Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (37 page)

In 1998, Robert Kraut published the
first seminal study examining these questions
.
What he found was disturbing.
Individuals who used the Internet more decreased communication with their families, had shrinking social networks, and reported increased depression and loneliness.
A series of other papers came out soon after
confirming these and other negative consequences of Internet usage.
But a few years later, a strange thing happened—all the new data was starting to show positive effects of Internet usage on social
connection and well-being.
Why the change?
In a word, Facebook.
In six words, people started using the Internet differently.

In the 1990s, the social usage of the Internet centered around topic-specific chat rooms.
People with common interests would enter the same chat room to discuss mutual interests.
People were going online to find new people who cared about what they cared about, and sometimes, after connecting online, these people might connect offline as well.
In most cases, though, people in these chat rooms did not connect in real life.

Facebook, created in 2004, was originally designed to facilitate an existing community—undergraduates living on the same campus.
It was a complement to real-world social connections rather than a replacement.
Although Facebook has grown beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, the original functionality is there.
People consistently report being more motivated to use Facebook to connect with people from their offline lives than to meet new people.
Because Facebook use is more of an extension
of real-world connections, it has been associated with enhancing offline social networks and general well-being.
It’s also particularly useful for maintaining social bonds over long distances.
Even though I live thousands of miles from the places where I went to college and graduate school, it’s easier to keep connected with these friends than it would have been decades ago.

Social snacks and surrogates are a testament to the power of social motivations.
People need to connect and have discovered all sorts of ways to satisfy this urge.
Some work better than others, and still others remain to be invented (holodeck, anyone?).
We should make use of these ways of connecting or savoring connections because they make us happier and healthier.

CHAPTER 11
The Business of Social Brains

I
work in a massive organization (the University of California), and I manage a team of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, undergraduate research assistants, and staff.
Working in this kind of organization is both a blessing and a curse.
It’s a curse because of the endless bureaucratic red tape we deal with, being a public institution.
The primary blessing, beyond the sheer brilliance of the people I get to be around, is that we think of ourselves as a family.
I spend a lot of time thinking about each of my students and whether they are on the path to future success.
It’s similar to how I think about my own son, Ian, and whether he is developing in ways that will allow him to be successful in his own adult life.
Indeed, I refer to Dan Gilbert, my PhD advisor, as my academic father, and my students are his academic grandchildren.
Treating my lab like a family has had enormous benefits for how the lab runs.
Unfortunately, most businesses, particularly larger ones, do not operate this way most of the time.

Working in groups and organizations, is a fact of life for most adults.
It’s the engine of economic growth for our society, the source of our incomes, and often it’s the place where we spend most of our waking hours.
Yet most organizations don’t get “social” right.
They don’t feel like families and they don’t feel like a positive part of one’s social life.
Given what we know now about the social brain, creating the right social environment in our places of work should be a
top priority for anyone who wants the best out of themselves and those around them.

Don’t Forget Your SCARF

If you run a company or department and want employees to show up on time, work harder, and stay with your company longer, there is a tried-and-true solution: pay people more money.
As economist Colin Camerer wrote,
“Economists presume that [people] do not work
for free and work harder, more persistently, and more effectively, if they earn more money for better performance.”
Of course we have already seen that making more money doesn’t actually make people much happier.
But people
believe
money will make them happier.
So offering more money for greater productivity ought to motivate people.
This has increasingly led to an incentive system where higher pay or bonuses are available, contingent on performance.
Pay for performance intuitively seems like a great idea.
Indeed, at first blush it might seem like the
only
idea when it comes to increasing productivity.
But in fact, higher pay often turns out to be a poor investment.
There are certainly some contexts in which financial incentives increase performance, but there are others in which money actually undermines performance.
Generally speaking,
pay for performance usually produces
small or no performance improvements.

Despite this disconnect, pay for performance is the dominant model used in the business world to increase productivity.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When money and the physical comforts it can buy are the only things you think motivate people, it will be offered as the solution to every workplace problem.

But we know better.
We know the brain is wired to care about social pains and pleasures in much the same way it cares about physical pains and pleasures.
These are core features of the brain.
David Rock, who runs the Neuroleadership Institute, has spent the last decade persuading businesses that “social” matters in the workplace—that if it is incorporated into workplace practices, it can produce a far better work environment that enhances employee engagement and productivity.

Rock has developed the SCARF model
.
The acronym stands for
status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness
, and
fairness.
They are the nonmonetary drivers of behavior,
“the primary colors of intrinsic motivation”
according to Rock.

I think it’s a great place to begin because these are all part of our basic motivational machinery.
Each of these can lead to what will look like irrational behavior to observers who think pain and pleasure are the only rational sources of motivation.
Autonomy and certainty aren’t really a social part of the story
, and they have been described well elsewhere (
Drive
, by Daniel Pink).
However, status, relatedness (or what I call
connection
), and fairness are phenomena that can trigger social pain and pleasure responses in the brain.

