← The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
493. Disrupting Implicit Bias
00:43:36
In this episode of The Brainy Business podcast, Melina Palmer welcomes Dr. Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta, author of the thought-provoking book, Change the Wallpaper. Buju, a prominent social psychologist and founding director of the Institute of Diversity...
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- [00:00]
Melina Palmer
Welcome to episode 493 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta, author of Change the Wallpaper. Ready? Let's get started.
- [00:21]
You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more br friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.
- [00:36]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
Hello.
- [00:37]
Melina Palmer
Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. What's the wallpaper in your life? This is the stuff that surrounds us all the time, so much that it blends into the background and we don't realize how it's nudging our behaviors. Those things we see and hear constantly shape attitudes and beliefs that that can be hard to change, especially when you don't notice they're there. My guest today, Dr. Nalanjana Des Gupta, is going to talk about the wallpaper around us and how to create opportunities to disrupt the patterns and habits for a better future in life and business. Nalanjana, who goes by Buju, is Provost, professor of Psychology and founding Director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a leader in research on implicit bias and science driven interventions to create positive culture change. Her passion is to translate science for social good. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Boston Globe, Scientific American Mind, and National Public Radio. Her research has been recognized by multiple awards and she was tapped to serve on Catalyze Tech, a think tank bringing together tech industry professionals and academics to expand and diversify STEM education and workforce development. She was also involved in a similar effort by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, charged with making recommendations for advancing anti racism, diversity, equity, inclusion in STEM organizations. Her new book is Change the Wallpaper Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities, Women, which we're discussing in today's episode. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Buju and myself, and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 493. Now let's jump right in. Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.
- [02:51]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
Hey Melina, it's good to be here.
- [02:54]
I think I made it through. This is when we talk so much about names and pronunciations. I end up getting in. In my brain, as people do. Right. So, Nalanjana.
- [03:04]
Perfect, perfect, perfect.
- [03:07]
Welcome to the show. Delighted. Excited to have you here. For those who don't yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?
- [03:16]
Sure. I am a social psychologist. My research is on implicit bias, but actually on the positive side, in the sense that I do research on intervention science. I design strategies and interventions to change local culture, and then I test the impact of those interventions over time, and then I test whether they've had positive impacts on the people in that culture, not just when those interventions are active, but over a longer period of time, especially in young people in higher education and in the entry to careers.
- [04:03]
Melina Palmer
Awesome.
- [04:04]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
For those who aren't necessarily familiar with the term of implicit bias and knowing their kind of different words. And people talk about bias more these days, thankfully. But can you share a little bit, give some definitions for those who are less familiar?
- [04:19]
Yeah. So implicit bias, sometimes people call it unconscious bias, but those of us in the field don't like to call it unconscious bias because it's actually not necessarily unconscious. These are sort of automatically activated, spontaneously activated assumptions about a group of people that jump into mind when we see a person, a member of a group that come to mind that make us prejudge them based on a name, appearance, characteristics, without really knowing who they are, that make us judge them negatively and sometimes positively. So they may be. They're implicit because we may not be fully aware of them. They may be implicit in the sense that. That we may not intend to be biased, and they may happen really quickly. So that's what implicit attitudes are. And sometimes they influence our behavior, our judgments in ways that we don't intend.
- [05:27]
Yeah. What I really appreciated about your work and the book is looking at both.
- [05:35]
Melina Palmer
Sides of the equation.
- [05:36]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
I think that often when people do talk about bias, it tends to be about how. Kind of what you were saying there. Right. How I have a bias about someone else and a particular group and how that would impact the way I react to them.
- [05:49]
Melina Palmer
And there's a lot in the book.
- [05:51]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
About that, of course, and also sharing about how we can. Like when we think about our own internal wallpaper, to use some language from the book, which, of course I want you to talk about, you know, that terminology. But how we can think about ourselves as a group can impact the way that we act, like our own bias, kind of about how we should act in a certain situation. Like if I'm the only woman in the room I may judge the situation differently than if there are other people like me that are there.
- [06:25]
Exactly. I think a lot of the impact of situations on ourselves can be self imposed. So the wallpaper or stereotypes or implicit biases affect ourselves as much as it affects how we see other people. So a lot of my research is to design interventions or environments that prevent those stereotypes from influencing women, working class people, people of color, in environments where they are the only one or one of very few. So it's to prevent. So the term that your listeners might be more familiar with is to prevent things like the imposter syndrome. To prevent feeling that we are not good enough or not confident enough, when in fact we might be just as good as anybody else. So what are those interventions like having a critical mass that might. Might sort of allow people to be inoculated against those negative stereotypes?
