Why You Hate Millennials (and I Hate Burnt Orange)

I am an Oklahoman. Though I have lived many different places, including time abroad, my birth certificate, attitudes, actions, and accent all confirm that I am an Okie. We Okies are, truth be told, unnecessarily prideful about our home state. My roots trace all the way back to the Land Runs of the late 19th Century and the majority of my family still live in Oklahoma. We tend to be competitive, tough as nails, humble, but with a bit of an inferiority complex. When Steinbeck writes one of the great American novels about the total devastation of your home state, it can impact your collective sense of self-worth. This tension between pride and humility that embodies most Okies was perfectly captured by Aunt Eller in Rogers and Hammerstein's musical Oklahoma! as she declares in song, "I ain't sayin' I'm no better than anybody else, but I'll be danged if I ain't just as good!"

Pride, Prejudice, and Football

The reason for this mixture of pride and anxiety over our place in the world stems from the hard-scrabble history that Steinbeck used as the backdrop for The Grapes of Wrath. The Oklahoma of the 1920's and 1930's was a hard place. The Dust Bowl and Great Depression took a heavy toll on the state. Into this disheartened situation stepped Dr. George Lynn Cross, President of the University of Oklahoma. He determined that the best way to collectively rouse the state from its depression and crisis of inferiority was to build a dominant college football program. And so, a young Minnesotan named Bud Wilkinson created the monster that is Oklahoma Sooner football. There is little doubt, historically, that Oklahoma football became one of if not the preeminent program of the late 1940's and 50's. Its success continued into the intervening decades and remains one of the most dominant and historically significant programs today. Understanding the symbolic power of the football team, Dr. Cross quipped after their first national title in 1950, "I would like to build a university of which the football team could be proud."

You may have gathered by now that, despite no degree from the University of Oklahoma, I am a rabid Sooner fan. I make no apologies for this, I was raised by Sooner fans to be a Sooner fan. Part of being a Sooner fan is learning to develop a fully-realized hate for certain other programs. If you are a Sooner, you have a begrudging respect for Nebraska. You mostly pity the poor saps who root for Oklahoma State. There is ill will towards the University of Notre Dame, they who ended the record-setting 47 game win streak. But true loathing is only reserved for one program: The University of Texas. I was raised to understand (with apologies to St. Luke) that "it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and cast into the sea, than he should" be affiliated with the tea-sippers of the University of Texas. We loathed their arrogance. We despised their privilege. We ridiculed their cow mascot. And most of all, we hated that awful burnt orange. No season's worth of joy can equal the pain of losing one game to the University of Texas.

Your Brain and "the Other"

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "how silly to feel so strongly about people whose only main difference from you is the color they choose to wear on Saturdays in the fall." Well, I have two responses for you. First, burn orange is hideous and those who wear it deserve our ridicule. As famed OU linebacker Brian Bosworth once said, "Burnt orange makes me puke." My second response, however, is that you are exactly right. It makes no logical sense to dislike another football team's fan-base. While you may not have a predisposition to dislike the University of Texas, though I assure you it's the right position to take, there may be other groups or individuals towards whom you harbor ill will. Your dislike for those groups may feel justified. Perhaps you or those you care about have been hurt - physically, emotionally, or financially - by an "other" group. Maybe you were simply brought up in an environment that instilled a mistrust of those who were not like you and those around you. This is not unusual. In fact, we are all wired to mistrust and attribute ill intent and unsavory characteristics to "others" - those who are not in our tribe. It is a limitation of our brains.

Our brains are phenomenal filters. Only a small fraction of the data that is bombarding you at any moment actually makes it into your consciousness. Be grateful for this. Otherwise you would be overwhelmed by all of the information coming your way through your various senses. You'd be rendered helpless by all the sights, sounds, smells, etc. Your brain quite simply does not possess the processing power necessary to make sense of it all. So instead, it cheats. Our brains create mental models; short-cuts and rules that help govern what information to pay attention to and what to do with unexpected and new information. These mental models allow us to save that precious cognitive processing energy for far more important tasks like playing Minecraft or Super Mario Run. Operating your brain requires a lot of energy, so you save it for the stuff that really matters.

