Something You Should Know - Why Winners Often Lose & What Great Teams Do Differently

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

When you ask someone to recall something from deep in their memory, watch their face — they’ll probably do something that actually helps them remember. You might do it too without realizing it. Listen as I reveal what it is and why it works. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/201110/why-do-you-close-your-eyes-remember Have you heard of the winner’s curse or the sunk cost theory? These are strange but predictable ways our brains can trick us when we take risks — especially with money. My guest, Alex O. Imas, Professor of Behavioral Science, Economics, and Applied AI at the University of Chicago, has studied these “behavioral anomalies” with Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler. Together they co-authored The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now. (https://amzn.to/48gycBj) . Listen to how these things work, because understanding these anomalies can help keep you from falling victim to them. We’ve all had to work in groups, whether it’s a team we are assigned to at work, or a neighborhood committee or parents’ group. Sometimes they run beautifully. Often… they don’t. Why do so many groups struggle, and how can we make them more effective? Colin T. Fisher, Associate Professor of Organizations and Innovation at University College London, joins me to share insights that can help any team excel. Colin is author of the book The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups.(https://amzn.to/48WcuCT). Whether you cook or not, at some point you find yourself in the kitchen putting food away and you run into the problem of – sometimes the plastic wrap clings to the container and sometimes it does not. Listen to hear the secret of how to get it to stick every time. https://lifehacker.com/run-a-wet-finger-across-surfaces-to-make-plastic-wrap-s-1728185077 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! DELL: Your new Dell PC with Intel Core Ultra helps you handle a lot when your holiday to-dos get to be…a lot. Upgrade today by visiting⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Dell.com/Deals⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ QUINCE: Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! ON POINT: We love the On Point podcast! Listen wherever you get your podcasts! ⁠https://www.wbur.org/radio/programs/onpoint⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. today on something you should know a simple technique that can help you remember anything better then why do so many winners end up disappointed it's called the winner's curse lottery winners

for example with lottery winners it's on the first day they're super happy but then that happiness goes right back to baseline because people don't take into account that their phones are going to be lighting up for the rest of their lives with people asking them for money. Also, a little kitchen trick you'll be so glad you heard. Then, being on a team, working in groups, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Groups are the engine of almost all the best stuff in the world, that if you want new scientific discoveries, they're being done by groups. That said, groups are also really hard, and we get them wrong a lot of the time.

this today on Something You Should Know. I want to tell you about a podcast I listen to. There's a new episode every weekday, and I believe it can help you uncomplicate the news and better understand what's really going on in the world. It's called On Point. On Point is a rare public space where you hear nuanced explorations of complex topics, live and in real time. Host Magna Chakra Barty leads provocative conversations that will help make sense of the world with urgency, timeliness, and depth. Each episode is a deeply researched, beautifully produced hour. Listeners will learn, be challenged, and have some fun, too.

You can hear episodes of On Point every weekday, wherever you get your podcast. Something You Should Know. Fascinating Intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers. Have you ever noticed that when you ask someone to recall something, in trying to recall it, they'll sometimes look up or even close their eyes. Well, why do they do that? I'm going to tell you, as we start this episode of something you should know, hi and welcome, I'm Mike Carruthers.

And so it is a common response. You've probably done this too. you ask somebody to remember and they close their eyes in trying to recall or they look up into the sky or at the ceiling and the reason they do that the reason we all do that is it really helps with recall it seems that any kind of sensory distraction

inhibits our ability to remember things closing your eyes blocks out the visual distraction researchers discovered that any sensory distraction makes remembering more difficult But what's even more interesting is that visual distractions make it harder to remember what you saw, and audible distractions make it harder to recall what you heard. So if you need to remember something, get away from any kind of distraction, and that greatly improves your odds of remembering it.

And that is something you should know. You've probably heard those stories about lottery winners who end up. end up broke and miserable just a few years after hitting the jackpot. They win, and somehow they lose at the same time. That's a classic example of something economists call the winner's curse. But this phenomenon goes far beyond lottery tickets. It shows up in auctions, business deals, and even in everyday decisions. And the psychology behind it is fascinating.

