 I'm giving you a chance because you picked the wick. So I'm just warning you, you got a few minutes. This is about stereotyping. In the session I had yesterday on how your brain works, one of the attendees said, it was interesting this session. But there were some things I learned about how people are that made me feel a little uncomfortable. So this talk will do that. You'll learn a lot, but it will make you feel uncomfortable. If you don't get a chance to ask me a question about it, or talk to me at the conference, you've got my e-mail address, and when I get home, I'll be happy to answer any questions that you have about any of the research that I'm going to talk about. Because this is not an academic presentation, but it is about research. If you would like to read more, or if you'd like to have the paper, I'll be happy to send it to you. So you've got my e-mail address, you've got my website. Oh my gosh, an old lady on Twitter, who would have thought? This is the opening, the doors for a museum in California. It's called the Museum of Tolerance, and it has two doors. Can you read what's on top? Here, this one on the left, the red door, there's a sign across the top. Can you read it? Prejudiced. Prejudiced. On the right, the green door, it says, yeah, unprejudiced. One of the doors doesn't really work. You really can't get in that way. Can you guess which one that is? It's amazing how many people have been observed pounding on that door, trying to get in. But only one door opens. Which one is it? That's that red one. That's the only way in because that's what we all are. And in the research that I'm going to talk about, there's always a control group, and they ask the people in the control group after the experiment when they've been looking at prejudice. And the people in the control group always say the same thing. Oh, not me, not me. I'm not prejudice. Harvard University is looking at prejudice. And you can go online and take a little test to find out if you are prejudiced. And I have a lot of friends in Nashville, Tennessee, where I now live, who are black. And they have taken that test and they have found out that they are prejudiced against black people. Oh, but you wouldn't be. I'm gonna tell you a story about some research that was done quite a while ago. In fact, in psychology, it's called a classic experiment. It changed forever the way psychologists thought about prejudice and stereotyping. It was done in the state of Oklahoma in the United States way back in 1954 by a psychologist whose last name was Sharif. And he had the idea of rounding up some young boys, they were about 12 years old. He got 22 of them and he put them in two balanced groups. And that means that essentially those two groups were the same. The two groups of boys had pretty much the same characteristics, same background, same year in school, apparently normal, although they did live in Oklahoma. Lower middle class, Protestant, just seemed to be normal. Well, he put them in two different buses and he took them out to a Boy Scout camp called Robbers Cave. So the name of this experiment is the Robbers Cave experiment. You can Google on it. I think there's a nice Wikipedia article about it. Remember, it's a classic. In the experiment, there were several phases. In phase one, each of the two groups was given a separate cabin. They were off in the woods in this nice Boy Scout camp and they had their own places to go. They had their little nature trails and their swimming holes where they spent a lot of time just enjoying themselves, doing what young boys do out in the woods. They pitched their tents, they hiked, they cooked. And they also did something very interesting. It's a phenomenon that we now look for in all small groups. They began to develop an identity, an us. They weren't instructed to do that, they just did it naturally. They began to form an us. They had a name. One group said, well, we're gonna call ourselves the Rattlers. And the other group said, well, we're gonna call ourselves the Eagles. And they wrote a song. They made a flag. And they started using that pronoun, us, we. We're the Eagles. We're the Rattlers. And they did it in a matter of just a few days. Formed a group identity. The transition to the next phase is when the camp counselors who were really graduate students began to make each of the separate groups gradually aware of the other group. They would arrange a hike so that they would come close to but not ever see the members of the other group. They could hear them off in the distance. And they began to talk about the other group using a different set of pronouns. They started saying, those people, they. And I hope they don't come over here. I hope they don't hike on our trails. I hope they don't come to our swimming hole. Remember, these two random groups were identical. They were two groups of 12-year-old boys with almost identical backgrounds, had never seen one another, but were already making assumptions, already labeling the other group as them. They are not like us. They even began to call them names. They said, those niggers. Phase two. They introduced the two groups to each other and they said, we're going to start having some competitive games. We're going to play softball. We're going to have tug of war. Games where there's going to be a winner and a loser. And the winner will get prizes and recognition. And of course, the graduate students were doing this for a very good reason. They were trying to bring this prescient us against them to a