today i'm back to reading this paper by @grimalkina about contest cultures and brilliance traps in software and I'm going to try to live tweet some notes because reading papers is hard
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/2gej5_v2
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@b0rk Thanks for sharing @grimalkina 's paper - this is right up my area of interest right now: https://agilepainrelief.com/where-is-ai-taking-software-development/
FWIW you might both be interested in another I saw recently, GenAI Personas: https://www.bernardjjansen.com/uploads/2/4/1/8/24188166/1-s2.0-s1071581925002149-main.pdf
@b0rk thank you for this work 😭💝 I know how much effort it is to not only read papers but live post about them!!
@b0rk @grimalkina the phrase "brilliance traps" immediately makes me think of "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should". So I guess I have to wait/read to see if my snap intuition was correct. And/or, Colonel Kurtz gone so far up the river of his own "brilliance" that it all ends up gone wrong.
first I'm curious about how "contest culture" might be defined
One of the references is this paper on "Masculinity Contest Culture": https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12280 which has this list of factors
"Admitting you don't know the answer looks weak" feels VERY familiar to me, I feel like I've said "I don't know X" on the internet and been weirdly attacked for it so many times ("how could she not know that??? what does that mean about what kind of programmer she is!!!!")
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Development and Validation of the Masculinity Contest Culture Scale
"Admitting you don't know the answer looks weak"One of my favorite bits of feedback I got on a talk was "I love how confidently you said you didn't know things".
next: what does "brilliance trap" mean?
they reference this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brilliance-paradox-what-really-keeps-women-and-minorities-from-excelling-in-academia/
which talks about a study they did on a possible explanation for why some academic fields have less women and Black people than others: the belief that you have to be innately "brilliant" to succeed in that field
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@b0rk Praising effort rather than intelligence has been recommended practice for decades:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9686450/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01443410.2019.1625306
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWv1VdDeoRY
tl;dr: praising effort leads to perseverance, praising intelligence leads to avoidance (fear of failure).
@landley yea she talks here about how fixed/growth mindset is different from the concept of brilliance (though related!) https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/115974677375162136
I've heard a lot in the past about Carol Dweck's "growth mindsets" (which to me is the idea that having a growth mindset makes you more _effective_ at learning than if you have the attitude that brilliance is fixed)
But I don't think I've ever heard that the attitude that "brilliance is fixed" could have an impact on representation before. that's interesting!
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@b0rk i mean, it makes sense, doesn't it? if you believe that brilliance is fixed, your brain starts looking for trends. not many women? seems like women just can't hack it. that will influence how you treat female colleagues (and especially how you treat female prospective colleagues)
@b0rk I don't remember all the details of the book, but I do think if not explicitly, at least implicitly that subject is brought up?
If I remember correctly, at least some of the example stories are about marginalised people and how the fixed mindset can affect them.
@torb oh interesting what book? i’ve never read it
@b0rk Oh, I just meant Carol Dweck's Mindset
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44330/mindset-by-carol-s-dweck-phd/
@b0rk
I’m surprised at that remark because I thought it would be obvious: even the mildest forms of racism and sexism require that individuals have innate qualities which distinguish their capacities. So it makes perfect sense they would be co-travelled. If you believe in innate brilliance you probably believe your genes are the origin.
@ThreeSigma haha i think it's a bit ironic to reply to a thread about how it's important to have space to learn in the open and not know things with "why are you surprised by X, that's obvious" :)
@b0rk The phrase "brilliance trap" is also connected in my head to Dweck's points about negative effects of praise.
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/PraiseSpring99.pdf
@earth2marsh @b0rk very connected (Dweck was my academic 'grandparent' in that I worked with one of her former students). Growth mindset (I can grow and change) is a distinct but related belief from field specific beliefs about brilliance (brilliance is required to succeed here), fixed mindset and brilliance trap thinking can reinforce each other.
@grimalkina @earth2marsh ahh thanks for explaining the difference between fixed mindset & brilliance trap
okay I'm learning (thanks to Cat's clarification!!) that they uses scales called "measures" to measure things like "contest cultures" or "brilliance belief". Cool! Here are the measures from the paper in the first tweet
https://osf.io/cd874/files/wkch8
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this is making me wonder if folks have studied whether "Imposterism" and "Contest Cultures" are connected, it feels like if you're in a culture where "admitting you don't know the answer looks weak" it would be extremely natural to be "afraid others will discover how much knowledge or ability I really lack"
(I've been suspicious of "imposter syndrome" conversations that frame imposter syndrome as a personal issue for a long time)
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@b0rk There’s a good article in the librarianship literature exploring the idea of external factors’ impact on syndrome:
Andrews, Nicola. “It’s Not Imposter Syndrome: Resisting Self-Doubt as Normal for Library Workers.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, June 11, 2020. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2020/its-not-imposter-syndrome/.
