How Soccer Stops Religious Hate (And The Psychology of Depressurization)
Dream Teams Chapter 4
Diverse teams naturally have conflict. Those differences in our thinking that lead to breakthroughs are the same differences that can lead to fear or hate. In this chapter of Dream Teams, I explore the brain-science of how “play” depressurizes the conflict that comes from our differences and creates psychological safety—even in extreme circumstances. I also talk to a scientist about “rat tickling.”
If you missed the previous chapters, read them here:
P.S. Though my latest work revolves around adaptation and managing change, I still frequently keynote about Dream Teams at conferences and leadership offsites. If you know a group that could use this message, learn more here.
Chapter Four: The Magic Circle
1.
The mood in Buenos Aires at the turn of the twentieth century—for its immigrant residents, at least—was tense.
Nestled along the beautiful Rio de la Plata on the southeast coast of South America, the capital of Argentina grew from two hundred thousand people to 1.5 million between 1870 and 1910. Most of these newcomers were not Argentinian babies. They were Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Russians, and natives of a hundred other places.
When it became an independent nation in the mid-1800s, Argentina had the same landmass as Europe, but one-fifth the population of London. The government wanted immigrants. Immigrants to develop the land, immigrants to build the economy and pay taxes. So in the late 1800s officials distributed 130,000 free tickets for Europeans to cross the Atlantic and settle. Those who sailed sent back word about how great Argentina was. And the ships kept coming.
Buenos Aires ballooned into a thriving, dirty metropolis. Like other immigrant-heavy cities such as New York and São Paulo, each wave of newcomers added to the urban friction. Immigrants proudly spoke their native languages in defiance of the local Spanish. Skirmishes between various ethnic groups erupted. And with each new group in each new place came the fear that an old group’s way of life would crumble.
Such was the case in Buenos Aires when the first Jewish families arrived.
The Argentines weren’t thrilled about non-Christians moving in. They didn’t understand how Jewish people did things or why. And the government didn’t like the idea of Jewish people owning land. Jewish families had left homes and livelihoods in Eastern Europe in the hope of a better future. Inevitably, however, they found themselves pushed into the less-desirable parts of Buenos Aires. By 1910, there were sixty-eight thousand Jewish people living in the city.
You can sense the locals’ fear in the newspaper headlines of the day. “Are We Becoming A Semitic Republic?” asked an article in 1898 in the Buenos Aires Herald. “The immigration of Russian Jews is now the third largest in the list, while Syrian Arabs (Turks) and Arabians are also flocking to these shores.”
Jewish people were effectively barred from good neighborhoods and civic participation. They were victims of hate speech and, occasionally, violence.
Many locals heightened the tension by championing the myth of the “true Argentino”: el gaucho. Gauchos were portrayed as macho, patriotic, horse-riding cowboys who stood for everything you had to be to fit in in Argentina. The gaucho was a South American Marlboro Man—born and bred on the pampas. You weren’t a real Argentino, people said, if you didn’t have a little gaucho in you.
No strangers to persecution, Argentinian Jews faced a wrenching choice: either lose their identity and conform to this culture, or lose their shot at a persecution-free life. The gaucho thing just didn’t work for most of them. Will we get driven out of here, too? they wondered.
So far in Dream Teams, we’ve seen that extraordinary collaborations are powered by differences, and that breakthrough progress is the product of cognitive friction. But as we talked about in the last chapter, groups often fail to reach their potential because friction tends to make people nervous. In this chapter, I want to dig into how we can reduce the fear that prevents us from getting together and doing the work we are meant to do. How do we move high-potential, but overly tense relationships back into The Zone, where magic can happen?
The Wright brothers’ debate-and-switch tactic was a great way for the two of them to keep their conflict constructive. Changing sides of their arguments prevented things from getting so personal that they might destroy each other. But this technique doesn’t really apply in a situation like, say, trying to make 1920s Buenos Aires a good place to live for fearful locals and struggling immigrants. And having grown up in some of the roughest neighborhoods of New York City, the members of the Wu-Tang Clan were pretty good at facing down conflict, and thus were willing to come to RZA’s battles to make records together. But the Jewish and Arab immigrants of Buenos Aires were not exactly lining up to have stirring debates about community projects with the gauchos. And so, what happened in their city is what happened in most immigrant cities: people became more or less segregated into parts of the city where they could have minimal interaction with people not like them.