My guest is Alex Emos. He is a professor of behavioral science. economics, and applied AI at the University of Chicago. And he is co-author, along with Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler, of a book called The Winner's Curse, Behavioral Economics Anomalies Then and Now. Hey, Alex, welcome to something you should know. Hi, Mike. I'm thrilled to be here. So I just use that lottery example to illustrate the winner's curse, but take us down the

road a little farther. What is the winner's curse? The winner's curse is the idea that let's say I want to make some money today. What's the easiest thing I can do other than, you know, something illegal? I can go to a bar with a jar of coins and say, all right, whoever bids the highest amount for those jar of coins wins all the money in the jar. Systematically what's going to happen is that the person who ends up winning the jar of coins will pay more for it than the amount of money in the jar. So by winning, they actually end up losing because they pay a certain amount for their bid, but they actually end up losing money on it. And that's the winner's curse in kind of a very small little scenario. But the way that the winner's curse was actually discovered was in the context of

very sophisticated oil executives and their engineers trying to bid for wells of where to drill the oil. And what they found is whenever they won the rights to basically drill a well, they found that the amount of oil in the actual well was less systematically than what they had anticipated and calculated, which meant that by winning the actual bids, they were systematically losing money. And they actually, the oil executives actually coined the winner's curse and behavioral economists have been kind of researching it and uncovering it in a bunch of different places since then. And so what's going on there? What's at work? What's at play that makes that so? Well, think about the jar example. Everybody kind of looks at the jar and they think how much

money is in that jar. And nobody's really correct necessarily, right? So some people think there's less money. Some people think there's more money than there actually is. And the people who have some sort of idea, let's say there's $15 in the jar. Some people think there's 18. Some people think there's 12. And everybody kind of bids a little bit less than they actually think is in there just, you know, because they're risk-averse and things like that. But the thing is, who's going to end up winning the actual auction? Well, it's the people who think there's more money in the jar than there actually is, the people who are over-optimistic. So the people who are over-optimistic will end up winning the auction, grabbing the jar,

and systematically, because they're over-optimistic, they're going to end up losing money. The way that it kind of works is the fact that when you're participating in an auction, you don't just have to think about, okay, this is what I think this object is worth. I also have to think about the fact that everybody else is doing the exact same thing, the same calculation and acting strategically. So I not only have to think about what it's worth to me, I have to think about what it's worth to everybody else and how everybody else is behaving.

In an auction, what that means is that you need to think about this, take the winner's curse into account, and decrease your bid systematically. And people just don't do that. So when people overbid and they win the jar of coins, Are these people, do they, I wonder, do they tend to do this a lot in life? Or each jar coin thing is its own unique experiment? That's a great question.

So in the case where the winner's curse was originally discovered, it seems like this is kind of a systematic problem that keeps happening to the same companies that are bidding. So it's not like, oh, I lost money. I learned my lesson. I'm going to bid lower next time. So it doesn't seem like it's something that is kind of a one-off to an individual where, you know, I lost money from this auction. I learned I'm going to act better next time. And, you know, there's examples not just from oil executives.

There's examples in, you know, professional sports teams when they're bidding for first round picks. It's just a systematic effect where people overbid over and over again. And so this is an example of behavioral economics. And what's another one? So another example of a behavioral economic anomaly is something that I documented with some colleagues looking at professional investors. So these are institutional investors who are managing million, sometimes billion dollar portfolios. And you would think that these are the people who are least likely to exhibit behavioral economic anomalies because all of the incentives are there. They're getting constant feedback on their decisions.

And lo and behold, when we got a data set of something like 900 of these folks over 13 years or more, we see their daily trading decisions. Lo and behold, we found that just like regular people, they pay attention to somethings and they ignore some things. What do they ignore? They ignore selling. In order to buy something, you have to sell something. That's kind of how institutional investing largely works. And they pay a lot of attention on what they want to buy. These decisions look great.