There are a litany of cognitive biases that we all use for a variety of situations, and an entire family of such biases that focus solely on our mental models about people. In general, we tend to fill in the gaps of our missing information with positive stuff about people and groups we know a lot about already. By contrast, we tend to look negatively at groups of which we are less familiar or less fond. These biases have names such as the Inter-Group Bias (we view people in our group more favorably than someone in another group), the Group Attribution Error (everybody in groups other than mine think and act alike), the Just World Hypothesis (if something bad happens to your group, you probably deserved it), and even the Cheerleader Effect (people look better when in a group than when evaluated individually - an important cognitive bias I wish I'd been aware of when I was a single man.)

The Robber's Cave Experiment

A classic example of cognitive bias in action, and what to do about it, is the famed Robber's Cave State Park experiment (think back to your Psych 100 class in college.) Conducted by Dr. Muzafer Sherrif in 1954, the experiment tested his Realistic Conflict Theory which sought to understand the genesis of intergroup conflict, prejudices, and negative stereotypes. I've included a video summary of the experiment below, but the essential thrust of Dr. Sherrif's theory is that intergroup conflict occurs when two groups are in competition for limited resources.

Dr. Sherrif took a group of 12 year-old boys and separated them into two groups at a Boy Scout Camp in the green hills of Oklahoma. The experiment was conducted in three phases. In Phase I, the groups were kept seperate. During this phase the groups developed social norms and customs (one group had a bit of a potty mouth - but then, these were 12 year-old boys.) Phase II introduced the groups to each other through competition. The groups engaged in games in which the winner was given valuable prizes and the loser received nothing. The level of animosity between the groups surprised the researchers as boys argued, fought, and destroyed one another's property. The final phase focused on cooperation, as challenges were engineered (such as the "breakdown" of a supply truck) that required the boys to work together for their common benefit. During this phase the level of animosity dropped considerably as the boys worked together to achieve common goals.

Robber's Cave and Inter-generational Conflict

While I titled this article "Why you Hate Millennials" I readily admit that hate is a pretty strong term. You probably don't hate an entire age group. However, you may have a bias or tendency to view Millennials (or whatever generation to which you don't belong) in a stereotypically negative way. In the same way that Baby Boomers stereotype Millennials, you can be sure that Millennials are returning the favor. (And, as a Gen Xer, le tme just say that we don't like either of the other generations. You Boomers were so busy building your careers when we were kids, then you suddenly woke up and lavished attention on those Millennial punks. They got trophies and private voice lessons. We got left on our own to eat frozen pizza and watch worn out VHS tapes of Goonies. See, stereotypes abound!)

These stereotypic points-of-view, and their root cause, are mirrored by the Robber's Cave experiment. While we may be tempted to view preceding or following generations as fundamentally different from our own, the truth is they're made up of people far more alike than different from us. In fact, Birkman International's research suggests no significant personality differences across generations. Just as the Robber's Cave groups attributed significant attributes to one another, in the end they were all just 12 year-old boys.

What did occur at Robber's Cave and does occur generally, however, is a significant period of initial separation that lends to the creation of unique social norms. You grow up with the rest of your generation, and as a generation you determine what you deem important and what values will guide your collective actions. The Robber's Cave groups gave themselves names (The Eagles and the Rattlers) and established social conventions. Generationally, we establish norms of language, social interaction, and value systems. This is all fine and dandy until you have to start mixing it up with another group.

Recall in the Robber's Cave experiment that conflict between groups did not just come about because of interaction with another group, but because of interaction based in competition for limited resources. The workplace is an environment in which power matters and is not evenly-divided. There are winners and losers. Earlier generations hold the majority of that power - they set the rules by which the workplace game is played. Later generations not only want the power the generations hold, they likely resent the organizational rules that do not fit with their generational context. In other words, the workplace is a perfect environment in which to create the Robber's Cave experiment every day. In my world of healthcare, there's a well-understood experience of nurses "eating their young," a phenomenon recently linked to inter-generational differences by Anderson and Morgan. Perhaps we aren't as different from those 12 year-olds, after all.

Fortunately, a key approach to alleviating inter-group tension is also presented in the Robber's Cave experiments - aligning on common objectives. When the Robber's Cave boys were given work that was for their mutual benefit the animosity was alleviated. While you may not be require to rescue a broken-down supply truck with your millennial compatriots, though that would be awesome, there is work to which you can mutually align. Writing for Forbes, Ron Carucci noted several items that Millennial leaders need to perform at their best. Three correlate well with this idea of aligning around common objectives: Give each other a voice at the table, Make learning mutual, and Be grateful for one another. Finding ways to figure out how to achieve together releases inter-group tension by allowing you to change your mental model; moving the generations with which you work from the "other" category to part of your tribe. Just don't let them wear burnt orange.