Why Do People Join and Identify with Groups?

You are trained to pick up a lot of these patients' cues, and this is your work, but how can a nurse or any other staff member who is very busy on a ward and involved with living patients better handle the situation of a dying patient on the ward? How do we get the time unless we stay after work? Their experiment was designed to capture the incentives people confront when asked to undertake a task that they would benefit from, but which they would prefer to leave to somebody else. Most university faculty members prefer someone else to organize their department's speaker series and most partners in law firms would rather have someone else mentor their firm's summer associates. But in both cases, faculty and partners benefit from great talks and wonderful future colleagues. In the experiment, people were assigned to groups and their earnings depended on finding one group member willing to volunteer. They were all better off if one person volunteered, but volunteering was costly for the person doing it. When in same-sex groups, women and men were equally willing to volunteer. But when grouped with members of the opposite sex, the pattern suddenly changed. Women volunteered more and men less. Everyone, including the women, assumed women would volunteer more than men. Accordingly, men adjusted their behavior, expecting to benefit from the women, and women lived up to their expectations. Intuitive, Sensing, Feeling, Judging, the Nurturer will always be generous. They're the philanthropist, you know, always willing and happy to give back. If you were ever kind to them, then they will return that kindness to you seventy times seven. That's just the way they are. If you're fortunate enough to have the Nurturer believe in you, then trust they will go out for you with no hidden agenda. The Nurturer also upholds the ideals they believe in with that same unbridled passion. They're the kindest, warmest personalities you will ever have the pleasure of knowing. Sensitive to the way others feel, the Nurturer will always hold peace, cooperation, and harmony in high esteem.

They're always considerate of others, and very aware of how people around them feel. Also, they can't help but bring out the best in everyone they meet. I think your problem is that you regard dying patients as not living patients anymore. I think a patient who is in the process of dying is living as much as any other patient, if not more, and needs your care, your time, and your attention as much, if not more, as those who are getting well and will be able to return home. Working with, listening to, and picking up cues from dying patients does not take any more time than doing the same thing for patients who are better off. It takes five minutes (and sometimes saves an hour of anguish, discussion, and agony later on) to give that extra care to terminally ill patient. What the staff often forgets is that the dying patient has very few demands. He needs to be comfortable, as pain-free as humanly possible, and he does not demand much except to have one human being who does not desert him. If a nurse can stop in for a minute and ask, Is it tough today? It takes very little time, and done in the right manner will save you many hours later on. How do you feel about the doctor's decision as to whether the patient should be told if his disease is terminal? Patients should not be told that their illness is terminal or that they are dying. This is a common pattern at universities. Researchers at one large university confirmed that there, too, female faculty were more likely to say yes to a request to serve on an administrative committee than their male counterparts. Committee work is an important service to the university, but it rarely benefits the individuals participating. It is troubling that this pattern appears to be generalizable. In an excellent review of why there are so few women working in STEM fields, Stephen Ceci of Cornell and colleagues discuss various studies finding that male faculty spend less time on service activities and teaching but more on research, the most promotable task in academia. To what degree these differences inhibit women's careers is an open question. To answer it, we would need a detailed analysis of gender differences in time allocation by field. For example, do female academics in fields where women have traditionally been under-represented, such as engineering, economics, or mathematics, have less time to do research than women in psychology, and the social and life sciences?

We do not know. For now, Ceci and colleagues conclude that mostly, current barriers to women's full participation in mathematically intense academic science fields are rooted in pre-college factors. The Visionary This Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving (ENTP) personality is also rare. They are extroverts, but they don't do well with small talk. Not even a little bit. Because of this, they don't do well at parties or social scenes, particularly when everyone around them is of a quite different personality type than they are. The Visionary is deeply knowledgeable about things. Their intelligence is unparalleled. These two traits make it, so they need constant mental stimulation, so they don't get bored. They love a chance to talk facts and theories, diving into every little detail, making sure you get it right. The Visionary is rational, logical, and objective in how they deal with everything. A patient should be informed that he is seriously ill but that everything possible will be done to keep him comfortable and to help him. When the patient becomes beyond medical help, he will ask the doctor if he has any chance. If the physician levels with the patient and gives him an appropriate idea of his expectations without leaving him without hope, the patient will then be able to come to grips with it much better than if he is told that he is going to get well. How does one assist the young doctor resident to face the fact that a patient is dying? Young physicians are much more amenable to this kind of training than older physicians, who have been already molded. When we try to teach the art of medicine and the care of the dying patient to medical students, we have a very high success rate. When we try to reach externs we are more successful than with interns, and after about two years of residency, it becomes almost hopeless. It is essential, therefore, to reach the medical students early in order to have better future relationships between nurses, clergy, and physicians in the care of the terminally ill patient, and to teach them the science and the art of medicine simultaneously.