- [07:40]
Yeah, definitely. And just as an. There's so many wonderful examples and stories throughout the book. And I always love when books have a whole chapter dedicated to storytelling because of how that comes together for, you know, our brains and things.
- [07:55]
Melina Palmer
Before we get to the wallpaper piece.
- [07:57]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
And define that, you have just an example, one example that sprung to mind here. There was a female student, I think it was at Harvard, maybe it was in engineering. And then realized she was the only one and left, but then maybe came back. Can you share? And whether it's that story or another of someone who kind of let the like the feeling get the better of them and made a change that they didn't ne they were just as good or better than other people, but they kind of got in their own head about it.
- [08:31]
Yeah. So yeah, it wasn't at Harvard actually It was a female student in engineering when I was a postdoc at the University of Washington in Seattle.
- [08:45]
Right here in my neck of the woods.
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Yeah, in your neck of the woods. And this meeting her changed the direction of my own research. It was actually a pretty profound experience. It, it was one of the first classes I was teaching and she was an engineering student in my psychology class. And I wondered why she was in. It was a small seminar and I wondered why she was there. And I learned later on in talking to her one on one that she was thinking of switching her major. And I thought maybe it was because she was having a difficult time in engineering. It turned out she wasn't. She was doing just fine in engineering. And she had been recruited into University of Washington because she was very strong in high school in math and science. But one day, as you said, she was in her class, in a large lecture class, and she realized that she was the only woman in the class. She had had other women in the class classes, but as the classes get caught, more advanced, she was the only woman in the class. And she felt that the professor was looking at her, and he may or may not have been, but she just felt really weird being the only woman in the class. And that experience made her wonder, do I really care that much about engineering? And that doubt about do I care enough about the subject matter made her think that maybe I don't care enough. So essentially, the feeling of being the only one made her doubt her interest in the field. So it's not that she lost interest in the field first, it's that she first felt alone. That made her doubt whether she was interested. That made her doubt maybe she was interested in something else. And slowly she started exploring other options, which brought her to my class to try and understand. My class was on stereotyping and to try and understand her own experiences. And she later became my research assistant and then later went on to pursue a PhD in social psychology. And her experiences is what made me start thinking about how these subtle stereotypes and assumptions can take somebody who's very good at something and shift around their understanding of their own ability and put them on a different path.
- [11:22]
Yeah. As they say, so much of the best research is me search, Right?
- [11:26]
Yes. That's. Sometimes it starts that way. It doesn't always, but oftentimes.
- [11:31]
Melina Palmer
Yeah.
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Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. And, you know, go dogs. I, too, went to the University of Washington. So. Yes. Well, let's now get back to the central point being the wallpaper. And with this. And I'm not sure how much you actually dig into the metaphor of this with people as you've had conversations. I find metaphors to be such a fascinating space in cognitive semiotics. We've had episodes about that. And so for one, I'm very intrigued about how you landed on calling it the wall. Like getting to this being a wallpaper versus something else. What else did you evaluate as far as how to talk about this concept and kind of getting into the root of that work?
- [12:21]
That's a great question. So actually, the wallpaper metaphor happened when our son, who went to a public school, a very racially diverse public school, went off to college. And he went off to college to a private liberal arts college because he wanted to play baseball. And he was not a D1 baseball player. He was more of a D3 baseball player. So D3 small school allowed him to both go to a play D3 baseball, as well as go to an academically rigorous school that happened to be a private school. So when he went to this college, he told my husband, his dad, dad, everybody here is white and rich. And my husband came back home and said, alex's wallpaper changed. And what he was saying is that this kid was in public school where everybody was economically variable, working class to middle class to wealthier, racially mixed. And now he was in this private college where people were all on the wealthy end of the spectrum and all mostly white. He didn't know in public school that the world was not like that. It is only when he left and went to a different place, he noticed that something was different. And my husband's interpretation, the metaphor he used was Alex's wallpaper had changed. And that phrase stuck with me. That was 2015. That you notice something is different or you notice your environment, which when it changes, we notice our environment when we travel. Right. We notice something is what is when we go to someplace that's different. So we notice our environment in a room when we go to a different room. That wallpaper, as the metaphor of our local environment, just stuck in my room till 2020. When I started to think about the book. And I thought wallpaper is really, in social, psychological terms, is the power of the situation. So much of what we think and how we act is influenced by these situational forces that we don't even realize. And that situational force can be described or metaphorically as the wallpaper. So I just hung onto his wallpaper has changed, which is how I start the book. And when I wrote the book, I thought, that's it. Somehow wallpaper has got to be in the title and in as the sort of the theme that runs through the whole book.
