By: Dave Popple, PhD
Summary
- Decision-making is about more than logical processes.
- Unconscious processes have a significant impact on our thinking and decision-making.
- We all need to feel significant, and that significance comes primarily from our careers.
- Many of us borrow significance from our leaders at work.
“I know it is a cult, but I miss feeling like I was part of something significant.”
Former Scientologist and Rock Star
I heard this from a friend who was somewhat famous in the 80s. Once his fame subsided, so did his feelings of significance. His loss of fame made him vulnerable and opened him up to Scientology, a cult he belonged to for over a decade. He said, “I always knew it was BS, but that did not matter.” Logic and truth were not factors in his decision.
Both my friend’s experience and the irrational voting of segments of the population in the recent U.S. election give insights into how all of us can be better leaders and more effective talent managers. If our followers’ decision-making is not about logic and truth, then what is it about? The answers lie in the three factors described below.
* This explanation does not fit every Trump voter. Anyone who claims a single reason for the unexpected results is grossly oversimplifying. For example, many finance leaders knew they would benefit from a Republican-led government, as evidenced by the stock market rise the day after the election. They discuss dollar valuation, tying tariff rates to other countries’ economic policies, and absorbing costs into profit margins. Their vote was more rationally motivated, and this article is not about them. For them, it indeed was the economy.
Factor One: Emotional and Unconscious Processes Guide Most Decisions
Dr. Bud Littlefield, one of my graduate school professors, often repeated this phrase: “Most decisions are made emotionally and justified rationally.” He meant that unconscious processes guide most of our decision-making. When I first heard him say this, the unconscious process seemed like a black box in our head from which true mechanisms could not be known. However, we have learned much about that black box in the 25 years since Dr. Bud first uttered that phrase.
According to Kahneman, Sibony, Sunstein, and Cass in their book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, emotions are misconstrued as beliefs. These emotional experiences (“the evidence feels right”) masquerade as rational confidence in the validity of one’s judgment (“I know, even if I don’t know why”). This sense of coherence causes people to ignore pieces of information that don’t fit. In my conversations about politics and the economy with Trump supporters, they cannot articulate why they thought tariffs would improve the economy (The number one google search on November 6 was, “what are tariffs?”), only that they thought Trump was a successful business person (which is debatable) and, therefore, he must know what he is doing.
What drives this conversion? New York University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dr. Jay Van Bavel, revealed one of the black box secrets that may be at least partially responsible. During an event called “The Secret Science Club,” he showed the results of an FMRI study on the brain differences between populists (Trump supporters) and moderates when they make decisions. An FMRI is like an MRI with video, allowing researchers to identify brain function. When the populists in his study were asked politically relevant questions, it was not the rational front brain that lit up. Instead, the question energized an area near the emotional center responsible for maintaining relationships and connections with people. When moderates responded to the same questions, the front brain lit up, suggesting a rational analysis.
As a political moderate myself, I used to believe that Trump supporters lacked education or experience or had significant character flaws despite knowing Trump supporters who were neither. Incidentally, when I was president of the College Republicans group and finding significance was integral to my identity, I thought the same about Democrats and Socialists. The study showed me that many of my populist friends’ unconscious processes prioritized maintaining a tribal connection.
As I put the insights from Dr. Littlefield, Kahneman et al. and Dr. Van Bavel into practice, my behavior changed in two ways:
- I stopped judging them.
- I stopped expecting them to change in response to my logical arguments.
The “irrational” Trump supporter was only acting out their humanity, a condition we all share.
How does this apply to leadership?
Two types of leaders should benefit from these facts.
The first is the highly logical leader who presents a logical argument they consider lock-tight. These leaders are highly confident in their conclusions because they are as obvious as two plus two. However, others will agree and not act or simply disagree, although they cannot clearly state why. For these leaders, the interaction is confusing and frustrating. In these interactions, another factor impacts the decision-making process. Our logical leaders need to account for the emotional process to optimize their influence.
The second is the intuitive leader who makes decisions but does not know why. More likely than not, their intuition is driven by a need to maintain connections to some group. In some cases, they want to maintain connections to customers, in other situations the connections are to coworkers. However, in the worst case, the decisions are meant to maintain status and significance. Our intuitive leaders need to understand the impact of their emotional processes and discern when their intuition is the result of experience or need for significance.
Factor Two: Feeling Significant is a Critical Factor to our Mental Wellbeing
Why has tribal consideration become a greater factor over the past decade? The answer may be that a greater number of U.S. Americans feel insignificant.
