Tom Guarriello argues that who you are depends less on fixed traits than on your situation. Drawing on Milgram's obedience study and Abu Ghraib, he shows how ordinary people act differently in different environments. He contends that online platform design is social engineering: the structures and incentives we build either encourage civility or aggression.
Oh, hi, it's Tom Guarriello. I've gotten some really interesting responses to a video I made a couple of videos ago, I guess, about "It's Just the Internet," and I wanted to just talk a bit more about something that's connected to that for me. You know, we carry around with us, each of us, kind of a our own private theory of existence and theory of personality. You know, we each think something about who we are and who people are and what accounts for behavior and the way we interact with one another and so on. And most of us carry around a model that says that, you know, we, each of us as individuals, you and me and you and all, all of us, are kind of consistent bundles of traits and beliefs and behaviors, and that those bundles kind of move through the world, you know, and encounter different kinds of situations and deal with those situations by virtue of who we are. Well, that's a comforting theory for us to carry around. And it's really the theory that underlies statements like, "I am." You know, like, "I am a good person." I am faithful. I am honest. I am hardworking, and so on. Though all those I am statements are founded in that kind of a belief system, you know, one that says I'm me and these traits, these bundles of things is me. Well, the history of, of social psychology research shows those theories to, to be, um, not very well borne out by the facts. What seems to happen, and this has been dramatically, um, demonstrated in experiments like the New Haven study, uh, and the Stanford Student Prison Study, which I'll put links to up here. Um, those— research in that line of thinking demonstrates that under the right conditions, um, most of us are capable of behaving in ways that we would never predict that we would be capable of behaving in. Doing things that we would never believe we would do. In the New Haven study, that involved just normal people delivering what they believed to be extraordinarily painful amounts of electric shocks to other people just as a result of being, of following the instructions of an experimenter. And in the case of the Stanford study, uh, uh, the, the, the favorite subject of all psychology, college sophomores, found themselves playing roles as prison guards and abusing others in ways that forced the experimenter, uh, Phil Zimbardo, who wrote a book on this called The Lucifer Effect, which I'll I put up here, that forced the experimenters to stop the study because the amount of, um, sadistic behavior that these normal college students were exhibiting towards their peers, other volunteers for the study who were making believe they were prisoners, the amount of sadism was such that it was no longer safe. For them to participate in this study. So, um, we find that behavior is deeply, deeply situational, and we see that all the time. You know, whenever there's a blackout, we see it. People behave differently when the power's off than when the power is on. We've seen it throughout history that, um, conditions drive behavior. Situations drive behavior so much more than any of us would ever predict. Abu Ghraib— these were normal, normal American soldiers who, under the right or wrong conditions, were capable of doing the things that we saw. Germany in the '30s— I mean, they're on and on and on. There are, there are literally thousands of examples of how context situation drives behavior. And so when I've been as powerfully advocating for a civility-enhancing context on the internet as I have been, it's been because I believe that we enable certain kinds of behavior or discourage other kinds of behavior by virtue of the kinds of situations that we create. In other words, the systems that we establish provide for people guidance about the kind of behavior that is not just accepted but also encouraged. And so When we are creating new structures here in the online interaction world, if we create structures that make it easy and in fact structures that encourage and reward people to behave in ways that are uncivil, aggressive, threatening, then people are likely to behave in those ways. If we create conditions that are more encouraging and, uh, more rewarding of behavior that is civil within the limits that we can ever civilize ourselves— because we know that as soon as the conditions change, we're capable of becoming very uncivil, we're capable of becoming horribly aggressive. We're capable of all— of anything under the right conditions. So, um, for me, the task of any kind of social, um, uh, design endeavor, which a website is, right? You're designing a social environment. The, the, the, the task becomes, how do I create an environment that encourages and rewards the kind of behavior that we want to see rather than the kind of behavior that we don't want to see? How do we create— to take the metaphor— how do we create a prison that encourages the firm incarceration of the prisoner without torture and abuse versus how do we create a prison that encourages torture and abuse? See, These are, these are our decisions that fall upon the people who are responsible for creating the context, for creating the environment. Individuals behave in ways that we see are within these limits, and the limits stretch greatly depending upon the context in which we find ourselves. So there isn't just one you, there's a lot of yous. Inside of you, and those yous come out just as my yous come out, my mes come out very differently in very different circumstances. And so, um, that's a, uh, for me, a large part of my theory of existence and theory of personality that, um, encourages me to want to see environments designed that enable us to be with one another in our most civil presence rather than in our least civil presence. So, um, take it easy and I'll see y'all again soon. Bye-bye.
