---
title: The Chameleon
teaser: 'How we treat our coworkers and clients will affect our projects more than
  we might think.

  '
tags: playbook,happiness,apprenticeship
author: Paul Smith
published_on: 2014-12-16
---

"It’s going great. The product is cool and so far things are going well." I was
happy to hear that a good friend of mine was happy with his new job.

After a bit more chatting, we started discussing the talk I was preparing for
RubyConf. When I touched on the "Chameleon Effect" his eyes lit up. What I
described happened to him daily at his new job.

## The Problem

Although my friend loved the company and the product, there was a member of the
team that made him feel as if he was an incompetent programmer. This happens far
too often. Coworkers treating others like they are foolish, open source
maintainers treating new developers like they aren't capable of contributing.

The question is, _does how we are treated affect our work_? Does it affect how
we build our product? If so, _how much_?

Let’s turn to psychology and behavioral science to figure out how this might
affect learning, performance and perception.

## The Experiment

How we treat our coworkers and clients will affect our projects more than we
might think.

A group of researchers contacted a command training school in Israel to run an
experiment. They told the training officers at the school that the new recruits
had been put through a preliminary test and that they had been assigned one of
three different statuses.

The three statuses designated command potential based on various tests. The
three groups were high, regular and unknown command potential (due to
insufficient information).

The trainees did not know anything about these scores; only the training
officers did.

At the end of their 15 week training camp the soldiers took a standardized test
and the researchers found that those with "high" command potential scored an
average of 79.98, those with "unknown" scored 72.43 and those with "regular"
scored 65.18.

## The Predictions

So what does this mean? It seems that the psychologists accurately predicted
which soldiers would do best. It probably wouldn't mean much, except that the
test was rigged.

_The statuses were completely invented_. The soldiers never took any tests
before their training. The real test was what would happen when the training
officers thought that some people had more potential than others.

When a person is treated a certain way, they tend to take on those attributes,
like a chameleon blending in to its surroundings.  Both the trainers and the
students were chameleons. The trainers changed how they treated their students
based on what they _thought_ the students abilities were. The students then took
on the characteristics that their trainers thought they had. In psychology, this
is called the [Pygmalion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect) and
[Golem effects](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_effect). The Pygmalion effect
refers to people taking on positive attributes and the Golem effect refers to
people taking on negative attributes. The combination of the effects is referred
to in [Sway](http://www.amazon.com/Sway-Irresistible-Pull-Irrational-Behavior/dp/0385530609)
as the Chameleon Effect.

## The Solution

One of the things I loved about my apprenticeship with thoughtbot was that I was
treated just like every other full time developer. Everyone expected that I
could learn what I needed to, and helped along the way. I never felt that I was
dumb or inferior. When I asked a question, I didn’t fear that I would be thought
of as incapable or inferior.

Treating people as competent, skilled and valuable will actually make them
_more_ competent, skilled and valuable. Treating people like fools will cause
them to act more like a fool.

We can do better. In fact, it's [already being done](https://github.com/madrobby/zepto/issues/1041).
The next great open source contributor might just need a little confidence in
themselves. Share some of yours.