Deborah H. Gruenfeld

And we have the perfect expert to teach us how this all works.

I am talking about the wonderful Deborah Gruenfeld.

She's a professor at Stanford University, a social and organizational psychologist who studies the psychology of power and powerlessness.

Debra is also the author of the 2020 book, Acting With Power, which is also the name of her wildly popular course.

And it's just as we all suspected.

It just gets to the essence of it.

And that to me is Deborah Gruenfeld, like super insightful, super clever and makes it accessible to the rest of us.

All right, well, I cannot wait.

So this was done at my alma mater, although they don't like when I say this here, UC Berkeley.

Um, and it, it, it-- and this was done about, probably about seven or eight years ago, and it's reported by, uh- Deb Gruenfeld, who's at the business school here, and Dr. Keltner at Berkeley, and the basic setup was they had three Berkeley students brainstorming about how to solve a social problem.

So things like, how do you make the UC Berkeley campus more green? Things like that, and-- but the real manipulation, since they're psychologists, and psychologists just about always lie to their subjects, um, what was really going on, the real manipulation was about halfway through the little brainstorm, they brought in a plate of five cookies.

So the question is, and we all know the norm, you don't eat the last cookie, what happens to cookie number four? And, oh, and the one thing I didn't add, which is really important, is two of them were brainstormers and one was assigned, randomly assigned as the boss to evaluate the quality of the ideas.

This is a good time to mention that if you're listening and you haven't tuned in to the previous four episodes, we encourage you to go back and listen.

Our fantastic guests included the iconic tech journalist Kara Swisher, Stanford power expert Deborah Gruenfeld, financial guru Haley Sachs, better known as Mrs. Dow Jones, and former Best Buy CEO and current HBS professor Hubert Joly.

I mean, I don't even know what to say other than that quartet is, it's so wonderful to visit with them and to learn from them.

Yeah, it was a fantastic lineup.