[Link] Can We Reverse The Stanford Prison Experiment?

daenerys

From the Harvard Business Review, an article entitled: "Can We Reverse The Stanford Prison Experiment?"

By: Greg McKeown
Posted: June 12, 2012

Summary:

Royal Canadian Mounted Police attempt a program where they hand out "Positive Tickets"

Their approach was to try to catch youth doing the right things and give them a Positive Ticket. The ticket granted the recipient free entry to the movies or to a local youth center. They gave out an average of 40,000 tickets per year. That is three times the number of negative tickets over the same period. As it turns out, and unbeknownst to Clapham, that ratio (2.9 positive affects to 1 negative affect, to be precise) is called the Losada Line. It is the minimum ratio of positive to negatives that has to exist for a team to flourish. On higher-performing teams (and marriages for that matter) the ratio jumps to 5:1. But does it hold true in policing?

According to Clapham, youth recidivism was reduced from 60% to 8%. Overall crime was reduced by 40%. Youth crime was cut in half. And it cost one-tenth of the traditional judicial system.

This idea can be applied to Real Life

The lesson here is to create a culture that immediately and sincerely celebrates victories. Here are three simple ways to begin:

1. Start your next staff meeting with five minutes on the question: "What has gone right since our last meeting?" Have each person acknowledge someone else's achievement in a concrete, sincere way. Done right, this very small question can begin to shift the conversation.

2. Take two minutes every day to try to catch someone doing the right thing. It is the fastest and most positive way for the people around you to learn when they are getting it right.

3. Create a virtual community board where employees, partners and even customers can share what they are grateful for daily. Sounds idealistic? Vishen Lakhiani, CEO of Mind Valley, a new generation media and publishing company, has done just that at Gratitude Log. (Watch him explain how it works here).

From the Harvard Business Review, an article entitled: "Can We Reverse The Stanford Prison Experiment?"

By: Greg McKeown
Posted: June 12, 2012

Clicky Link of Awesome! Wheee! Push me!

Summary:

Royal Canadian Mounted Police attempt a program where they hand out "Positive Tickets"

Their approach was to try to catch youth doing the right things and give them a Positive Ticket. The ticket granted the recipient free entry to the movies or to a local youth center. They gave out an average of 40,000 tickets per year. That is three times the number of negative tickets over the same period. As it turns out, and unbeknownst to Clapham, that ratio (2.9 positive affects to 1 negative affect, to be precise) is called the Losada Line. It is the minimum ratio of positive to negatives that has to exist for a team to flourish. On higher-performing teams (and marriages for that matter) the ratio jumps to 5:1. But does it hold true in policing?

According to Clapham, youth recidivism was reduced from 60% to 8%. Overall crime was reduced by 40%. Youth crime was cut in half. And it cost one-tenth of the traditional judicial system.

This idea can be applied to Real Life

The lesson here is to create a culture that immediately and sincerely celebrates victories. Here are three simple ways to begin:

1. Start your next staff meeting with five minutes on the question: "What has gone right since our last meeting?" Have each person acknowledge someone else's achievement in a concrete, sincere way. Done right, this very small question can begin to shift the conversation.

2. Take two minutes every day to try to catch someone doing the right thing. It is the fastest and most positive way for the people around you to learn when they are getting it right.

3. Create a virtual community board where employees, partners and even customers can share what they are grateful for daily. Sounds idealistic? Vishen Lakhiani, CEO of Mind Valley, a new generation media and publishing company, has done just that at Gratitude Log. (Watch him explain how it works here).

Humans are reinforced by tasty food, sex, accumulation of material goods, flow, laughter, love/empathy, status bumps

This is hardly an exhaustive list. We're also reinforced, for example, by people we like being happy, especially in relation to us. This is the type of reinforcement I'm talking about.

When my wife smiles because of something I did for her, the warm feeling I get does not resemble the feeling of status elevation. This is even more relevant in the case of, say, a stranger thanking me for holding the door -- I don't know them and don't really care what status they assign me.

Finally, I really don't understand what you're arguing for here. Specifically, I fail to see where you are offering any different actual advice for people to carry out, and we agree that insincere appreciation equals status-lowering.

We only appear to disagree on whether status-raising is a requirement for appreciation to be reinforcing... and there, you seem to have retreated to the position that any sort of positive appreciation affords a status grant, even if no increase in relative status results.

But it does not appear to me that your argument is other than definitional: that is, I do not understand why it's important to you to assume that all actions either generate or consume status points, as opposed to say, viewing some actions as being status-neutral. Which way you look at it strikes me as being merely dependent on how you choose to frame the math, and that there is no strong reason to prefer one framing over the other.

Actually, if I were to follow what seems to be your model, where people need to be repeatedly filled with status-giving gestures in order to merely maintain their current status position, then I would either have to have a model for how status deflation occurs, or else assume that everybody's status is always increasing in the absence of any actions taken to decrease status. This seems incoherent to me, especially since it would imply that older people would nearly always have higher status than younger people, a correlation which doesn't hold much past adulthood.

At this point, unless you clarify your model of status and what it is exactly that you think we differ on, I don't see much point in continuing this thread. (Honestly, I'm not sure why you started it in the first place.)

When my wife smiles because of something I did for her, the warm feeling I get does not resemble the feeling of status elevation.

The fact that she chose you as her partner, instead of other potential candidates, gives you some status (not relative to her, but relative to all other real or imaginary candidates). Could this play some role in your feelings from her smile?

This is even more relevant in the case of, say, a stranger thanking me for holding the door -- I don't know them and don't really care what status they assign me.

A stranger thanking yo... (read more)

0Vladimir_Nesov14y

The "really" in that statement hides a lot of ambiguity. Here, the status assigned to you fails evolution's consequentialist calculation, so one might say that evolution shouldn't care what status strangers in a big city assign you. Your psychological adaptations might still care, in the sense that they get activated, not having recognized absence of evolution-relevant consequences. On the other hand, the psychological drive may be seen as representing a terminal value, preference for accumulation of status for its own sake, irrespective of its effect on other people's behavior or of the impact of their behavior on you. In that case, one may say that you should care. It would still be the case that you should care even if the relevant psychological adaptations don't in fact activate, so that you happen to not care in the psychological sense.

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[Link] Can We Reverse The Stanford Prison Experiment?

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[Link] Can We Reverse The Stanford Prison Experiment?

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