Playing Well with Others

Posted on March 19, 2007

Learning from people in a variety of fields is essential to continued growth, asserts Laurence Steinberg (bio).


A lot of the work that I do now involves collaborating with other people, many of whom come from other disciplines and one of the things that I think at this level separates out successful from less successful people is, and I can't put it any more bluntly than this, being able to play well with others. Everybody at a certain level is smart enough to do it, but what I have found is that not everybody works well in a group. Not everybody is able to be interested in something outside their own area. I mean, for the work that I do now, and I'm trained as a developmental psychologist, I've had to learn law, criminology, neuroscience, policy and so on. I've enjoyed,I've loved learning about those things. But in order to learn about those things I had to be willing to listen to law professors explain how they think about something, and not look at it and say, "Oh, well, that's the wrong way to think about it because that's not how a psychologist would think about it." Instead to try to really enjoy, I look at my life as like a continuing graduate seminar and it's great, I mean, it's a lot of fun.

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Excerpted from interview with researcher in March 2006.

 

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