head. They were trying to increase the amount of division between the two groups. They were doing that intentionally, recognizing one as the better, or the stronger, or the faster. The winner. And they said, we're going to get prizes and they were all eating together and people could see, well, who won the prize? Who was better? And of course, this caused the already pretty strong tension between the two groups to become, well, it was like a war. And after one incident, the Eagles captured the Rattler's flag and burned it. And the next day, the Eagles flag was burned in retaliation and this fight broke out. After one particular contest, the Rattler's launched a night raid on the Eagles cabin. Next morning, Eagles took revenge on the Rattler's. Both groups began to store weapons of mass destruction in preparation for all-out war. These are 12-year-old boys with similar backgrounds. They were essentially identical. And in a very short period of time, we already have the outbreak of war. For what reason? Phase three. Now the staff was instructed to try to resolve the conflict. Let's find some way of bringing these two essentially identical groups together. Well, after all 12-year-old boys from similar backgrounds, this should not be too difficult. Why don't we do some fun activities together? Have you ever been on one of those team-building activities where they haul you out into the woods and they say, we're going to build a team now by doing some common activities. We're going to catch each other as we throw ourselves off a tree branch or cross a river helping one another. Have you ever been on one of those? How was that? Did it work for you? I never have. I've read about them, but it seems to me that they really wouldn't be very successful. And in this case, they weren't successful at all. In fact, the more they tried to do things together, let's do some fun things together, the more the aggression built, the more fighting, and since they ate together, sometimes those fights involved food. Imagine 12-year-old boys and hot dogs out in the woods, a lot of aggression, a lot of hot dogs being flung at one another. Well, let's leave them in the middle of their food fight. Here's what the evolutionary psychologists tell us that based on this and many other experiments, it doesn't take very long before this group identity emerges. It seems that it's something we do. People, humans do that. We develop a name sometimes. We start calling ourselves a name that reflects the character of our group and we start talking about us. Would that ever happen in software development? I once sat next to a guy who loved the programming language fourth. I call him a fourth head and he used us and them a lot. Would programming language choice bring out aggression? What do you think? Would process choice bring out aggression? We, Agile fans, those... Of course, you're not one of those people who would do something like that. You're unbiased, rational, and realistic, aren't you? Let's take a poll. How many smart people in the room? Yes! Okay, I can see lots of smart people. Therefore, you are rational, logical. Of course you are. You don't make decisions based on emotion. You're here today because you looked at some controlled scientific experiments that told you that Agile was better than the alternative. Isn't that right? He was all scientific, wasn't it? Isn't that how we make decisions in software development? Cold, calculating logic made by smart, rational people. Yes? Did you read any of those controlled scientific studies that showed clearly that Agile is better? Did you read any of them? I'm glad to see that there are no hands because there aren't any. None. All we have are stories. Somebody tells us a good story. In my company, on my team, we're using Agile, and oh, it's really working well. If the drug company picked your favorite, made decisions the way we do, it would be a little like this. Hey, I've got some blue pills that really help me. I'd be happy to let you try it. Would you like to try it? If it comes with mushrooms. Yeah, it works for me. It works for me, so obviously you should at least try it. You should give it a try. Now, I've been in software development a long time, and that is always how we have made our decisions. Just like the little blue pills. And now it's a little blue pill. Tomorrow it'll be a little red pill. Next day it'll be a little orange pill. So apparently we're hardwired to do this kind of thing, to divide the world up. And in fact, it keeps your brain very busy. So here we are at a conference and we're meeting new people. And what your brain is doing immediately when you meet somebody new is you're classifying. I'm American and you're Indian. I'm old, you're young. And we all do it. We all do it all day. We do it for ourselves. We do it to other people. Who's taller, shorter, lighter, darker, smarter, labeling other people. Labeling ourselves. Oh, it keeps us very busy. And we've been doing it for a long time. It meant survival at one point to identify clearly which are the proper foods, which are the aggressive people, which road should we take? We're hardwired to do it. That's a sad piece of news. I'm sorry. I know you don't have time to look up this wonderful broadcast on PBS about a very interesting experiment that a young woman did in her grade school class. The day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, she was thinking to herself, how can I convey to my white students in Iowa what it must be like to be a black person in the