In the early 2000s, some of the best minds in America were competing quietly in a race. The goal was to build a software engine that connected Internet user searches with targeted advertisements, an esoteric-sounding task that would potentially unlock a multibillion-dollar market. The question was which company would win.
The overwhelming favorite was Overture, a well-funded Los Angeles outfit led by a brilliant entrepreneur named Bill Gross. Gross had pioneered the field of Internet advertising. He had invented the pay-per-click advertising model, written the code, and built Overture into a thriving business that was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, as well as a recent initial public offering valued at one billion dollars. In other words, the contest between Overture and its competitors appeared to be a profound mismatch. The market had placed a billion-dollar bet on Overture for the same reason that you would have bet on the MBA students to defeat the kindergartners in the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge: because Overture possessed the intelligence, experience, and resources to win.
But Overture did not win. The winner of this race turned out to be a small, young company called Google. What’s more, it’s possible to isolate the moment that turned the race in its favor. On May 24, 2002, in Google’s kitchen at 2400 Bayshore Parkway in Mountain View, California, Google founder Larry Page pinned a note to the wall. The note contained three words:
THESE ADS SUCK
In the traditional business world, it was not considered normal to leave notes like this in the company kitchen. However, Page was not a traditional businessperson. For starters, he looked like a seventh-grader, with large, watchful eyes, a bowl haircut, and a tendency to speak in abrupt machine-gun bursts. His main leadership technique, if it could be called a technique, consisted of starting and sustaining big, energetic, no-holds-barred debates about how to build the best strategies, products, and ideas. To work at Google was to enter a giant, continuous wrestling match in which no person was considered above the fray.
This approach extended to the raucous all-employee street hockey games in the parking lot (“No one held back when fighting the founders for the puck,” recalled one player) and to the all-company Friday forums, where anyone could challenge the founders with any question under the sun, no matter how controversial—and vice versa. Like the hockey games, the Friday forums often turned into collision-filled affairs.
On the day Page pinned his note to the kitchen wall, Google’s competition with Overture was not going well. The project, which Google called the AdWords engine, was struggling to accomplish the basic task of matching search terms to appropriate ads. For example, if you typed in a search for a Kawasaki H1B motorcycle, you’d receive ads from lawyers offering help with your H-1B foreign visa application—precisely the kinds of failures that could doom the project. So Page printed out examples of these failures, scrawled his three-word verdict in capital letters, and pinned the whole mess to the kitchen bulletin board. Then he left.
Jeff Dean was one of the last people in Google’s office to see Page’s note. A quiet, skinny engineer from Minnesota, Dean was in most ways Page’s opposite: smiley, sociable, unfailingly polite, and known around the office for his love of cappuccinos. Dean had no immediate motive to care about the AdWords problem. He worked in Search, which was a different area of the company, and he was more than busy navigating his own urgent problems. But at some point that Friday afternoon, Dean walked over to the kitchen to make a cappuccino and spotted Page’s note. He flipped through the attached pages—and as he did, a thought flickered through his mind, a hazy memory of a similar problem he’d encountered a while back.
Dean walked back to his desk and started trying to fix the AdWords engine. He did not ask permission or tell anyone; he simply dove in. On almost every level, his decision made no sense. He was ignoring the mountain of work on his desk in order to wrestle with a difficult problem that no one expected him to take on. He could have quit at any point, and no one would have known. But he did not quit. In fact, he came in on Saturday and worked on the AdWords problem for several hours. On Sunday night, he had dinner with his family and put his two young children to bed. Around nine P.M., he drove back to the office, made another cappuccino, and worked through the night. At 5:05 A.M. on Monday, he sent out an email outlining a proposed fix. Then he drove home, climbed into bed, and went to sleep.