But when you look at what they're selling, they do worse than random. I can actually throw a dart at that portfolio, which is an empirical strategy we use in the paper. And my dart does better than what they do. They do worse than random because essentially they're not really paying attention to what they're selling. They just kind of want to sell something in order to buy. And then they end up selling the thing that they most recently bought, which is still earning value for this. them. That's why they bought it in the first place. And we show that this sort of inattention, this behavioral economic anomaly, costs them a lot, a lot of money. And why are they so

blind to their selling mistakes? The thing about anomalies where they happen over and over, a lot of the time, the reason is that there's no kind of clear opportunities for learning to happen in the first place. So in this case, when I buy something, it's in my portfolio. I'm tracking it all the time. When I sell it, unless I'm selling, sorry, tracking everything I've sold, I don't really learn that this was a bad decision. So it's a lot harder to learn about my mistakes in selling that it is for buying. And we think that that's part of the reason why this happens over and over again. Yeah, because once you sell something, you're literally not invested in it anymore. You don't see what, you don't pay attention as much to what happens to it because

you don't, you have nothing to do with it. But it happens not only in investing, it happens in everyday life, right? Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, the anomalies were first documented among college students and kind of everyday people. So the famous anomalies that people are loss-averse, which is essentially means that they're too risk-averse relative to the standard economic models, which predicts that people should largely be risk-neutral over low-stakes. Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky, have a famous paper, kind of one of the big early behavioral economic papers called Prospect Theory showing that people are actually risk-averse over tiny gambles, so a 50% chance of winning $2, 50% chance of losing a dollar.

This is a positive, expected value gamble. They found that people were churning these down. And this is an anomaly for standard economic theory, which predicts that over these tiny stakes people should be risk-neutral and should love this gamble. basically. And this has been shown amongst, you know, not just college students, which was the original paper, but amongst everyday people in all walks of life, cross country, cross-culturally, very, very replicable phenomenon. So a lot of these anomalies, like the ones that we've been talking about, are not just investors. It's not just oil executives. It's just a basic

psychological process that almost everybody has unless there's some decision aids or learning opportunities for people to make better decisions. Is this inevitable? Is it human nature? Or do some people figure this out and then change their behavior so they don't fall victim to this? That's a great point. So whenever we're talking about an effect such as loss aversion or winner's curse, when

you actually look at the data, there's an average. which is, or the mean of the process, which is the effect. So let's say there's a winner's curse on average people overbid, right? But if you look at the data, there's certainly some people who don't. And there's some people who are not loss-averse. There's some investors who pay a lot of attention to their selling behavior. So it's not that everybody has the exact same tendency to fall trapped to these things. There are some people who figured it out, as you said.

So, you know, they realized at some point, hey, my selling sucks, I'm going to fix it. And then they're selling improves. Or there's people who just have a predisposition, their personality is such that they're not loss of us. Or they, from the very beginning, we're like, look, selling is just as important as buying, and I'm not going to fall to, I'm not going to fall for this trap. So why are winners, people who do win, sometimes so disappointed with what they won? Sometimes it's literally the winner's curses and they're disappointed because they're paying more money for something that's worth less money. So that's a clear case of disappointment.

Other times people just have rosy expectations and they're just over-optimistic about, you know, how good a vacation is going to feel or how good, you know, getting that next promotion is going to feel. So a person works nights and weekends and thinks that, you know, getting that next promotion is going to be just going to be generating all this happiness for them. And all of a sudden, they get it. They paid all of this time and effort and time away from their family to get it. And then now what? It's kind of just another part of the job. Sometimes it's not like that and it's everything it was cracked out to be. But a lot of times we do see disappointment. And

this has to do with the fact that people's beliefs are often miscalibrated in the direction of either being too pessimistic depending on the setting or too optimistic in other settings. We're talking about these interesting behavioral anomalies, and my guest is Alex Emas. He's author of the book, The Winner's Curse, Behavioral Economics Anomalies Then and Now. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. A new era of fitness is here. Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, built for breakthroughs, with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move.