Operating a city—or any size community for that matter—takes a lot of teamwork. Economies grow when people interact. Streets stay safe and clean when everybody pitches in. Ensuring people have resources, protection, and stability isn’t just the mayor’s job.
This kind of social cooperation is the reason humans developed collaborative abilities in the first place. If you remember, we mentioned earlier that our brain’s ability to interpret body language and facial expressions, and even language itself, are all part of an evolutionary tool kit that made homo sapiens the dominant species on the planet. Thus puny, cooperative humans hunted woolly mammoths and giant armadillos to extinction. We figured out how to defend ourselves from predators, even kill them off.
And in a world without saber-toothed tigers, humans’ biggest threat soon became other groups of humans.
At that point, ironically, the same survival instinct that pushed us to work together also pushed us to be jerks to people who weren’t like us. Whereas we could generally trust our own tribespeople not to murder us in our sleep for a woolly mammoth steak, we came to count on neighboring tribes to want to do just that. Our brains developed a predisposition to view people who don’t look or talk or act like us as potential threats.
Scientists call this in-group psychology. To speed up how fast we react to potential threats, a healthy human brain automatically tends to put people into one of two categories: the “safe” in-group (our tribe, or people with familiar attributes who we’re naturally inclined to help and trust) and the “suspicious” out-group—every other human being on the planet.
Neuroscientists have discovered that our brains actually are hardwired for this. The culprits are called the amygdalae. They’re a pair of oval-shaped lumps in the very middle of our brains, responsible for helping us identify threats, and then firing up a series of automatic responses to get our bodies ready to fight or flee when danger comes.
Here’s how it works: Say you’re walking down the street, and a minivan swerves from its lane toward you. Your brain interprets this new, loud, fast-approaching object as a threat. So your amygdalae go on alert. They trigger a waterfall of chemical responses. Your brain creates a molecule called glutamate that makes you freeze—or flinch—and pay attention. It then signals a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus tells your glands to start pumping out adrenaline. This raises your heart rate and blood pressure, which gets you ready to either run or fight. (If you’re smart, you don’t fight in this particular case.)
Your brain is an amazing organ. In an instant you’re ready to handle the threat.
This automatic fear response pays off in situations involving warring prehistoric tribes and out-of-control minivans. But it backfires when it comes to dealing with people in the modern world. Our amygdalae start the same chain reaction when we encounter people who don’t look, speak, or act like we do, even if we’re not in conflict.
The neurochemical sequence that goes off when we encounter something or someone foreign to us is hard to control. It creates tension with people who are different before we even have the chance to start working together. Left unchecked, our natural reaction to an out-group neighbor who moves to town is an impulse to avoid or to destroy.
The science is clear: if our amygdalae are normal, then we all have this “deep-rooted fear toward strangers or the unfamiliar.” The Greek word for it is—get ready—“xenophobia.”
This got us pretty far because it was useful when the world was big enough for us to actually stay away from each other. But that was before we knew that a bad Starbucks is better than a good cave. The dawn of agriculture foretold that humans were going to be living at very close quarters.
At that point, the amygdalae and the in-group psychology that once helped us to survive stopped being as helpful. Not only are we now surrounded by our out-groups, but more than ever we need them and the cognitive diversity they bring in order to make progress.
Back in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires, citizens began to panic when all the strange new people started flooding in.
On the one hand, the locals could ignore Jewish immigrants, relegating them to their own neighborhoods and leaving them out of civic matters. But what would happen if too many of them showed up? What if Jewish people decided they wanted the intendente’s office and a town house in the Recoleta? That was a war waiting to happen.
Another option, the locals’ amygdalae surely suggested, was to oppress these immigrants. They could beat them down, deny them opportunities, maybe even kill them, as Adolf Hitler’s regime would do not many years later in Europe.
The best choice, of course, would be to figure out how to trust each other. This would require doing one of two things. They could override the natural amygdalae process through sheer willpower—a difficult feat. Or they could figure out how to get all these foreign neighbors to become part of their in-group.
Of course in 1910 nobody was thinking about things in those terms.
In the history of the world only one nation—the United States—has taken in more immigrants than Argentina. In many ways the Gangs of New York–era tensions between immigrant groups in Manhattan were mirrored in Buenos Aires. The backlash against Jewish newcomers threatened the city’s stability—at first.