- [15:25]
Yeah. Well, I love that. And the, you know, kudos to all the great spouses out there that see things in that different way and can point that out. I. It made me think about. So I worked at a financial institution. I ran a marketing department for several years and would go to visit the branches and would talk to the teams about how, like, we're doing an audit. Because, you know, when you're in the same space, stuff can just sort of like, blend in. You don't even realize what it looks like over there. And so we can go in and say, like, this thing is kind of dirty or it's a little dusty over here. We need to change out images or something. Because when you're in there day in and Day out, you just stop noticing all the stuff. And one day we got a call. It was actually a coworker of mine. His wife had said, hey, like, I'm driving by this particular branch. Like, do you know that their posters upside down in the window, like, they have it upside down, and the thing that's facing out to the street that everybody's driving by, is there, like, is there a reason that that is that way? Um, and no, they actually put up the poster upside down and didn't even realize or notice or check or see it every day when they were walking into the branch. And, like, nobody commented on it until, you know, somebody said, that's weird. And then we had to change it. So the things that. How could someone not notice? And there are lots of ways that we don't notice the very obvious things around us. And sometimes they're influencing our behavior even though we don't realize it.
- [17:01]
That's right. That's right. I mean, and sometimes we notice it initially, and then it fades into the background. And other times we don't. Your example is when we don't even notice it at all. Yes. I think there's a lot that we are. That are just not in the center of attention. I mean, in psychology, a lot of times when we teach about visual illusions, that we use visual illusions to show students how you show something. And some people see one reality, other people see another reality, but both coexist in the same illusion. It's that kind of thing. And the illusion is just that illusion. But the kind of wallpaper we are talking about is one that has more meaning, that then influences the way we see social reality, whether we see inequality or we don't see inequality. And all of that. Which is sort of the topic of the book.
- [18:06]
Yeah, one of the. I feel like I want to jump in all the directions and ask all the questions, which happens often. But I would say one thing that really stuck with me being this idea that the people that need the help the most are maybe least likely to ask not. But it's also because they just don't even realize what's different about their wallpaper.
- [18:31]
Melina Palmer
Right.
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Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
And so knowing. So, like, I was raised in sort of a. You know, you challenge authority and you can ask questions about things and you can speak up. And it's easy to just assume that everybody heard the same thing that I heard and has this equal, you know, opportunity there, and even something like that. And there were these kind of two stories of. Of students that went side by side. Can you share a Little bit about those.
- [18:58]
Yeah. What you're talking about is one of the four types of wallpaper I talk about in the book, which is this tacit cultural knowledge about how to navigate social institutions to get ahead. And that tacit cultural knowledge is whether you ask for help, whether you ask for rule bending when you need it, you ask for extensions, you ask for accommodations, whether those kinds of things. So there's a whole list of sort of tacit knowledge, which is never. It's not like a recipe list that's communicated that for. For folks who are upper middle class, you sort of learn it just by mimicking your elder siblings or your parents. And people who are working class or poor. Working class and poor just don't know it. In the book, I show it as a maze. And some people have the roadmap to the maze, and they can get through the maze easily and get to the shining light at the end. Other people get stuck, hit a wall, and miss opportunities. So the story you're talking about actually comes from a sociologist who studied these young people through 20 years and followed their lives as from middle school all the way through adulthood. And these were stories about these two young girls, one working class and one, one middle class, and their mothers. And the working class girl went through middle school and high school, and her mother had never graduated from, had never gone to college. She sort of looked to teachers to be the guidance counselors to show her kids what kind of classes to take, what kind of high school to go to. When her kid got a D in math, she told her mother not to worry about it. So her child didn't get into the high school that she wanted to. The mother didn't understand why her child didn't get into that high school, so she went to a secondary high school. Her mom wasn't hooked into the right parent circle, didn't quite know how to navigate from high school to apply to college, didn't know how to guide her daughter to apply to colleges that were sort of pegged to the right SAT scores. So her child didn't get into the colleges, ended up going to community college, sort of ran into all the kinds of things where she got into a little bit of a fender bender, missed classes, didn't know to ask the professor for accommodations, did poorly in the classes, failed some classes. So all of these little things that made the student essentially take forever