Everything is identity

0:00You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank? Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining al fresco or relaxing poolside? Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to 70 % off during Wayfair's 4th of July clearance. Score huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs, and more. We're talking thousands of products for every style and budget. Plus, surprise flash deals July 6th. Don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in.

0:36Let's get started. Uh, sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice? I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyer's rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. limitations and exclusions may apply see our seven-day return policy at corfana.com

1:07this is eat sleep work repeat it's a podcast about workplace culture hello i'm bruce hazley if you don't know much about the study of identity i might be on the verge of giving you a brand new obsession let me give you my own entry point in 2020 covid all that going on i was i was start to write a book on resilience. I read so much stuff. I read stuff for about a year. I watched so much stuff. If you ever want to explore terrible science, reading about resilience is a great place to start. People saying that the answer to resilience is reframing. The biggest, the biggest psychologist in the world, his whole model of resilience is reframing.

1:48Oh no, it's not a tragedy that my partner died when all those bees escaped from the honey factory. In fact, it's an opportunity. I've got an opportunity to meet a new wife. That reframing and a parody there, but it's not much further from that. It's not just useless. It's actually toxic. I was reading about combat soldiers being given that model of reframing and they collectively time and time again fell into depression when they were forced to do training courses in one soldier camp when everyone was forced to do the resilience training. set about the combat soldier resilience program. Resilience fell and sleeping tablet prescriptions doubled.

2:32Now, all of that felt manipulative to me and wrong, and I was trying to make sense of it all. Then I came across the work of Professor Alex Haslam, and I was blown away. Amongst one or two adjacent theories, Alex focuses on social identity theory and self-categorisation theory, areas that explore how we see ourselves and how we use the way we see ourselves to connect with other people around us it's not exaggeration to say that the more you explore the evidence and data around identity you start to wonder how much of human life it actually explains human longevity is shaped by how socially connected we feel our well-being and happiness come from how many groups we feel part of.

3:15Ability to cope with stressful situations and jobs often comes from how we see ourselves. I'm a bum disposed expert. This is what we do. And yes, my obsession, resilience is the strength we draw from each other. So the frustration then is discovering this work and there's plenty of links to my own obsession in the show notes and thinking, why isn't this reaching every single person, every leader in the workplace to start with? Why aren't we trained on this? The next three episodes attempt to resolve that. Firstly, there's two brilliant episodes discussing and interviewing Alex Haslam. He's very much like the godfather of the field with another researcher called Stephen Reicher.

3:55And I've spoken to Stephen Reicher at conferences. He's never replied to any of my emails. And Alex is a generous and egoless man who wants to use the field to make the world a better place. Then the third episode is an application of this. It's a discussion with Jeremy Holt, who's written a book ostensibly about how to bring identity to a sports team, but effectively it could be applied to any team. And he's got this fabulous research, sometimes like a single number is the hook that anyone gets excited about. And Jeremy Holt has written this book, studying the use of identity in teams, finding that teams with strong identities are 50 % more effective than teams who don't have strong identities.

4:41And that's the difference between promotion and relegation. That's the difference between winning the league and coming right down the bottom of the league. This stuff really works. I feel that it's one of the most valuable assets of understanding that any of us can have. In the show notes, there's a really outstanding sort of beginner's guide, academic presentation that Alex gave to the British Psychological Society I've watched this without exaggeration at least six times, maybe 10 times I've watched this. And each time I scribble down notes and think, wow, that explains so much. It's the best training you could send yourself on because you start to realise that the way that we perceive ourselves, the groups that we're part of, it takes on identities that we use to connect with the world around us.

5:31The applications for work are immense because of Alex's generosity in answering my requests and meeting up with me and inviting me to conferences. I've got to know Alex and the people who work on this a little, and I'm just continually blown away by the power of the work they do. You know, I try to be reductive in my thinking when I'm thinking about a model for workplace culture. I'm like, well, what are the big pillars? You can't explain everything, But can you give people a few pillars about what workplace culture consists of, what it's all about? And there's so much about the way that we interact with work that is explained by identity, by the way that we perceive ourselves first and the way that we use that to connect to other people, the way that that group identity shapes far more than notions of purpose.

