The researchers theorized that thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mind. When people think analytically, they’re less likely to think emotionally. And the researchers believed it was people’s emotional response to Rokia’s plight that led them to act.

The key to understanding is noticing the reaction. Dr. Sayres, my once-longtime therapist, would say, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” If there’s an outsized reaction—negative or positive—chances are you’re operating from your shadow. Or, even more precisely, grabbing an attribute out of the long black bag and flinging it onto the people in your life and blaming them for your internal discontent.

But as I got deeper into this research, observing the vast differences across the people in this study and how they flourished at their best when life lined up with their encodings and what fed their inner fire, I gradually began to change. Subtly at first, I began to shift away from trying to change people into what I wanted them to be. Simultaneously, I shifted toward finding or creating the best possible match between their encodings and their responsibilities. It didn’t happen overnight, it was more of a managerial form of simplex stepping. I’d sense something about a person’s encodings, and then I’d make a shift in their responsibilities to fir those encodings. Then I might observe something else about their encodings, discovering something wonderful about them when they thrived in a task, and I’d make another shift in responsibilities. Together, we essentially simplex stepped toward them coming into frame in a seat on the bus.

The social psychologist Joshua Aronson and I did one of the early experiments testing this. We invited white and Black Stanford University students into our laboratory one at a time and gave them a very difficult thirty-minute section of the verbal Graduate Record Examinations (GRE).

Stephens assembled a distinguished team of collaborators— Stephanie Fryberg, Hazel Rose Markus, Camille Johnson, and Rebecca Covarrubias— to take up this question. They reasoned that the gap might stem in part from signals universities send to students about the “right way” to think about their college experience and— often unintentionally— about the kinds of people who belong there. They set out to test this logic.