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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I’m taking a diversity training today which opened with the following:

It’s diversity and inclusion, not diversity and isolation, yet the sad fact is that despite our best intentions, many of us feel excluded and alone at work.

A study conducted by behavioral scientists Carr and Reece found that a whopping 40% of us feel that sense of isolation on the job.

That means that despite the nearly $8B businesses typically spend each year on D&I training, nearly half of the employees still don’t feel like they belong.

Obviously, the architects of this particular training didn’t decide to “spend less on candles.” Nor did they pivot into a deep discussion of training efficacy and reform, which I would have found fascinating, but isn’t remotely relevant to my job. The rest of the training segment, instead, fumbles towards the idea that cultivating Belonging is the real goal.

A focus on diversity can only go so far if the next step is assimilation or exclusion.

Out of curiosity, I tried to track down the initial study. Carr and Reece wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review which included the 40% claim, citing a separate HBR article written by an Ernst & Young executive. In turn, that one pointed to an E&Y press release. Supposedly, there was a “Belonging Barometer” survey of 1,000 adults. The trail ends with a link-rotted press release and no sign of any peer review or data.

This doesn’t stop stop the training from embedding an E&Y video and otherwise parroting points from the articles. It concludes with a quiz and a cutesy certificate. If I go make fun of it with my coworkers over drinks, we can bond. Perhaps the company would consider its slice of that $8 billion to be well spent.

Out of curiosity, I tried to track down the initial study.

This HBR article seems to be taking that number from the survey here. It's not clear which version of the UCLA Loneliness scale they're using, but see here for an example of V3 and considering a score over 43 to be "lonely", normal caveats about Likert Scale here. Survey was of "more than 20k" people ages 18 or older, and given that Cigna is an insurance company and the most likely way that they got that volunteer set together, it's prooobably not very representative of the average person, especially for lower-income individuals.

Some of this is being occluded because "more than 40%" is a garbage number: it's not used in the linked material, which generally focused on individual questions from the UCLA Loneliness scale (which... isn't really how that's supposed to work), and other summaries from Cigna that give exact numbers give different answers:

Of a possible total loneliness score of 80, the current average loneliness score in America is 45.7, up from 44 in 2018. Loneliness is defined as a score of 43 or higher on UCLA’s Loneliness Scale. Currently, 61% of Americans have a loneliness score of 43+, compared to 54% in 2018.

It's possible that Carr and Reece have a different paper on loneliness I'm not finding, but it's possible they either pulled from other summaries that broke out solely employed workers (who are less likely to score 43+), or got access to the raw data and pulled those numbers out.

In theory, this sort of "lonely" is tied to earlier mortality, though I expect there's some munging of what, exactly, they're measuring and who they're measuring for to make that comparison.

Thanks!

I'd ended up at that same article, and I think the 40% number comes from the Ey Belonging Barometer link, which is where I got the idea that it was 1000 adults. They claim their study "substantiated existing evidence" from the Multivu Cigna study. Unfortunately, the Barometer has vanished into the aether, since it just redirects to their generic press release page.

At least from diving the Wayback Machine (though not difference in live version), that's plausible as a source:

When social exclusion happens at work, people feel physically and emotionally isolated. More than 40 percent of respondents across generations and genders feel physically alone, or in other words, ignored.

But it's even less clear what that actually means, given

Millennials are most likely to feel ignored (38 percent), stressed (30 percent) and lonely (24 percent)

From the tea leaves, I think they took a summary of multiple survey response and munged them together, such that being ignored is a type of being 'isolated', but at that point you're letting the social scientists play telephone.

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