6:22It shapes the way that we see ourselves. We're obsessed with high standards around here. This is what we do around here. and identity is a really critical component like say i think these three episodes work together but in addition i've actually had a few conversations in the past that have been about identity and i've put all of these podcasts when they eventually all go live into a playlist about identity and you'll see that link to the top of the show notes one trigger warning along the way we do discuss suicide at one point and just i wanted that to be flagged right up front this is my discussion with Professor Alex Haslam.

7:04Alex to kick off I wonder if you could introduce who you are and what you do. Hi I'm 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 well-being and health. And then I'm particularly interested in the role and the dynamics of leadership around those things.

7:53Good, and I'm quite excited to sort of go into them. If I wanted to do something that I think holistically illustrates to me the power of what you generally talk about and have 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, 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 alcohol consumption.

8:34And they completely miss the one that seems to be very heavily evidenced as transforming our whole lived experience. and i just wonder if you could you could explain what what that thing is and maybe talk us through the mechanism the answer is social relations and human connection and the point about that is that 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, you know, wear sunscreen, all that sort of stuff, take the right medicines.

9:18And of course, all of those things are important for your health. But yet, a number of very significant analyses and one very influential meta-analysis by Julianne 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, 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 bottom.

9:53They 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? Well, when you ask people, they say, well, having a lot of money and being healthy. Well, actually, being healthy is a very good predictor. But just as good 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're a member of.

10:34And 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 you don't have meaningful group-based activities, and that can take any form, you're going to 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.

11:19And 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 financial state. providing of course that you're not in abject poverty or penury yeah the money is very good at getting you if you like to you know allowing you to keep body and soul together but beyond that it has very little value other than allowing you to actually live out valued group membership so obviously if you want to be a member of the golf club but you want to you want to be in your book club or your you know your dinner club or whatever or your movie club well you're going to need some resources to do those things and some things are more expensive than others so but the The best thing you can do with your money is invest it in functional, meaningful group memberships that make you feel good.

12:12There was an example 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 and 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 stories class and it had the same benefit.

12:55It had the exact same benefit. For me, if you wanted a vivid example of sometimes how we see something and we believe what we want to believe, actually the social element was as effective. You must know much more detail of that. Yeah, yeah. And actually we did a study, this was with Ilka Glebes, who's at LSE, and my colleague and partner Kath, many years ago, which was down in Devon. And we did this study in a care home in Devon. And there was an article in 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.

13:38And, of course, the point there when you're older, it's very important not to dehydrate, so drinking water is 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, like drinking water almost by definition and it had all these remarkable benefits and the paper that we wrote the research we did it's published i think british journal of psychology was is it the water or is it the club and so 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 just a newspaper club and they just got together and talked about the news well there was no difference between the two clubs but they were both massively better than the water and you know that's just you that study you could do a million times because again i mean look you know 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 you know 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 so i'm in australia like and i moved to australia a long time ago 1986 and one of the first things that when you know when i was sort of starting to sort of socialize and meet new people some some friends you know took me to an afl game okay australian rules football anybody's ever been to an afl 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 you know it's as it as games go it's pretty daft i mean it's bloody hard to play and blah blah but the and you play it for whatever it is two and a half hours goes on forever okay and every week you know 80 000 people in melbourne go to pretty much every game you know it's got massive following you know afl is central to the lifeblood of you know australian society and the point of a thing like AFL is not to kick a ball around, is to get a lot of people together to enjoy themselves and to find meaning in something that's utterly meaningless.

16:00And that's really, so much of what we do is actually inherently of negligible value. And it's pretty meaningless in a particular sense. I mean, but by being members of groups, first of all, we impute meaning to it we give it meaning we imbue it with meaning and we um and we um extract value from it in a form of enjoy enjoyment well-being 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're not doing those things there's a sense in which well you're going to be unhappy but you're not going to be like properly human in a particular sense i'd say and again lots of work i think on you know by sociologists anthropologists you know evolutionary scholars really pointing to the the fact that it's our ability to sort of congregate and find meaning in collective activity and it's the psychological processes that allow us to do those things That is what makes us distinctly human, 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.

17:42But what's the mechanism at work? Because, you know, it's one thing to say sort of being part of something and these brilliant charts that you, you know, I've linked in the show notes to the presentation that I must have watched four times, which is you talking to the British Psychological Association. And you show these charts of people being hospitalised for a mental health episode or for people being hospitalised for various different things. And the biggest predictor of their well-being after two years and five years is how many social groups they report feeling part of. It's just astonishing to see it laid out in such a powerful chart.

