Power to the peers!

As I rewrite Working Smarter, Boosting Brainpower for Fun & Profit, I’m gathering up sound beliefs and best practices from a variety of disciplines to inject into corporate learnscapes.

My search for innovation finds me mashing up concepts from corporate culture with those from other disciplines.

For example, Scientific American Mind has a brief interview with Judith Harris, author of the controversial 1998 book The Nurture Assumption, Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do.

Harris was savaged by the scientific community for daring to question our cultural belief that parents have tremendous impact on the development of their children. According to Harris, the major parental impact is genetic inheritance. What happens at home (the “nurture”) has little to do with a child’s behavior and personality outside the home.

Whether it’s musical talent, criminal tendencies, or fashion sense, we humans want to know why we have it or why we don’t. What makes us the way we are? Maybe it’s in our genes, maybe it’s how we were raised, maybe it’s a little of both–in any case, Mom and Dad usually receive both the credit and the blame.

But not so fast, says developmental psychology writer Judith Rich Harris. While it has been shown that genetics is only partly responsible for behavior, it is also true, Harris asserts, that parents play a very minor role in mental and emotional development. The Nurture Assumption explores the mountain of evidence pointing away from parents and toward peer groups as the strongest environmental influence on personality development.

Rather than leaping into the nature vs. nurture fray, Harris instead posits nurture (parental) vs. nurture (peer group), and in her view your kid’s friends win, hands down. This idea, difficult as it may be to accept, is supported by the countless studies Harris cites in her breezy, charming prose. She is upset about the blame laid on parents of troubled children and has much to say (mostly negative) about “professional parental advice-givers.” Her own advice may be summarized as “guide your child’s peer-group choices wisely,” but the aim of the book is less to offer guidance than to tear off cultural blinders.

If kids in a classroom splinter into several opposing groups, their learning experience is less coherent. Harris suggests this may be why Asian students are often better learners: teachers keep them all singing the same song.

Harris’s work fascinates me, for it has direct application in the workplace. In place of parents and children, think of superiors and employees. The superior could be a manager, a mentor, a charismatic leader, or an instructor. The important point is that the superior is not a peer.

Traditional corporate learning and development relies on employees learning from superiors. Harris’s hypothesis suggests there’s a better way.

Part of the promise of pull learning is that you can learn from your colleagues. You’re more likely to have faith in what you hear from someone you can identify with, your work peer, than from a corporate father figure. Hence, it makes sense to incorporate opportunities for peer-to-peer exploration and reinforcement of new knowledge into the corporate learnscape.