United States and to be treated differently? How can I put that across so that these children will understand what it must be like for them? She had a brilliant idea. She came to class the next day and she said, I've been reading some interesting research. And this research tells me that I've been doing a bad job of teaching. I'm going to change. I'm going to try to do a better job now based on this new research, which tells me that brown-eyed children are smart. Blue-eyed children, well, blue-eyed children are nice children, but they're just not as smart as those with brown eyes. So we're going to divide the classroom into two groups. I'll put all the brown-eyed children over here and I will spend most of my time talking to the brown-eyed children, helping them learn because they're smarter. The blue-eyed children, well, we'll find some activities to keep you busy, but you just don't have the ability to learn like the brown-eyed children. Oh, and over recess and at lunch, I don't think it would be good if you mixed. Stay together. Brown-eyed children, stay together. Blue-eyed children, stay together. I think that would be best. Oh, one other thing, just so we don't forget, I have made some little collars for the blue-eyed children. So I want all the blue-eyed children to wear little collars, so we'll just put that around their necks. So they can all see who the blue-eyed children are. In this PBS special, which was taken 30 years after this experience, the blue-eyed children said they could still remember what it was like when she put that collar around my neck and I felt stupid. I still feel that. So we know that when we label someone in some way, we can actually create what we expect. If we think people are stupid or not as smart, we can actually make them not as smart. We can create an environment that meets our expectations, especially if we have any kind of power like a teacher over a young child or a manager over a team. I read some research that said, you know, managers make up their minds pretty quickly about the people who join the team long before they've had a chance to see real performance. They've already decided who the good guys are and who those who are not so good. They've already made up their minds. I didn't believe that. So I was at a conference. I saw a table of managers and I sat down and I said, you know, I've just read this interesting research about how quickly managers make up their minds about people on their teams. Tell me, is that true? Any managers in the room? Well, one fellow at the table said, oh, Linda, well, yeah, maybe it is true. But we are always right. Of course they are. Of course they are right. If you expect that someone is going to be a good contributor, that's what you will see. And you will change the behavior of that person by your expectation. If you expect that someone's not going to be as good, that's what you will see and you'll create a poor performer. So if you have power, you're especially able to create an environment that meets your expectations, but we all, in a sense, have that power over others and ourselves. We know that stereotyping or labeling is a bad thing, but maybe we didn't realize until now how bad it is that, of course, you lose the contribution of someone if you stereotype them as being, well, not as able to contribute, but I don't think we realized until a lot of the research came out that said, you're actually creating. You're making that expectation come true that we can all do that. Something I care very deeply about is not seeing enough women in IT or science or math. That's where I've been all my life. So I was really interested to look at the research around women in math. So the experiment goes something like this. They had two groups and they gave the women in the two balanced groups a really, really challenging math test. And the two tests were exactly the same. The only difference was one small little box before the test where your name and other information is at the heading of the test. In one version there was a little tiny box that asked you to check it indicating gender, female. The other version exactly the same except no little box. That couldn't make any difference. What are you talking about? A little box over here and no little box over there. Are you going to tell me there'd be a statistically significant difference in the performance of those women on a difficult math exam? Is that what you're saying? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And when the women were asked, did you notice that little box at the beginning that said female, they didn't even remember. They didn't remember the box. They didn't remember checking. But clearly looking at the differences in the scores, clearly, clearly at least unconsciously they were aware of that. And the message was you're a woman. You're just not as good. They put a little collar around their own necks and said, well, you know, women are just not as good at math and science. You know, they're nice people. They're just not as good. And they set their own low expectations. And they're created their own result to verify that. And their scores went down. That's frightening. We're doing it to ourselves. We buy into that stereotype. So I'm a member of so many stereotype groups now. I've lost count. I'm a woman. I'm old. I'm from the United States. Strike three. And I believe a little of that myself. Oh, well, Linda, you're really getting old now. I'm always asked at conferences, are you going to keep traveling at your