Make Yourself Useful: The Psychology of the Founder Reflex
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Doctor Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about the Founder Reflex. That's the almost automatic move that white women make toward building something new rather than looking for what people of color have already built, along with the specific psychological and cultural systems that produce that behavior.
Leslie Poston:I wanna note that this is not exclusive to white women. White men do their own version of it constantly, usually with more funding and less scrutiny. Our focus today is on white women because of the specific combination of social capital, progressive legitimacy, funding access, and gendered socialization around visible caring. That combination is what makes the Founder Reflex show up in their work at scale. Let's look at why this happens so predictably.
Leslie Poston:The behavior comes out of several interacting cultural and psychological systems that reward founding over joining, where visibility pays better than usefulness, and manufactured community pays better than the kind of community that already exists. Listeners who've been with us for a while will hear echoes of past episodes about individualism, civic trauma, and the comfort trap. I'll reference those episodes as we go forward rather than re explain what we learned in them. Let's get into it. So what are some examples of the Founder Reflex in action?
Leslie Poston:Perhaps a woman learns about an issue that moves her, and within weeks, she's launched a substack or a nonprofit, convened a book club, pitched a podcast, or trademarked a framework around that issue. Maybe she reads about climate grief and starts an email newsletter about it with no apparent awareness of the black and indigenous ecologists who've been writing about ecological loss for decades. Or in a city with a thriving Black woman owned DEI firm, a new white founded diversity consultancy opens and competes for the same contracts. Someone writes a book on care economies without engaging the Latina scholars who define the field. A trauma informed somatic practice launches, borrowing heavily from frameworks developed by Indigenous and African diasporic practitioners with no citations and no financial relationship with the originators.
Leslie Poston:This behavior has real consequences. Grant dollars that could have gone to the original organizers end up funding the less effective parallel initiative instead. Media coverage flows toward the newer and wider version. Attention fractures across duplicated projects when it could consolidate behind the original. Women of color already leading this work end up competing with their own ideas repackaged by people who have more social capital, who claim they arrived at these ideas independently.
Leslie Poston:There's a real human cost for those originating leaders as well. They watch the fields that they built get crowded. Newcomers get invited to speak about things that those newcomers learn from them. Well meaning emails arrive from the founders of parallel initiatives asking to meet for coffee, which in practice means asking for free consulting and access to relationships that they can leverage. That I didn't know anyone was already working on this defense comes up constantly.
Leslie Poston:We'll come back to this point later in the episode since motivated ignorance preserves the illusion of innocence while enabling this harmful behavior. McAdams spent decades studying how Americans tell their life stories, and the same thing kept showing up. He called it the redemptive self. The main character suffers, overcomes, and comes out the other side with something to offer. It's the feeling detailed in every American memoir, every TED Talk, and even every nonprofit origin story.
Leslie Poston:McAdams found that people who tell the stories of their lives this way do tend to be more generative and more civically engaged, so the redemptive self isn't inherently a problem. But it can lead to negative behaviors and beliefs, such as a specifically American arrogance and self righteousness. The founder identity fits inside the redemptive self. For example, you suffered, or you learned about suffering and were transformed. You noticed what others didn't.
Leslie Poston:You took action while others stayed passive or you built something. That narrative gives people a transformation moment and the idea of a legacy. Followership or joining doesn't give people that strong psychological reward. Marcus and Kitayama's work on self construal showed decades ago that American culture sits at the far end of the independent self construal spectrum. Later, cross cultural work by Vignoles and his collaborators explored the simple East West split and showed that in many cultures, selfhood runs on multiple dimensions.
Leslie Poston:But the research on the American psychology of the Founder Reflex, especially in White Americans and White women, has held up. People raised here in The US learned early to see themselves as the main character. After startup culture came in, Founder became an identity that anyone could inhabit with its own media coverage, its own funding, and even its own look. That mentality has spread into activism and philanthropy as well. Nonprofits started pitching themselves like startups.
