2002: Four psychological dichotomies that made me want a Locus-style coworking space
The original idea of starting something akin to a coworking space began before “coworking” had a name. I had just come back after almost 2 years of fieldwork, collecting data for my Ph.D. in “The Committee on Human Development” (HD) an interdisciplinary department (mostly comprising psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists) at the University of Chicago. Although we were closely tied to the psychology department, unlike most psych students, we tended to go off on our own for a year or two and do anthropology-style participant-observation to try to understand psychological processes within a cultural context.
Fieldwork had been difficult (I spent a year and a half mostly in casinos, dealing blackjack, interviewing gamblers, and gambling myself). I was tired. I came back to the university with nothing to do but analyse my data and write up my dissertation. I did not have an office or a lab. I did not have an active advisor (we met once every month or two, and what I wrote would be my own). I was finished with coursework. Most of my graduate-student cohort were somewhere else. I was struggling to focus on the dissertation and the hard work that would be required to finish it in a reasonable amount of time. Like many freelancers working alone from a one-bedroom apartment in a town far from parents and close friends, I felt very alone.
There are four dichotomies associated with the struggle I was going through that, together, go a long way toward explaining what I was originally looking for in a coworking space and why I thought it would be valuable for more people than just me.
Dichotomy 1: Two types of ability: skill and expertise versus personality
- I felt sure that I had both the expertise and intelligence to do a great job on my dissertation and in a career as an academic/social scientist.
- But I was worried that I lacked the right psychological disposition to work independently rather than for someone else: the sustained self-motivation, focus, and self-discipline that it takes to be a successful academic.
Dichotomy 2: Odysseus and the Sirens
- Odysseus wanted to hear the famed sirens’ songs; I wanted the freedom and independence inherent to a career as a social scientist.
- But Odysseus knew that if he listened to the sirens, he would be incapable of resisting their appeal and would be drawn into the rocks that other sailors who listened to the sirens had been drawn into. I knew that without external structure and support, I could not be the successful academic I wanted to be.
Odysseus was given the insight (thanks to the sorceress Circe) that he did have the capacity to listen to the sirens without losing control. He just needed to be tied to the mast of his ship while he listened. I had a similar–if not so epic–conviction that my capacity to work independently—and to be happy while doing it—depended on help from my social and physical environment. If these examples seem reminiscent of the dichotomy pointed to by Neuberg in his 2005 blog post above, they should. He had a similar insight when he wrote that “coworking is the solution” to the problem of wanting a certain kind of freedom and independence (wanting to be able to hear the sirens), but not wanting the loneliness and lack of structure, accountability, and community that goes along with that (not wanting to crash into the rocks and die).
Dichotomy 3: The fundamental attribution error: the person versus the situation
The fundamental attribution error is the compelling finding in social psychology that people tend to overemphasise the influence of stable personality traits (the person or disposition) relative to the situation when explaining behaviour. That attribution error links the person with enduring traits (I am self-disciplined; he is dumb; she is kind) and the situation with variability (I couldn’t focus on my work because I didn’t get enough sleep, he did poorly on the text because it was unfair; she brought flowers because that’s what people do when someone’s in the hospital).
As an aside, the “fundamental” attribution error is far less fundamental than originally thought. First, it depends on whether the attributions are about oneself or others. Second, whether the error exists and how it depends on self vs. other attributions both vary widely across cultures (for a variety of rich examples, see Markus & Kitayama, 1991, “Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.”) That said, at a general level, the error still applies well to most WEIRD people (people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democratic countries; Henrich et al., 2010, “The weirdest people in the world”): the cultural group most likely to design and participate in psychology research, and also the group most likely to seek out coworking spaces.
Back to the dichotomy:
- I had a strong feeling that the difference between success and failure as a scholar, or perhaps as a person more generally, was dispositional: both enduring and about me (I either am that kind of person, or I’m not). The struggle to be effective with my work felt like a personal and enduring failure.
- But my background–both my social-scientific training and my personal experience–made it clear to me that that narrative was wrong. My Master’s thesis was about the role of the social environment on world-recognized scientists’, artists’, and business leaders’ great accomplishments. My PhD was about the influence of the cultural and physical environment on gamblers’ choices and beliefs, and–ultimately–on the rationality of those choices and beliefs. The graduate program where I wrote both my master’s thesis and dissertation emphasized that the physical and social environment was interdependent with how people think and behave. All that research and training made clear to me that seeming psychological dispositions–self-discipline, efficiency, and focus, but even the Big-5 personality traits–are as much about the situations we develop in as they are about the person. I chose that department and those particular themes, in part, because I already believed that the role of the environment in who we become is under-appreciated. As an early teenager, to put it obscurely, I got into a lot of trouble and I was eventually sent away to a strict boarding school. After two years in a very different environment from the “home culture” I had grown up in, my behavioural patterns completely changed, and so did my identity and “dispositions”. Who I was, even at the level of biology and personality, had unambiguously changed.
Dichotomy 4: Normal (common) versus abnormal (unusual)
- I was beating myself up for how hard I was struggling to stay motivated and to finish my dissertation. That was not just because I over-credited my disposition and under-credited the situation in evaluating my performance. It was also because I felt that I was unusual in this respect. Most people–with the opportunities I have had–have been able to thrive with the independence that I had (I thought). How lucky that I had the rare opportunity to choose my career. How much less acceptable, then, that I was not thriving.
- But a less emotional, more conscious and intentional part of me recognized that the situation I was in–working on my own without external structure or accountability or social support–was not the norm and that, given that situation, my performance was not abnormal, but was almost predictable. The fact that everyone else in my cohort–a group of originally overachieving, optimistic PhD students at a top-tier university–were all going through the same thing I was, helped convince me that this was largely situational. That was reinforced by the opportunity to compare ourselves to the separate cohort of psychology students not affiliated with HD. Instead of going off to do solo-field work for a year or two, that group worked in traditional labs with labmates and regular meetings with an advisor. Their research would become an offshoot of their advisors research and their papers were going to be co-authored with their labmates and advisor. They had far less independence and far more guidance, structure, and feedback–on a daily basis–regarding how they worked and what they worked on. The difference in performance across those two groups was stark. A much higher percentage finished the program. They were happier. They seemed more confident and competent in their sense of domain expertise. And they usually finished in four years, whereas if our group finished in 6 years it was considered a great success. The contrasting outcomes of these two groups of students was stark. I both did, and did not want that kind of structure. I already had a topic I wanted to study and I knew how and why I wanted to study it. We got to follow our creative vision. They had to do what other people (their advisors) told them to do. But it was clear that the students in that more structured, social environment were psychologically thriving in a way that we were not.
Of course, there are a lot of independent workers who thrive (without coworking!), but I became convinced that most of them thrived because they had created–or lucked into–social and physical environments that promoted that thriving. I began to consciously look for people, tools, or business services that helped provide that positive work environment for solo-workers so that I could continue to work independently but without feeling like it was a daily struggle. There must be hundreds of thousands of people in Chicago going through what I’m going through, I thought. That was the first time that I considered trying to start a business that both (a) met a need that I was sure was widespread and (b) was not available even in a large city like Chicago. But I had a dissertation to complete, and I didn’t have the background or–at the time–the desire to try to reinvent myself as an entrepreneur.