Yet, even taking into account the unequal weight of social contagions, I learn that the scale itself does not always work the way we might assume. Sometimes a positive work ethic is as damaging as a negative one. This happens when it fosters company cultures like some in Silicon Valley, predicated on what the executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University notes is the most intense, competitive, 24-7 environment in the country. Corporations lauded for their free restaurants and on-site massage services also employ people willing to work excessively long work hours to achieve prohibitively high standards.
Transforming conscious choice into an unspoken, authorless zeitgeist, the culture of Palo Alto eventually ingrained the social contagion into its DNA. While noting that nothing directly links strong work ethic to children who decide to kill themselves, there is still a suspicion that a culture producing such pressure to achieve, exerted through the encouragement of an exceedingly strong and intense work ethic, has been at the very least a factor in pushing the teenagers in my town to hit a wall. Like a hacker who abuses a flaw in the system to upload a computer virus, the social contagion of work ethic exploits inherent vulnerabilities. It takes advantage of the only weakness the cascade of otherwise beneficial ideas and behaviors possesses: the tendency for students to mirror a desire to breach the highest standards and achieve beyond any rational measure of accomplishment. Added to this is a troubling tendency for some to ruminate over failing to reach an arbitrarily high level of success.
The mantra of a strong workforce—I must work longer, labor harder, reach higher—becomes the chant of young people worried about their places in the world, a contagion that proliferates freely among children who harbor the best intentions, to thrive, to succeed, and to, above all, do and be better.
There’s a rather famous story in Palo Alto about two college students who roomed together as undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. Elon Musk would go on to head, among other companies, Silicon Valley–based giants PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX. Adeo Ressi would found a hyperlocal news platform that he sold to America Online, as well as a Web development firm and a Silicon Valley–based start-up incubator called the Founder Institute. The narrative conjures up a kind of destiny-spinning myth in which, for a time, two inchoate charismatic leaders lived under one roof. It’s as though there was something uniquely contagious in their house, a kind of hard-driving work ethic virus floating in the air that each caught. The truth, of course, is that there exists nothing so extraordinary. However, their home did harbor something unique, a surplus of a style of thinking and behaving that was particularly motivating to those around them and to each other.
I find myself thinking about this story after my most recent conversation with Habib. If students are catching the culture’s contagious work ethic, then I want to know which entities are most responsible for driving them toward this institutionalized frenzy. I start to look at the types of companies and leaders who are capable of cuing people in to both healthy and harmful epidemics of motivation. Ressi and Musk, I reason, exemplify entrepreneurs who encourage people through the social contagion effect of charismatic leadership, the epoxy banding everyone from employees to future investors together in pursuit of a singular vision. The passion for building something new and innovative is a powerful rallying cry. An entrepreneur’s leadership style can be persuasive, and through unconscious mirroring it can also be a vital factor in an individual’s, as well as a corporate venture’s, triumph or failure. Even if someone doesn’t deliberately go about trying to spread contagious zeal, the writer John Hersey suggests that leaders hold positions of unavoidable infectiousness. The most infectious will naturally transfer to others the desire for an individual to commit to an idea, a philosophy, an endeavor. One’s passion aligns thoughts, behaviors, and emotions; it fuels innovation, persistence, and accomplishment.
In many ways this phenomenon of top-down contagious enthusiasm is remarkable only in its banality. Obviously, exuberant leaders inspire others. And yet its apparatus, its middling sway, remains one of the most overlooked factors in organizations large and small. While examining the cause of company collapses in America, Germany, and Japan, the executive recruitment firm Egon Zehnder discovered that a CEO’s failure often has little to do with competence, knowledge, or lack of experience. Those who failed were hired on the basis of their IQ and business expertise—but fired for lacking the ability to win over their board of directors or inspire their employees. Leaders who possess the ability to control and express their emotions well, and thoughtfully handle interpersonal relationships among stakeholders, remain the most successful at aligning teams and spreading a productive work ethic. Their interactions with people create a nonverbal duet of mutual empathy and understanding. They stoke personal drive in others without uttering a single word, conveying sentiment through subtle, nonverbal channels like the pace and timing of a conversation as well as body movements. Charismatic leaders are particularly good at listening deeply and responding to what others feel, say, and do. Their gauge for interpretation is also highly accurate. They tune in to what someone else feels and thinks with stunning exactness. In so doing, they have a remarkable ability to pass along contagious zeal, impart their ambition to others, and inspire pride.
If there is a worrisome flip side to contagious charismatic leadership, it exists at the apex where intention and outcome meet, where people catch the aspiration and hard-driven work ethic of the leaders in their midst. We’ll toil for longer hours and dedicate more energy to achieving their vision. As the Wharton professor Adam Grant highlights in his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, when Polaroid founder Edwin Land was developing the instant camera, he once worked for eighteen days straight without even changing his clothes: “Just like the Silicon Valley founders . . . [Land’s] focus was rather on whether [employees] would value generating novel ideas and dedicate themselves to the mission. Surrounded by others who shared the same passion and goals, his employees felt a strong sense of belonging and cohesiveness. When you’re bonded that strongly with your colleagues in your organization, it’s hard to imagine working anywhere else.”