Leslie Poston:Movement work started looking like entrepreneurship. And if you wanted to care about something publicly, you began to feel like you needed a brand and an origin story. Our episode on white supremacy culture named individualism as one of the characteristics that gets coded as a neutral professional norm, and that same thing is happening here. Psychological ownership forms through three things. Putting yourself into something, controlling it, and knowing it inside and out.
Leslie Poston:People who start something from scratch get all three rewards. People who join something that already exists get a different set of satisfactions like belonging, usefulness, and learning from people who have been doing the work longer. You might have heard me mention research on the IKEA effect in a past episode. That's where people who assembled their own furniture or folded their own origami, for example, valued what they made more than objectively better versions that were made by experts. Labor produced attachment, and the attachment distorted what the thing was actually worth.
Leslie Poston:The two findings explain the reward split for the founder reflex. Founding something gives people the psychological reward of an origin story, press coverage, speaking invitations, and a feeling of being the one who saw it first. Joining gives people less tangible and less outwardly visible rewards like belonging, usefulness, and relationships with others who've been doing the work longer. Founding and joining can both accomplish some amount of real world good, but joining often accomplishes more because it adds to an existing effort instead of fragmenting attention across a new one. But joining is psychologically harder.
Leslie Poston:It takes longer to feel good about. The psychological payoff is delayed and quiet while founding delivers the payoff upfront and in public. And that's why the founder reflex keeps showing up so consistently, especially in the culture of white women. The Reflex isn't irrational. It's a response to a reward structure.
Leslie Poston:White progressive spaces celebrate founders loudly and sustain the women who show up for other people's work almost not at all. So people are just following the incentives. Incentives certainly explain some of the problem, but incentives alone don't explain why certain people chase them so hard or why the same personality pattern keeps appearing from white women entering these spaces and co opting the work. For that, we need context from research on narcissism. Let's talk about a construct called communal narcissism.
Leslie Poston:You already understand agentic narcissism, the kind that you picture when you hear the word inflated self regard about achievement, intelligence, or status, with grandiosity and entitlement as the main engine driving it. Communal narcissism is the same structure expressed through the prosocial domain. Communal narcissists rate themselves at the top of every warm, caring, moral dimension they can think of. They seek admiration for being good people with the same intensity. Agentic narcissists seek admiration for being successful ones.
Leslie Poston:The behavioral finding is what makes the construct useful for us. In the research, communal narcissists didn't behave more prosocially than average. They just rated themselves that way, and they expected others to rate them that way. But their actual behavior doesn't back their self rating up. The gap between what they say about themselves and what they actually do is how you spot this.
Leslie Poston:The construct has been validated across 16 samples using the communal narcissism inventory. This inventory accurately identifies the self rating pattern in communal narcissists, and the people that it flags are different from the ones we talk about with standard narcissism measures. The Founder role gives these communal narcissists what they want, recognition for warmth, moral exceptionalism, and status as the one who cares the most. Supporting someone else's leadership gives these people none of that. And this isn't a diagnosis of anyone listening, and it certainly doesn't apply to every white woman that's co opting these spaces.
Leslie Poston:I'm simply turning our attention to a cultural setup that selects for and rewards communal narcissistic expression in white progressive activism and philanthropy and then elevates people who show up that way. White women occupy these spaces at scale, which means the field is handing out the specific reward that communal narcissists are oriented toward to the demographic most likely wanting to receive it. In white progressive spaces, that reward structure produces a lot of performed care, but not much practiced care. And the women actually practicing care don't get the mic. Let's talk about what happens when movements get taken over.
Leslie Poston:Researcher Taiwo named this elite capture. What happens when a movement grows and gets taken over directionally and substantively by whoever has the most social and material capital in the room? Identity based framings can speed this up rather than slow it down because the people with capital often share identity markers that let them position themselves as representative voices for the whole group. His argument is that elite capture is structural. It's happening when nobody organizes against it.
