The Goethals and Allison reading introduced a lot of new theories/ideas while also bringing other ideas together. I thought the most interesting new concept was the “basic law of rumors.” Rumors are something we are all acquainted with, but this is the first time I’ve seen it written into an equation. I think this makes complete sense, especially when put into the context of modern-day America. We seem to have a problem with rumors aka “fake news.” I think a large part of this issue come from the first piece of the equation: importance. Everyone has different things that are important to them, so everyone is more likely to believe a rumor that aligns with something they find important. Similarly, people are drawn to news outlets that reenforce their own beliefs and what they find to be important. This perpetuates the issue because no one is challenging the information that they see and hear, or potential rumors they encounter, because it aligns with their own “importance scale” and makes them more likely to believe it.

I also thought that the implicit leadership theories (ILTs). The first part of leadership schema (beliefs about traits of a leader) reminded me a lot of the reading on SSSs and what physical traits we associate with leadership. The second part (beliefs about what leaders do) reminded me of the reading we read for Monday about what makes a good decision maker and what doesn’t, especially how we gravitate towards the opposite of those good decision maker traits because doing things like being decisive and never admitting wrongdoing supposedly convey strength. This leads back again to the first reading about how our un-evolved brains value strength. One thing I feel like the past two readings as well as this one have failed to do it explain what we can do as a society to work against them perceptions in our brain. If we know this information, how can we spread it to the rest of our communities to make everyone more analytical when assessing good leadership?

Finally, the Stanford Prison Experiment. I’ve read about and studied this before in other classes, and what I find so continually interesting is the role of power in the way that we act. It almost reminds me of some game theory concepts like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In that situation, in order to maintain power/control, you are encouraged to be selfish even though collaboration would bring you the best outcome. In the Stanford Prison experiment, the guards become more violent and cruel towards to prisoners’, most likely because they feel a need to keep control and go to more extreme measures than necessary to absolutely ensure it. Even though this was an experiment, there are real-life instances of these kind of things happening such as in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. In this instance, American soldiers and intelligence officers went to terrible extremes in torturing prisoners, even after some were determined to have no connections to terrorist groups; most people attribute the abuse to “power trips” or incessant needs for control.