You May Not Be Who You Think You Are

Full Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by an automated system and has been lightly edited for clarity. It may contain errors or omissions.

Janet Varney: Good evening, San Francisco Sketch Fest. Please welcome to the stage Theme Park Improv!

Kevin Cool: Meet Janet Barney.

Janet Varney: I’m one of the creative directors and founders of SF Sketch Fest, the San Francisco Comedy Festival, and I also am a working actress and writer in Hollywood.

Kevin Cool: Janet is a comedian. Her favorite type of comedy is improv.

Janet Varney: I do a lot of improv in that. I don’t do any standup, but I do comedy. I am not a person who wants to sit in a room by myself jotting down ideas for what I think is funny or what strikes me as funny. I love the spontaneity of improv and I love that it is a team sport.

Kevin Cool: The fact that improv is a team sport and relies on others is what makes it so compelling for her.

Janet Varney: What I love about improv is that you can show up and as long as you are playing with people that you trust, you will be in good hands and you will support other people.

Kevin Cool: Improvisers depend on the people around them to create the characters and scenes that make the show successful.

Janet Varney: There’s something for me, very special about being on a stage with someone, and if I say something completely idiotic, a person that I’m with could potentially turn that into something genius. I love the potential for that and I love that that lives in the space between two people. It’s not just in your brain.

Kevin Cool: It’s also about performers letting go of the first idea as they step on stage with and constructing something new.

Janet Varney: You can’t go out there assuming that someone is just going to come and show up and know where your brain is. So you have to be able to be loose and flexible with that. You may start with an idea and in that little limited amount that you’re able to reveal in your first sentence with the other person who came out with you, they may not get it, and that has to be okay. You have to be able to pivot immediately and make something new together.

Kevin Cool: As an example, she points to a recent performance at the festival.

Janet Varney: There was a phenomenal scene happening with Gary Anthony Williams and Cole Stratton, and at some point it became clear that they didn’t necessarily know what the next thing was going to be and something about what Gary said, Cole said, hang on, let me just make a quick call. I have no idea what he intended, and I’m not sure he intended anything specific. He just knew something needed to be given to the scene. And when Cole held the phone up to his ear, my instinct was to say 9 1 1, and it got a huge response, and it made the whole scene make sense and suddenly there was an end to the scene.

Kevin Cool: But for any of this to work, performers need to understand the people they’re sharing the stage with.

Janet Varney: These are the people that I’m with. How do I get to know them? How do I get to know their work styles and how do I manifest what I know they’re capable of without it seeming like I’m demanding something or I’m insisting or I’m strong arming.

Kevin Cool: Although Janet is talking about improv, this isn’t unique to the stage. It also happens in the workplace. In fact, Brian Lowery, a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business argues our identity is shaped by our everyday interactions.

Brian Lowery: The way people behave is much about where they are as who they are and where they are includes being around you. And if you start to see it that way, you can have a more profound effect on the way people behave.

Kevin Cool: Brian is the author of the book, Selfless: The Social Creation of “You.” Whether you’re leading a team, running a company, or navigating the workplace, understanding your own ability to influence the way others think, work, and collaborate can be powerful. And that’s what we’re exploring today.

This is If/Then a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business where we examine research findings that can help us navigate the complex issues facing us in business, leadership and society. I’m Kevin Cool, senior editor at Stanford GSB.

What do you want people to reconsider about the notion of self?

Brian Lowery: I want them to be curious about themselves and who they are. I think people have this sense that they know who they are because you spend every conscious moment with yourself and that degree of familiarity can create false sense of understanding. And I’d like people to see just how little they really understand about the nature of themselves and to be curious about it, to wonder about how are the people that I’m interacting with, how are they creating me? How are they affecting me? How am I affecting the people that I interact with? When I think about what my life is about, how do I even begin to answer that question? We give easy answers to incredibly complicated questions, even when it comes to ourselves, and I want people to see that the easy answers aren’t necessarily satisfying or maybe not answers to the right questions.

Kevin Cool: So in connecting sort of this notion of selves that are dynamic and being constantly co-created in some way, how would understanding that help someone in a leadership role?

Brian Lowery: Well, the easy way to think about it is when we manage people, when we think about people, we often think of them as fully formed closed systems that we have to push against to get them to do things, right. That we have to figure out how to manage this person, how to get them to work this way or not that way or do this thing or not that thing. And there’s another way of thinking, which is that the person is not a closed system, that they’re responding to and being created by the environment they’re in, and you. And there’s a different way of thinking when you say, how do I shape this person’s experience? How do I shape the way they see themselves in this situation? You’re doing it whether you think about it or not. And if you are more conscious and more intentional about it, I think you can be more effective in your engagements with other people. The way people behave is much about where they are as who they are. And where they are includes being around you. And if you start to see it that way, you can have a more profound effect on the way people behave. You can be a more compelling leader, I think.

