Xiaohongshu
Building bridges: Tyler Salley on thinking differently whilst working together.
3rd Year PhD Experimental Psychology
Tyler, a doctoral researcher in Experimental Psychology, believes we’re each uniquely positioned to solve the problems we’ve lived.
Tyler Salley has spent his career asking how people can work better together. Before UCL, he spent ten years in behavioural science and organisational development, most recently at Meta, where he led team effectiveness programmes for around 80,000 employees.
But his story starts in Chicago, where from the beginning he knew how important identity is.
“I would never say I’m from Illinois. I’m from Chicago.”
Growing up, Tyler found it hard to feel pride in his identity. Pop culture, the news and society kept telling him he didn’t belong, and that social pressure grew as he became the first in his family to graduate from college and earn a master’s degree, then moved into spaces with fewer people who looked like him. Owning his identity in spaces where he stood out taught him the value of building bridges across difference.
That idea sits at the heart of his PhD. Now in his third year, Tyler works across UCL’s Division of Psychology and Language Sciences and the School of Management, studying how political polarisation shapes collaboration. The question first occurred to him after one of his best friends cut ties with him over political differences. Tyler began to wonder how similar divides might play out in the workplace, where people aren’t as sure of their coworkers’ political beliefs, but they have to keep working together. Tyler’s dissertation explores how uncertain political signals shape whether people seek out or avoid information about a coworker’s political beliefs.
His studies suggest they do. In experiments, people tended to avoid finding out the politics of someone they sensed was different from them. However, people who felt certain about a person’s politics were more likely to ask them for advice, share information and feel safe taking risks with them, even when they disagreed. Knowing where someone stands, it turns out, can help build a bridge.
At UCL, Tyler is again one of few, as there are not as many Black PhD students or researchers as there should be. But this time, he knows that his place in these spaces is not something he needs to validate. “I deserve to be here, because I know that I had to overcome a lot more to be standing in this room,” he says. “I’m surrounded by brilliant people who like working with me, and that’s the best feedback you can get.”
“I deserve to be here, because I know that I had to overcome a lot more to be standing in this room, I’m surrounded by brilliant people who like working with me, and that’s the best feedback you can get.”
Tyler sees part of his role as making space for the people who come next. For him, that is why embracing identity is so important.
“I might be the first in a lot of these areas, but hopefully I’m not the last. We are uniquely positioned to solve the problems we’ve lived. We can be the mentor, the believer, and the friendly face in spaces where others feel like strangers.”