18:20But what's at work? Why? I mean, I get it. I get that we're social beings. I get that we are wired. But why on earth would that be so predictable? Yeah, yeah. So just, I mean, just that thing you just said also is really worth underlining. Like, 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 want to keep all the family and everything away from the recovery space, because, you know, they just interfere with the medical treatment.

19:06But 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 whether recovery happened, but also it speeded it up by a factor of about three. So if you're not doing those things, you're wasting two thirds of your health budget because people aren't recovering. So again, the fundamental point here is it's not just an add-on. That's what people sort of say. Oh yeah, we can do it in a group if you like. I might save a bit of time rather than doing everybody individually.

19:42No, you want to do it in a group because if you get a group that locks it in, that builds it in, that allows people to do all the sense-making. 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 wanted they want to be part of the group but again and i think you see that all the time how difficult i'm here's just a little thing you know kath and i both work in the same area and every so often she has we're separated she goes off to a conference or i do or whatever when she goes away i just realized that how how just difficult it is to do really 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 why when you have couples who've been married for a long time when one of them dies the other you know dies within a month i mean my you know that's such a common story because it's just and of course people you know i'm getting to the age go to probably more funerals and weddings.

20:44And, and, you know, 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 been 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 in the world not just in terms of our personal identities our individuality as important as those things are in a range of contexts but we are able to self-categorize as a member of a group so we so what that just in very basic terms means is that the self is not all about I and me.

21:34It'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 amazing explanatory power. And you can pretty much, I mean, you know, I think 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.

22:16And all the studies that we've been talking about. And you can see how you could pretty much, I could watch the news every night and it'd be something where someone is talking about the value of something that people do individually. and in the background are 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 I mean my short story I think is that it's a big con I mean I think that it was I think that the individual self is a relatively modern sort of invention of a particular form but the reification of it the valorization 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 and the politics that was wrapped around that the politics of organizational psychology and society as a whole and which you know which sort of which for which there was value in atomization of people and undermining or blocking their capacity to act collectively.

23:21And that's really to do with issues of politics and power and the idea that high status groups are the thing that worries them most is the collectivity of lower status groups. And so wherever you're talking about the workplace or the world at large, you want to kind of neutralize that collective power and you want to also get people to imagine that the best version of themselves is themselves as an individual notwithstanding the fact that you know i mean you know the evidence i mean and we have whole theories which are really about that i mean if you know there's i mean i'm sure i don't know there's people listening to this like as an organizational psychologist or someone when you if there's i mean there's quite a lot of things that make me virtually wretch.

24:06Okay, but Maslow's hierarchy of needs is kind of 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 itself a fiction. That's not what, if you read his writings, that's not what he was talking about. But we've sort of come to imagine 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, you know, is self-actualisation. Well, no, not really. It's interesting, you sort of, because you're talking about that depersonalisation and the separation of our own identity from fixation on ourself, it sort of comes to something that I was going to come to later, but it's got a direct application for the way we think about work, because a lot of work now has been about the celebration of the self.

24:59In fact, I was reading something today that you sent to me, which is about leader narcissism. And the quotation from the paper that you contributed to is, quote, nevertheless, we argue that hyper-competitive leadership selection practices have the capacity to catalyse 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 that very common in American companies of stack ranking organisations and your end of quarter review will be based on how you have performed individually versus your peers.

25:40And those hyper-individualised practices, you say, lead to a form of narcissism inside the workplace. And as a result of that, they actually get to the detriment of overall business performance. And I'd just love to think about that because that is, it's just such a norm of most businesses to try and set people up competing against each other or in somehow to appraise them versus each other. I'd love to give you your perspective on how work's going wrong there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, I don't know. I'm sure your listeners have got reflections on this. But I remember when, you know, all through my career, you know, actually the thing I enjoy about work is the teams I work in.

26:25I've worked with fabulous teams. And in all the places I've been at and am at, you know, it's the people that you work, it's the people make the place. I mean, that's a platitude really. But again, we say that all the time. We don't really think what it means. But I remember all these things, a lot of these things, particularly in academia, all the kind of, you know, 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 I – this was a long time ago when I was at the University of Exeter. They introduced – they were going to introduce a sort of scheme where they had a sort of bonuses for academics based on sort of performance.