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We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear-off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same level, language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk. Business. So Alex, I've always found it interesting. And yeah, I guess I've fallen victim to this myself where people want something so bad. They've got to have that car, that house, that video game. But pretty soon,

you get habituated to it and it's just it's just your house it's just a car it's just a video game it as soon as you get it it it loses its sparkle yeah so this idea of habituation and adaptation is a classic case of a forecasting error this is a type of anomaly where your beliefs are miscalibrated where you think you know what I would be so happy if I won the lottery. Or I would be so happy if I bought that convertible. And it's because of the fact that when we're imagining the future and imagining something that something happens to us, we're not imagining everything that's going to be happening to us. We're imagining a subset. So when I'm thinking about a convertible, when am I thinking about driving it? So let's say I buy a convertible

in Minnesota in the summer. I'm imagining top down, wind in my hair, beautiful day. This is amazing. What's the reality? It's called, you know, September through May in Minnesota. It's cold and I have a car that I have to close the roof and the wind is getting in and it kind of sucks. But the problem is when it's a sunny day, people aren't imagining that. They're imagining all their sunny days. They buy the convertible and then they end up not being very happy with it. This is actually an empirical study by Devon Pope, my colleague at University of Chicago and some co-authors. They they show that on sunny days people are a lot more likely to buy convertibles and then they end up kind of less happy with it because they didn't take into account all of the other things

that could be happening. You know, with lottery winners, it's, there's, there's really nice papers showing that, you know, on the first day, they're super happy, but then that happiness kind of goes right back to baseline, sometimes even less than baseline because people don't take into account that, you know, they have a lot of family and friends and their phones are going to be lighting up for the rest of their lives with people asking them for money. Yeah. Well, I imagine everybody thinks a little bit about that. But, but yeah, I mean, that's kind of a universal belief. Boy, if I could win $500 million, I mean, life would just be sweet as can be. And yet you hear stories of people where it just isn't. And like, you know, lottery winners are incredibly likely to become bankrupt as many, many new stories have focused on individual incidents.

but there's actually papers now showing that bankruptcy is a real thing with lottery winners. Talk about the sunk cost fallacy and what that is and how it plays out. Well, the sunk cost fallacy is basically the idea that, you know, once you buy something or invest in something, in standard economics, that becomes a sunk cost. When you're trying to make a decision of whether, let's say I bought a ticket to go to a basketball game. And it's pouring rain. It's, you know, snow. It's dangerous for me to go there.

Should I go? Well, economists would say, look, it doesn't matter whether I've already bought a ticket or not. You should make a decision of how much am I going to enjoy the game? What are the costs of going to the game and do that calculus and then decide whether to go or not? And it turns out if a person bought the ticket already, it's sitting in their pocket, they're a lot more likely to go because they're not ignoring the cost of the ticket when making the decision of going to the game. The same kind of thing happens when you're, you know, a manager or a startup executive thinking about, you know, I invested in this project. And let's say it's going poorly and I have to decide whether I want to put more money into it or not.

In standard economics, you should ignore the money you've poured into it and say, look, is it worth pouring more money into it or not? And just ignore the past. That's a sunk cost. But in fact, this is called an escalation of commitment, which is a form of the sunk cost. fallacy that you see people pouring more and more and more money into these failing projects because they're not ignoring the sunk cost well like a like an everyday example that I've noticed is like if you buy a ticket to a movie and you go and you just think it sucks you still stay you because you can't get up and leave

you paid for the movie oh Mike this is the biggest lesson for me from being a behavioral economist is training myself not to do that So I would go to concerts, I'm a big concert goer, and I would go to a band that sucks. And I would sit there, and I have so many things to do in my everyday life. But I would sit there and I'd be uncomfortable, buy the expensive beers just because I bought the ticket. But on Friday, for the first time of my life, I went to a concert, it was not good, and I left after three songs. And I was incredibly proud of myself. well good for you but that's very hard to do for most people i think because it's very hard to do