Do you have any structured ways (such as groups) of helping staff to deal with their own and their patients' feelings? Our seminars on death and dying not only dealt with the needs of the dying patient, but each seminar and patient interview was followed by a group discussion among the staff on an interdisciplinary level to share gut reactions and feelings in relation to the patients discussed. If you are concerned about gender-based imbalances in your organization, you can easily follow in Harvard Kennedy School's footsteps. We try to measure (and compensate) as many contributions relevant to the institution as possible. We employ a point system to measure faculty's workload. A full-time faculty member's workload is 100 points, with a margin of error of 10 percent plus or minus. If faculty members contribute substantially more, the school compensates them more. If a faculty member falls significantly short of workload expectations, explanations and sometimes adjustments in compensation or time status are in order. Points are allocated for teaching and administrative tasks, and faculty have substantial flexibility in how they meet their obligations. Some might choose to teach more than the minimal requirement, others might give more of their time and effort to service or organizational leadership opportunities. The point system has lots of advantages, providing incentives for people to deliver the public goods everyone benefits from. The flexibility allows them to trade off activities they are less good at for tasks they are better at, making everyone better off. They approach arguments the same way, so if you ever find yourself in a verbal fencing match with them, know that they expect you to be logical and rational. The Composer Say hello to the Intuitive, Sensing, Feeling, Perceiving personality. The funny thing about these introverts is that they don't always seem introverted. Sure, they have some stumbling and fumbling going on when they try to connect with you for the first time, but give them enough time to warm up, and they become very friendly, warm, and approachable. The ISFP is a fun person to hang out with. They can act on a whim, the spontaneous Composer. You'd have a great tie going to various events with them, whether planned or unplanned.

The Composer has one intention: Make the most of life. They are all about being present, and this helps others see the wonder of the ordinary moments they take for granted. This not only helped the staff ask their questions and share their feelings, but it helped us to understand each other's problems. The nurses began to respect the physicians' difficulties more and vice versa. This has to be done in the absence of the patient and is always kept strictly confidential. Have you had any success in lessening the resistance of the medical-surgical community to providing the means and situations where the terminally or critically ill patient can deal with the problems of his illness and possible death so present to him and his family? If so, how? We have had hundreds of workshops, seminars, and in-depth meetings with different members of the helping professions from high school level to medical schools, and the attendance has ranged from approximately twenty-five participants up to four thousand, a slowly increasing number of whom were physicians. I think the atmosphere is changing now and there is hope that in the future our dying patients will not be so bitterly deserted. What about restricting the visiting time in an intensive care unit to five minutes an hour when the patient will be dying within hours and then the patient dies alone--isn't this terribly inflexible? Yes, these rules should be changed. When a patient appears to be beyond medical help, all restrictions should be lifted and at least one relative should be allowed to stay with the dying patient during this final period and not be sent out of the room at the moment of his dying. As a design, this is almost a pure win-win. True, not everything is quantifiable, which is why every few years we have a discussion about whether our workload system rewards effort adequately and does not crowd out intrinsic motivation. But I do not mind, and I believe most of my colleagues prefer our system to the less flexible, more opaque, and seemingly less equitable systems followed at other academic institutions. At the very least, the Kennedy School's points bring inequities out into the open and make service activities a part of any conversation about faculty contributions. The larger issue is, of course, this. Through the measurement of all contributions, we can correct for differential impacts of gender bias ex-post. Ideally, we would level the playing field exante or intervene to mitigate impacts before they fully hit. But if we can't, ex-post compensation for career-relevant imbalances resulting from the expectations placed on one's gender can be a helpful design feature.