When you say, I know you’re this kind of person, I know you’re the kind of person that can do this. I know you’re the kind of person that’s great at giving talks. I’m really looking forward to it. That shifts how people think about themselves. That’s a way of being explicit. I think you’re this kind of person, I know you’re this kind of person. And I think there are ways in which that really affects how people not just feel about the relationship but see themselves. If someone’s like, I really trust that you’re honest, so I love that I never have to worry about you telling me the truth, that actually can make it really hard for someone to lie to you. I mean, it just makes them uncomfortable because what you’re doing is trying to shift their sense of themselves. And I think people want to behave in ways that are compatible with the way they understand who they are. And when you shift how people understand who they are, it will I think, shift how they behave. Because again, people consistency between they are ideas of themselves and their behavior.

Kevin Cool: Yeah, so let’s sort of use the lens of a teaching exercise that you do where you split people randomly into groups and then you assign a leader. Can you describe that exercise and what usually happens?

Brian Lowery: Okay, so in the big picture exercise, it’s usually a larger group, so I don’t know, it can be anywhere from like 40 to 70 people or so. And we tell ‘em they operate as an organization. You all are one organization, you have a client, you have a task, and we describe exactly what the task is. And then I kind of pick who’s going to be in different positions. And so I put people into leadership roles. I send ‘em outside of the classroom. I tell them more or less, your job is to make sure this organization’s successful. And I give them a little bit of a orientation about here’s how much stuff costs, here’s your budget, here’s how you can work with these other members of your management team. And that’s it really. And the workforce, the people inside the room are starting to do work.

So I have ‘em out there for, I don’t know, five minutes and then I say, all right, the time is starting. The first quarter has begun. And I send them in. And as you watch this play out, they started to work and the leaders try to organize. And what evolves almost certainly is the workers, the people in the workshop floor as I call it, become unhappy with the leaders. No matter what the leaders do, it’s irrelevant who you choose as leaders, really. When I’m choosing leaders, I’m deciding who’s going to get beat up is what I’m doing. I’m not making decisions that’s going to affect whether or not people like them because the way I have set up the workers and what they know and what they believe and who the leaders are and what they know and what they believe, it’s such that when they interact, there’s likely to be dissatisfaction from the workers.

And it’s interesting to tell this to people because we tend to assume that what’s driving outcomes are the internal attributes of the people engaging in the behaviors. The workers, are they lazy? Are they smart? Are they hardworking, whatever. And the managers, are they really good or not? And while that’s true, those things have an effect. It’s also the nature of the situation that is constructed around them, they’re engaging in. So the workers are generally unhappy because they have a sense of uncertainty. And it turns out that I have not given the leaders the ability to actually eliminate that uncertainty. They can’t resolve that, but the expectation of the workers is the leader should resolve this for them. And that is in essence, I think what is creating in that exercise, the tension, and this is just a really easy way to see that the environment situation you put people in can dictate outcomes independent of the people you choose to put in those situations. And I think that’s an important thing for leaders to understand.

Kevin Cool: The people who’ve been assigned as leaders, do they start looking at their behavior and making changes or is that part of the exercise at some point?

Brian Lowery: Okay, that’s a good question. So in this exercise at the halfway point, we have a meeting, and at that meeting I say, we’re not going to solve any problems. I just want to know how you feel, what’s your experience right now working in this organization? Now what’s interesting is leaders can respond usually in one of two ways. One way is upset that is going wrong and kind of upset with the workers, right? People aren’t doing what I tell them to do. People aren’t listening, they’re not having a good time,

Kevin Cool: It’s their fault.

Brian Lowery: Yeah, it’s like, but the workers are, if they were better, then it would be working more smooth. If they would listen to me, if they would do what they were told it’d be, we would be okay. There’s another version which is I’m struggling. The leaders will say some version of I’m drowning. There’s too many people, there’s not enough of us. We don’t have enough time to sit down and come up with a plan. It’s really hard and we are trying, and then the next half we’re going to try harder to do better. And usually when they come with that second approach, workers will start to try to help leadership. They’ll change their behavior in ways that make it easier for the leadership team to actually help make the whole team successful. That is a strange thing because I think many leaders feel the need to demonstrate complete control of what’s going on, that they know the answers and you just do what you’re told and everything will work out, and that at least in this activity, that tends not to produce the most beneficial for the organization, beneficial behavior from the workers.

Kevin Cool: You make a reference in the book, and you credit this to the esteemed Stanford social psychologist Claude Steele about a Black man whistling Vivaldi as he’s walking through a white neighborhood. At various times I’ve heard colleagues talk about how exhausting it is to try and navigate themselves in a culture that has a different expectation of some kind. How does a manager address situations where people may not be able to express themselves in an organization or in a job situation without, I don’t know, pretending? Is that the right word?