But then something wonderful happened. While Jewish people were persecuted and murdered in Europe, and relegated to segregated neighborhoods in New York, anti-Semitism in Buenos Aires plummeted. Buenos Aires became the place—outside of modern-day Israel—where Jewish people were most thoroughly accepted. Urban Argentina became renowned for its cosmopolitan culture. The Porteños’ fear of immigrants in general and their incidence of hate crime—targeting people for being different—dropped to among the lowest in the world. Argentines developed an identity that included immigrants on the team.
How did this happen? To find out, we’re going to look at three stories about computer geeks.
2.
Our first group of computer geeks hailed from Massachusetts.
It was 1999. As dust settled on the DaimlerChrysler merger, Carol Vallone, CEO of Universal Learning Technologies, was planning a buyout of her own.
ULT was well funded and growing fast. Its squad of computer programmers made tools for teachers to manage classes online. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Canada, a professor at University of British Columbia had been working on an online education company called WebCT. In two years, WebCT, a nonprofit, had signed up almost 3 million students.
It was the classic nonprofit-meets-for-profit romance. WebCT had connections and customers and loved walks in the rain. ULT had business and technology chops but was allergic to cats. Would they merge? Wouldn’t they?
In the end Vallone got down on one knee. ULT bought out WebCT, and together they rode off into the digital sunset.
But honeymoons don’t last forever. Vallone soon noticed how oppositional the cultures of her two offices were. One was a nonprofit on Canada’s west coast, the other a for-profit on America’s east. They had dramatically different points of view.
ULT’s employees were ambitious and creative, almost to the point of impatience. They weren’t thrilled when Vallone announced that they would take WebCT’s name and adopt WebCT’s platform.
WebCT’s employees, on the other hand, were academic and cautious. “They felt like the Blue Suits were coming to Vancouver to take over the company,” Vallone recalls. The conflict was obvious and immediate.
Organizational silence began to set in. The biggest fear on the Canadian side, Vallone recalled, was that WebCT would now be focused on enriching its investors instead of building the industry. And the Americans feared that the Canadians’ university and nonprofit ethos would resist speed and innovation. Vallone worried whether the newlywed companies could really blend cultures. They were skeptical of each other. “How do we build trust?” Vallone asked.
The ULT-WebCT merger had all the potential for progress that diverse perspectives and heuristics bring. And it had all the potential for failure. “You’re under attack,” warned the employees’ subconscious brains. “Time to run or fight!” Fear threatened to sink the whole enterprise.
3.
Computer geek story number two starts with a stereotype:
“Nothing’s scarier,” said A. J. Harbinger, “than going up and talking to a beautiful woman.”
I had once walked in on a full-grown bear eating all my food on a camping trip, so I begged to differ. But I kept that to myself.
We were in Los Angeles, at Harbinger’s two-and-a-half-story man-pad. Here his company, Art of Charm, hosted a weeklong “confidence boot camp” for single men with social anxiety. I was working on a magazine story about it.
Harbinger’s statement made me cringe at first. But then I considered his audience: eight terrified, nerdy straight guys sitting on couches. One had a condition where his voice would squeak when he got nervous around people, which was always. Another was a shy Filipino immigrant who was petrified to talk to American women but really wanted to get married one day. Another was a computer programmer from Colorado who hadn’t mustered the courage to ask someone on a date in years. Et cetera. Each man had his own slightly different story but was ultimately there because coed socialization scared him.
The first thing Harbinger did was bring in—get this—an actual woman! Her name was Suzanne. The assignment was to take turns bantering with her in front of the group while Harbinger recorded it. To show how “simple” the task really was, they asked the magazine reporter to give it a shot before the nerds gave it a try. Talking to strangers is my job, but in front of a confidence coach with a Flip camera, I felt suddenly intimidated. The geeks looked on in openmouthed wonder. My amygdalae started going nuts.
Each day the boot camp served up some version of this exercise. Monday it was Suzanne. Tuesday it was giving high fives to random strangers at a bar. Wednesday and Thursday it was playing silly games with a local improvisational comedy troupe.
They made the nerds pretend to be characters and act out skits with them—an ax murderer applying for a job, bodybuilders expressing effusive gratitude to each other, couples breaking up over ridiculous things, and so on. They formed circles and made up stories together where each person contributed one word at a time. They took turns rolling on the floor in laughter.
Harbinger called this “exposure therapy.” The way to overcome the fear of a social situation, he said, was to put yourself in more of those situations. Afraid of strangers? Force yourself to meet some. Afraid of women? Force yourself to spend time with some.