Leslie Poston:Historically, this has been called movement capture with origins in a study of the early NAACP's relationship with its largest funder, a predominantly white philanthropic foundation called the Garland Fund. The NAACP had been focused on anti lynching legislation and fighting mob violence against Black Americans. The Garland Fund tied its largest ever grant to educational desegregation work. Over the following decades, the NAACP's anti lynching work faded and educational desegregation became the organization's central fight. That shift is still visible in their agenda today.
Leslie Poston:Women of Color Against Violence edited an anthology called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, which documented the nonprofit industrial complex in more detail. The five zero one c three structure absorbs movements. It requires them to professionalize, chase funding on terms set by foundations, and work inside legal structures that prevent more radical organizing. White women founding new nonprofits to work on issues women of color are already organizing around sit inside that white progressive structure. Most of them have read the books and listened to the conversation black women and black men are having enough to be aware that they're doing this, although they may revert to motivated ignorance if pressed.
Leslie Poston:They choose to found instead of join or support anyway because the reward structure makes it worth it. The aggregate effect is movement capture one five zero one c three at a time. And this aggregate shows up predictably because the infrastructure is built to produce it. Progressive philanthropy and media fund founders, publicize founders, and reward founders. And in white progressive spaces, that means they fund, publicize, and reward white women.
Leslie Poston:Movement capture is the result. Back to the I didn't know defense that keeps coming up. Mills developed the concept of white ignorance as a specific form of motivated ignorance that is socially organized and actively maintained. This not knowing takes work. Someone has to curate your information environment so certain things don't reach you, and that curation runs through news feeds, professional networks, reading lists, podcast queues, and even your friend groups.
Leslie Poston:In a racially stratified society, all of those filters do the work without anyone needing to intend it. When a white woman says she didn't know anyone was already working on an issue, she is often describing her information environment accurately. That ignorance is real up to a point. The environment that produced it was built to produce exactly that ignorance. But as we discussed in the last segment, most white women in progressive spaces have read the books and sat through the trainings, most of them presented by black and brown women.
Leslie Poston:The not knowing is serving a specific interest. It's letting founding something feel like a discovery. I heard someone on the Internet call it Columbus ing the other day, which I think is accurate. Cooper's book, Beyond Respectability, examines what she calls the great race man paradigm. From the late eighteen hundreds through the black power era, the field of racial leadership was narrated through the lives and ideas of men.
Leslie Poston:Women's intellectual contributions got absorbed into the field without attribution. Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauline Murray, and Tony Gade Bombara each developed theoretical frameworks that shaped conversations later credited to men, and that erasure is fully on the record. The contemporary version works the same way. Continuing to, quote, not know whose work came first is the same move Cooper documented in the historical record. Women leading current conversations in anti racism, mutual aid, abolitionist organizing, and environmental justice have intellectual genealogies that go back more than a century.
Leslie Poston:White women who show up thinking they have noticed something new are working inside frameworks that those women built. Mohanty's essay Under Western Eyes laid out how Western feminists construct non Western women as objects of saving rather than as agents with their own analyses and movements. The same construction happens when white American women encounter black and brown women's movements in The US. If you heard our white supremacy culture episode, Birch's point about the rush to get it just right comes back here. Urgency and perfectionism as individual stances end up reinforcing the system by rooting all the effort into personal purity.
Leslie Poston:The framework Birch was responding to came from Akun's list of characteristics of white supremacy culture, which came out of a workbook Akun coauthored with Kenneth Jones for social change groups. Akun has since noted that the list wasn't formal research, but their observation still holds true. The episode about Swifties and K Dot Nation set up a distinction I wanna revisit. One kind of community is manufactured and purchasable, organized around a brand people buy into through merchandise and membership. And the other kind of community already exists within a cultural practice with its own history and leadership that was there before anyone else showed up.
Leslie Poston:The Founder Reflex applied to activism produces the first kind of purchased community. People build a container, invite others to buy in, and then belonging flows through newsletter subscriptions, retreats, and courses. The movement becomes the product, and the founder becomes the brand. Showing up to existing organizing produces the second kind of community. People attend what is already happening, taking direction from leaders who have been doing the work longer.