Work ethic, for better or worse, springs from a leader’s ability to spread fervor for reaching a level of triumph. In the best cases, leaders stimulate in people creative thinking, problem-solving abilities, and enhanced task involvement. In the worst cases, contagious charismatic leadership is so powerful that it tilts an entire culture toward an impossible work ethic, raises standards staggeringly high, perverts interpretations of greatness, and pushes an idea of perfection so hard that it threatens to tear the best of us asunder.
Chapter 13
On the Trail of the Motivation Lab
Like all strange contagion events, the makeup of the one in my town is unique and continues to prove its complexity to me. The ingredients I’ve collected thus far repeat in my head—fear, hysteria, work ethic, transmissible zeal—but none of these components directly addresses the issue of personal susceptibility. Why are these specific social contagions so catchable? As unique as Palo Alto’s situation is, there is something about these social contagions, and others, that makes each of us vulnerable to their sting. I worry it’s something central to our human constitution.
Not long after Habib turns in his grades for the semester, I take what I’ve learned about contagious work ethic and book a flight to Philadelphia. From there, I catch an early morning train that brings me to 30th Street Station. In terms of scale and grandeur, its grand platform is beyond any on the Caltrain line back home. The ones I know lack this station’s natural stone veneer and its lofty coffered ceilings that muffle the sound of voices and shoes click-clacking across the marble. The sign in the center of this station springs awake with a rapid, trill-like sound as the large split-flap display announces arriving trains for Boston, Harrisburg, and New York.
Its rotating tiles of letters and numbers create the impression of a flowing motion acr
oss the dark face of the display. The mechanical whir of the sign triggers a rush of commuters that hungrily swarms the gates to the trains. At some point in the history of commuters, this has become the way of train riders everywhere, a Pavlovian response creating a kind of contagious urgency and cuing a torrent of movement. I can’t help but watch this interplay under the new light of social contagions, the way thoughts, behaviors, and emotions cascade through group culture.
I leave 30th Street Station on foot and walk a bridge across the Schuylkill River. Its banks are hemmed with lines of oil-hued railroad tracks. The trains lumber across the brown earth beneath the overpass. I stuff my hands in my winter coat pockets as a line of russet- and rust-colored container cars clanks by. The approach to the Wharton School leads me west of the University of Pennsylvania’s main campus. The streetlights are draped with banners promoting an exhibit on ancient Panama at the Penn Museum called beneath the surface. To find this answer, beneath the surface is where I’m headed. It’s the place where dread and panic, good and bad influences, and hard-driven work ethic all tread.
Slipping quietly into a multilevel rotunda, I watch Adam Grant finish leading an undergraduate class on organizational behavior. He is a youthful professor dressed in blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and bright blue tennis shoes. His head is shaved close, his expression one of enduring thoughtfulness. I’ve sought him out because Grant’s research is at the forefront of work motivation and leadership. Oddly, despite teaching in a school dominated by economists, he’s landed at a surprising place in terms of the one social contagion he grudgingly propagates. “The study of economics pushes people toward a selfish extreme,” he tells me after his class lets out. More to the point, he says, “The scholarship of economics is responsible for spreading a contagion of greed.”
The Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank has discovered many examples of this, Grant says. Consider that professors of economics give less to charity than professors in other fields. Or that students of economics are more likely to practice deception for personal gain. Then there’s the fact that students majoring in economics routinely rate greed as generally good, correct, and moral. In fact, says Grant, simply thinking about economics chips away at one’s sense of compassion for others. Studying economics also makes people become less giving and more cynical. Students who rank high in self-interest might self-select for degrees and careers in economics-related fields, but by learning about economics they wind up catching more extreme beliefs than those they possess when they first register for class. By spending time with like-minded people who believe in and act on the principle of self-interest, students of economics can become convinced that selfishness is widespread and rational. Self-interest becomes the norm. Individual players within the whole unconsciously model and catch behaviors, in turn pushing ethical standards.
Grant’s argument draws me back to something Deborah Brenner-Liss said to me at her office in San Francisco months earlier. She explained that the young people in Palo Alto have a unique temperament, a penchant for running as fast as they can to reach their prizes, and they are doing so at younger and younger ages. Since then I’ve encountered this, too. A fifteen-year-old student I spoke to in Palo Alto once told me about an idea for an electric car battery she was developing in her garage with some of her friends. Without compunction, she stated flatly the device was going to save electric car manufacturing companies billions. Her exit strategy was to sell the battery technology to Elon Musk. A seventeen-year-old I met was building a data storage system he hoped to bring to market before going to college in a year. A sixteen-year-old I spoke to was foregoing college to join his friend’s online clothing start-up, which had already attracted angel investors. Another high school student was creating an online social network, adding confidently, without a shred of diffidence, that his product was going to crush Facebook—a belief that sprung from either great naïveté or the deep-seated mind-set of champions.