Despite the apparent absurdity of some of the exercises, Harbinger cited a scientific rationale for this “therapy.”
It’s known as mere exposure effect, and it’s based on classic research by social psychologist Robert Zajonc and illustrated well by the following newspaper report in 1967:
A mysterious student has been attending a class at Oregon State University for the past two months enveloped in a big black bag. Only his bare feet show. Each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11:00 a.m. the Black Bag sits on a small table near the back of the classroom. The class is Speech 113—basic persuasion. . . . Charles Goetzinger, professor of the class, knows the identity of the person inside. None of the 20 students in the class do. Goetzinger said the students’ attitude changed from hostility toward the Black Bag to curiosity and finally to friendship.
At first, the students in this college class were not especially nice to the strange, mute person in the black bag. But merely being exposed to it over and over led students to stop being afraid of it—even to like it! Zajonc used this and other studies to show how humans become less scared of things the more they encounter them.
At Art of Charm, repeatedly interacting with Suzanne and other strangers was like Harbinger’s man-in-the-bag. Most of the guys had spent their lives avoiding interaction with unfamiliar people. Getting them to interact with strangers over and over was not only good practice but also psychological fear-busting.
By week’s end I saw a dramatic difference in our little AV club. The geeks were walking up to strangers in bars, asking them to dance, striking up conversations on Hollywood Boulevard.
I was impressed. Harbinger’s therapy was working!
It would be easy for us to conclude from Harbinger’s geeks and the mere exposure theory that Buenos Aires got more tolerant toward Jewish people simply because they lived there. But that doesn’t quite explain what happened. Otherwise we would expect to see the same phenomenon in other immigrant-heavy cities like São Paulo and New York during the early 1900s. Each of these cities indeed had a reduction in xenophobia—as measured by surveys of its citizens’ fear of immigrants taking control or committing crimes—over time. But nowhere was as pronounced as Buenos Aires, nor as quickly.
Mere exposure effect happens a lot quicker with college students and mysterious black bags than it does with groups of people with long-standing fear of each other’s religions. It wasn’t enough to erase the deep-rooted anxieties in Buenos Aires in such a short amount of time. Mere exposure wouldn’t be enough to make the folks at WebCT a team before nervous employees would decide to quit. And just being around unfamiliar women wasn’t enough to explain how quickly Harbinger’s Art of Charm alums overcame their fear of talking to them.
It turns out that Harbinger, the city of Buenos Aires, and soon Vallone would tap into something even more powerful.
4.
In 2005, a motley group came together to work on a big project. There were over twenty of them, and each was an equal member of the work group—our third coalition of computer geeks.
They hailed from everywhere: Asia, Australia, Europe, and all corners of the United States from Tennessee to California. One member was a traveling salesman. Another was a university lecturer. One was a city bus driver. Another, a commercial airline pilot. There was a Chinese graduate student, an Indian researcher, a Caucasian real-estate agent. There was a grandfather, a young girl and her little brother, a bartender, a firefighter, a computer programmer, an architect, an engineer, a waiter, some high school students, a health spa worker, a veterinarian, and the stay-at-home wife of a soldier who was fighting in Iraq.
What task could bring such a team together? And where on earth would they convene?
It was actually not earth. They met in Azeroth, the fantasy realm dear to the hearts of all who play the online video game World of Warcraft.
The twenty-some-odd collaborators formed a “guild” of gamers—a ragtag team that took on missions in the game together. They knew each other only by their voices. They had only vague notions of their very different lifestyles and locations and levels of income. Some might have even avoided one another on the street, if they hadn’t known better.
But they were here to play. And besides, Serpentshrine Cavern wasn’t going to free itself from the reign of the evil Hydross the Unstable.
I don’t want to get into too many details. Simply put, MØndr@ke and Cylonluvr figured out that a warlock can basically kite the Lurker Below by throwing instant-speed dots and then just running up and down the stairs. But AngelNavio got jumpy and aggroed the coilfang frenzy way too soon, and the guild all thought they were cooked—until DocSnopes and Flutterbye cleared the last platform pack, and then it was the coilfangs who got cooked. So after that, they were basically just farming coilfang mobs. Morogrim Tidewalker was a grind, but he dropped the Luminescent Rod of the Naaru, and Hydross was cake after that. But then Jennikka9 said her mom was making her log out or she was grounded, so after that the raid was pretty much over.