because of of that thing you know i paid for it i it was my decision so i'm gonna i'm gonna see it through and where else where else do we trip ourselves up do you think of in these kind of behavioral economicy kind of ways where where we do things we behave in ways because of this general idea well one thing that uh was demonstrated very early on in behavioral economics is this idea that you know you um say you want to do something today and you really should do it today but then you say look you know what tomorrow is better and then you say like look i'm going to go to the gym tomorrow i really want to get in shape i have a real goal of getting in shape tomorrow is a good day for me to go to the gym. Guess what happens when tomorrow arrives? The best day to go to the gym is actually

tomorrow. Tomorrow arrives again. The best day to go to the gym is once again tomorrow. And you do this for 365 days until, you know, December 31st, you have not gone to the gym or maybe gone once or something like that. Well, this is important to pay attention to because we're all affected. We all fall victim to these anomalies, some or all of them. And, and And at least by knowing they exist and what they are, you can protect yourself to some extent. My guest is Alex Emos. He's a professor of behavioral science, economics, and applied AI at the University of Chicago. And he's co-author of the book The Winners Curse, Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now.

There's a link to his book in the show notes. And Alex, thank you for coming on today. Thanks so much. Did you lock the front door? Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision?

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Conditions apply. Hi there. Fred Greenholt here. director of audio dramas like DC high-volume Batman and Star Trek Khan. However, my one true love remains all things spooky, and I'm excited to say there's a new season of my horror podcast, Undertoe. This season is called Familiar Haunts, standalone horror tales that reveal how the past is never truly gone, and humanity may be the most ruthless monster of them all.

Familiar haunts is available now. Find it by subscribing to Undertoe wherever you get your podcasts, such as the app where you're listening to me right now. Search for Undertoe. No matter who you are or what you do, at some point, you've had to work in a group, on a team, at your job, on a committee, a board, even a neighborhood project. And let's face it, groups can be tricky. When people come together, something almost chemical happens, a group dynamic forms.

Suddenly, it's not just about you, it's about how everyone interacts, who takes the lead, and how things actually get done. Understanding that dynamic can make the difference between a group that struggles and one that thrives. My guest, Colin M. Fisher, studies exactly that. He's an associate professor of organization and innovation at University College London, and he's author of a book called The Collective Edge, Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups. Hi, Colin. Welcome. Good to have you on something you should know. Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me.

So all of us have been on teams at work or we've worked in groups. And sometimes it's a good experience. Sometimes it's not such a good experience. And we hear that teams or groups are important because the collective work of a group can be better than the individual. So what is your whole take on groups? We need groups. And I think groups are the engine of almost all the best stuff in the world. that if you want new scientific discoveries, they're being done by groups.

If you want the world-changing new businesses, those are also almost exclusively the domain of these small teams of entrepreneurs. And if you want great art, great music, great sports, you know, most of these things are coming from groups. And research is showing that actually the rate of group contributions to knowledge and development that the world is, you know, higher than it's ever been. That said, groups are also really hard and we get them wrong a lot of the time. And so I think the kind of dual associations we have with group and teamwork where it feels so necessary and it feels like such a good thing. But on the

other hand, so many of them can be boring or ineffective is a product of these kind of two faces of groups and teams. So I've never really thought of myself as, I guess, as a good team player group participant. In part, because I'm never really sure, like, how does the group work together? Do we each go off and do our thing and come back and talk about what we did on our own?

Do we sit down and, you know, okay, let's write this thing. Bob, you handle the first paragraph and Fred, you take the second. I'm never really sure how it's supposed to work. so I guess so I just rather do it myself yeah I mean I think the kinds of tasks that we do and don't do in groups really matters a lot and that you're absolutely right that if we you know try to like alternate words or alternate sentences as we're writing something that's not going to work very well and that's because you know anytime we work in a group there they're coordination costs it's hard for us to just hand something off from one person to another. And so we're always balancing these coordination costs against the benefit we get from, you know, having usually two minds on the problems or sometimes, you know, two pairs of hands. And the question really is, what kind of problem is this?