to get her associate's degree. On the other side the comparison was another student, a middle class student whose mother was hooked into the parent circle, ensured that she got into the gifted program, when she missed the gifted program by a smidgen, made sure she got tested privately and ensured that she got in after that, got into University of Maryland when she got a C in some class, said, this is not the right major for you. Try this major. If you're not doing well here, go to see the advisor. That's what the advisor is for. Go to your faculty's office hours. So essentially helped her daughter navigate college all the way until her daughter got her footing. In the writing of these stories, it was clear that her daughter didn't even realize how much her mother was steering her very carefully to prevent her from. From sort of taking the wrong turn until everything clicked and then her mother stepped back and the daughter went forward. And so it really shows how the social capital that one mother had that the other mother didn't have made a huge difference in the lives of these two daughters from where they started to where they ended up. And the huge difference both in terms of the debt one daughter got into compared to the other and where they ended up 20 years into the story. And the difference was really about social capital, about sort of the knowledge, the cultural knowledge, about how do you navigate social institutions. Everything from schools to college to early careers.
- [24:16]
Melina Palmer
Definitely.
- [24:18]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
Thank you for taking us into those journeys, learning a little bit from them. As you said, this is one of the four types of wallpaper. It represents one of the four types of wallpaper. Can you give just a little bit about what those four types are?
- [24:34]
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So this type was. Was the cultural knowledge. And my visual representation as a very visual person is this was the maze. You either have the roadmap to the maze or you don't. The second type of wallpaper is material culture. So if the physical design of the places we are either allow us to interact with other people who are different from us or segregate us from each other. So in the book, the example I give is if an organization that we work in is one where the C suite people, the leaders, are in the top floor and separated from the rank and file people who are on the bottom floor. Like the Bon Appetit magazine example that I started the book with, that means that the leaders, the executives, never meet the rank and file people. They never have real relationships with them, and so they never get to know them, and they're entirely segregated. Or the physical design of places of a workplace might be one like Drift, which is a startup company that I talk about in the book, which has an open floor plan where the CEO is sitting in the same space as his employees, interacting with them, asking them about their projects. And so they have genuine relationships, even when they're not just in meetings. And those relationships lead to organic mentoring opportunities, sponsorship that is much more organic and not so structured. So the physical design can segregate or integrate and allow for, or not allow for human relationships. I think of it as material cultures. That's a second kind of wallpaper. The third kind of wallpaper is symbolic culture or stories. Your favorite stories provide explanations for why things are the way they are. So explanations of why is somebody's success deserved? Is it because they worked hard, or they are brilliant and innately talented? Or is somebody's failure the result of bad personal choices? Or is it because of external, extenuating circumstances? Stories through the protagonist or through the hero conveys that worldview in a way that is where we get sucked in, and we sort of absorb that, and we remember that. So stories sort of leave us with a residue of whether the inequalities or the successes or failures are something about the internal person or something about the environment. And that then makes us make attributions about other people's successes or failures. So that's symbolic. That's the third kind of wallpaper. And then the final kind is representation. People in high places. Another way of saying it is the portraits on the wall. When we walk into a. A room, the people we see as the portraits on the wall tell us who is valued and respected in that place. If we see the portraits on the wall being of the people looking all the same, and they are all people in a similar role, it tells us right away, in a split second that all of the people who are valued and respected are people in this narrow band. There are people in these kinds of roles, and they must belong to these kinds of groups. Which also means that people who are not in those roles, who don't look like that, are just not that worthy. And all the resources and recognition flows from that. We immediately know that in this workplace, this is the invisible ladder of respect. We don't need to be told. We can just look around in that physical environment and very quickly know who is valued and who is not. So those are the four kinds of wallpaper. And they are often not communicated explicitly, and they're often sort of in the background. And that's sort of how they fit the metaphor of the wallpaper.
- [29:07]
Thank you for sharing about those and knowing that we could talk about all of them in such depth as you share within the book. And everybody will have their opportunity to.
- [29:16]
Melina Palmer
Read about as they pick up their copy. As we think about applying this into.