Imagine the face of a CEO of a Fortune 500 company being pitched the idea that in order to motivate his employees he should focus less on financial incentives and more on status, relatedness, and fairness.
His expression might reveal contempt or confusion as to why you would make such a ridiculous claim.
He might go on to ask something like this: “How can social connection produce the same the bang for your buck as an actual buck?”
Here is the answer: We evolved over millions of years to become a deeply social species.
This means that a variety of motivational mechanisms predispose us to respond positively to signs that we are accepted by the group (
connecting
), and it also means that we are motivated to work hard for groups we identify with (
harmonizing
).

In trying to persuade our CEO, let’s start with the easy non-monetary motivator: status.
This one is easy because our CEO will say, “Sure, I already know about status.”
But his theory about status will mostly likely be the wrong one.
He assumes that people seek out status because it’s a sign that more money is likely to follow.
Status is a means to a means to an end—physical comfort.
But evidence suggests that status is also an end in itself.
We desire status because it signifies that others value us, that we have a place of importance in the group and therefore are connected to the group.

A recent study demonstrated
how much people crave status and recognition
in the workplace, even when there is no material payoff from it.
The title of the paper says it all: “Paying $30,000 for a gold star.”
Economist Ian Larkin took advantage of a peculiar situation at an enterprise software vendor to separate recognition from the increased money that typically accompanies it.
Some companies acknowledge individuals who end the year in the top 10 percent of sales with membership in a “President’s Club,” which typically has few tangible benefits.
In the case of the company Larkin was studying, the names of the winners were shared in an e-mail from the CEO to all employees, a gold star was put on their business cards and stationery, and all the winners took a three-day trip together to an island resort (valued at $2,000).

Salespeople close to the 10 percent level heading into the last months of the year faced a dilemma.
If they completed their deals in the current year, they would dramatically increase their chances of getting into the President’s Club.
But this would cost them a lot of money in commissions.
The company has a commissions accelerator program: the higher one’s sales in a quarter, the higher the commission rate.
For instance, a sale made in a poor quarter might yield a 2 percent commission, but in a strong sales quarter, the same sale might yield a 24 percent commission.
A person who has a number of sales lined up toward the end of a weak quarter would be wise to delay those sales until the next quarter, when, combined with the normal sales from that quarter, they would end up yielding higher commissions.
Indeed, this is exactly what people who aren’t close to getting into the President’s Club do.
But salespeople close to getting the “gold star” face a quandary: whether to finish up the sales in the current quarter and get the recognition, or move the sales into the next quarter and make more money.

Of the people facing this dilemma, 68 percent chose to take the immediate sales in order to ensure that they would get into the President’s Club.
By doing this, they gave up about $27,000 in future commissions on average (far more than the value of the three-day vacation).
The affected individuals earned about $150,000 in yearly salary and commissions.
In other words, they were willing to trade 20 percent of their salary for the privilege of being recognized as a high-status salesperson.
Larkin tracked whether these individuals benefited in terms of future sales or promotions.
They didn’t.
All they got was the recognition itself.
When confronted with the results, at least some of the employees felt they had made the right decision.
One said, “I paid $20,000 for that Gold Star.
And it was worth it.”
When we hear this statement, we think that the employee must not really mean it—it’s just rationalizing their irrational behavior.
But if we understand that status might act like an ongoing trigger to the brain’s reward system, then it starts to make more sense.

Does our hypothetical CEO have a Gold Star program in his company?
He should, after hearing about Larkin’s research.
Recognition is a free renewable resource.
I can’t imagine many CEOs who would prefer giving out large bonuses instead of patting a deserving employee on the back.
In Larkin’s study, the $27,000 that employees gave up didn’t vanish into thin air.
It went straight into the company’s bottom line—as profit.

On to connection.
If you take a moment to think it through, the benefits of social connection (or relatedness) in terms of productivity are self-evident.
When you work on a project in an organization, most of the time you will not be able to complete the project on your own from start to finish.
Either you will be assigned to work on it with a team, or you will need to reach out to others to help you with certain aspects of the assignment.
Let’s say you need someone to put together specialized analyses to include in your report and you can’t move forward until you receive them.
Who is going to get them to you more quickly, a friend or a stranger?
And if you were
the person being asked to provide the analyses, taking time away from your own work, whom would you be more motivated to help?

In my own lab, I strive to admit graduate students who are socially skilled, in addition to being smart and motivated.
The graduate students in my lab all have their distinct areas of expertise, so they all need to be comfortable learning from others and teaching others—helping and being helped.
Being smart and motivated, without being able to connect with others in the lab just won’t cut it.
I’ve had a couple of students in the lab over the years who never really integrated socially with the rest of the team, and they often struggled.
They could leverage their own intelligence and hard work, but they were less able to access the intelligence and expertise sitting in the next office over.
From this perspective, social connection is a resource in the same way that intelligence or the Internet are resources.
They facilitate getting done what needs doing.

Economists have long studied human capital as a driver of productivity in organizations.
Human capital
is the amount of intelligence, experience, and education a person has.
Not surprisingly,
companies with more human capital
tend to do better.
However, most studies of human capital ignore the concept of
social capital
, the social connections and social networks within an organization.
Does human capital lead to productivity all on its own, or does social capital play a role in catalyzing human output into optimal performance?