Notices by Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)

Reading before bed and I hear my wife say to herself with quiet but immense focus "oh I love mutual cooperation studies in non-human primates"

@analog_ashley

I need to correct something I've posted about my book: I told people the ebook would be DRM-free. I shared that because I asked my publisher directly and was told it would be, but I've just this morning learned that's not accurate. I'm sorry. I was overjoyed to think we had worked out that option for folks because I know it really matters to some of you.

I also have open questions out right now about screen reader compatibility. I'll post what I find out as soon as I have it.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@augieray/116783159507230485

I am incredibly saddened by the way that many online patient and health communities have become places of toxic harassment, weaponized victimhood, and are turning resolutely anti science. I experience this constantly as a complex patient who is also science-informed. It's unbelievably bad behavior a lot of the time.

You might immediately be tempted to assign a valence to this. Surely "approach strategies" are the best!

Well, nothing is pure good and pure bad in psychology. These both play important roles for us! There are lots of reasonable situations in which we might want to avoid taking risks. But psychologists who study achievement -- and in particular, who persists in long-term achievement -- have been really interested in which strategies work best here.

We need another variable though

So now we've got something like this....sorry for the pencil scratch, I'll get you a better image in a second

The really interesting part is that psychologists have found that depending on which of these four quadrants you fall into, we can predict a lot of things about the patterns we'll see in your long-term achievement

(take a minute to actually put yourself in a quadrant if you're really playing along...! where do you end up most?)

But there are other goals! Maybe instead, you focused on performing against a normative standard, seeking out opportunities to demonstrate your competency to others, and getting to wield a certain kind of status.

We might call it an orientation toward Performance

Let me tell you what the next label means.

Try to remember a time in your life when you faced a new challenge, maybe a task in the workplace or learning a new thing. Maybe what felt most important to you were things like: increasing your own level of understanding, knowing you've achieved task competency, and intrinsic enjoyment. In fact, maybe you've engaged in caring about those goals so much it's a little bit beyond just a preference. We might even call it an "orientation" toward Mastery

Now, we're going to label one of these elements. Let me tell you what it means first.

Let's imagine we are facing a moment when we need to try to accomplish something. Our minds can prioritize very different goals in that moment. We could focus on maximizing challenge and taking a risk (but with a potential reward!). Or we could swing to the other side and try to *avoid risk*, let's say, the risk of looking incompetent in a performance situation

Now an interesting thing about these two opposing goals is that psychologists have got names for this!

Generally speaking, when you're prioritizing seeking challenge, we like to call those "approach" strategies. And when you're trying to do something like avoid looking incompetent in front of other people, well, we're not very imaginative so we named this "avoidance strategies"

Ok so we have our first spaces. On the far right, we'll call it "seek challenge." On the far left, we'll call it "avoid incompetence."

Like this:

Pull out a piece of paper and draw two lines on it. You're doing something you've seen a million times since grade school (it's a useful way to think about multivariate space!), using two different directions to divide the world into quadrants.

Like this:

Having a group identity is like a magnifying lens, focusing and strengthening the meaning we take from people we consider "like us," and the information we exchange with them.

And one thing this gives us is a thing your mind absolutely craves: a feeling of certainty.

That means our willingness to merge our identity into a group might be entangled with...how certain we feel about *ourselves* and who we are in the first place.

Strong group identity is a factor in whether we fall into patterns of intergroup prejudice.

Groups can funnel our attention and simplify our thinking.

This suggests that highly coherent groups may give people increased justification for failing to suppress prejudice towards others, even when we wouldn’t normally behave in a prejudiced way. Protecting our group feels rational to us when the differences between groups are magnified in our minds.

Picture being the first person to step out onto a dance floor at a party. Scary, right? It feels a lot easier to be the second, even better to be the third or fourth...now it's a GROUP you can join.

Our willingness to engage in collective behavior is impacted by how much we think the group we’re joining is cohesive within itself and distinct from others.

This is something scientists who study groups call "entitativity" (I know....psychologists are just as bad at naming things as devs)

What have psychologists learned about "firming up the self" and reducing that uncertainty? I'll tackle that in another post!

This is the COUNTDOWN to preorders for THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOFTWARE TEAMS on June 23!

In celebration, I'm sharing a new piece of evidence every day from the book and how it helps us understand our minds and build more thriving, joyful communities in technology ❤️

Sign up for a preorder reminder here:
https://www.drcathicks.com/#book

This is also a reason that old group divisions can get hold of teams at work when uncertainty about what we actually need to solve comes bubbling up to the surface and a new team identity hasn’t truly been invested in at an organization.

Uncomfortable uncertainty changes how we think about the people around us and the explanations we come up with for their actions

That’s exactly what Hogg and collaborators found across several studies where they directly manipulated people's identity uncertainty with a brief psychological intervention.

Participants who felt more uncertain about their own identities, *and* were presented with a highly coherent group, were more likely to come out feeling strong identification with that group.

In uncertainty, we gravitate toward compellingly coherent groups. Those two pieces can lock together like LEGO

Some researchers have proposed that mitigating uncertainty about ourselves is one big reason people seek to join groups.

Uncertainty-Identity theory, proposed by psychologist Michael Hogg, argues that joining a group ameliorates the stress we feel in uncertainty. Under this theory, we’d predict that people will tend to form stronger group bonds when something is leading them to question who they are, and when a possible group presents a compelling opportunity for certainty.

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

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"