Breaking Out of In Group Thinking

This article was originally published on LinkedIn: Breaking Out of In Group Thinking.

This article discusses some of my thoughts around group psychology and its impact on developing a diverse and inclusive workspace. I believe that some of the psychological concepts discussed in that article – in and out groups, muting – have a direct impact on how we treat others at work, and especially those who are very different from ourselves.

It is important to note that by this time I had had a rather long career in tech. I had graduated from MIT, worked in many different tech jobs, gotten an advanced degree, been the technical lead on several research teams, been a Principal Investigator on a DARPA (US government) research project, led a data science team, and had many other accomplishments under my belt.

The interviewer showed up late, and started talking. He told me how it was so nice that I wanted to learn data analytics. He mentioned that they had some really easy problems to start on so I could learn gradually. He said that they would help me all I needed so I could have some early successes.

Clearly he had not read my resume. Clearly he was going off the fact that he was looking at a fifty-something woman who had the audacity to think she was qualified to apply for a senior position in data science. Though his words seemed like he meant to be encouraging or supportive, they were totally off the mark.

I tried to bring the interviewer up to date by bringing in anecdotes from my experience and by asking intelligent questions, but he did not appear to be particularly engaged in the interview nonetheless. Naturally I declined to continue with the interview process.

That day, the company I was interviewing with lost something. They lost the chance at hiring a person who had already proven herself to be competent and innovative, and who checked off every check box in their posted job requirements. They also lost the chance at having a different kind of voice – an older woman’s voice – to have input into the design and implementation of their products.

When you look at a potential or current coworker, do you think about how their differences could enhance your business or your team? Alternatively, do you look at coworkers who are different from you as less competent or harder to work with? Do you view diversity as enhancing or dividing?

In-Group Thinking

A long time ago, when the world was much more primitive, we as humans organized into tribes. A tribe was a group of people who lived together, supported each other, and protected each other. In this setting, it was natural for my tribe to distrust your tribe – each tribe was competing for stuff from the same pool, and you wanted your tribe to survive. 

We still maintain this mentality today, but I would argue that our notion of “tribe” has changed. Its original sense was, “a social group comprising numerous families, clans, or generations together with slaves, dependents, or adopted strangers.” [Merriam Webster] The more modern sense is, “a group of persons having a common character, occupation, or interest.” For example, when Steve Silberman wrote the book Neurotribes, he was discussing groups of people and their neurological similarities and differences. 

This same notion of tribes aligns well with the psychological notion of groups. Groups in the workplace identify with each other for a variety of considerations, including things like race, age, neurology, religion, ability or gender. Closely related to this is the idea of culture or cultural lenses, in that a group of people often identify together as a group because they share similar cultural lenses. In many cases, the people in the same group have similar backgrounds, similar experiences, and similar ways of reacting to others. Their language, both verbal and body language, revolves around common teachings and expectations. These all feed into the way they view, interpret, and interact with people outside of their group. The tribal mentality still holds.

I believe that much of our struggle with implementing truly inclusive workplaces is rooted in group psychology and how our minds work.  That is, underpinning the challenges of diversity and equity is the fact that our basic psychology is wired to be discriminatory. For example, in my interview experience described above, the interviewer clearly had me mentally grouped according to his notion of the technical abilities of the fifty-something year old women he knew. He had not taken an unbiased look at my experience. I was grouped and classified.

Group psychology says that whenever you have a number of people working together, they naturally form into groups. This natural clustering of coworkers has several effects. We mentally have an affinity towards people in our own group (our in-group), and attribute different levels of respect to others based on their groups. The predominant group at work defines the tone of the working conversations. It dominates the values, thinking processes, communication processes and working practices of the group. The coworkers who are in other groups then must make a greater effort to understand the predominant groups’s values and thinking, and take the effort to make their communication, and working practices to “fit in.” This innately places a higher cognitive load on the people in the other groups, which leaves them with fewer reserves for their actual work. This is explained in more detail in my article on masking [The High Cost of the Mask].

In addition to the increased cognitive load we have the issues of in-group favoritism and out-group negativity. In-group favoritism is “favoring members of one’s in-group over out-group members … in evaluation of others, in allocation of resources, and in many other ways.” Out-group negativity is “punishing or placing burdens upon the out-group.” Behaviors that are acceptable from a member of the predominant group are punished when done by members of other groups. For example, in a setting where males are predominant, if a male is assertive that may be considered as a leadership strength, but if a female does the same thing it is more likely to be considered to be pushy and a behavior to correct. Another place favoritism often occurs is in decisions about advancement and promotion. In-group favoritism leads managers to excuse deficits in a person in their in-group, assuming they will learn to do better. At the same time, these same deficits may be a barrier to advancement to a person in an out-group.

