One 2000 study found that playing name games actually helps people remember others’ names, which makes working together easier. As the management scholar Stephen Fineman wrote, “Fun typically gains its ‘funness’ from its spontaneity, surprise, and often subversion of the extant order”-the exact opposite of following your manager’s orders, in other words.Īlthough icebreakers might not always be pleasurable, some research does indicate that they can be good for workplace productivity. But trying to make connections while under the boss’s eye has a way of stripping all of the enjoyment out of the process. Indeed, liking one’s co-workers does enhance career satisfaction people who have friends at work tend to enjoy their role more. “We’re the most social of all primates,” Nick Epley, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, told me-but still, “people tend to underestimate just how social others are.” Epley pointed out that even basic self-disclosures through fun facts could facilitate bonding. This means your listeners probably didn’t find your fun fact as inane as you feared, and likely enjoyed getting to know you. Seen another way, the liking gap can be comforting: People like you more than you suspect they will. Read: Teens are protesting in-class presentations This phenomenon is known as the liking gap, and it’s even stronger in shy people. “When people have a conversation with someone new, they tend to overestimate, basically, how harshly they’re being judged by those people,” Boothby explained. You’re unlikely to come to positive conclusions. Introducing yourself to a group demands that you evaluate how every single member responds to you-an overwhelming task. When we meet a new person, we’re constantly trying to gauge how they’re reacting to us, Erica Boothby, a lecturer in the operations, information, and decisions department at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. Even after you’ve decided what you’ll say, the act of sharing is essentially an instance of public speaking: a major source of anxiety for many people. Having something sprung upon you-especially something that you might be judged for-without warning can incite stress and perhaps trigger the fight-or-flight response. For one, people typically aren’t given much time to prepare. Psychology can lend some insight into why such activities can feel so painful. When it’s required, fun just isn’t that fun anymore. Work and school are already stressful, and the pressure to make a good impression is high. But rather than putting people at ease, too often these prompts only create more discomfort. The goals of such an exercise may be noble, aiming to let group members get to know one another in a more human way before they have to work or study together. And the stakes for striking the right balance are high, given that the fact someone shares may very well be the most personal information their co-workers (or fellow students or teammates) ever learn about them. Within such parameters, it’s virtually impossible not to come off as either hopelessly boring or a complete fool. The form demands a tidbit that’s honest without being overly revealing, interesting but never indecent, unique but not weird. The mandate to share one about yourself, typically posed as an icebreaker in schools, offices, and other formal settings, is deeply constraining.
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