"Everyone here works like this"

You may feel that your hours aren't really yours to set. It's the culture. Everyone in the department stays late, and everyone answers email in the evening. Anyone who didn't would stand out, and you've a fair idea of what people would think of them. You know this because you know what you've thought about Tom.

Look more closely at that last sentence, though. You know what you think. What everyone else thinks, you've inferred from what they do, and they've inferred what you think from what you do.

Social psychologists have a name for the situation where most people in a group privately doubt a norm but go along with it because they assume everyone else believes in it. They call it pluralistic ignorance. Each person sees the others complying and takes the compliance as conviction. The norm holds up even though few people in the group actually believe in it.

Christin Munsch, Cecilia Ridgeway and Joan Williams tested whether this applies to working arrangements. In an experiment, they asked people to evaluate an employee who'd requested flexible working, and also to say how they thought other people would view that employee. People consistently believed that others would judge the flexible worker more harshly than they did themselves. The stigma that everyone feared was partly a shared mistake about what other people thought. In a second study, the researchers found that when people were told that most senior staff in an organisation worked flexibly, the bias against employees who asked for flexible hours shrank.

Think of your office at half past six. There are five people at their desks. It's quite possible that each of the five would rather be at home. Each may be staying partly because the other four are, and each may be assuming that the other four are there out of a devotion they privately don't share. You've been one of the four for each of them. None of the five has ever said out loud that they'd rather be at home, so none of them knows.

I can't tell you that this is true of your workplace. Some cultures really do demand the hours, and the people at the top mean it. But you can find out, more easily than you'd think. Ask a colleague you trust what they make of the hours, and you may be surprised by the answer. And note the second study. The thing that reduced the bias was seeing senior people work differently. You're a senior person to eight others. Whether or not you chose the culture, you now help to keep it going, and you're in a position to be the first visible exception. Chapter 14 comes back to what your hours do to your team.