27:04you know and it was you know and it was a anyway i mean there's question marks about how good an idea that is i mean uh i don't you know this isn't really what motivates us i mean 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 started he was part of the appraisal thing and we said this is my colleagues and i said this is ridiculous like 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 is it does violence to that reality moreover of course it's worse than that is right so we've got six of us and then and then they somehow on some basis say oh well actually this one person is better than everybody else and so they're going to get the uh you know whatever it was thousand pound bonus or something or, you know, 100 pounds or maybe five.

27:58Well, what does that do to Team Dynamics? And the reality is, well, firstly, I mean, they wouldn't let us do it. It was the first thing. And we lodged and we presented a, you know, we felt pretty indignant about it. And we presented a sort of an intellectual case for why this wasn't a good idea. And if you were going to 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 um it these things are destructive but of course there's a whole right walks range of spheres activity where we sort of just take them for granted i i think and we think oh yeah that's right you're going to do that but i think you know and i think 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 you know your person doesn't get the prize when you've done all the work and obviously there's other things built into that like power asymmetries and i think you know 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 practices which people pretty much take for granted and think oh that's the way the world is you know it was the 11th commandment you shall subject yourself to individual level performance appraisal no not really um 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 want to go back to one thing because because it's important and and again like if you know we work in our research team like i guess there's lots of we're going to 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 is just to reflect on the way that you use the term the 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'll say 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 well we do i we're interested in the self it's just not the personal self it's the social self the collective self the weiner sphere and personal 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.

30:25So it's not about the self versus the group. That's a false dichotomy. And the first kind of barrier to recognizing that that's false is just the language we have around this. So again, I spend – you know me well enough to know I'm a bit of a pedant. The first thing that I do when I'm having discussions 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're using the term the self or the self in your theorising or as it informs your practice, what is your model of self and how limited is it and how limiting is it of what you're doing and thinking?

31:08Yeah. When you think of the self, do you think first and foremost of the social self? Do you think there's something different between the individual self and the social self? The way I always construe it is that 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 going to quote something to you, because it's very adjacent to some of the stuff you talk about. And it's by a writer called Will Storr. He's written loads of books about how to write stories, storytelling.

31:43And one of the things he talks about in his most recent book, which is, I think, the story is a deal. It's about sort of using stories to sell ourselves to people. But he's talking specifically about suicide. He works on a suicide helpline. And he says, he says this quotation, he says, I've found, so he works on a suicide helpline. He says, I've found the suicidal tend to be suffering either from chronic pain, recent bereavement, or most commonly identity failure. They're seriously and persistently lacking in connection or status, usually both. They feel the character they're playing in the story of their lives has failed and they're trapped in that failure.

32:29Now, that's interesting because for me, that gives a bridge from this idea of the individual self, saying that the individual self is effectively our access point to connections with other people. And, you know, 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 to everything you're talking about, but it feels quite a sort of relevant application. I'd love your thoughts on it. Each of these questions, like there's three, in my mind there's like three or four paths out of it. You know, there's really multiple things.

33:04I mean, firstly, this thing about suicide. Yeah, I mean, I, and we, Kath and Teagan and other, Teagan Cruz and other colleagues of ours, we've got starting to do kind of more walk-on on that. But, you know, I think that idea of that if you're locked in the personal self and you can't see that, you can't make that connection to the group, to the collective, you know, 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 and 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 all aspects of the sorts of prevailing models of suicide can kind of be come kind of be traced to that like feeling one of them is feeling that you're a burden so you feel that you know that you're that you know you're 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 individual and you and again right the other bit there too which really is comes through and actually one of the studies that you alluded to earlier is you know the biggest what's the bit there's the two biggest predictors of depression are you know at a global level are one of poverty don't talk enough about that and secondly identity loss so if i will actually making you depressed or me depressed is a is a relatively easy thing to do i'm just going to 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 them depressive make them unemployed you know like like at note with give them no notice type thing why because you're taking away a valued social identity you're not replacing it with anything and again that goes back to that the the career transitions retirement piece but cath and others have done big meta-analyses around this yeah social identity loss is a huge risk factor for just about everything radicalization you name it like so yeah it's a you know it's an ever-present kind of feature of the world.

