The famous Prison Experiment by Phillip Zimbardo comes to mind:
http://www.prisonexp.org/
"What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University. How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress." --Phillip Zimbardo
Another famous experiment, the Milgram Experiment, highlights a similar phenomenon, demonstrating how people will behave irrationally if their behavior is sanctioned by an authority figure. Both experiments reveal, somewhat cynically, the expression of irrational, morally compromised behavior under distressed or radically non-normal circumstances. One thing to take away, I venture, is the determination to be an independent thinker capable of going against the grain when your internal barometer informs you that a situation is corrupt, immoral, illegal, or generally offensive to your values.
Dan Ariely explores this theme in his book, Predictably Irrational (2008). An MIT behavioral economist, Ariely sets up a series of experiments that reveal deep fault lines in the ways people make decisions.
http://www.prisonexp.org/
"What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University. How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress." --Phillip Zimbardo
Another famous experiment, the Milgram Experiment, highlights a similar phenomenon, demonstrating how people will behave irrationally if their behavior is sanctioned by an authority figure. Both experiments reveal, somewhat cynically, the expression of irrational, morally compromised behavior under distressed or radically non-normal circumstances. One thing to take away, I venture, is the determination to be an independent thinker capable of going against the grain when your internal barometer informs you that a situation is corrupt, immoral, illegal, or generally offensive to your values.
Dan Ariely explores this theme in his book, Predictably Irrational (2008). An MIT behavioral economist, Ariely sets up a series of experiments that reveal deep fault lines in the ways people make decisions.
http://www.predictablyirrational.com/
In particular, he demonstrates that people have a very hard time following through on long-term decisions since our brains are hardwired to respond immediately to threats and opportunities. Futurist, Ray Kurzweil, makes a similar point when discussing technology trends and the difficulty humans have grasping the nature of predictable exponential growth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A
I've been thinking about this question all week, actually, of how to relate a moment when my behavior was not consistent with my values in a work situation. Interestingly, this class is a work situation, in a sense, and so the context of sharing is colored by that. How honest should I be? Context shapes that question. Am I communicating to a public forum, a corporate blog, an email thread shared by my colleagues, a blind-cc'd email to a group of my students or a group consisting of people who work on my GameZombie team? Am I on a psychoanalysts' couch; speaking to my sister or my best friend; or am I in a job interview? What I choose to say and how I calibrate it will invariably be shaped by what Malcolm Gladwell calls my 'practical intelligence,' or my ability to successfully negotiate the situation.
I thought of a negative experience that people might find interesting. When I was an Assistant Instructor in grad school I told the professor I was working for that his lectures were 'boring,' because I genuinely thought they were. He was being lazy, providing a class of 120 students with one lackluster lecture after another. I cared about the material and he was strangling it. So one day, I told him so. But I did it with insufficient tact. He was offended and resentful. Afterward, he vastly improved his presentations, but he always held it against me that he felt obligated to work harder than he wanted to. At one point he thanked me for pushing him to improve, but I think he only half meant it. On another occasion, he told me it's sometimes better to just lie and keep your mouth shut--implying that's what I should have done.
I'm glad I spoke my mind but I should have done so with greater empathy, using a softer approach to achieve the same results and avoid provoking an unpleasant response.
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