Jay Van Bavel

speaker

271 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Jay Van Bavel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Hidden Brain · You Are Not Ordinary · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

And sometimes even in a group, it can be useful to have someone who's low on intellectual humility because they push everybody to think about something that they're not taking seriously.

And they continue to pound away at it.

This is often the psychology of a whistleblower, that they're not going to drop it because they think something really bad is going on.

And so they're going to continue to hammer it home or get the word out to the public about it because they're very deeply concerned about it.

So again, this is partly the role of leaders to create norms

And when I run my research meetings every Friday, we have a research team of 15 to 20 people who meet.

If I'm talking about a paper we're working on or something that I've written and I share it for feedback, I share my opinion last.

Because what I learned is once I became a professor, the students saw me as powerful.

And if I would say I really like something or disliked it, they would go around the room trying to find reasons to agree with me.

And they're smart, so they could do that.

But we got much smarter as a group when I shut up and I asked them for their opinion and they would go around the room and share all kinds of different perspectives, including ones that were quite different from mine and kind of caught blind spots that I had.

And in those cases, we came up with much better solutions, more creative ideas, and we became more innovative and our research became better, became more impactful and

And guess what?

That's an environment that everybody loves.

So it also became a place that people wanted to be part of that group more and more once they realized that there was kind of this vibe of intellectual humility.

So it's something I'm trying to study now is how you can create this in other groups, because I think this is really fundamental to a getting a shared sense of reality, but also being creative and innovative and creating a space that people want to be a part of.

The issue of agency in groups is crucially important.

The message that I try to send to people all the time is that you should be very thoughtful about the groups that you join because those groups will shape you.

And that was something she mentioned, that once you're part of the group and people see you that way, you start to adapt to that view.

And the other way in which the group shapes you is by their values and norms.

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