A Cognitive Theory of Community

A talk presented at DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2025

Sometimes I find myself on stage giving a talk. It’s a thing that just kind of happens to me from time to time—I find I have something to say, someone (looking at you @floord@hachyderm.io) feels like maybe they want to hear it, and then plane tickets get purchased and I find myself in the unenviable position of having to make a slide deck.

A big part of my professional (and personal) life revolves around building and sustaining communities of various sorts. I don’t know that I’m the best at it, but I certainly am good at giving advice.

And a big part of my past life was studying neuroscience, professionally. Not doing it, but studying it. I picked up a few things along the way.

Turns out these two things combine naturally. Watch the video above, or read the transcript below to find out how.

Also, thanks to all the organizers at DevOpsDays AMS, and those folks who asked so many questions afterwards! Thank you!

Transcript

Just real quick, this being a relatively new audience for me, how many of you are involved in—I mean aside from the organizers—in community building communities at your organizations? A few of you. Okay, well the rest of you are still going to get something really good out of this talk I think, but for those few of you here in the audience who are privileged to work with communities, you’re in for a treat I hope.

Yeah, so I’m Don Goodman. I’m the head of marketing at Formance. My own background is actually in—well it started in philosophy of neuroscience. I did a lot of backend engineering along the way to where I am now, but just to give some bonafides that I have at least a little bit of a clue what I’m talking about because I studied neurotransmitters and squids, as one does.

But before I start talking about community and before I start talking about neurotransmitters, I want to talk about this record shop and this experience that I had with them. So I collect vinyl. As many of you who collect vinyl know, there’s an online marketplace called Discogs where you can go put in your wish list and find stores that’ll sell them to you. I live in Lisbon, the store is in Porto. I placed an order with them over Discogs and everything went wrong—like every imaginable thing went wrong with this order. It was delayed, there was no communication, they only shipped half the things that I ordered. I’m like, “Well this is ridiculous, I’m going to leave a negative review.” And I did, and within 5 minutes they called me on the telephone. Like, who does that?

And I’m just like, what could you possibly say in these circumstances? And then they said—and this is really important—they went on to say a number of very right things, things that we’re going to talk about today. First of all, they apologize. They’re like, “Look, we fucked up. Your review is absolutely factual. That’s true, we did that. That’s on us. We’re really sorry. You don’t have to retract the review. You never have to do business with us again, but we want to let you know genuinely that we apologize for this. We feel bad about it. And you’re not the only person who’s had this kind of experience, and we number two want to change that. We’ve removed our store off of Discogs because it has been a serious bottleneck in our customer service, and we are no longer going to do business there because it creates bad outcomes for everybody.” I’m like, okay, this is getting interesting.

And then they say, “And you know what, screw it, here’s our WhatsApp number. If you want to place an order, just text us. Shipping’s on us now and for always—lifetime free shipping no matter how small the order. Don’t worry about it if you want to order from us again, which you don’t have to.” And then finally they said, “Also, next time you’re in Porto, you should come by the warehouse. It’s not open to the public, but you know, let’s sit and talk shop and drink a few beers and dig through crates.” And I’m like, at the end of this I’m like, screw this, I’m removing the bad review. And I now buy exclusively through them because they did a number of things that we’re going to talk about in this talk today, which really surprised the heck out of me because retailers don’t usually get this. And I think this is something that we can learn from.

So chapter one, let’s talk neurochemistry. So the core of neurochemistry is neurotransmitters. Are there folks in the room who know what neurotransmitters are broadly speaking? Right, so neurotransmitters are the medium of communication between the neurons in our brain, the rest of our body.

Skipping ahead, but the interesting thing is, you know, we think of neurons as being electrical beasts, right? And when you have electrical connections, there are three possible signals: there’s high voltage, there’s low voltage, there’s floating voltage. But contrary to popular belief, neurons don’t communicate with each other using electricity—they communicate by passing chemicals. And there’s well over a hundred different kinds of these neurotransmitters that are used. You may have heard of some of these. There’s a lot of them. This is just a fraction of them.

But what makes this very interesting is that by having over 100 different kinds of neurotransmitters, we can have differentiated signaling in the brain and in the body. So the body and the brain assign—I want to be very careful not to anthropomorphize here—but they assign meaning to these things. So for example, serotonin is a neurotransmitter associated with happiness. This is why those of us on anti-depressants are taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which ensures that there’s a steady stream of serotonin in our brain.