Over 100 million players around the globe have been citizens of Azeroth at one time or another. You might call it the world’s fourteenth-largest country—beating Germany, the UK, and Egypt. Yet its players come from all those places and more. Contrary to the stereotype, World of Warcraft gamers are not basement-dwelling shut-ins with bad hygiene. They’re doctors and bartenders and Delta pilots and—everyone.
Anthropologist Bonnie Nardi, a professor at University of California, Irvine, took part in the raid on Serpentshrine Cavern. She was conducting an ethnographic study of the culture of online games and had joined a guild to get an inside peek at the phenomenon of collaboration that happens inside the game.
“One of the most striking things about World of Warcraft was the way it brought together social classes,” Nardi observed in her book My Life as a Night Elf Priest. Nardi had spent her career conducting research on cultures around the world, and she’d come to expect general patterns of human behavior relating to in-groups fearing out-groups. In her travels, she’d personally confirmed psychologists’ observations that humans’ default mode was to collaborate with similar people and avoid or suspect different people. “When I was walking around villages in Papua New Guinea or Western Samoa,” she said, for example, “I was obviously an outsider whose identity required explanation.”
But Warcraft was different. In the game, there was neither fear nor judgment for who she was. “In Warcraft,” she said, “I was just another player.”
World of Warcraft was a community where nobody needed to be afraid of who they were dealing with. It was a “magic circle,” where players experienced, as Dutch historian Johan Huizinga put it, “a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity,” which takes the pressure of everyday anxieties away.
First published in 1938, Huizinga’s oft-cited Homo Ludens broke ground in explaining what happens to our brains when we play—whether it’s Warcraft or another game, or it’s simply joking around. Play, according to Huizinga and later behavior scientists, is an absorbing experience where we escape from our regular social or physical obligations and experience pleasure. It becomes a refuge from real-world problems, danger, and fear.
And in recent years, neuroscientists have demonstrated that play and laughter can actually change our brains to be less fearful. How?
By tickling rats, of course.
In my entire life I never dreamed I’d hear the words “rat” and “tickle” in the same sentence. But there I was, on the phone with Jeffrey Burgdorf of Northwestern University. Burgdorf was the world’s foremost expert on rat tickling. He and his fellow researchers conducted experiments wherein they tickled rats to make them laugh.
My first question for Burgdorf was probably yours, too. “Why?”
Because these weren’t just any old rats, Burgdorf explained.
“These rats are depressed.”
Of course.
Depression, in the technical sense, is when one psychologically “gives up,” Burgdorf explained. When you’re depressed, you have a hard time engaging with the world—getting out of bed, working up the will to try. You can’t see “the open door” to a potentially better future in front of you, and you shut down in a sort of fear-like apathy.
But getting rats to laugh, Burgdorf discovered, releases a chemical in the brain that “produces a rapid and robust antidepressant response.” Laughing and playing can help to temporarily revitalize a rat who has stopped trying. In doing so, the rat becomes less paralyzed by the fear of the empty future its brain foresees. And after doing this a lot, it turns out, the neuroplasticity of the brain forms new pathways that helps the rat move forward.
Let me be clear: chronic depression is an insidious affliction. Millions of humans struggle with it every day, and laughter alone won’t alleviate it for more than a moment. But Burgdorf’s research is fascinating because it indicates how playing can physically help the brain to get braver. In other words, it hints at the brain science behind Huizinga’s findings about how laughter and play can help our brains to “end a tension.”
Do you see where we’re going here?
When our brain perceives something scary, it goes on alert. The amygdalae fire up. This could be a dangerous object like that runaway minivan we talked about, or it could be the presence of a person who’s different than us.
But when that violation turns out to be benign, the sudden realization has a cathartic effect. And so we breathe a sigh of relief, we laugh, and we go on.
Happening suddenly upon a bear, for instance, is scary. (I learned the hard way.) But finding out that it isn’t a bear—it’s just your friend Brian with his shirt off: that’s a benign violation, and it makes you laugh. The amygdalae stand down; the hypothalamus holds off on the adrenaline. Everything’s going to be okay.
This is exactly what playing does to us. As play theorist Dr. Brian Sutton-Smith says, “What we have in play is a simulation of an anxiety attack.” Our amygdalae may start to get us riled up and alert, “but adrenaline is not being pumped into the system,” Sutton-Smith says. “The frontal lobes win out over the reflexive phenomena in the back of the brain.”