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Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
Business and you have lots of tips and insights and stories and so much value. If you were going to, you know, share with people, you know, what, what's something they could be be doing something they should be looking for. If they want to start to kind of see what their own wallpaper is, start changing the wallpaper, you know, what do you recommend for people to be doing in business?
- [29:43]
Yeah, I've actually been thinking a lot about in business, about managers, supervisors, leaders, people who are even in informal roles of coaches and those kinds of things. And I think one of the things I've been thinking about is how your listeners might expand how they think about talent, how they define talent. So instead of traditionally we think about talent in terms of achievements, but I would suggest to your listeners to think about to define talent in terms of achievement relative to the adversity people have overcome. So in choosing candidates, if we choose them based on achievements relative to barriers or adversity overcome, we will end up identifying people who are resilient, who have sort of qualities, who have qualities like grit, who have qualities, like qualities that are often invisible in other ways, character compared to other candidates who might have achievement, but who haven't faced quite the same adversities. So I think talent is something that is a combination of achievement to barriers overcome. So that's one. The second way to think about talent is to evaluate talent not just based on the skills that somebody has, that experiences that somebody has acquired through informal internships and those kinds of things that are unpaid because those kinds of internships are often things that people who are affluent can acquire because they are supported by families. But for entry level people who are supporting themselves and supporting their families are not always able to have those kinds of internships. So I think look for skills and abilities that don't advantage people who have family resources. The third kind of thing is don't mistake outward markers of status for internal talent. So there's a bunch of research that shows confidence is often mistaken for talent, where actually confidence is just confidence. It may or may not indicate that somebody is really talented. Accent is often mistaken for talent. Degrees from elite institutions is often mistaken for talent. And these are just outward. It's judging a book by its covers. So use measures of actual talent that is based on work performance rather than being dazzled by the COVID of a book. So expand how talent is defined. And the second thing that I'll mention a few other things. There's a lot of research that some of your listeners, I'm sure, have heard of, that talks about talent being made, not born. So think about talent in terms of a growth mindset set, not an innate quality. So if talent is developed, then what it requires is a work environment where the soil is fertile. What does fertile soil require? It requires relationships where a workplace encourages collaborations, more collaboration, less competition, mutual support of people in that environment. A culture that encourages consistent practice, consistent, honest feedback. Rewards for improvement rather than reward for perfection. Communication, sensitivity to people's feelings and refuting stories of brilliance and instead amplifying stories of success that comes with struggle. So I think these kinds of qualities of the environment allow for somebody's potential to develop into full blown excellence instead of assuming that people will come with brilliance.
- [34:29]
Yeah. And that example there. And thank you so much for sharing all those tips and tricks and the. Of course, I'm tagging onto the storytelling piece because I love that aspect. But, you know, one of the things you share in the book is about how the same person, depending on how.
- [34:47]
Melina Palmer
You tell their story, can either be inspiring or intimidating. Right.
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Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
And so you had the example with Oprah Winfrey, and if you say how she was this superstar destined for greatness, there was something about her that helped her to push through, you kind of go, okay, well, good for her. But that doesn't help me.
- [35:05]
Melina Palmer
Right.
- [35:06]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
But when it's saying she, you know, challenged and had to go against these, you know, things that maybe were working against her, but she kept going, even though similar. You know, there are just all these stories of people who were rejected however many times before they got their acceptance because they persevered and believed and. And whatnot, that we feel inspired by that and think, why, if they can do it, I can do it.
- [35:30]
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up, Melina. I think that's really important. So that series of studies my student and I did like a decade or so ago, really showed that stories of brilliance, like that version of the Oprah Winfrey story where she is a superstar, not only does nothing for. So people admire that version of her Oprah story, but in some studies, we found that it actually deflated women. It made them feel that that version of Oprah was so different that they could never get there. But the version of Oprah that said she started off as a teenager in a really difficult family under difficult circumstances, had these small successes, had a breakthrough here, and so. And so helped her, and that's how she got to that final success was inspiring both because of a combination of the struggles, help from other people, small successes, some more struggles and a circuitous path that allowed people to see the stepping stones that made the present self to the future success seem more plausible. And it's those stepping stones that made the story inspiring. So a story of brilliance is not just nothing, it can actually be deflating for a listener.
- [36:58]
Oh yeah, such a great point. And I know that there are so.
- [37:02]
Melina Palmer
Many other amazing tips and insights for.