It worked. Dean’s fix unlocked the problem, instantly boosting the engine’s accuracy scores by double digits. On the strength of that improvement and subsequent others it inspired, AdWords swiftly came to dominate the pay-per-click market. Overture’s effort, hamstrung by infighting and bureaucracy, faltered. In the year following Dean’s fix, Google’s profits went from $6 million to $99 million. By 2014, the AdWords engine was producing $160 million per day, and advertising was providing 90 percent of Google’s revenues. The success of the AdWords engine, author Stephen Levy wrote, was “sudden, transforming, decisive, and, for Google’s investors and employees, glorious….It became the lifeblood of Google, funding every new idea and innovation the company conceived of thereafter.”
Yet that was not the strange part of the story. Because inside Google, there remained one key person for whom this incident didn’t mean much—for whom the events of that historic weekend registered so faintly that he barely remembered it. That person happened to be Jeff Dean.
One day in 2013, Google adviser Jonathan Rosenberg approached Dean for a book he was co-writing about Google. Rosenberg wanted to get Dean’s version of the story, so he started in—I want to talk to you about the AdWords engine, Larry’s note, the kitchen—naturally expecting Dean to pick up on the cue and launch into a reminiscence. But Dean didn’t do that. Instead, he just stared at Rosenberg with a pleasantly blank expression. Rosenberg, slightly confused, kept going, filling in detail after detail. Only then did Dean’s face dawn with the light of recognition—oh yeah!
This is not the response you would expect Dean to have. It is roughly the equivalent of Michael Jordan forgetting that he won six NBA titles. But that was how Dean felt and how he still feels today.
“I mean, I remember that it happened,” Dean told me. “But to be completely honest, it didn’t register strongly in my memory because it didn’t feel like that big of a deal. It didn’t feel special or different. It was normal. That kind of thing happened all the time.”
It was normal. Google personnel were interacting exactly as the kindergartners in the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge interacted. They did not manage their status or worry about who was in charge. Their small building produced high levels of proximity and face-to-face interaction. Page’s technique of igniting whole-group debates around solving tough problems sent a powerful signal of identity and connection, as did the no-holds-barred hockey games and wide-open Friday forums. (Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure.) They communicated in short, direct bursts. (Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.) Google was a hothouse of belonging cues; its people worked shoulder to shoulder and safely connected, immersed in their projects. Overture, despite its head start and their billion-dollar war chest, was handicapped by bureaucracy. Decision making involved innumerable meetings and discussions about technical, tactical, and strategic matters; everything had to be approved by multiple committees. Overture’s belonging scores would likely have been low. “It was a clusterfuck,” one employee told Wired magazine. Google didn’t win because it was smarter. It won because it was safer. *1
Let’s take a closer look at how belonging cues function in your brain. Say I give you a moderately tricky puzzle where the goal is to arrange colors and shapes on a map. You can work on it as long as you like. After explaining the task, I leave you to your work. Two minutes later I pop back in and hand you a slip of paper with a handwritten note. I tell you that the note is from a fellow participant named Steve, whom you’ve never met. “Steve did the puzzle earlier and wanted to share a tip with you,” I say. You read the tip and get back to work. And that’s when everything changes.
Without trying, you start working harder on the puzzle. Areas deep in your brain begin to light up. You are more motivated—twice as much. You work more than 50 percent longer, with significantly more energy and enjoyment. What’s more, the glow endures. Two weeks later, you are inclined to take on similar challenges. In essence, that slip of paper changes you into a smarter, more attuned version of yourself.
Here’s the thing: Steve’s tip was not actually useful. It contained zero relevant information. All the changes in motivation and behavior you experienced afterward were due to the signal that you were connected to someone who cared about you.
We get another example of how belonging cues work in an experiment that might be called Would You Give a Stranger Your Phone? It consists of two scenarios and a question.
SCENARIO 1: You are standing in the rain at a train station. A stranger approaches and politely says, “Can I borrow your cellphone?”
SCENARIO 2: You are standing in the rain at a train station. A stranger approaches and politely says, “I’m so sorry about the rain. Can I borrow your cellphone?”
QUESTION: To which stranger are you more likely to respond?
At first glance, there’s not a lot of difference between the two scenarios. Both strangers are making an identical request that involves a significant leap of trust. Besides, the more important factor here would seem to have less to do with them than with you; namely your natural disposition toward handing a valuable possession to a stranger. All in all, a reasonable person might predict that the two approaches would yield roughly equal response rates.
