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   Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 15-Jun-2026 00:51:43 JST Cat Hicks

   We hear about competition all day long. Win goals, win games, win business, win against the other applicant, win against the other team.

   I've been in a lot of workplaces where the dominant messaging about how we should all act was that competition is what delivers the sharpest knowledge work, and I'd bet a lot of you have heard this too.

   But the science of group problem-solving tells a different story

   • Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: likes this.
   • Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 15-Jun-2026 11:51:32 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     And the specific thing competition does to your brain, once you know about it, is hard to unsee.

     We literally *stop being able to fluently access empathy* when our cognition is pointed at grouping the world into opposing sides. The more we see people as not as the complex individuals they are but as a flattened part of a rival group, the stronger these effects. The more we interpret group conflict as the stage for individual actions, the more our minds inhibit empathy.

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 15-Jun-2026 11:52:05 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     Mina Cikara's research on intergroup competition (among others) documents that under competition conditions, the empathy gap between us and them can flip into something measurable as pleasure at the other side's failure. People surrounded by narratives of intergroup conflict are more likely to justify violence toward outsiders, and feel more schadenfreude at their misfortune.

     We have powerful systems in our minds for empathy, but we also have systems that dampen empathy during threat.

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 15-Jun-2026 11:52:05 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     But we can disrupt this zero-sum competition frame, and the healthiest groups learn how to do this. Some concrete strategies that work across the research:

     - making people aware that groups are not monolithic in their social connections
     - finding cross-cutting ties between members of "different" groups

     and,
     - invoking a group's own values against a harmful set of actions and holding one's group to a higher standard --> this one is a particularly fun area of work on "loyal dissenters"

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 15-Jun-2026 11:52:05 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     Loyal dissenters, as studied by Dominic Packer, are people who strongly identify with their group but *are also capable of dissenting with their group's norms.* They are key agents of reshaping and moving groups toward better. They are, as he calls them in a delightful paper title, "rebels with a cause."

     Disrupting the empathy dampening is absolutely possible, and the more you cultivate habits of empathy, the more you become willing to point out hypocritical groups, the more you play this role