- [37:04]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
People personally, professionally and looking for ways to help change the portraits on the wall.
- [37:11]
Melina Palmer
Right.
- [37:12]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
For the people that you get to see that it doesn't feel incredibly homogenous that you are helping to not just say something in a diversity statement, but we have representation that you can actually, you know, you're walking the walk, not just talking the talk. One of, you know, my potentially poorly paraphrased version of what you very eloquently discuss in the book, but lots of really great tips for people that they will get to know as they pick.
- [37:36]
Melina Palmer
Up their copy of the book, which.
- [37:38]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
We'Ll have linked in the show notes for everyone. And so as people are now inspired to, you know, learn more, connect, follow you, all of that, you know, what's their best place to do so they.
- [37:50]
Can go to the website for, for my book, www.changethewallpaper.com. so on the book website, all of the usual places where people can get the book, there are on the author notes, there's places where or more details where they can learn more about the work. If some of the listeners are researchers and they want to read the original papers, they can find the original publications and other sort of more popular op EDS and things that I've written. If they want to sort of get thumbnail sketch of what's the bottom line.
- [38:34]
Oh, perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the show for the book, for your wonderful insight insights. It's been really delightful to chat with you today.
- [38:44]
Thank you, Melina. This was really fun.
- [38:48]
Melina Palmer
Thank you again to Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, one of the key things that drew me to this book was the simple frame of calling it the wallpaper and using the metaphor of changing the wallpaper to help make the point. We all have had the experience of living in a house for a long time or being in an office where you get so used to the wallpaper or paint that you don't even notice it anymore. And then one day you come in when it's been replaced or repainted, and everything feels different. Something stands out more. Maybe you feel more cheerful or want to replace other items to help match this fresh new facade. Changing the wallpaper can start a ripple effect that you can use to your advantage in interior design. And even if you didn't consciously realize the impact the wallpaper was having on your actions previously, it doesn't mean that it wasn't influencing you. This makes me think of the research with an honor box in a break room, One of those things where you can take a snack, or in this case, cream, sugar, and tea, and leave payment to be collected at the end of the month or week. So instead of like a vending machine where you have to put in the exact amount and then you get whatever the item is there in the moment. It's like a cardboard box and you can be leaving the the money inside and it just gets collected at the end of the week. So you can be grabbing things kind of as you go and be honorable in paying back. The researchers in this case swapped out an image above an honor box which had been there for years, and they were swapping out this image every week to see if it impacted how honorable people were in their repayment. And it alternated between I weeks and flower weeks. And some of the eyes were super intense staring at you while you made your selections. Now, even though I'm sure it seemed obvious to the researchers, no one commented on the image above the box, even as it changed every week. But it did impact their behavior. And people paid back three times as much on eye weeks. Feeling like someone is watching you versus flower weeks. So the question would be, what's the wallpaper in your life and work? It can be something as simple as the portraits of the board or past executives in the lobby. How might you change it if they're a bit too homogenous? And if there is a good mix, is it visible to all so people feel supported and that people like them belong there in high positions? Maybe there's something to do with the status and the physical layout of the office? Are the higher floors for higher titles and those lower on the office hierarchy are down in the basement? Do the best views and corner offices go to those with more status with a mundane, centralized experience? For everyone else, it may feel like this is the only option. This is sort of the norm. But you know, I actually worked at a company once where the offices were central. So if you get a door, you don't get windows. And all the other desks and cubicles were outward with a lot of natural light and windows. It helped everything to feel more balanced than a traditional corner office experience that you see in a lot of offices. And it had more of this kind of open door policy with people walking around. It's, you know, kind of cool in a natural way to have some simple wallpaper that has a very different experience for people. And these are just some simple examples, of course, but there's a lot that you can do. I hope the conversation with Nalanjana opened up your eyes to the opportunities that exist in your work, office, community and life to help Change the wallpaper. There are lots more ideas and examples for you in the book Change the Wallpaper, which is of course linked for.
- [42:35]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
You in the show notes so you.
- [42:36]
Melina Palmer
Can go get your own copy, along with links to my top related past episodes and other books, ways to get in touch with Nalanjana and myself, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and atthebrainybusiness.com 4 and thank you again to Dr. Nalanjana Dasgupta for joining me on the show today.
- [42:57]
Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta
It was a delight to chat with.
- [42:59]
Melina Palmer
And learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.
- [43:18]
Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.