Summarizing their own and otherâs research, a distinguished group of Canadian psychologists led by Toni Schmader (Schmader, Micheal Johns, and Chad Forbes) points to three things that typically happen when people are under this threat. First, theyâre stressed. Their heart rate, blood pressure, and sweating are elevated. Activity in their prefrontal cortex is often suppressedâ which makes it more difficult to control attention, thinking, emotions, and behaviour. Itâs harder to engage in the task at hand. Second, theyâre self-conscious. The exhort themselves to double down, to disprove the stereotype. Then they monitor themselves to see if their efforts are working. Third, they try to suppress negative thoughts that, if allowed to surface, would deepen their sense of threat.
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Hereâs what they found. In the brains of the students who received negative feedback the sympathetic nervous system lit up. This is the âfight or flightâ system, the system that mutes the other parts of the brain and thus allows us to focus only on the information most necessary to survive. When this part of the nervous system is triggered, your heart rate goes up, endorphins flood your body, your cortisol levels rise, and you tense for action. This is your brain on negative feedback: it responds as if to a threat, and it narrows its activity. The strong negative emotions produced by criticism âinhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment,â psychology and business professor Richard Boyatzis said in summarizing the researchers findings.
Negative feedback doesnât enable learning. It systematically inhibits it and is, neurologically speaking, how to create impairment.
In the students who received attention focused on their dreams and how they might go about achieving them, however, the sympathetic nervous system was not activated. Instead it was the parasympathetic nervous system that lit up. This is sometimes referred to as the ârest and digestâ system. To quote the researchers again: â[T]he Parasympathetic Nervous System . . . stimulates adult neurogenesis (i.e., growth of new neurons) . . . , a sense of well being, better immune system functioning, and cognitive, emotional, and perceptual openness.â
In other words, positive, future-focused attention gives your brain access to more regions of itself and thus sets you up for greater learning. Weâre often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but this finding gives the lie to that particular chestnutâtake us out of our comfort zones and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience. Itâs clear that we learn most in our comfort zone, because thatâs our strengths zone, where our neural pathways are most concentrated. Itâs where weâre most open to possibility, and itâs where we are most creative and insightful.
Research has shown that we often judge ourselves harshly and that we tend to experience negative emotions more quickly and with greater intensity than positive emotions. The nervous ape doesnât like to be vulnerable or ask difficult questions. Reality can feel threatening. Of course, we may truly believe that loving the work and seeing more clearly is the better approach â the true path to sustainable safety, satisfaction, and success â but the nervous ape needs calming and convincing to go that route.
Today, over a thousand research papers in fields ranging from education to business to medicine, have shown that teams and organizations with higher psychological safety have better performance, lower burnout, and, in medicine even lower patient mortality. Why might this be the case? Because physiological safety helps people take the interpersonal risks that are necessary for achieving excellence in a fast-changing, interdependent world. When people work in psychologically safe contexts, they know that questions are appreciated, ideas are welcome, and errors and failure are discussable. In these environments, people can focus on the work without being tied up in knots about what others might think of them. They know that being wrong wonât be a fatal blow to their reputation. Psychological safety plays a powerful role in the science of failing well. It allows people to ask for help when they're in over their heads, which helps eliminate preventable failures. It helps them report -and hence catch and correct- errors to avoid worse outcomes, and it makes it possible to experiment in thoughtful ways to generate new discoveries. Think about the teams that youâve been a part of at work, or at school, in sports, or in your community.
Loneliness is more pervasive than ever before, and our ancient brains, designed to seek the safety of groups, experience those negative feelings as life-threatening, which leads to stress and sickness.
There is poignancy to stereotype threat: Itâs felt most by those in the stereotyped group who are most identified with achieving in the area where the stereotype applies, and who are trying to do challenging or frustrating things in that area. It affects most the vanguard of the groupâ as in Mirna wanting to succeed as an ultrarunner; as in women trying to break glass ceilings in finance; as in highly invested African American law students taking challenging state bar exams; as in white American males trying to succeed in elite basketball. Thatâs when, in the heat of frustration, the stereotypeâs dark messageâ âeverybody knows that, because of who you are, you probably can't do well at this, and that you probably donât belongââ becomes personally relevant. Thatâs when it can cause enough churn to interfere with performance.