Finally, there is the issue that minority groups are often muted. The muted group theory implies that the predominant group is the group that creates the communication system, and that members of the minority need to learn that communication system in order to express themselves. Because the minority groups have different values, thought processes, etc., they may be unable to express their ideas clearly in the predominant group’s communication system. In fact, ways that they would express themselves naturally may be interpreted incorrectly by members of the predominant group. Consequently, the predominant group often fails to understand what the minority group is saying, takes the easy way out, and ignores or dismisses the minority group. This effectively mutes the minority group’s input. “Mutedness results from the lack of power and might lead to being overlooked, muffled, and invisible. [Griffin, Emory A (2011). A First Look at Communication Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill].

Because we as humans naturally form groups, with one group dominating, people who are not members of the predominant group inherently have problems with communication and fitting their working practices into those of the predominant group, with progressing in their careers due to additional burdens and punishments beyond those placed on members of the predominant group, and with speaking and speaking up in settings where their ideas are overlooked and suppressed. 

Becoming More Inclusive

So many of the inclusion problems in the workplace are effects related to groups, group privilege, and the reduced ability of muted groups to participate in the workplace at their full capacity. Because the notion of groups and group favoritism is so deeply rooted in our psychology, working against this mentality is challenging. As I have worked through my own journey to break free of my own biases and favoritism, I have specifically taken up certain cultural values. Embedding these values into a workplace is an important step in making it more inclusive.

Learn to be comfortable with people who think differently from you and have different worldviews and values.

Get to know people from different groups, cultures and mindsets. When we do not know multiple individuals in some other group, we tend to stereotype them, and this stereotyping leads to biases. Getting to know a wide variety of people helps us to remove that tendency to stereotype, which helps get rid of some of the bias.

As a data engineer, data scientist and data architect I have been responsible for creating and maintaining data and model pipelines to support many different aspects of the businesses I have worked in. It was easy in my setting to get to know the people in the predominant group – in this case younger, male software developers. However, many times I was one of the few data people who regularly talked to the people who used the different data related products – the customers of the products as well as the salespeople, the business analysts, the finance people, etc. Often, these people were very different in terms of their priorities. The sales people wanted the sales data to stay consistent and predictable so that they had an easier time explaining it to the customers. The female customers wanted to make sure there was no gender bias out of the data. The older engineers were looking to make the pipelines maintainable and lower technical debt. Without getting to know these other kinds of developers and consumers of the data, and effectively un-muting them in our conversations, I would not have been aware of some of these priorities, and would have delivered data products that were less useful.

Part of learning to be comfortable with people who are different from you is learning to be comfortable in the space of not knowing or not understanding. Just because you do not understand another person does not mean that their thoughts are invalid. For example, when I first started talking to the sales side of the organization in a company, I could not really understand why their thinking could lead them to prefer less accurate but consistent data to more accurate but less explainable data. Initially, I had a strong value towards data accuracy that really went against the grain of what some of the sales people were saying. I had to accept that they had a different value long before I really understood what the differences were and why those differences were there. I think this also happens a lot with disability and accessibility. When I look at articles like I’m deaf and this is what happens when I get on a Zoom call, it is clear that the deaf worker’s team related much more to his issues when they had experienced some of what he was going through. However, for many, the experiences that shape their needs are long-term and harder to grasp. When we listen, accept and react to people’s stated needs without understanding, this goes a long way to giving them a sense of belonging in the group.

However you go about learning to be comfortable with people across groups, it is hard work. In Confronting Bias: Thriving Across Our Differences – How can you prevent yourself from saying the wrong thing?, Vernā Myers says, “. … If I would say there was any daily practice, it would be curiosity, but then also the willingness to do the work of understanding others.” We may start with accepting what we do not understand, but in the long run interactions smooth out when we can see the world from the other person’s perspective and understand their concerns. It is hard to reach out to, listen, and accept people we do not understand. It is hard to push into that, be curious, learn, and start to understand. It is hard work to develop bridges across the different cultures in the group. In the end, however, the ability of team members to build these bridges results in better team relationships, the ability to be inclusive with more diverse team members, and the benefits of being able to leverage the wider variety of experiences that a more diverse team brings to the table.

Look for where muting and exclusion is occurring in your team

Teams and workplaces have in-groups and out-groups. Out groups tend to be muted at least to some degree. We know this because we have terms related to muting appearing increasingly in our language – mansplaining and manterruption, othering, code switching, and many others.