A reasonable person would be wrong. When Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School performed the experiment, she discovered that the second scenario caused the response rate to jump 422 percent. Those six words—I’m so sorry about the rain—transformed people’s behavior. They functioned exactly the way Steve’s tip did in the puzzle experiment. They were an unmistakable signal: This is a safe place to connect. You hand over your cellphone—and create a connection—without thinking.
“These are massive effects,” says Dr. Gregory Walton of Stanford, who performed the Steve’s tip experiment and others. “These are little cues that signal a relationship, and they totally transform the way people relate, how they feel, and how they behave.”*2
One of his most vivid examples of the power of belonging cues is a study by an Australian group that examined 772 patients who had been admitted to the hospital after a suicide attempt. In the months after their release, half received a series of postcards that read as follows:
Dear
It has been a short time since you were here at Newcastle Mater Hospital, and we hope things are going well for you. If you wish to drop us a note, we would be happy to hear from you.
Best wishes,
[signature]
Over the next two years, members of the group that received the postcards were readmitted at half the rate of the control group.
“A small signal can have a huge effect,” Walton says. “But the deeper thing to realize is that you can’t just give a cue once. This is all about establishing relationships, conveying the fact that I’m interested in you, and that all the work we do together is in the context of that relationship. It’s a narrative—you have to keep it going. It’s not unlike a romantic relationship. How often do you tell your partner that you love them? It may be true, but it’s still important to let them know, over and over.”
This idea—that belonging needs to be continually refreshed and reinforced—is worth dwelling on for a moment. If our brains processed safety logically, we would not need this steady reminding. But our brains did not emerge from millions of years of natural selection because they process safety logically. They emerged because they are obsessively on the lookout for danger.
This obsession originates in a structure deep in the core of the brain. It’s called the amygdala, and it’s our primeval vigilance device, constantly scanning the environment. When we sense a threat, the amygdala pulls our alarm cord, setting off the fight-or-flight response that floods our body with stimulating hormones, and it shrinks our perceived world to a single question: What do I need to do to survive?
Science has recently discovered, however, that the amygdala isn’t just about responding to danger—it also plays a vital role in building social connections. It works like this: When you receive a belonging cue, the amygdala switches roles and starts to use its immense unconscious neural horsepower to build and sustain your social bonds. It tracks members of your group, tunes in to their interactions, and sets the stage for meaningful engagement. In a heartbeat, it transforms from a growling guard dog into an energetic guide dog with a single-minded goal: to make sure you stay tightly connected with your people.
On brain scans, this moment is vivid and unmistakable, as the amygdala lights up in an entirely different way. “The whole thing flips,” says Jay Van Bavel, social neuroscientist at New York University. “The moment you’re part of a group, the amygdala tunes in to who’s in that group and starts intensely tracking them. Because these people are valuable to you. They were strangers before, but they’re on your team now, and that changes the whole dynamic. It’s such a powerful switch—it’s a big top-down change, a total reconfiguration of the entire motivational and decision-making system.”
All this helps reveal a paradox about the way belonging works. Belonging feels like it happens from the inside out, but in fact it happens from the outside in. Our social brains light up when they receive a steady accumulation of almost-invisible cues: We are close, we are safe, we share a future.
Here, then, is a model for understanding how belonging works: as a flame that needs to be continually fed by signals of safe connection. When Larry Page and Jeff Dean participated in the whole-company challenges, the anything-goes meetings, and the raucous hockey games, they were feeding that flame. When Jonathan protected the bad apple group from Nick’s negative behavior, he was feeding that flame. When a stranger apologizes for the rain before asking to borrow your cellphone, she is feeding that flame. Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.
This model helps us approach belonging less as a mystery of fate than as a process that can be understood and controlled. A good way to explore this process is by examining three situations where belonging formed despite overwhelming odds. The first involves soldiers in Flanders during the winter of 1914. The second involves office workers in Bangalore, India. The third involves what might be the worst culture on the planet.