When a thorny political topic comes up at work, do you jump into the fray to express yourself or do you prefer to stay out of it? For many of us, the second option seems safer.

While there’s an intuitive appeal to staying out of controversial issues in the hopes of dodging conflict, Ike Silver, an assistant professor of marketing, wondered, “Could it backfire?”

We’ll learn more about his research today. We’ll also hear from two economists about the future of capitalism.

Should You Just Stay Out of It?

Silver and his coauthor were intrigued by the idea that celebrities and other high-profile people often try to avoid commenting on hot-button issues. Think Taylor Swift’s long avoidance of talking politics.

To understand if this was actually helping people’s public image, the researchers conducted 11 experiments. In one, they focused on the controversial issue of football players kneeling during the national anthem. Participants saw a brief video clip of the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs responding to a reporter’s question by saying, “there’s really nothing to talk about.” Half the participants were told that the owner was speaking to a mostly liberal audience, and half were told it was a mostly conservative audience.

Participants who believed it was a mostly liberal audience thought the owner opposed kneeling during the national anthem, while those who believed his audience was mostly conservative thought the opposite. In other words, people thought the owner was being calculated in his neutrality to avoid angering his audience.

And, strikingly, participants found this behavior less sincere, honest, and trustworthy than outright opposition. “Many participants, whether they were on the right or the left, said they’d trust him more if he just came out and disagreed with them,” Silver says.

“People tend to interpret attempts to ‘stay out of it’ as strategic concealment for some self-interested reason,” Silver explains. “They assume if someone is saying, ‘I’d really rather not get into this,’ what they believe deep down probably contradicts what their audience believes.”

You can read more about the research here.

What Will the Future of Capitalism Look Like?

A central question many economists wrestle with is how economies can continue to grow and innovate in ways that are sustainable over the long term.

Philippe Aghion, a professor at the College de France and at INSEAD, recently spoke with Kellogg’s Ben Jones, a professor of strategy, to discuss innovation, competition, and designing a more equitable capitalist future. Below is an excerpt from their conversation, which you can read in full here.

AGHION: COVID revealed some of the weaknesses of capitalism, which are different from one country to another. While the U.S. is the best model of innovation—with its basic research funding, venture capital, and institutional investors—it might not be the best social model. During COVID in the U.S., a lot of people lost their jobs and their health insurance and fell into poverty when they needed support. We didn’t see anything like this in Scandinavia or Germany. Which raises a big question for debate: Can you be innovative like the U.S. and protective and inclusive like Denmark?

I think there are policies that can make you both more innovative and more inclusive. For example, when you lose your job in Denmark, for three years, you get 90 percent of your salary. The state helps you find a new job and they retrain you.

Another example is education. We know there are many “lost Einsteins,” or very smart children born to poor families that cannot give them a proper education and aspirations to become inventors. Now, what’s very interesting is that Finland had a reform in 1970 to make education high quality and very inclusive. With this inclusive education system, they overcame the “lost Einsteins” phenomenon. When you do that, you manage to have a more innovative economy, because more people can become inventors and it’s more inclusive.

JONES: There are features of markets that are great for innovation, but the idea that the market left to itself is going to get it right is far off. If we starve the pipeline of future innovators by not offering high-quality access to K-12 education in the United States, these lost Einsteins are really lost. And that’s on public policy to get that right.

AGHION: Education and competition policy are as effective at making growth more inclusive as taxation.

LEADERSHIP TIP

“The dopier the story, the more people may groan—but years later they remember it,”

—Professor Mitchell Petersen in Insight, on why you should include stories, and not just data, in your presentations.