35:26But 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 really big question. And again, 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 their 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 you can 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 you know my football team or my family they're 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 like i think you know what i think you know if you want to one of the things i often say to students is just tell me about the best version of yourself, when do you think you're kind of at your best?

36:48And 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 want to see the best version of me, you want to 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, whatever it might be, or with my family having a really nice meal. That's quite a common thing for people to say. in those moments I think I sometimes think if I give a talk which I should do you get really you get a bit of a rush you kind of feel validated as an individual through your participation in those collective activities and especially if you're 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 walk out into the street after the conference or whatever We walk down the street and you're nobody.

37:46And I think, and I just, and you just have that, you just have that thing. And you just, for a moment, you just have that sense. And I find those, I find those junctures, those sort of fault lines of our lives. Like, 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 because 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 here's a provocation for you then because um i saw something fabulous online recently by a guy called nick shappleton jones and he applied exactly that prism that you brought there to why bosses want workers back in the office.

38:40Because he said, when bosses are at home, they're just another guy on a Zoom call in a teacher. No one in their household pays any 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 to them. And so what they effectively feel by going, 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 strip someone of any sense of well-being, is strip their identity from them.

39:20These people have been stripped of their identity. What do you think of that? I loved that. Yeah, absolutely. And I saw that podcast because I saw your thing to it. And I was thinking, yeah. And actually, a colleague of ours, the University of Leipzig, Hannes Zucker, has data on exactly that in the pandemic. And one of the things that you see, and it was really, really clear in his data, and it was longitudinal, tracking people, daily diary type stuff, was that in the pandemic, rank and file workers were very happy because they could just get on with their work and they could self-organize, collectively self-organize.

39:51They were very productive, more productive than they, you look at academic production during the pandemic was through the roof. 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 really were able to just get on with what they wanted to do. And yes, in Hannes' data, what you see is that middle-upper management, they were apoplectic. But also they were pretty wretched and miserable. and they also 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 if this were to go 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 you know that was a there was a bit of existential threat in there too and 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 kind of restore you know normal service as it were but with bells on and so i feel that that was absolutely and part of that process and of course it was hugely misguided and and is hugely problematic and is not in any way supported by the data but yet those um in my organizational class it's actually which is brilliant a fourth year honors class for students the students every year do absolutely fantastic presentations and maybe 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 you know 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 you know 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 sort of got it in for them and and and is absolutely and is punishing them for these kinds of for in this way and that again and they are very interested to look at the data and say well 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 Quiggan done a lot of economists very well respected 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 well-being benefits for people you know actually very good benefits for organizations that implement it in terms of job satisfaction commitment lack of turnover you know reputational stuff so real big benefits but absolute total pushback from the sort of managerial class and the owners of corporations i mean and somehow suggesting that were 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 it's not just it makes them important, but it allows them to create a world that fits with their ideologies, their ethos, and their broader political objectives.

43:44That's the end of part one of my discussion with Professor Alex Haslam. The second episode will be available this time next week on your podcast feed, but if you're listening to this afterwards, then you should find it on the same page on the show notes. I've been Bruce Taisley. See you next time.

44:24thousands of products for every style and budget. Plus, surprise flash deals July 6th. Don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. You've got social dialed in. Search is doing its thing. So why do your marketing results look the same as six months ago? That's because you're fishing in the same pond as everyone else. Podcast listeners are a different audience entirely, more engaged, harder to reach through traditional channels and ready to act when someone they trust makes a recommendation. We're Acast, and we put them right in front of you.

45:00Browse thousands of the world's leading podcasts, book host reads or run your own ads, and track every conversion in real time. Same skills you already have, brand new results. Acast. Acast.com slash advertise.

45:22Guys.

45:44Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Evening, buyer's remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Uh, sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice. I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. Here's a tip for you.

46:22There's a podcast out there with fans waiting to be your next customer. They tune in every week. They trust the host. And that host wants to talk about brands like yours in their own words to their audience. The problem is you just haven't been introduced yet. We're A-Cast, where that introduction happens. As the world's largest podcast marketplace, we let you browse shows, see who's listening, and book host-read sponsorships or run your own ads all from one platform. Transparent pricing, real-time data, complete control. Start advertising on podcasts by visiting acast.com slash advertise.