age? And I feel myself getting a little shorter and you have to be careful about that because the research is very clear. If you buy into the stereotype, even for yourself, it affects your own performance. Oh, I forgot to mention this one. This is a new study in using video games with avatars. Players of both sexes, if they chose a female avatar, they gave up sooner and performed poorly when playing against a male avatar. I was in a class that Michael Hill was teaching about agile coaching and team management. And he said something that I have heard a million times, but I had just been working on this talk and going through the research. So when he said it, somehow bells went off in my head. He said, rule number one for good management, catch them doing something right. So that means the manager is setting expectations that he will see the kinds of things he wants to see or she will see to say, if you suspend belief for the sake of the retrospective and if everyone on the team does that, that over time what you're doing is raising those expectations, setting the belief that we're all doing the best we can and that's what will emerge. That will be the emergent behavior as a result of that belief even if it's just pretend for the sake of the retrospective because your expectations will create a team where everyone is doing their best. So managers especially, I know I've talked about a lot of research but I'm going to actually cite this, look at the date, 1988. It's a study by Harvard Business Review on something called the Pygmalion Effect where it was clearly observed that if managers believed certain things about their teams then that behavior resulted. If you have not read that paper, send me an email and I will email you that paper because you should read it. It's about the power you have over your teams. If you haven't seen it for yourself or you haven't realized it or maybe you just don't believe me and that's okay but you should believe Harvard, right? Oh my gosh, I forgot about those guys fighting with their hot dogs flying. Whoa, we better go back and see if we can help out so the graduate students had an idea. He said, well nothing has worked up till now let's find some other activities. Let's find an activity where there's a real big serious problem that affects all of us and the solution for that problem is going to require the effort, the contribution of all of us or we're going to be in big trouble. So the first experiment was uh-oh, the water. The camp's water was cut off. Staff said we don't know what the problem is but we suspect there's a problem somewhere in the waterline. Well the waterline is a mile long. We need both the rattlers and the eagles to walk along that line and look for a problem, a leak possibly. Something is wrong there. We're all going to have to dig in otherwise we won't have any water. No one will have any water. So it was a problem that impacted everyone. A serious problem. In order to solve it we're all going to have to contribute. So the eagles and the rattlers started walking up and down and they found a clogged valve. And when they did they said we. We found it. It was actually an eagle and a rattler together. We found it. They all celebrated. Together. They found a tug of war way of removing a big tree that had fallen on the mist tent. It took the work of all the eagles and all the rattlers together to move that big tree. And then they noticed that the truck that brought in the food got stuck in the mud and all the boys together had to pull it out. So the characteristics of these new activities that successfully brought them together were some serious real problem that affected all of them and the solution required that they all had to contribute. Okay Linda. Sure but you know really remember these guys were all alike. You were able to bring them together but you know they weren't that different I wonder what would happen if we took some groups that were really really different. I wonder how this experiment would go under those circumstances. So the good thing about many psychology experiments is that they're repeated over and over and over again. You don't just see one but it's replicated many different environments. So let's look at this version. This was done in 1963 in Beirut. We're still talking about young boys. The experiment's been repeated lots of times with adults but I happen to like these two comparison experiments. We've got eight Christians and 10 Muslims. And not only that but these young boys have been raised in religious schools and they live in a place with a lot of history of conflict between the two religious groups. I wonder what would happen here. So they did the same thing. They divided them into two groups. They formed a group identity. They were called the blue ghosts and the red genies. When they got to phase two that was the aggressive let's ramp it up a little bit phase. They had some serious serious conflict. In fact at one point we have three genies threatening a ghost with knives. Things got so bad that they decided to go ahead and stop the experiment. They didn't want to take the risk. Well okay. You know religion that's serious. Religion does make a difference. Remember our other groups were all Protestant so we could expect that maybe things wouldn't work so well if you have religious conflict. That's what I thought when I read the experiment but I had to read the fine print because the two groups were not defined by religion. If you thought that you made the same assumption that I did. They