what you need is high level integrative theorizing that looks in all of those registers and comes up with an integrated understanding of the operation of the mind and sees the mind as yeah, fundamentally social in ways that we’ve talked about. Yeah. So it for me, yeah, it was a.
It was a yes, it was absolutely critical. I don’t know whether it was for other people. One of the things we’ve always tried to do with the BBC is to say could we go back and revisit that study and talk about it now? We know so much. And I think that’s not how television works.
They just, they just want then that’s not, they’re not interested in that, which is a shame, I think. But it is still, I think on the A level [01:20:00] syllabus in the UK and I, we, I still get, I would say I get 10 emails from students high school students a week asking questions about it and that, it’s nice to be wanted in a particular way.
And I, and there’s a thing. Yeah. And I think people still find it interesting. It, yeah it is interesting. And it’s much more interesting than I think it seemed at the time.
At the time it was just very scary.
Bruce Daisley: I’m so grateful for the time you’ve spent today. What do you think the next steps are in, in studying groups, studying social identity, studying how this works?
Alex Haslam: Yeah. Good question. Yeah, I don’t, and I and I can, I could come up with some things. I really don’t know the answer. I’ll tell you what I did do last, the, I just come back so I’m moment, but just come back two weeks ago from a social identity summer school that was hosted by some colleague of ours in Lu and in Belgium.
And there were 40 students from all over the world, young not all young, different but mainly young from all doing all manner of things. We had four streams, social, organizational, sport and political. And they worked on projects and ideas and the only, there’s only two, the two things I’d say there is one is we couldn’t, no way could have anticipated what they would.
Come up with in the course of that week working intensively. And the second is, I, watching them work and seeing what they were doing and seeing those things evolve, filled me with an enormous sense of kind of optimism in terms of their just generative power. And I gave a talk at the beginning and the I started with a quotation from Sun Suby and said the best way to predict the future is to create it.
And I think that was what that’s about. So I, and I think and to that I would add, yeah, don’t create it on your own. Create it in groups. So for me that’s about what are the groups that I’m in gonna do? What are the, what are we gonna do? And part of, I guess part of having these conversations is about trying to mobilize other people to be part of that collective endeavor.
And ’cause if you are gonna be doing that with other people, you’re gonna enjoy it more and you’re gonna enjoy it more. And you’re gonna. You’re gonna stay the course. I think the thing that’s sustained me through my career is, as I said, the groups I’m in, most of my colleagues in academia are retired now.
And they’ve given up, I think well often because Yeah, they were, early on, they imagined this was just a game you played on your own. Not really, no. And that’s not a recipe for. For success. It’s not a recipe for for I think a, general level sort of equanimity.
So yeah, I’m very positive about that. I always say too, and one of the reasons I really like teaching, and I still continue to teach when again, a lot of people wanna get out of it, is I, when I go into a classroom every year and I see what the students come up with I’m filled with a massive sense of optimism.
When I, if I wanna be depressed, I just turn on the news and honestly, I just is just so depressing. When I wanna feel good, I just go and listen to a group of students present their ideas about what we could do to make the world better. And I’m, I’m that’s the only thing that gives me optimism, I would say.
And I, yeah. But I, but it does and that’s why I go, that’s why I want to, carry on doing it. And I think if you’ve got the right groups and you’ve got the right motivations, you’ve got the right theories, the right ideas, I think there’s so much more to do.