Play allows us, in other words, to become less afraid of things that might otherwise make us anxious. And that includes people from our out-group.
A New York University professor named Jay Van Bavel demonstrated this effect in a study wherein he showed photos of black people’s faces and photos of white people’s faces to a group of test subjects. Van Bavel scanned the test subjects’ brains as they looked at the different faces. Predictably, the white test subjects’ amygdalae were more active when they saw black people’s faces—and vice versa. Neuroscience commonly finds this phenomenon with anyone who encounters someone of another race.
But then something interesting happened.
The test subjects were told they would be playing a game with the very people they were seeing in the photos.
When test subjects looked at the faces of fellow players, their amygdalae were more calm, regardless of what they looked like.
This happens in nature all the time, it turns out. Scientists have found that lemurs will play with lemurs from other kinship groups to get over xenophobia. Gorillas will play “tag” like human children to depressurize tense situations.
And that’s what the millions of people who play World of Warcraft do.
A surprisingly large contingent of real-life military personnel play World of Warcraft, Nardi reports. And not because soldiers love war games. They play, she said, to cope with the tension of actual war. “The game is escape,” remarked a US Army soldier during one of Nardi’s Azerothian campaigns. He said it helped to settle his fear.
Escape from outside tension isn’t the only benefit of play. A 2008 study published in Harvard Business Review confirmed what we’ve just discovered. It found that playing online games like Warcraft helps people become better collaborators across social divides. And not only that. The game also “gradually makes them less averse to group conflict.”
Playing, it turns out, makes us less afraid of cognitive friction.
Harbinger and his coaches at Art of Charm thought they were helping their students overcome social fears through mere exposure. But the most powerful element of the program was play. The role-play in front of the camera with Suzanne was frightening, yes, but it was essentially a game. That made it easier to do. Gathering high fives at the bar? That was a game, too. And the improv comedy was nonstop.
Recast as play, threatening social interactions became social practice. Like baby lions practicing how to hunt by play-wrestling with each other. Playing helped depressurize situations that, for the students, were normally too scary to engage with. It helped them become comfortable with the inherent tension of social interactions that once drove them to shyness.
Just like it would help Carol Vallone’s newlywed company stave off organizational silence.
5.
An old proverb says, “You can learn more about someone in an hour of play than in a year of talk.”
Carol Vallone didn’t have a year to spare. Her rival camps of programmers and educators were already digging trenches, preparing for segregation or war. She knew she had to do something.
So, at the new company’s first conference in Vancouver, she strode onto the stage for her speech wearing pancake makeup, a feather boa, six-inch stilettos, and a two-tone bouffant.
She addressed her new company and its users as Cruella de Vil, the Disney villain, and facetiously announced that she was coming to ruin the old company. It was a hilarious acknowledgment of the worry on everyone’s mind. “That,” she said, “broke the ice.”
Broke the ice. Broke the silence. With this little role-play, Vallone rendered a tense situation more benign. Her spoof made it easier for her employees to talk openly about what they’d been saying under their breath.
And Cruella de Vil was just the debut. Vallone set about creating a workplace permeated with play. She cross-relocated employees from one office to the other and restructured the company into rotating, cross-functional teams that not only had to work on projects together (and make use of the cognitive diversity that she “cast” on each team!), but also were to play together in a never-ending series of team games and competitions.
Teams competed to come up with funny internal code names for new products and features the company built. They made Olympic-style bids on what the theme of the each company party would be. They prank-decorated the offices of employees who were out sick. They performed at all their conferences in costumed skits. They nominated each other for funny awards; when someone was caught doing an excellent job at something, her coworkers would tape a silly certificate to a barrel of pretzels and give a speech.
Some of the fun was more practical, but fun nonetheless. “There was a running competition that if your team could show that you could do something in a more cost-effective and collegial way, then you could have at it,” Vallone said. One team figured out that instead of renting a block of hotel rooms for a company trip, they could rent a mansion for cheaper. So they did.
The new WebCT was a haven for jokes and costumes, fun rituals and made-up holidays. Contrast this with the scared silence of DaimlerChrysler’s newly merged cultures. Playing created a “magic circle” where WebCT employees could fearlessly address the various elephants in their rooms. Play helped them feel like they were in the same in-group.
“It was part of the fabric of the organization,” Vallone said. “It defuses angst. It defuses fear. It defuses worry.”