Shala Nicely’s article in Psychology Today provides some context:
Feeling seen by others is a basic human need. Its basis is evolutionary: If your tribe didn’t see you, there was a risk you’d be left behind when the nomadic life of early humans dictated they move, and being alone equated to death. If other tribes didn’t see and respect you and your tribe, they were likely to invade your territory, take your resources, and leave you and your family to die.
In the ancient part of our brains, not being seen is equivalent to being sentenced to death.
It can be argued that the shift in U.S. society (and I assume in the Western world) would make people feel more invisible and less relevant. U.S. Americans have experienced four things during the last decade, some new, some more intensely.
- Social media and digital comparison have amplified the “highlight reel” effect, where people constantly see others’ successes, which can lead to feelings of insignificance in comparison.
- Economic inequality and job insecurity have grown, leaving many behind or disenfranchised. For example, I met a fifty-something-year-old greeter at a superstore who quickly told me his former job was as a floor supervisor at a mid-sized manufacturer. Now, even his current job is at risk. The shift from high-status to low-status jobs likely contributes to many feeling insignificant.
- The decline of traditional community structures has left some people feeling alone and invisible. The decline of churches provides a microcosm. In most churches, everyone was considered significant. The fastest-growing religion category on the U.S. census is “none,” and no institution has replaced it. With the church and other institutions in decline, it is no wonder that studies using the UCLA Loneliness Scale or the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale have shown increases in scores, indicating higher loneliness levels over the last decade.
- With rapid AI and machine learning advancements, many leaders have questioned the need for human labor, while the loss of a career for many is the loss of an identity. For example, I recently spoke at a biotech conference where another speaker reported that ChatGPT outperformed residents on diagnosis during hospital rounds. This would have been science fiction ten years ago. AI and automation are already replacing jobs in blue-collar, banking and finance, and legal and medical fields.
These four factors are attacking many U.S. Americans’ self-esteem. It is hard to explain how emotionally painful it is to have a fractured ego unless you have experienced it. For those experiencing this pain, their unconscious is focused on alleviating it. Feeling part of a tribe becomes more than having someone to meet for coffee or a beer. It feels like a necessity.
So how does this apply to leadership?
If you provide employees a sense of significance, they will stay longer and invest their discretionary effort in your organization. There are three ways to leverage this fact.
- Develop your employees to the point where they feel like experts in their niche. All of your employees have the urge to get better at something that matters. Humans are naturally motivated to learn and improve, especially when the task is challenging but achievable.
- Leverage the the need to do something meaningful and larger than oneself. People are more motivated when they see their work contributing to a greater good or aligning with their values. This may include working on projects that make a social impact or understanding how their role fits into the organization’s mission.
Build a tribe at work. I have noticed that companies where the employees have nicknames tend to have high engagement and job satisfaction. When building a tribe, people share their lives with each other and often socialize after hours.
Factor Three: Borrowed Ego
People can borrow ego functioning from their tribe, but it is even easier to borrow it from a leader. Although the science is somewhat unclear, our brains appear to identify powerful people, and those people impact our moods and thoughts more than less powerful ones. Much of what I have read attributes this to mirror neurons, suggesting the process is at an unconscious level. Borrowing significance from a powerful leader who appears to care about us is an immediate relief to the pain of a fractured ego.
A Common Process
We can all relate to the borrowed ego, because there was a time when we all had weak egos – adolescence. In our teens, we often borrowed significance from others to form our identity. For some, it was associations with peer groups or emulating a celebrity (i.e. Swifties) or athletes. When I was a teen, it was my church group and politics. For example, my group of Young Republicans would all dress the same at political events, wearing blue jackets and khaki pants. My decision to borrow identity from these groups and leaders like President Reagan had little to do with reason. Furthermore, my adolescent brain effectively ignored any behavior or ideas that countered my values to maintain my borrowed identity.
My grandmother attempted to expose my irrationality. She quizzed me one afternoon in her living room, asking my opinion about several political topics and revealing that my responses were clearly more aligned with Democrats. In hindsight, I perceived Democrats as losers after Mondale’s poor showing in 1984. It took about eight more years until I matured and stopped looking for significance externally. My opinions became my own once again.
I am not naive to the reality that my career provided significance; my work in social services, teaching graduate school, clinical psychology, and management consulting were all high-status positions. To date, I have not experienced losing my status like so many others have. In 2024, we have a significant slice of our society, men and women, who manage the pain of feeling insignificant by borrowing ego functioning from another.