Brian Lowery: Code switching is generally what the language is.

Kevin Cool: Code switching.

Brian Lowery: Yeah, code switching some version of that. I’ll go back to Claude Steele. He’s really interested in this concept of trust, and what he basically says is trust is not that I trust that you fully understand me, that you fully know me in an organization. Trust is I believe that you’re invested in my success. That’s what it requires. Even if I think that you might fall down or disappoint in some way in terms of your understanding of myself that I might be able to overcome that or have grace around that, let that go. Even though there’s no reason I should just grace, if I believe that you’re invested in my success, that you care about me doing well in this organization, doing well in my job, that you’re going to give me the resources I need, that I trust that if something’s going wrong, you’re going to tell me it’s going wrong.

That if I do something well, that you will praise me that I’ve done that thing well, that I have faith that you are committed to my success. That I think is the trust that he, as I understand that he talks about is being critical, and that’s different from I have faith that you see the world understand how it affects me and my place in it and how I’m managing all that. I don’t know that that is required, and that is a lot to ask of someone. They fully understand your experience of the world if you inhabit a different social category than they do. That doesn’t mean people can’t be sympathetic or people shouldn’t try to understand, but what people can do independent of their identity or independent of their understanding of your identity is be fully and truly committed to helping you succeed. And if you trust that people are doing that, I think that goes a long, long way.

Kevin Cool: So let’s pivot just a bit. I want to ask you about something that is so pervasive in American society right now and to some degree in other cultures as well, and that’s polarization, tribalism, identifying a camp and being part of that group. How could a different understanding of the self and some of the things you described in the book help counter polarization?

Brian Lowery: So if people are listening to this and they know me will know that I am not by nature an optimist. So anybody who spends a little time with me will know my predilections. Do not lean towards optimism, let’s say it that way. I think our ability to connect with other people is a beautiful thing and there are significant negative downsides to what is an essential feature of being human. I need to know who’s with me, who can I trust? Who’s going to take care of me? Who loves me? Who can I depend on? Those things, when you say it that way, those are wonderful things But there’s also who can I trust, who’s not me, who’s not with us? That is the other side of that. I don’t know that as humans exist currently in our current state, and I don’t mean this in a small historical way, I mean this in a broad evolutionary way, what it means to be human as we currently exist. I’m pretty sure we will not eliminate the separation of people into us/them.

In my, I don’t know, let’s call it 30 years of study of human psychology, what I know, what I believe given the literature I’ve read is that it’s highly unlikely we’re going to eliminate that. Not even sure if I haven’t thought of, it’s not even sure if you could, you’d want to. And so really I think the question becomes how do we attenuate the negative consequences of that basic feature of humanity as opposed to how do we eliminate it? I just think that’s the wrong question, and there I think, and this is now me personally, I think less in terms of polarization and more in terms of power. So these things become problematic. I think, and you can certainly disagree with this point, I’m just going to for now say when there are big power asymmetries, it can be problematic. If there’s a sense of fear associated with that asymmetry, I think the worst scenario is when the group that is powerful has what is probably an irrational fear of the group that is not powerful. To me, there’s nothing more frightening than a strong person that feels victimized, because they will behave in what they think is a defensive way that can cause incredible damage.

Kevin Cool: Well, trust and grace seemed like they could apply in this situation too. I’m thinking about there’s an ideological spectrum, but let’s just say Democrats and Republicans for shorthand for this conversation, they attribute certain characteristics to someone. They are somehow creating that thing that they are assuming that person is.

Brian Lowery: What’s interesting is I think people stereotype groups and then will often make exceptions for individuals without in any way changing their views. We do this routinely in the literature. It’s called subtyping. There’s a type, right? There’s a stereotype, but then you have all these subtypes of that group. There’s the MAGA Republicans and then there’s like the country club Republicans. There’s the reasonable Republicans who are just the fiscally responsible ones, but not the social ones. There’s all these ways in which we see variation in the group, but we have this broad stereotype of the group. How do we manage the variation that we see? Well, we say there are different kinds, but there’s still subtypes. And then I’ll say something else about why this can be positive depending on your political bent, but you can make an argument that we have more responsibility for people close to us than people distant from us.

When I say close, I’ll just use physical proximity for a second. There’s an argument to be made I should care more in this moment about what happens to you than equivalent in you 3000 miles from here. There’s something about that that just as a thought experiment feels right. There’s also this kind of social, not physical, but social proximity. There’s arguments to be made that I should care more about people who have cared for me and supported me and allowed me to be successful than that should care about people who are even physically proximate who have not shown that kind of care for me. Like I owe them something.

