There’s no Me In Team. Oh Wait….

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LinkedIn is full of middle management types spouting poorly-understood stuff about psychology they got third-hand from some AI-written copypasta. The general thrust of such posts is that everyone needs to be a humble, agreeable team player. They think that anyone who thinks they are an expert on anything is trumpeting their ignorance – a clear misunderstanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They think that the workplace, and indeed the world would be a better place if we all worked in some sort of partnership of collaborative mediocrity.

I’m not an expert on psychology, though I did study a bit as part of my teaching qualifications. “A bit” is apparently rather more than the “less than nothing” that the LinkedIn posters know. The first thing that I learned was that psychology sits on the boundary of science and bullshit, so there are psychologists who think their discipline is a science, and try as hard as they can to be rigorous; but there are many others who reject the idea of science entirely. Outsiders may have difficulty knowing which kind of psychologist they are dealing with.

The Dunning Kruger effect is one of the major tropes of pop psychology, and isn’t even about experts at all. It’s about self-deluded know-nothings (not unlike the exact people who post that graphic about the DK effect on LinkedIn). Know-nothings like the idea that “know somethings” are the real know nothings, and the (socially popular, but scientifically shonky) idea that humility is correlated with knowledge.

‘Body language’ is another example. Mehrabian said that only 7% of communication was verbal when communicating about feelings. But people with poor language skills especially like the idea that non-verbal communication is what really matters. This can cause problems when you are trying to communicate complex technical ideas – especially unpopular ones – with people who are inclined to glaze over and focus on your body language instead.

‘Emotional Intelligence’ is also popular with middle management types, but it has no foundation in empirical research. It is way over psychology’s bullshit boundary. Its origins lie in Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory, which were overextended by Goleman in order to produce his pop psychology bestseller. What Goleman’s EI really measures is conformity. Obviously, conformists like to think that conformity is smart, but that’s actually the opposite of what the science-y psychologists say.

There isn’t that much fact in psychology, but there is something which is pretty much universally agreed. The Big 5 model of personality states that there are five major stable dimensions of personality: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Ideally, one would hope that wherever a person sat on each of these five scales would be viewed as OK. But this is not the case. People in general, and middle management types in particular, have views on where people ought to be on the scales of these traits. This is perhaps why 60-70 % of people feel the need to hide aspects of their personalities at work. Interestingly, my generation are far more likely to be authentic in their work personas than Gen Z.

If we look at just one of these traits, agreeableness, there is no doubt that agreeable people are easier to work with. However, they are also likely to have difficulty putting forward original ideas, voicing (or even thinking) unpopular truths, and resisting groupthink – i.e. standing out from the crowd. This is why low agreeableness is associated with promotions and higher income. Leaders and innovators tend to be disagreeable people (who might however want their underlings to be agreeable, because it makes their lives easier).

The great engineers of the past were not considered great because of their great agreeableness. They were universally rather disagreeable. They focussed on logic over people, on persistence over popularity, and on challenging the status quo. Luckily there was no popular psychology to tell them how they were getting it wrong back then else we’d all still be living in. Disagreeable people may be “jerks”, but the workplace – and the world – needs the truthsayers, the whistleblowers and the out-of-the-box thinkers.