But there’s one in particular that I really want to talk about because it’s a lot of fun, and that’s oxytocin. Oxytocin is the neurotransmitter of connection and bonding. You can imagine why I want to talk about this in a community talk. It facilitates attachment between individuals. It increases the awareness of social cues. It increases empathy for other people. It’s the neurological underpinning of trust. It increases feelings of attachment and bonding. It enhances social memory—that is to say, memory that we have of particular social situations involving other people. It creates a sense of belonging in a group.

So oxytocin is literally the neurotransmitter of love. It’s also literally the neurotransmitter for community. So if oxytocin is the neurotransmitter for community, how do we leverage that? Because we should be, and in many cases we are.

So what triggers oxytocin release? We can imagine it’s a lot of common sense, but I think it’s worth repeating what a lot of these options that we have are. First of all is simply feeling welcome, which is something the crew here is trying to do very much for y’all with the—what’s the name of that program with the conference buddy? The conference buddy, right? Helping people feel welcome.

Receiving a genuine compliment. Oh, I failed to mention that phone call. He’s like, “By the way, your musical taste is impeccable.” I’m like, “Yeah, it is. It works.”

Knowing you’re being talked about behind your back. Right? There’s nothing really better than hearing from somebody else that was like, “Oh, so-and-so is bragging on you the other day.” I’m like, “Really? That’s awesome.”

Receiving helpful advice—not being mansplained to, but timely, actionable advice when you need it. Being listened to. Having your problem solved when you want your problem solved. Sometimes you don’t want your problem solved. Hearing a relatable story. Having your feelings or opinions validated—that’s something else the representative did right. He’s like, “Yeah, we screwed you. Sorry about that. You’re right to feel bad about it.”

Receiving something of value in a context-sensitive way—this is real important for those of us who hand out stickers, and I’ll have a little more to say about that. Recognition that you are part of the in-group.

But doing it once—only doing it only once—doesn’t work. If you do it once, you will trigger serotonin release. They’ll feel happy. You might even trigger norepinephrine release, which is the neurotransmitter for infatuation and crushes. But that goes away really quickly. Those neurotransmitters are not very long-lasting. In order to actually trigger oxytocin release, you have to do it over and over and over and over again. They must be repeated. They must be consistent. And the reason it works with my vinyl dealer is he responds to WhatsApp consistently, quickly, repeatedly. Moment he drops the ball, things are off. Can’t help it. That’s just the facts.

So when it all goes wrong—those of you who may have seen some of my earlier talks know I tend to go to dark places pretty quickly, so this is now where we’re going to take a dark turn in this talk, just a heads up—because there is a dark side to oxytocin.

So oxytocin increases group think. You tend to agree with the people in your in-group, disagree with the people with your out-group because you have these feelings of bonding. It increases the propensity for group-serving deception. You want to defend your in-group that you’re a part of because you don’t want that in-group destroyed. An attack on the in-group is an attack on you because you love these people—literally love these people—and you will lie on their behalf.

It increases sensitivity to contagion cues. This is a very interesting evolutionary response because when you see your family, for example—to give a more typical example—when you see your family is feeling unwell, you’re more likely to notice it than if you see a stranger that’s feeling unwell.

It increases the magnitude of fear responses. This is all aligned with the other things that I’ve been saying, but it tends to make you more excited when you see something scary happening. It increases the magnitude of anger responses. Those of you who’ve seen toxic communities go wrong know exactly what this looks like. A lot of people in the United States also know exactly what this looks like right now.

Oxytocin makes breaking hearts go viral real quick. We’ve all seen this. When a community breaks, when somebody does something that damages or fractures a community, people take to—God help us—the Twitters or wherever the kids are going to these days, and they talk about it a lot, more so than they talk about the good things that are happening within the community.

So oxytocin is also literally community in all the negative, awful, bad ways that we have seen toxic communities be. All of those toxic traits that we’ve seen are the result of an oxytocin response.

So what does this mean? How do we put this together? Let’s talk about a general unified theory of community given all of this information.

Community building is a practice of cultivating love, really and truly. Like, I worked in DevRel for a long time, and we used to talk about developer love, and I used to think it was a metaphor. It ain’t a metaphor. Because cultivating love means triggering oxytocin release.

And so theory one: our jobs as community management people, who work in communities, community builders—our jobs are done well when we trigger oxytocin release, and our jobs are done poorly otherwise. But theories are testable.

So testable hypothesis one: treating people with kindness and respect—a running theme of my talks—will improve your numbers, assuming you’re being measured on these things, more than anything else you can do on a person-by-person basis. Right now I’m not talking about activities that involve large groups of people like sending out newsletters or something like that, but any kind of activity that involves directly interacting with an individual—talking on forums, running a conference. Kindness and respect are the watchwords. And if you can remember to do that, then the hypothesis is your numbers, whatever they are, are going to improve.