This is interesting. I have been speaking of "cultures of display" for a long time, not knowing what else to call it. Self-figuring is another established framework that seems helpful (from Stephen Greenblatt). But I never actually worked in this field – my musings are really nothing more than a way for me to make sense of the world around me. So much of academic success seems to hinge on posturing and even charlatanism: I lost faith in the "impostor syndrome" conversation because it's so obvious that there are numerous impostors doing incredibly well, career-wise, and numerous people who do endless drudgework, just collecting and sorting out data and producing formulaic, uninspiring articles that seem only to keep the machine turning over. The lesson that I took from this is that intellectual prowess is not what academic careers are necessarily built on. This isn't to say that there aren't brilliant, insightful, creative people in high places. Just to say that, outside élite institutions, I've met maybe a handful or two of them. It's simply not what modern universities are about, but it remains an important visage for universities and academics to project.
A parallel might be found in the tension between politics and governance: it's the politicians who tend to do best, but governance, not politics, is what government is about. For this same reason, Machiavelli observed that Christians are the people least equipped to run the Church.
@b0rk Impostor syndrome is the mirror of dunning-kruger. (The curve seems to be u-shaped.)
See also https://xkcd.com/2501/
@b0rk When I started in my career, I would frequently comment "I don't get why the CEO is paid so much for doing such a bad job", and would get the defensive answer from colleagues "Oh you just don't understand you're young etc".
Nearly 3 decades later I've learned that I was in fact right: your bosses really _were_ bad at their job. Senior engineers really _were_ wrong. You really _could_ do their job, and probably better, because you could admit your limitations.
@b0rk That’s a clever idea and I couldn’t immediately find any research that backed it up. There’s research into “psychological safety” at work, which seems like the opposite of a contest culture. Some researchers claim it boosts self-esteem, self-efficacy, and team performance. Sounds like the opposite of impostor syndrome but I don’t know if anyone’s directly researched that connection.
i have never thought about how psychology research works and my extremely simplified model now is
1) develop surveys ("measures") and look at how responses to one relates to responses to another with stats
2) publish them so that other researchers can iterate on the measures you're using to discuss the concept
this list of measures says "IS has been shown to have good internal consistency, reliability, and construct validity", which I guess are things we want
https://osf.io/cd874/files/wkch8
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@b0rk on brilliance and representation-- people have so many things wrapped up in their idea of "brilliant." Like, often "brilliant" people have bad social skills and/or are jerks. That tends to filter for the people who can afford to behave that way... who, in my culture at least, tend to be people who look a lot like me.
(I'm really enjoying this thread and the links, thank you!)
@cliffle @b0rk exactly. The structure of how these beliefs hang together (in "networks" that include stereotypes and judgments of competency) is a very interesting emerging area of research. Many of these beliefs about ability have been studied from one angle (like growth mindset) but there are other variants, and our cultures and stereotypes can reinforce certain ways of thinking. Eg, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39804388/
@grimalkina
I'm looking forward to the b0rk psychology zines that come out of this!
@cliffle @b0rk
@b0rk our measures are also available in the open supplemental to the paper! (can be a little annoying to find on psyarxiv)
@grimalkina thank you!! I don't know any of this vocabulary ("measure"!), I'm so out of my depth haha
@b0rk you learning out loud is gonna make me emotional. Why would you know? This is social science stuff. Super happy to chat about anything but also happy to hang back and let you read in peace 😂
@grimalkina i would love any thoughts on how to think about this if you have any! https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/115974721100862550
really appreciate all your replies in the thread, they're so helpful, it's so hard to read papers and I'm reading everything in a very scattered way and very unsure about if I'm representing it accurately :)
@b0rk here is an open access textbook that might be useful for looking things up
@b0rk our measures are also available in the open supplemental to the paper! (can be a little annoying to find on psyarxiv)
> how could she not know that??
Yep. Learning this ^^^ behaviour is what elementary and high schools are for. And the uni is for unlearning it