Is this something where we already know how to break it apart and we can have individuals go off and, you know, do their little piece and then we can put it back together? when we're when we're all together. Is this something where we don't know how to break it apart at all? Or maybe we don't even know what the parts of it are. And that in that situation, we do need the group to sort of talk about, well, what could we send individuals off to do? What is this even?

What are we trying to accomplish? And that I think that rubric of saying, if we know what the parts are, we know how to break them up and we know how to put them back together, then it makes sense to delegate these things to individuals and have us kind of work in what I would call a modular fashion. Whereas if we don't know that, then we do need to have a discussion until we do know that answer. And sometimes what we discover is we never find it out and we have to do everything as a group, although I think that's rare. But that that in and of itself is the work of a group to do creative stuff. So you sometimes hear people say when they see something, they may say, well, this looks like

it was done by a committee, implying that here's something that probably could have been simple that one person perhaps could have done. And instead it was given to a group of people. And they collectively screwed it up so bad that it's worthless. And I think that that happens a lot. I think when people are saying something looks like it was made by a committee, they're sort of saying this looks like something that everybody could sign off on, but nobody really likes and doesn't really express anyone's best work. And that that's not the way I would hope the best groups would sort of resolve tensions and disagreements within the group, that it's not by saying, oh, you want 10 and I want one, so we should settle on five.

And especially when we're talking about, you know, ideas and knowledge work, we usually need to say, well, which idea is the best? And let's pick that one and let's build on it rather than let's always compromise and find the average between two different pieces, or let's take a little bit of everybody's idea and kind of stick them together into a Frankenstein's monster of a project. And I think that because we misunderstand how to do group work and that we think that working in a group means a kind of compromise in the middle rather than a choosing, the best from each person that we sometimes end up in these situations.

So let's talk about how to do the work of a group because I would imagine, you know, one of the big issues is who's in this group? You know, Lenin and McCartney wrote some great songs, but if it was Lenin and Smith, we would have had very different songs. It would have been two people writing together, but it wouldn't be the Beatles. Absolutely. The composition of a group determines a lot of things about the group and that the most common problems are that first we just don't think very hard about who's going to be on the group and a lot of a lot of them are overly inclusive and that can be anywhere from the top management teams of the biggest organizations in the world to you know a PTA bake sale committee where the criteria for composing the group

is who's available and who's going to be upset if we exclude them, so we're going to include them anyway. Those are really the wrong criteria. That what we want is to say, what are the perspectives, knowledge, and skills that we need to do whatever it is we're trying to do? And can we make sure that we have those people? And then second, the other thing we get wrong is that most of our groups are too big to get anything done. And I think this is where we get this sense of things being created by a committee or that groups are kind of doing mediocre work. And that's because they get too many people into a room to actually have a meaningful

discussion of anything. So if we have 20 people in a room and we have an hour, the chance that we're going to really learn what everybody thinks is very, very low. But if we get this optimal number of people, which research shows is about 4.5, which is pretty tough to do. It's hard to get 4.5 people in the room so we can settle for anywhere from 3 to 7 people. Then we've got a real chance. So if we're selecting for the best knowledge and skills that are appropriate to the task,

if we have a small group where we can have real meaningful discussions, know what everybody thinks, know what their opinions are, to find out what they really know. then we've got a much better chance. I remember hearing about some research about putting groups together where if the group members were too much alike, it was a problem, and if the group members were too diverse, it was a problem, and there was some sort of sweet spot. Are you familiar with what I'm talking about? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, even when I was getting my PhD, this is essentially what we were taught, which is that if everybody knows exactly the same thing and thinks exactly the same thing, then the chances that groups are going to make good decisions, come up with creative ideas, or be able to even divide labor effectively, are very low. So we don't want groups where everybody's two the same. But on the other hand, if everybody's so different that they can't understand each other,

that they can't agree on anything, or at an extreme, they don't even speak the same language and understand each other well enough, then they're also not going to do very well. But when you actually look at the data, it turns out that the worry about groups being too different and too diverse is overblown. That research on work teams shows basically more diverse teams that are doing tasks where they have objective performance criteria, so you can just say that it's black and white, whether they did better or worse, more diverse teams tend to do better. And it's only when we have subjective evaluation of performance by outsiders. So people are looking at the group and saying,