Borrowing from Narcissists
Some people do not develop their ego in a healthy way. These people received extreme feedback, either overly positive or negative. For some, the ego grew into a positive exaggeration. For others, a false grandiosity developed as a defense against the pain of feeling worthless. The abundance of ego that is often out of touch with reality is called narcissism.
It is important to note that people with fractured egos do not solely look for narcissists to provide relevance. Any person with perceived significance is a potential donor. The difference is that those whose significance is based in reality tend to reject them, whereas narcissists need followers to maintain their false, exaggerated ego.
Here is the scary part: as narcissists lend some of their significance, aspects of the narcissist’s ego replicate within the followers and they begin to think and act like them. In his book Friedman’s Fables, Friedman likens the process to the relationship between bacteria and phages that infect and replicate within bacterial cells. In some cases, the phages destroy the bacteria, just as some followers of the narcissist destroy their identity.
Need further proof that the narcissistic ego has been replicated in many U.S. Americans? Has there ever been a time in U.S. history when a felon was elected who has been convicted of sexual abuse and destroyed the lives of many entrepreneurs through his bankruptcies? Lesser things have ruined campaigns. Gary Hart 1988 and John Edwards 2008 had affairs that cost them their campaigns. In comparison, less significant events like Howard Dean’s scream in 2004 and Herman Cain’s unproven sexual harassment allegations in 2012 derailed their campaign. U.S. American values and beliefs before 2016 ruled these candidates out. After 2016, we started justifying these behaviors, and the rise in hate crimes in 2016 suggests some adopted them.
So how does this apply to leadership?
This factor tends to be the most surprising and unnerving one for leaders. However, once this is understood, leaders’ self awareness and presence skyrocket.
First, leaders need to understand that any follower who borrows ego or status from them will not give them accurate information. Early in my career, I coached a middle manager. The topic for one session was upward feedback. We scripted his feedback to his primary boss and set a deadline to deliver it. He met the deadline and reported that the conversation was a success. However, two weeks later I asked his boss about the conversation and he thought little about it because it was highly complementary and felt like my coachee was brown nosing. He delivered very little of the difficult feedback and framed the rest as positive.
Second, they will respond poorly to constructive feedback. People with strong egos attribute success and failure to their actions. When they receive difficult feedback, they simply adjust their behavior. Those with weaker egosattribute success to internal factors and failure to other people. Therefore, when they receive difficult feedback from the person from whom they are borrowing ego, it is much harder for them to hear.
What are the Lessons for Organizations?
I worry that this article will provide a framework for people with less character to start manipulating others. I hope that is not the case and that this article provides vulnerable people immunity from manipulation. These factors may also be used in a prosocial way.
Organizations are affected by these factors in multiple ways that could easily fill a book. Here are two of them that seem to be most relevant.
- Hiring Decisions
If building and maintaining a tribe unconsciously affects decision-making, the key is to increase objectivity in the decision-making process.
First, identify clear selection criteria before anyone involved in the decision meets a candidate. When someone attempts to convince others to set aside those criteria after meeting a candidate, it is more likely than not that the emotional process is superseding the rational one.
Second, psychometrics and outside assessors like the ones at Psynet Group increase objectivity. The psychometric does not have an unconscious process, and Psynet Group consultants will not be co-workers with or leaders of the candidate and, therefore, are not selecting them to be part of a tribe.
Third, make self-confidence and ego strength a hiring criteria. The people you hire will someday be involved in the hiring process. If their ego is weak, they will make poor hiring decisions.
- Organizational Dynamics
If an organization has a dynamic of narcissistic leaders and weak ego followers, there are no governors to dampen the narcissists’ impulsive and self-centered decisions. Before the election, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote an article about the need for dampeners in a Trump presidency, and the same is true for our companies. Although I have no direct access to information about the interactions between Trump and his team, I have seen teams make multi-million dollar mistakes that appeared irrational to outsiders due to this dynamic.
This dynamic also creates cultural toxicity. In his classic book, Paradox of Groups, University of Pennsylvania professor Kenwyn K. Smith states that for a group to exist, there must be people who do not belong. The same is true for tribes. When employees have a tribal mindset, people who do not think like them or challenge their thinking are considered as not belonging and present an unconscious threat. The result is an us vs. them mentality, even within the same organization or team.
Final Thought
We are all prisoners of our unconscious processes to some extent. As I work through my own, I have found guidance in Albert Camus’s writings: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” He is not talking about physical imprisonment but independent thought, which is not unduly influenced by a person, tribe, or even society. I have not experienced this level of freedom … yet.