Charles Duhigg has a long feature in the New York Times called What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. It includes a summary of really fascinating research on the core elements of a healthy, productive team:

As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. “As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,” Woolley said. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.”

Second, the good teams all had high “average social sensitivity”—a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling—an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.

So, effective teams are built on equality and empathy. Seems terribly obvious, of course, but I feel like very few teams actually live these values. We can do better.

Cliff Kuang wrote an excellent article on Microsoft’s push for more inclusive design. From Microsoft’s Radical Bet On A New Type Of Design Thinking:

Dubbed inclusive design, it begins with studying overlooked communities, ranging from dyslexics to the deaf. By learning about how they adapt to their world, the hope is that you can actually build better new products for everyone else.

What’s more, by finding more analogues between tribes of people outside the mainstream and situations that we’ve all found ourselves in, you can come up with all kinds of new products. The big idea is that in order to build machines that adapt to humans better, there needs to be a more robust process for watching how humans adapt to each other, and to their world. “The point isn’t to solve for a problem,” such as typing when you’re blind, said Holmes. “We’re flipping it.” They are finding the expertise and ingenuity that arises naturally, when people are forced to live a life differently from most.

This is similar to the points I tried to make in Beyoncé, Coldplay, and the myth of the “average” user. The advantages of having more diversity in our design and development processes go far beyond the moral rightness of it. We end up with better products that serve a much wider cross-section of a population.

Maria Konnikova digs into the research on How People Learn to Become Resilient:

[Developmental psychologist Emmy Werner] found that several elements predicted resilience. Some elements had to do with luck: a resilient child might have a strong bond with a supportive caregiver, parent, teacher, or other mentor-like figure. But another, quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. From a young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms.” They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

Kate Bowler’s Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me is the best thing I’ve read this year so far. It’s funny, sharp, and deeply moving. Kate recently got cancer, some time after writing an academic book on the prosperity theology phenomenon in many American churches. Prosperity theology—the idea that “good” faith in God can make you rich and keep you healthy—is an immensely damaging philosophy, and Kate addresses this with poise and clarity.

I hesitate to quote anything from the essay because you really should read the whole thing, but one of my favorite paragraphs deals with the recent rise of the #blessed hashtag:

Over the last 10 years, “being blessed” has become a full-fledged American phenomenon. Drivers can choose between the standard, mass-produced “Jesus Is Lord” novelty license plate or “Blessed” for $16.99 in a tasteful aluminum. When an “America’s Next Top Model” star took off his shirt, audiences saw it tattooed above his bulging pectorals. When Americans boast on Twitter about how well they’re doing on Thanksgiving, #blessed is the standard hashtag. It is the humble brag of the stars. #Blessed is the only caption suitable for viral images of alpine vacations and family yachting in barely there bikinis. It says: “I totally get it. I am down-to-earth enough to know that this is crazy.” But it also says: “God gave this to me. [Adorable shrug]. Don’t blame me, I’m blessed.”

I am thankful for people like Kate who, instead of saying “Everything happens for a reason,” says “Life is really hard—and yet, I still believe.”

Patricia Pisters explores why horror movies are much scarier than they used to be in her essay Neurothriller:

Consciously or unconsciously, contemporary filmmakers not only tap into increased knowledge about the brain offered by neuroscientific experiments, but their films also stimulate the neural senses of emotions without the detour of narrative. […]

But the difference between the classic thriller and the neurothriller is not simply the difference between a narrative-driven plot and a character-driven plot. It is not necessary, and often not possible, to identify or engage with the character at the beginning of a neurothriller at all. In contemporary cinema, we are often denied an establishing shot or introductory scenes situating the character in a narrative context. Thrown in the middle of a confusing situation, we first connect on the immediate primal level, expressed through cinematography’s aesthetic stand-in for the emotional mind: close-ups, grainy images, colours, sounds can all have direct impact without being connected to either a story or a person. The neurothriller has ‘embodied’ the emotion of the film, just as the human body embodies the emotion of the mind.

When everything about your life is out in the open, there is power in keeping some of it secret. The ironic side-effect of social media is that it makes it easier to hide. When people think that you share everything, they don’t expect you to keep anything secret.

I recently went on a brief trip to South Africa to visit family, and I stayed (mostly) off social media. It felt weird—I felt this strange guilt, like I was “hiding” something because so many of my friends didn’t even know I was in the country. I know it was the right thing to do considering the circumstances of my visit, but still. Our minds can be deceptively cruel to us.

Anyway, I started thinking about it because Jim Farber explores this from a celebrity standpoint in his really interesting article The New Celebrity Power Move: Keeping Secrets:

Meanwhile, the stars get to both circumvent the media and to float an image of utter transparency through their promiscuous use of social media. In fact, that may only obscure them further. “Digital media creates this notion that we can know everything,” [Kathleen Feeley, co-editor of a scholarly study of celebrity gossip] said. “But it’s still a performance. It just creates a false intimacy.”

The audience’s belief in social media as the most direct route to a star exacerbates “the expectation that everyone will tell everything,” said Daniel Herwitz, a professor at the University of Michigan who wrote “The Star as Icon.” “Against all that, it becomes totally extraordinary when somebody doesn’t tell. On one hand, the public is in awe of the fact that the star, for the moment, resisted the system. But they’re also disappointed, as if somebody let them down. ‘Why didn’t I know this? The media dropped the ball!’”

“Why didn’t I know this”, also known as Why wasn’t I consulted?

Facebook’s “On This Day” feature has always felt really strange to me. It’s an algorithm that’s aware of its weirdness, hence the almost apologetic “We care about you and the memories you share here” message that surrounds it. As if it knows it’s bound to get it wrong and show you something you don’t want to be reminded of.

Leigh Alexander provides an interesting perspective on that feature and our social media “memories” in What Facebook’s On This Day shows about the fragility of our online lives:

Part of the palpable dissonance comes from the fact that many of our posts were never intended to become “memories” in the first place. An important question gets raised here: what’s the purpose of all this “content” we serve to platforms, if it’s useless in constructing a remotely valuable history of ourselves? Are we creating anything that’s built to last, that’s worth reflecting on, or have social media platforms led us to prize only the thoughts of the moment? […]

We generally think of social media as a tool to make grand announcements and to document important times, but just as often – if not more – it’s just a tin can phone, an avenue by which to toss banal witterings into an uncaring universe. Rather, it’s a form of thinking out loud, of asserting a moment for ourselves on to the noisy face of the world.

Despite multiple attempts I still don’t understand how Snapchat works, but from what I understand from the Young People this is a big reason for its appeal. There isn’t an expectation that something you post on Snapchat has to be profound enough to become a permanent memory. As one of my friends Simon1 put it: Snapchat is there to “Share (not remember) moments.” (Side note—if you haven’t done so yet, please read Ben Rosen’s My Little Sister Taught Me How To “Snapchat Like The Teens”. It is absolutely bonkers.)

So Alexander’s point is an interesting one: how do we take control of our online memories? It’s not possible to know for sure, in a moment, if we’re experiencing something we’d like to remember forever. Maybe the best solution is to keep it the way it’s always been: rely on our brains to remind us of things. We can always then dig up those old photos ourselves—without the help of an algorithm—if we really want to relive the moment.

1. Some of my best friends are Young People. ↩