Leslie Poston:They bring what is useful when it's asked for. Belonging gets earned through usefulness over time. Both versions can scale a movement, but the Founder version scales ego and the Founder's own platform first. The joining version scales impact and relational trust among people who need to count on each other. The infrastructure of mainstream progressive philanthropy and media coverage was built almost entirely for the first version of community.
Leslie Poston:The second has to work so much harder to be legible to that infrastructure, which is one reason it stays smaller and quieter than its actual impact warrants. A few writers and researchers have documented the longer history of white women treating women of color's organizing as raw material for their own success. Kendall's book Hood Feminism makes the case directly across American history. Zakaria's Against White Feminism traces how white women branded feminism as apolitical individual empowerment while simultaneously leaning on racial privilege. Hamad's White Tears, Brown Scars documented how the strategic deployment of white women's distress in interracial conflict shifts social costs onto women of color.
Leslie Poston:Hamad went deep on the tears of white women specifically. When a white woman cries in a movement setting after being challenged, the social cost of continuing the conversation accrues to the women of color who are present. And then they end up attending to the white woman's feelings and softening whatever critique they were making until the disruption passes. The tears function as an exit from accountability while preserving the self image of someone who cares. Our politeness protocol episode covered an adjacent version of this with the weaponization of professionalism.
Leslie Poston:The crying version operates on the same principle through a different channel. Cargill has been making a related argument publicly for years. Her knowledge empathy action framework names three components of real allyship. Her sharpest line is that anti racism can't rest as a self improvement space for white women. The Founder Reflex turns anti racism into something close to that, with the point being the becoming of a better self and occasional actions in service of that self improvement.
Leslie Poston:Gendered socialization adds another layer. White women are raised to be seen as helpful and to produce visible caring, with social reward attached to the perception of warmth, a relational skill. Supporting someone else's leadership without recognition is cutting against that socialization. Founding something caring shaped satisfies that socialization. The Founder Reflex takes the shape of socially rewarded femininity.
Leslie Poston:Kellerman's book Followership argues that follower engagement is as consequential as leadership. She developed a typology of five follower types based on level of engagement and argued that the skills of engaged followership can be learned. Engaged followership is a specific set of behaviors that have real impact. For example, people show up when invited and sit it out when they're not. They bring whatever resources the people running the work have asked for.
Leslie Poston:They defer to the existing leaders on strategy and framing and decline to write the mission statement or give the interview when the person running the work would be the better speaker. They do the small logistical labor that nobody puts on their LinkedIn, like taking notes or sticking around for cleanup. The infrastructure for white people to practice this already exists. Showing up for racial justice or surge was cofounded by Carla Wallace and others. The organization has about 200 chapters across the country supporting white people and doing racial justice work that's grounded in the vision of black leaders.
Leslie Poston:The Reflex to found something new as a choice made inside available options since the option of joining what's already there exists. The Marcus and Kitayama work we covered earlier treats independent self construal as a cultural tendency acquired through socialization, which means it can be refined over time. People who spend sustained time in roles they didn't create, in groups where they were not the center, develop different cognitive and relational habits. The skill of being useful without being central can be built, but it requires practice since the surrounding culture doesn't teach it, and white culture often punishes it. The Founder Reflex is a trained response.
Leslie Poston:Noticing that comes first. The longer work is replacing it with the practice of making yourself useful. The next time you feel the urge to start something, consider a few questions before you act on it. Look for who is already doing this work. Then look again.
Leslie Poston:Have you looked hard enough to really find them? The system has made that hard. What would it mean to show up to their work and support it rather than launching your own? Whose intellectual labor are you building on, and have you credited it financially or publicly? What would you lose by joining, but what would the movement gain?
Leslie Poston:This episode is one piece of a longer conversation about whose work gets seen and who gets to absorb it into their resume. Our episodes on comfort and community collapse pair with this one along with the white supremacy culture episode. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Dr Leslie Poston, signing off. As always, until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Creators and Guests