put the Christians in one group and Muslims in the other. No, no. That's not what they did at all. There were Muslims and Christians in both groups and the conflict that broke out broke out because of the group identity not because of religion. In other words the loyalty the identity they felt with the small group they had only been a part of for a few days was stronger than religion. The three genies that had the knives were Christian and so was the guy they were going after on the other team. Christians were going against Christian. So the experiment has been repeated with religion, with politics, with any one of the how many things that divide us and what the results show over and over again is that in a small group we develop pretty strong ties pretty quickly and we feel a sense of identity with that small group that can override our history that can overcome our affiliation with a religious group or a political group or a geographical group we feel a stronger tie to this little group that we've only been a part of for a very short time. So this is the counterbalance we've got two hardwired tendencies on the one hand we label everybody and we're equipped to categorize especially based on external features and there's nothing we can do about that we do it all day labeling, labeling, labeling but on the other hand we love to be a part of a small group that somehow has a sense of identity we love that we're hardwired to be a part of a small group it's the way we've been for thousands and thousands of years and the identity extends to the extent that it can overcome those stereotyping labels other associations that we have these are two conflicting forces within us on the one hand to stereotype everyone on the other to have a close connection with a small team it's got to be a special small team it's got to be a team where everyone is working together everybody plays a part everybody's important as soon as I began to read the descriptions of the kinds of things the psychologists were looking for in these small groups I immediately thought of Agile is that the secret sauce? is that what Agile has to offer that pull, that evolutionary tendency that we have to want to be a part of a small group that works together collaboratively is that the heart? is that the essence? is that what makes a team an organization? Agile, that sense? we know we see it in the practices the daily stand up you're promising you're collaborating pairing, collaborating time box iterations if we don't all work together we won't be able to deliver on that end date we all have to contribute retrospectives what can we learn together? what can we learn that will help us all be better? I think especially in the United States we get this feeling confused with friend I've worked on many great teams with people I did not like but I respected them and I trusted them and I knew they were going to do a good job and I knew they respected me and trusted me even if we don't go out for a beer afterwards it's a different thing we've got to be really careful about that because I think especially in the U.S. we get those lines a little blurry and they're different things so here's what collaboration is according to the psychologists is everybody is a part of what's going on everybody's important I can't do my job unless you do your job and what we get out of that is what I just said trust and respect and I think if we had to make a list of the things we really care about really want out of life I think respect is at the top so until he retired a year ago my husband was a software developer and he knew because we'd been married a long time and still are when he came home he knew that he shouldn't bring me flowers or candy or jewelry the thing I loved when he walked in the door at night was when he said I am stuck on a really tough problem bring me a problem said I've been working on this all day I don't know what to do could you help me I'd like to hear what you have to say when I hear that my brain does a little translation and what comes out is I love you so much and think about it Agile teams have that all day long will you pair with me what held you up yesterday what did you learn I want to know what you think I need your help we all want that I still want that even at 71 years of age I still want somebody to say I want to know your opinion what do you think help me out they call it social interdependence well I like collaboration better and I said already we don't do a good job of experiments we don't but they do and they have measured the benefits of small teams that have this sense of interdependence and they show that the team members share common goals everybody's outcomes are affected by the actions of others I can see that I can reach my goal if and only if you do yours and so we all work in this cooperative environment the measurable impacts are increased effort to achieve not only for the individuals the team members but for the team itself many times when teams work together you see a psychological effect called social loafing which means people don't do as much work because they know there are other people on the team who will pick up the slack on a team where you have collaboration or social interdependence what you see is everyone does more the team is better more positive relationships give and receive social support and I have to be friends improved psychological health increased self-esteem decreased anxiety and depression no wonder agile teams seem to have it if you've ever been on an