That intuition, you could argue, both supports the idea of us/them, but also maybe springs from the same place. It’s hard to get outside of ‘this is a basic feature of humanity.’ There are aspects of it that I think most people would think of as incredibly positive. I care for my family more than I care for strangers. Most people would not challenge the morality of that. I care more for my compatriots in my country than I care for some country I’ve never been to and don’t know. Most people don’t challenge the morality of that. I mean you can, there’s nothing inherently right about that. You can challenge it, but I think most people kind of accept that all those things are versions of tribalism.

Kevin Cool: This leads to so many interesting hypotheticals in my mind when you say, at this moment, I should care more about the person next to me than someone 3000 miles away. Suddenly, if this building suddenly caught fire, we have a different relationship now. Because we may have to help each other out of the building, may have to literally save the other person’s life. And so whatever your political views are or whatever, it suddenly does not matter. What you’re describing, the malleability of who you are, what yourself is, is so determined by the circumstances.

Brian Lowery: Yeah, and I love that point because this idea when I said, look, I don’t think we’re going to eliminate us/them. And again, I don’t know that we should. And you connect that with the flexibility of identity that I talked about, and you add to that this idea that our physical proximity matters and just the way you said and also social proximity matters like our family matters. What you get is in essence, the thing that’s most malleable is identity. How do I understand who I am? I don’t think it’ll eliminate this idea of us/them, but who is us and who is them? That almost certainly will change. The idea that that is stable is a mistake. That us/them, be it race or political party who constitutes who is us in terms of race, that can change.

What does it mean to be Republican democrat that has changed in this country within a few generations. I mean in the sixties there’s a huge realignment, like what it means to be Republican 60 years ago or more or less 70, 80 years ago was very different than what it means to be a Republican now. These things shift. These things change. But once you are a part of the party, the us/them dynamic is still the us/them dynamic. Also say that just because the self isn’t fixed, there’s no essence, doesn’t it all mean it’s not real. Even these identities that they’re made up, that we construct them, they can change, they’re real and they have consequences. It means something to be a man, to be a white or a Black person. Those things have real consequence in the world and they really do affect who you can be in relationship to other people, but that doesn’t mean they’re not a construction. Like construction and real are not somehow in opposition.

Kevin Cool: You’ve said you want people to be a little terrified and a little excited by seeing the world this way. Why terrified and excited.

Brian Lowery: Terrified because the world can appear then to be unstable, not what you thought it was. As if you pull the curtain back and you’re like, this is not at all the world I thought I was living in. I mean this is now an old cultural reference, but it’s like finding out you live in the matrix. This is a version of what it can feel like. You’re like, oh, I thought it was this and this is not at all what it is. What it appears to me, like me in there, that little person in my head that doesn’t exist.

There’s no little person in there. What am I to do with that? How am I supposed to live with this idea that I have no idea who I am and what I am? That it’s in some ways, the way I’m describing the world that I think is likely to be true? I also realize is at odds with the way the world feels. And it’s true for me. I don’t feel the world is the way I describe it in the book. I just believe that to be true. The upside, the reason it’s exciting is the amount of opportunity that’s available in something that looks like chaos. What you can create, who you can be, like all these constraints that you feel, maybe those are also imaginary, maybe those are also wrong. That you’re not stuck being who you perceive yourself to be now. Why? There’s something that’s exciting about that, that you get to be in communion with other people in this way that is not just bumping into another island, but is engaging with them in the deep way that allows for exchange and connection that I think we don’t truly embrace often. There’s something exciting about that. I mean, the world opens to you, I think if you believe this, but that is also what’s terrifying about it. What’s exciting is what’s terrifying.

Kevin Cool: Yeah. It almost sounds psychedelic. You mentioned the matrix. Physical laws kind of don’t work anymore. Everything is sort of up for grabs. Would you describe it that way? I mean, is it that kind of depth of reconsideration?

Brian Lowery: I’ll say this. I’ll leave you with this. I hope we all get to go on a long strange trip.

Sketch Fest: And that’s our show!

Kevin Cool: Our show is written and produced by Making Room and the Content and Design team at the GSB. Our managing producers are Michael McDowell and Elizabeth Wyleczuk-Stern. Executive producers are Sorel Husbands Denholtz and Jim Colgan. Sound Design and additional production support from Mumble Media and Aech Ashe, and a special thanks to Janet Varney. For more on our faculty and their research, find Stanford GSB online at gsb.stanford.edu or on social media @StanfordGSB. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider sharing it with a friend or colleague and remember to subscribe to If/Then wherever you get your podcasts or leave us a review. It really helps other listeners find the show. We’d also love to hear from you. Is there a subject you’d like us to cover? Something that sparked your curiosity? Or a story or perspective that you’d like to share? Email us at ifthenpod@stanford.edu. That’s I-F-T-H-E-N-P-O-D@stanford.edu. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back with another episode soon.