And testable hypothesis two: treating people with disrespect will kill your community very, very quickly. I use the word “kill” on purpose here because the negative reactions that come through the flow of oxytocin happen very, very fast.

So are there—this is the question that you should be thinking about—are there repeatable mechanisms available that trigger oxytocin release? And will those efforts yield movements in your North Star metrics?

Because programs that do not trigger oxytocin serve no purpose whatsoever as far as community building is concerned. They may serve other purposes like SEO or, I don’t know, marketing or something like that, but within the community space, they serve no purpose.

So blog posts and stickers are not good enough. They’re not good enough. Stickers don’t trigger oxytocin unless and except those stickers give someone a sense of belonging and feeling like they’re part of an in-group, which is why GitHub’s sticker campaign worked so well—is for many years, that’s precisely what it did. It made people feel like part of something bigger than they were, like they were part of a community. But if you just got a sticker with your logo on it, it’s not doing anything for you except sending money to the sticker company.

Same with blog posts. Like if you’re just talking about your latest product release and blasting it out there, like, nobody really cares. It’s not really something necessarily of value to them unless you’re announcing a feature that they’ve been waiting for, but that’s only a small portion of your audience. You’re not really providing something of value in a context-sensitive way in either of these cases.

And so you need to think about what you should be doing instead. And I don’t have the answer to that, but you need to be thinking about what you should be doing instead to try to provide value to your community in a context-sensitive way that makes them feel like they belong as part of the in-group.

Yeah, so bragging about your latest release? Not good enough. Because it’s—this is key—it’s never about you. Sticker with just a logo on it? That’s about you. It should always be about them. What are you giving them that recognizes that you’re thinking about them and not just yourself?

We want to make developers, or the members of our community if they’re not developers, the hero of their own story—not the hero of your story. And you’re not the hero of their story. They’re the hero of their own story.

So we want to do things that build personal relationships so that we can get to know people, we can understand what their stories are, we can understand how to make them the hero of their own story. And we want to do things that encourage others to build personal relationships in the same way because we want members of our community building each other up.

But for reasons stated previously, triggering oxytocin release means we risk toying with people’s emotions, and we have to be very careful about what we’re doing here because our job is akin to getting members hooked on Molly at scale with no oversight.

Right? Oxytocin is perhaps the greatest, most powerful drug on the planet, and our job is to use it to our advantage. And so that comes with a certain degree of responsibility.

So oxytocin and you. This is the final part here. Takeaway one of seven: oxytocin is a neurotransmitter responsible for love. I think we got that.

Oxytocin is the neurotransmitter responsible for group bonding.

Treating people with kindness and respect is what triggers oxytocin release.

Repeated, consistent action is necessary for oxytocin release. Otherwise, you just get serotonin or norepinephrine, which are far less interesting to us as community builders.

Oxytocin makes entire communities sensitive to the negative treatment of individual members. This is why we have to be real careful with things around codes of conduct. We have to be careful to handle toxic community members very carefully. We have to work hard to curate the kinds of content that are being shared, the kinds of interactions that are being offered, because it doesn’t take very much. There’s an English saying: “One bad apple spoils the bunch.” And it’s very true, especially in communities like this.

Six: Remember, love and strong communities depend upon oxytocin. I think that goes without saying at this point. And we must be sensitive to the emotional effects of our actions because this is precisely what we’re doing. We are invoking, evoking emotions in people—very, very strong, powerful emotions in people. And we need to be mindful of the effects that these efforts have.

So successful community programs are ones that engage in patterns of repeated activities that demonstrate kindness and respect for its members. I see people taking pictures, so I’ll pause for just a moment.

And conclusion two: failing community programs are ones that engage in activities that demonstrate a lack of respect for its members. And lack of respect includes neglect. If you neglect your community, you’re effectively setting it up to be nastily toxic.

So kindness and respect are table stakes. You can and you should go much further, a lot further. There’s a lot of work to be done beyond merely setting these sorts of things up because we want our communities—well, we want our communities to be engaged around certain topics. We want them to do certain things. They play a role in our business ecosystem. They play a role in our larger lives. They interact with each other. So this is just like baseline community building stuff. There’s so much more, of course, that we have to do on top of all of this.

So that’s me. That’s the talk. I have to put in a word for my employer who paid for me to get here. Thank you, Clem. I know you’re watching right now. I work for Formance, we build open-source financial infrastructure. And that’s my cognitive theory of community.

Support this blog

If you enjoy reading this blog, I encourage you to consider purchasing a book or print to show your support. And if you're into analog photography, check out my new mobile app Crown + Flint.