I get to decide if that's good or bad, that diverse teams are getting penalized. And so what that says is it's probably more about outsiders, biases, and their theory that diverse groups are going to struggle than it is that diverse groups actually truly have trouble collaborating. So I would say it's pretty safe to actually continue adding more knowledge, more perspectives, more skills to your team, and that research suggests that it's pretty unlikely we're going to get to that tipping point of being so different we can't understand each other. it is not uncommon for a group to get together in the beginning and somebody more or less takes over they kind of hijack the group they designate themselves as the leader of the group and it's his way is the best way and how do you deal with that guy so if one person is dominating for any reason that's a sign again that the group needs leadership I think the best things you can do are, first, if there's a problem, to call it out. So say, hey, I've noticed we're hearing a lot from Mike and we're not hearing so much from, you know, there's other members to have some kind of discussion about how we're making decisions and the process by which we're doing that. And again, ideally this would have been done in the first meeting, not waiting for this problem to emerge. But that, and that you can tell, probably tell,

I'm hesitant to say, oh, there's a problem with somebody's behavior. That means that person is the problem, and we should intervene by trying to get them to behave differently, although sometimes that's necessary. Usually that's a symptom that the group hasn't been set up well, that we didn't set these norms in the first place, that we're not clear on what we're trying to accomplish and how we're trying to accomplish it. But better than all of this is prevention. Prevention is much better than curing group dynamics because once we get to these difficult situations and these problems, it's true. It's really tough. And that's why I put so much emphasis on think about the structure of your group, even before it ever meets. Think about launching your group well in that first meeting to prevent these kinds of problems from ever occurring.

And that those tend to be the healthiest groups rather than those. and the ones that are constantly fighting fires and saying, hey, we're having this dysfunction that's now emerged, which again is usually a sign there's something deeper wrong. I'm sure that groups have been studied to death. And there must be like the psychology of the group says that when a group forms and it gets to work on a project, this is what's going to happen. What is that psychology of the group? Well, most of what's going to happen, most of a group's fate.

is determined in those kind of early moments of its existence, groups tend to be what we call inertial, that whoever talks the most in the first meeting is going to tend to talk the most in the second, third, and fourth meeting. If somebody gets into that role of kind of sitting back and not contributing much in the first meeting, they're probably going to keep doing that. And so because we know that these social norms are so sticky, we need to really work hard to have productive ones right from the start and not have this attitude that, oh, you know, groups are going to kind of gradually figure things out and get better a little bit every time, that it tends to be much more sudden than that. And so we really need to take those early moments seriously. Is working in a group a skill and the more you do it, the better you get at it? It's all based on the group.

The group determines how good the group is, and it's more of it in a vacuum. I mean, it's a little bit of both. There's certainly skills, like communication, like listening, like asking questions, that can help you across different groups. There's knowledge, like the things that we're talking about, the condition, knowing about what's important to get right in a group and when you can intervene, that are likely to be. relatively transferable but you know every group is different and that they're all in new situations and that the real key is that we we learn together and we stay on the same page the biggest danger in any group is that we have slightly different visions of where we're trying to what we're trying to achieve so if if there's a group within it

say a workplace, you know, it's Bob's group. We put Bob and his group on this problem and they nailed it. Is it a good idea, has anyone ever studied this? Is it a good idea to take that very same group and give them another problem and they'll do just as well? Or is the problem such a big factor that you, that's not a safe assumption? So there is some pretty good research on this and that keeping successful groups together is a good strategy. And that too often that's not what we do. And part of that is when we work together with people, we learn about their preferences,

we learn about what they know, what they're good at, what they're not so good at. And that knowledge is useful. And it helps us kind of continue to collaborate over time. And that the research does show that, you know, this kind of conventional wisdom that groups get stale and that we want to mix them up. turns out to be a bit overblown, that for the most part, if you have a successful group, you want to keep them together as long as everybody's happy to continue working together and they're doing good work. We should leave Bob's group together to do the next project again.

