Cognitive scientists have figured out why your selfish coworkers are all friends with each other

Welcome to Fast Company Daily, our daily newsletter on LinkedIn, featuring a free article selected each day by our editors as well as a roundup of great advice on careers, hiring, innovation, and technology.

Visit fastcompany.com for our top stories and breaking news.?

FAST COMPANY PREMIUM: Inside the move to help parents flee the ‘woke ideology’ of public schools

At the Wake Up to Woke Education conference in Florida, speakers—from conservative activists to homeschool teachers—preached about “wokeness” and a “gender identity cult” infiltrating public schools.

The keynote warned of a “battle” of who gets to teach the next generation of American children. Read the full premium article.

Don’t miss these top stories:

• A new generation of Silicon Valley designers is racing to build AI’s next big thing.
• There’s a simple way to improve your decision-making, according to a cognitive scientist.
• What would it look like if President Biden declared a national emergency for climate change?

Cognitive scientists have figured out why your selfish coworkers are all friends with each other

By Clint Rainey

If teamwork makes the dream work, why does every workplace seem to have a clique of selfish coworkers who always collaborate on everything?

According to?new research, the answer could be that they cooperate even if it’s to their detriment, because our own behavior is the main driver for what we expect others to do. It’s the argument made in?a?Cognitive Science?paper?published Monday by psychologists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, which found people who are selfish by nature tend to punish generosity and reward selfishness even when it costs them personally.

Social scientists have often held that social mores are what guide a person’s decision-making in zero-sum competitive scenarios. “The prevailing view before this study was that individuals form expectations based on what they view as typical,” lead author Paul Bogdan said. “If everyone around me is selfish, then I’m going to learn to accept selfishness and behave accordingly. But we show that your judgments of other people’s behavior really depend on how you behave yourself.”

To judge others’ actions as generous or selfish, they write that humans enlist a set of subjective expectations—standards often believed to be based on social norms. Behavior that deviates from the norm can elicit negative feedback (what they call “punishment”), but the researchers posed an alternative hypothesis: What if expectations were based on the individual’s own tendencies to behave generously or selfishly?

To explore how we set expectations and decide to respond, the team ran a series of tests involving the Ultimatum Game—a classic experiment where two players are told they’ll be sharing a pot of money. It helps evaluate the economic, social, and psychological problem of dividing resources among people, with one common application being to explore how fairness and inequality affect teamwork. In the experiment, the first player, the Proposer, decides how the pot will be split: even steven, or unfairly so it benefits just one player. The catch is that if the second player, the Responder, rejects the offer, both leave empty-handed.

Normally, Responders will pocket more money when their Proposer is generous. But the researchers discovered that selfish people don’t necessarily care; they sort of just like playing the Ultimatum Game with other selfish people, including when that means leaving money on the table. “People really like others who are similar to themselves—to a shocking degree,” Bodgan explained.

They repeated the experiments, and found that some individuals eventually started punishing generosity and rewarding selfishness—but only after their own behavior had changed, reinforcing it was their own tendencies driving expectations, not social norms. “You may have groups of selfish people who are more accepting of other selfish people,” noted one of the other authors, Florin Dolcos, adding that “In order to be part of that group, newcomers might display the same behavior.”

The team concludes a person’s underlying nature likely influences their behavior across other areas of life, too. “It has practical relevance to many types of social interactions and social evaluations,” said Dolcos.

Follow us on?LinkedIn,?Twitter,?Instagram,?Facebook,?TikTok, and?Medium.