When we step inside the magic circle of play, we leave real-world tension behind. And play, it turns out, doesn’t just temporarily alleviate fear. Over time, it helps groups conquer it. As Pisa Group researchers Daniela Antonacci, Ivan Norscia, and Elisabetta Palagi point out, play “leads to the direct inhibition and regulation of aggression, thus improving social integration.”
When we step out of the magic circle and return to real life, the players we’ve played with tend to stay in the “safe” category to our amygdalae. When we head to the locker room or log off the video game or wind up the improv session, we do so as members of the same “in-group.”
Which is exactly what happened in Buenos Aires when the Jewish immigrants started playing soccer.
6.
During its first few decades in Argentina, futbol was a sport for the elite. Wealthy landowners played on manicured private football pitches.
But they weren’t playing futbol in the barrio—not at first, anyway.
By 1920 the city’s population was pushing 2 million. Half of all Porteños were born in other countries. Half of the rest were the children of immigrants.
The Western Europeans soon formed a distinct bloc—Italians, Germans, French, Spaniards, Britons, and even Scandinavians. These—sufficiently similar in appearance and religion—became an ambitious political minority. Argentina’s ruling class worried about the country’s national identity. What was an argentino anymore? As Buenos Aires grew, it was getting harder to answer that question with “gaucho.”
Around this time, futbol made its way from the estate to the street. It was fast becoming the favorite sport of the working class. Kids started playing it on pavement. Futbol clubs popped up. Immigrants and nonimmigrants found themselves on the same street, or cancha together. Their love for the Beautiful Game united them.
“Soccer introduced a national identity that was represented by the working class,” writes David Goldblatt in The Ball Is Round, an epic nine-hundred-page history of the sport. “The Argentine football player and the Argentine football style became central icons of new notions of masculinity and the nation.”
The celebrated gaucho gave way to the celebrated “pibe”: the streetwise kid from the barrio; the one who gets by on sheer cunning and will. The pibe wasn’t roping cattle from horseback. He was hooking a football. This was the new Argentine Dream: the rags-to-riches football god.
Jewish gauchos were comparatively few, but what about Jewish pibes? Around the turn of the century, the roughly 120,000 Europeans of Jewish descent living in Buenos Aires were generally considered outsiders. They dressed and spoke and worshipped differently from other immigrant communities. They lived primarily in their own barrios, and they were seldom thought of as Argentinian.
But as futbol’s popularity grew, Jewish children started playing it—among each other and with others from their out-group. And they didn’t stop playing it as they grew up. By the 1920s futbol had become pastime número uno for Jewish Argentines. The cancha was common ground. Now there was something safe for everyone to make small talk about. Local newspapers were already portraying futbol as the new symbol of porteñidad—porteño-ness. Thus the Jewish footballer became porteño.
Tel Aviv University professor Raanan Rein explains that belonging to a futbol club was a way for Jewish people to “become” Argentinian. Futbol, Dr. Rein writes, was “a means of creating a new social identity.”
Jewish Argentines didn’t abandon their faith, of course. But in adopting Argentina’s unofficial religion—and in joining with others to worship the almighty gol—Jewish Argentines made differences of faith and custom seem less scary. Public perception of Jewishness gradually became less hysterical.
Jewish Argentines were part of the in-group.
Barnard College historian José Moya writes that “Jewish residential segregation in Buenos Aires [ . . . ]dropped faster and sharper than in most other cities.” Within a few years Jewish Argentines no longer needed to live shoulder to shoulder in order to feel safe. They soon dispersed into virtually every neighborhood in the city.
Were the Porteños really so exceptional? After all, Buenos Aires was hardly the only city in the Western Hemisphere to embrace futbol. The sport swept Latin America: São Paulo, Santiago, Mexico City—New World boomtowns with huge immigrant populations. While futbol helped depressurize tension between cultural groups in those cities as well, historians agree that the effect was more pronounced in Buenos Aires. Porteños simply became less fearful more quickly.
So why the difference?
Granted, the factors that drive social change are varied and complex. But in Buenos Aires, one factor is beyond dispute: participation in futbol was higher there than in any other city. Buenos Aires boasts the highest concentration of futbol clubs, and more people play per capita than anywhere in the world.