What is it you find in talking with people that they just don't really understand about groups and how they work and how to make them work? that really small groups are the unit that society is built on, that, you know, whether it's roommates or families or friends or work teams, bands, or whatever it is, that most of our life are spent in these small groups and that the dynamics of them are really unique, that the way you feel at home with your family and the way you feel in a work team are quite different. the way you behave is quite different in all likelihood. And so we really underestimate how important groups are.

And I think this kind of over-emphasis on individual leaders, individual geniuses, has caused us to really sort of mismanage the world in a lot of ways. I'm not trying to argue that, no, there aren't great individuals. But I think that thinking that the way we're going to get change in the world is to be saved by some great individual rather than to build better groups is kind of what's holding us back here.

Well, I've enjoyed this discussion because, as I said earlier, I've always been one of those people that thinks, you know, why take five people to do something when one person could probably do it better and faster? But groups are part of life. I mean, you're going to be in one sooner or later, probably sooner. And understanding the dynamics of how they work and how they change and what they do is really interesting. I've been speaking with Colin Fisher.

He's an associate professor of organizations and innovation at University College London. And his book is called The Collective Edge, Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Colin, thanks. Okay, well, thanks so much for having me on, Mike. If you spend any time in the kitchen, not just cooking, even if you were just in the kitchen cleaning up and putting food away, you've noticed that when you put plastic wrap over a bowl or a container,

sometimes it sticks and sometimes it doesn't. Well, there is a remedy for this. It's to wet your finger with water and run it along the outside edge of the bowl or container. Then the plastic wrap should stick. Plastic wrap has a substance in it. It's kind of like gelatin. And since gelatin becomes sticky and gooey on contact with water,

a similar reaction seems to take place here. The one tricky part is you don't want to wet your fingers too much. Plastic wrap is very hard to work with when your hands are wet. It can get all tangled and messed up. and when that does happen, don't throw the plastic wrap away. You just stick it in the fridge for a while, and when you take it out, it will be easy to handle again. In fact, keeping plastic wrap in the fridge all the time is actually a good idea as it is easier to handle. And that is something you should know.

You've heard me ask a million times at the end of almost every episode to please tell someone about this podcast, and I ask so often because it really does help. It really helps grow our audience and spread the word. And so again, I would ask you to please tell someone you know about this podcast and ask them to give a listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. When they were young, the five members of an elite commando group nicknamed the Stone Wolves

raged against the oppressive rule of the Kradarocan Empire, which occupies and dominates, most of the galaxies inhabited planets. The wolves fought for freedom, but they failed, leaving countless corpses in their wake. Defeated and disillusioned, they hung up their guns and went their separate ways, all hoping to find some small bit of peace amidst a universe thick with violence and oppression. Four decades after their heyday, they each try to stay alive and eke out a living, but a friend from the past won't let them move on, and neither will their bitterest.

enemy. The Stone Wolves is season 11 of the Galactic Football League science fiction series by author Scott Sigler. Enjoy it as a standalone story or listen to the entire GFL series beginning with season one, the rookie. Search for Scott Sigler, S-I-G-L-E-R, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm often asked, as you might imagine, what podcast do I listen to? And I actually have an eclectic taste and I jump around, try different ones. But I will say that I have a couple I'm very consistent about, and one of them is The Jordan Harbinger Show. It's kind of a little like something you should know, but Jordan goes in interestingly different directions. I do know that we share a lot of listeners, a lot of listeners who like this podcast like the Jordan

Harbinger Show. Jordan is really good at getting his guests to open up and share great insights. Recently, he discussed modern romance scam tactics. I mean, that's the lowest of the low, but you've got to know about them so you can fight back against them. And another episode he did was about how society has engineered a generation of lonely men. The show covers a lot of great topics, which, well, like I said, if you like this show, you're going to like his show. There's so much here. Check out the Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.