So many of these lofty dreams are driven by intellectual and creative desires to better the world. Just as many, however, are motivated by the goal of making as much money as possible. Between studying and tending to extracurricular activities, kids are developing prototypes, learning the complexities of marketing, practicing the skills of networking, and sharpening their abilities to design and develop business plans to present to venture capitalists. It’s remarkable really: upon meeting these teenagers, I remember thinking about where my life might have taken me if I’d applied even a fraction of the energy they are devoting to such ambitious causes.
But behind the story of constructive ambition lies the other story of cultures high on the contagion of economic-spread avarice with a long history of producing societal and personal downfalls. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, for instance, the market went mad selling tulips as a desire for these exotic plants reached astronomical heights; sellers rushed to make a fortune, ratcheting up the price of Switsers tulips by more than 1,000 percent before the world’s first speculative bubble inevitably burst and caused a market collapse. An economic bubble driven by greed, runaway debt, and consumer credit preceded the stock market crash of 1929. In the late 1990s, hungry entrepreneurs rushed to Silicon Valley to make their fortunes against the surface tension of a hyperinflated dot-com bubble, which popped in 2000 and drove the American economy into a recession. The global economic downturn of 2008 was also heralded by market gains propagated by greedy home mortgage lenders.
I imagine taking this information back to Roni Habib, telling him that he can no longer teach economics to his students at Gunn High because it makes them catch greed, and then awaiting the incredulous silence sure to follow. “We can’t eliminate economics classes any more than we can avoid seeing the effects of economics in play everywhere,” I say to Grant. “So where does that leave us?”
He cautions me, however. I’m not looking at the problem correctly. While the specialty of economics indeed spreads greed, there is actually something more foundational at the heart of all social contagions. This is not an issue of economics but an issue of commonality, he says. Greed is one of the most common traits on the planet. Its universality is the very thing that makes everyone respond to the stimuli of economics, which simply triggers that trait. Lights it up. Turns it on. It’s a cue that activates a widespread quality within each of us. It begs the question, if something as universal as economics can cue a social contagion like greed, what other triggers are influencing the children back home, and can we identify them before it’s too late?
To complete this picture, I realize I have one more stop to make. I’ve got to track down a place known as the Motivation Lab.
To find it, I board an Amtrak train from Philadelphia and head north. I arrive ninety minutes later at New York’s Penn Station. As I cross the dimly lit grotto of this subterranean place, every few seconds the changeable text announces arrivals and departures, the black and white tiles flipping with an illusion of cascading scales. I ride the escalator up to Eighth Avenue, entering into a citywide laboratory of greed, charismatic leadership, resilience, drive, hope, fear, and frenzy undergoing infinite sequences of catching and spreading.
Inside a gloomy NYU building, I make several quick turns down dull hallways lined with doorknobs of tarnished brass. At the end of a corridor, an entryway opens into an empty room with a lamp, a coffee table, and a second door, a room within a room. I rap on the doorframe and step inside to a warm space—bright, even—endowed with a bit of natural light from the windows.
This is where I find Peter Gollwitzer.
He calls me over with a little wave. “Come in, come in.”
He’s seated at a small table, and I settle in a chair across from him. He’s handsome, solemn, mid-sixties, with pale skin and short hair as white as textbook paper. Our table is in the middle of a roomy office, and there is a sofa and chairs set up to my left. There are pictures on the wall above it, capturing a winter scene. On the other side of the room hangs a set of different pictures, image
s of brightly colored buildings. There’s a smell of floor wax.
“You want to know how motivation affects action,” Gollwitzer says, speaking softly. His tone is deliberate as well as imbued with a German timbre. “You’re interested in how strong the effect is.”
“I am.”
“You want to know how people catch motivation, yeah? How people arrive at strong goals, catch them from other people, and how they go on to translate those goals into action.”
Yes, and more, I say. I want to know why the Palo Alto kids are so responsive to specific social contagions and what we can do to identify the triggers.
He watches me, unblinking. Takes off his glasses, which have thick black frames. Turns them in his hands.
“You want to talk about primes.”
Chapter 14
We Have a Problem of Primes
In the Motivation Lab, where the heat moves through old pipes, I’m getting an idea about where Gollwitzer fits in within a long line of psychologists like William James, Clark Hull, Robert M. Yerkes, and John Dillingham Dodson, pioneers in the drives, incentives, and arousals that provoke people to chase their goals. One of their more widely accepted theories about motivation suggests people choose to pursue goals as long as they believe that the outcome is attainable, that it’s attractive, and that it’s socially desirable. But as a senior researcher at Munich’s Max-Planck-Institute for Psychological Research, Gollwitzer found that, even if people have the belief that a goal is feasible, oftentimes they don’t act on it.
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