agile team that's a special situation you can feel it you pick up that sense that everybody is working as hard as they can because they have bought into this social interdependence now we have a name for it so I feel like maybe I've been a little discouraging up till now I've told you some bad things about the way people are and that's us, by the way all of us so I want to close with some positive things I just finished reading this interesting book on trench warfare ooh, that doesn't sound too encouraging, does it? during the first world war there was a giant, huge trench and the men who were fighting in those trenches spent month after month after month after month in the mud and the blood and the rain and the snow and what the studies show is that in those trenches you could look across no man's land the little tiny space between your trench and the trench of the enemy you could look across no man's land and you could see the enemy in fact you could see the enemy so well that you knew when the wounded were carried out when meals were brought in when new fresh troops arrived you knew pretty much the life the daily schedule of the team on the other side and as a result of that something very strange happened along the miles of trenches little tiny pockets of peace broke out I know when they're taking out the wounded so we won't fire on them during that time no one signed an agreement we didn't tell them that we were not going to fire but they noticed and so when we took our wounded out they also did not fire when they're bringing in fresh troops serving meals we won't fire and they noticed so they won't fire when we're bringing in meals or fresh troops we'd have little pockets of time when there was no war there was peace oh come on Linda that's a stretch what are you talking about here how can that be collaboration remember that list of requirements what was that very first thing there on that list it said something about common goal well that's the enemy they're the enemy how can there be a common goal what is the common goal survival it wasn't my idea to be here probably not your idea either I sure wouldn't have elected to spend many months of my very short life in the mud and the blood and the rain and the snow wasn't my idea I just want to go home I want to go home so do I that's probably the biggest common goal we all have isn't it survive I just want to survive it's never happened before or since something about those trenches and the fact that those men spent so much time so close that they could really get to know one another even though they never really shook hands just little pockets of peace I thought it was so encouraging and of course most of you who have heard me talk before know that I love animals especially primates I have an interesting talk I give about bonobos and agile development so let's look at some animal experiments so this one was done with two kinds of monkeys the first are the reces well the reces monkeys they just are nasty nasty bite don't get long they're violent and then the other group of monkeys called the stunt tails who are so easy going so friendly peace loving so some psychologist had an idea he said let's take some very young animals the young aggressive reces and the young easy going stump tails and let's put them together and let's see who teaches who how to solve problems will the reces monkeys teach the stump tails how to be nasty and aggressive or will the stump tails teach the reces how to be calm and easy going interesting interesting experiment well the stump tails as you might imagine the name stump tails they have no tails just have a little little stump the reces on the other hand have long silky soft tails well the stump tails resolve aggression by grooming they don't fight so when the reces began to be aggressive well the stump tails do what stump tails do which is groom and they groomed the reces the young reces and especially because they don't have tails especially those long fluffy soft tails they loved those tails and the reces thought hey you know this is kind of nice having somebody groom my tail maybe we should all try that I don't know how we would do that in agile development maybe we could have a practice something to do with grooming your tails would be worth an experiment what do you think so at the end of the experiment the reces had become peace loving and they began to resolve differences by grooming so if we wanted to say there was a winner and a loser here we could say that the peacemakers won they taught the aggressive reces a better way I think that's an encouraging hopeful thing because we know there's a long line where we were all together so their tendencies really stayed with us maybe we could learn something from the reces and the stump tails so there's a picture of some stump tails the alpha male always gets fed first but the others are not aggressive they're not fighting they're all waiting they know that at some point they'll get their share of the food so I think that somehow embodies the stump tail view of life we're all in this together I think that's definitely reason for hope so hope it hasn't been too discouraging are you okay did you survive all of that with the little blue-eyed and brown-eyed you're okay and all of the information about you that you are a stereotyping animal but that you also love to be in small groups and you have a strong identity to the people that you work with and collaborate with is that okay so was it a worthwhile hour and whatever okay thank you