“Societies where play (both with rules and without) is used in social practices,” explain Antonacci, Norscia, and Palagi, “show a more fluid, democratic structure and are more open to new incomers.” Play helps knock down social hierarchies by releasing the tension that prevents people from speaking up or out of turn. Even when play takes the form of win-or-lose competition, as long as the exercise is about the game and doesn’t devolve into an exercise in destroying the other people, it has this camaraderie-building effect. And Buenos Aires had more of this effect than any comparable city in the world.
Play led to something of a virtuous cycle in Argentina. More futbol playing meant less segregation, which meant even more futbol playing and even less prejudice. As Professor Miles Hewstone of Oxford University found in a series of studies, city neighborhoods “with the most mixing between ethnic groups lead to the highest reductions in racial prejudice.” And neighborhoods in the early-to-mid-twentieth century had less ethnic and racial segregation in Buenos Aires than any of its Brazilian, Chilean, or Mexican counterparts, because of soccer.
They were comfortable living together because they played together.
Of course play is no panacea for prejudice. Xenophobia persists in Argentina as it does everywhere, futbol notwithstanding. But, in spite of this, modern Argentina still ranks high among nations in terms of tolerance and inclusivity.
And Argentina’s Jewish population? Over two hundred thousand, by most estimates. At the time of this writing there were about as many Jewish people in Argentina as in Haifa.
In 2014, Pope Francis I staged a battle between representatives of the world’s biggest religions. Jews and Christians; Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists—the old pontiff pitted them one against another.
Why?
For charity. You see, Francis is Argentinian. He loved futbol and was hell-bent on watching devotees of the world’s major religions go toe-to-toe on the field, proceeds going to a good cause. The Pope had grown up knowing that play helps us get along.
“Tonight’s match will . . . reflect on the universal values which football and sport in general can promote—loyalty, sharing, welcoming, dialogue, trust in the other,” the Pope said. “It’s about values which joins every person regardless of race, culture and religious belief.”
It’s not just sports that have this in-grouping effect on our brains. Play outside of sport can get the same psychological results. Antonacci and her colleagues teach that even unstructured play limits xenophobic aggression.
And speaking of aggression, remember Wu-Tang? Those nine street-hardened lyrical warriors did not see themselves as an in-group at first. Robert Diggs knew their energy had the power to create—or to destroy—when first he hosted his in-house rap battle. And if we think about it, RZA’s intramural competitions were actually a kind of game. That game helped enemies like Raekwon and Ghostface to bond. The circle worked its magic. Against the odds, Wu-Tang became a clan.
Now think about that fear-busting improv comedy—the secret sauce that helped the geeks at Art of Charm find their groove. By engaging in awkward play, shy guys started to see strangers for the first time as potential members of their own in-group, rather than as opponents or terrifying outsiders.
Dr. Nardi’s World of Warcraft guild thought they were battling a luminous blue-green water monster. In fact, they were bridging social and geographical divides to an extent rarely seen in, say, a fractious UN General Assembly. No one had to sign a treaty. The guild’s bridge building was simply the natural result of playing with different people.
When Argentines started playing futbol together, they became more comfortable with differences that had frightened them before. And as Argentina’s national team got good—with players like Diego Maradona becoming world-famous—play became something that enabled practically any two people in Argentina to have a conversation, no matter how different they appeared on the outside.
You’ll recall how our friend Keith Yamashita likes to say that “micro-actions add up.” Each of our stories of play reinforce this point. Vallone stabilized an unstable group through a thousand micro-opportunities. She set up an environment where her people could accumulate lots of little bonding moments in the Magic Circle together—and they became a great team through it. The sum of hundreds of positive, fun social interactions helped the Art of Charm geeks get better at being social, and they reported not just getting better at dating, but better at work, at networking, and at collaboration in general. And after thousands and thousands of encounters on the futbol cancha, the residents of Buenos Aires found a shared identity through play as well.
In all these cases, people who on paper should not have gotten along could now progress together in The Zone.
Overcoming fears and stabilizing group relationships is not the end, of course, to the challenge of making a great team tick.
In fact, sometimes our teams sit outside of The Zone, not because we have too much fear of conflict or too many problems with each other, but because things are going so well.
Or so we think.
Stay tuned for the next free chapter of Dream Teams next month!
Make a great day—
Shane
P.S. If you’re enjoying Dream Teams, get a free signed copy of the book by upgrading to a paid membership to The Snow Report. Or check out my keynote speaking here.
Fascinating angle - and worth digesting properly over a glass on the hottest May Day in London ever by 19 degrees Celsius