You can start to understand where muting and exclusion are occurring by paying attention to lines of communication in the people you work with. 

• In meetings, who is talking and who is not talking? Who is interrupting whom? Who is generating the ideas and who is taking credit for those ideas? 
• In the company cafeteria, who is sitting together? Who is excluded? Who is talking to whom? 
• When there are informal meetings, who is there? If the discussion involves a number of stakeholders in the topic of the meeting, who is not there? Why were they not invited? Are the same people consistently not being invited?
• When there is a time of personnel evaluation and deciding on promotions, who is pushing for the promotions of whom? Are there characteristics that people are saying are desirable in one person and undesirable in another? What signs of favoritism do others see in you? What signs do you see in others?
• In one-on-one meetings, what is the other person trying to tell you? If you ask them where they perceive that they fit in the group, would they say they are a critical member, on the edge, or somewhere in between? If they say they are nearer to the edge, can they articulate why they think that? How much do they trust you and the situation, so that they can speak frankly?

Once you have identified where people and groups are being muted, and by whom, you have a lens on who is actually in the in group and who is in some out group. You also, as a consequence, have a lens on where some of the unconscious biases are occurring in the different groups. This exercise, if done well, is bound to lead to some discomfort, as well as some realization of what needs to be done to bring the muted people into the work group. As you and your team become more comfortable working across cultures and groups within the workplace, you all will develop skills that will enable you to embrace inclusion more fully.

Listen and respond to every person’s voice

An inclusive group is one in which the ‘in-group’ contains all of its members. Every voice is listened to and no voice is muted. People whose voices tend to be muted have their voices elevated, and people who tend to dominate are encouraged to sit back and listen. The group that works towards being unified and inclusive develops a new set of customs, new methods of discourse and new ways of communication that are welcoming to all of the members.

When one of my companies updated their software development processes, one of the ways that they broadened their capacity to listen was with the increased use of anonymous brainstorming techniques. In Why Brainstorming Works Better Online, one of the things Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic points out is that virtual anonymous brainstorming enables feelings of anonymity, which means that ideas are judged more objectively. If we think about this in terms of muted groups, what virtual brainstorming does is to give the minority groups a chance to speak objectively and to have their ideas listened to and evaluated on the same footing as the ideas of the dominant group. Anonymous input is effective in many other areas as well – I have seen it work well for things like for asking questions after a presentation, and for soliciting input in retrospective-style meetings.

Having an open and thoughtful process for proposing new ideas, both large and small, is also a good way to create this kind of work culture. In Radical Candor, Kim Scott describes an “ideas team,” which was committed to listening to and responding to any idea that anyone brought to them. If the ideas team rejected the idea, they needed to give a clear explanation of why they rejected it. If they accepted the idea, they were empowered to give the person who proposed the idea some resources to actually work on it. No idea was allowed to be left to languish. This process empowered everyone to be able to suggest an idea and have it be considered seriously. Since the ideas team were independent evaluators, they could consider the idea with respect to its benefits to the company and not be swayed by team politics.

Approaches to idea generation like anonymous input and ideas teams enable groups to perform well partly because they naturally cause people to listen to a wider variety of inputs. The norm is to be dismissive of ideas proposed by people outside of your in-group, regardless of the merit of the idea. When you remove the option to respond according to group politics, you are forced to listen to a broader set of ideas springing from people with a wider variety of world views and experience. This alone may account for the increase in creativity and product relevance that comes when your groups become more diverse and inclusive.

Key Takeaways

Embracing diversity and inclusion requires reaching across groups and cultures, and learning to understand people with different values and world views. This process goes directly against our innate psychological tendencies to favor our in-groups and mute our out-groups. To reiterate, in a workplace setting, people who are not members of the predominant group have challenges related to fitting their communication and working practices into those of the predominant group, progressing in their careers due to additional requirements beyond those placed on the predominant group, and  having their ideas overlooked and suppressed.

Being welcoming and inclusive to a wide variety of people requires both a mindset shift and hard work. The mindset shift is to one that embraces and values diversity, and results in the building of a culture of diversity and inclusion into the day to day working values of the company. The hard work involves learning, looking and listening:

• Learn to be comfortable with people who think differently from you and have different world views and values.
• Look for where muting and exclusion is occurring in your team
• Listen and respond to every person’s voice.

Having a more diverse and inclusive workplace both improves company morale internally and also correlates with concrete financial and brand benefits. It is hard work, but worth the effort.