PROJECTS
In 2018, I felt ill at ease about my place in the world. I felt uncomfortable with the discrepancy between how much my work meant to me personally, in terms of providing a route to financial security and material comfort, versus how much it meant to the world, in terms of directly speaking to the difficult, seemingly intractable challenges experienced by people across the globe.
At the time, I barely acknowledged these feelings and kept pushing on my limited set of professional goals. As much as I was saddened by the plight of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students whose lives were either taken or forever changed by an explosive episode of mass murder, I did nothing other than complain and weep. As much as I am hurt by constant reports of the police killing unarmed Black, Native American, impoverished, and mentally ill men and women (for minor offenses or, far too often, no offense at all), I viewed it as the responsibility of activists and organizers to fight for accountability, justice, and recognition of the fact that our lives are not disposable. As much as I worried about legislative and judicial attacks on reproductive rights, attacks that disproportionately land on the heads of those already marginalized in society, I felt that it was enough to quietly support organizations fighting to ensure everyone’s basic human rights are protected.
As we all emerged from the pandemic, suffering from the physical and psychological after-effects of both COVID-19 and social distancing, reeling from the supposed racial reckoning embodied by the protests against the murder of George Floyd, and waking up to the reality that our autonomy over our own bodies was being stripped by the state (especially true for women and people in the trans community), I realized that I was not doing enough.
Throughout my career, I have felt a need to minimize myself at work. Whereas it seemed perfectly reasonable for other behavioral scientists to center their investigations on their personal interests (“me-search”), I felt as if I needed to keep Lawrence far away from my studies. Perhaps I overly internalized a lesson learned early in grad school – that my mere presence (as a Black man in a predominantly white space, both historically and contemporaneously) can activate thoughts and feelings in research participants that ruined my experimental designs. As such, my desire to understand the social psychology of rap music and depictions of violence in the media morphed into a Lawrence-lite program of research examining the emotional consequences of psychological distance. The pain of seeing my academic advisor dragged through the mud (with undue vitriol and self-righteousness) materialized into a paper critiquing the assumptions researchers make about consciousness and its role in causing behavior.
The projects highlighted on this page mark my effort to abandon this habit of minimalizing myself in my work. They represent a mixture of academic and practical pursuits. Spanning each of these projects is my deeply held personal belief that business, as an institution, has a key role to play in improving the lives of everyone by tackling big hairy daunting problems and ushering in a global culture in which all social institutions are invested in a sustainable future. Please reach out for more information!
BEAM: The Black Experience of the American Marketplace
The relationship between two relatively recent cultural creations, Blackness on the one hand and capitalism on the other, is complicated and difficult to acknowledge, but also essential to understand. The relationship is both tragic and beautiful. It is not news that key stages in the development of the Western world into centers of economic might were fueled by labor stolen from enslaved people. Yet, through BEAM, my colleague Andy Poehlman and I emphasize the fact that enslaved people, though often treated as objects by those in positions of power, were agents in the development of American culture and marketplace practices. In this project, we adopt a cultural evolutionary framework and focus on how “mainstream” American marketplace norms and practices both shape and are shaped by the experience of historically marginalized subcultures (e.g., enslaved Africans and their descendants, immigrants, and Indigenous peoples throughout the world). Through BEAM, we connect the dots to show how the cultural influences on the structure and function of America’s economy emerge from a set of foundational principles of group dynamics informed by biology, anthropology, network science, and social/cognitive psychology. In so doing, we offer new insights for (1) enhancing inclusiveness in the marketplace, (2) spurring innovation amongst entrepreneurial producers, co-creating consumers, and their intermediaries, and (3) appropriately valuing Black lives.
Connect with Purpose: Implementing Purpose-Driven Strategy
With Connect with Purpose, Nicole Mead and I are taking insights obtained from our research on meaning in the marketplace and putting them to work for socially responsible businesses. We want to help usher in a new era of socially responsible business, by helping companies find profitable and sustainable ways to add meaning to the lives of their stakeholders. The world faces major challenges, including slowing or curtailing climate change, dismantling systems of oppression and hate, fostering global collaboration to mitigate large-scale catastrophes (e.g., covid-19 pandemic), and preserving limited natural resources. Our passion derives from our belief that business represents our best chance at addressing the big, hairy challenges that impact all of our lives, and the lives of future generations. In many ways, the market facilitated, accelerated, or downright created the messes we face. But we believe that the market will facilitate, accelerate, or create the solutions we require. We stand ready to help firms in this broader mission, which is critical to their long-term survival and success.
W-P: Unlocking Unconscious Culture
Organizations want to be more inclusive, more hospitable to diverse talent, and more effective in their multicultural marketing efforts. Organizations want to see their inclusion efforts pay off in terms of greater profitability and employee satisfaction. We want to see organizations succeed on these fronts. Our approach is one in which inclusion and diversity outcomes are entirely tied to achievable business goals, such as profitability, increased innovation, and higher levels of employee satisfaction and engagement.
We ground our approach in research— spanning biology, epidemiology, social psychology, network science, and marketing — showing how cultural development is the mechanism through which organizations flourish, and cultural inheritances provide the raw material for making organizations more inclusive and hospitable to diverse talent.
Building inclusive culture is not about avoiding negative outcomes. It is about pursuing positive change, capitalizing on the tremendous growth opportunities our hyper-connected, increasingly diverse world affords.