Reading about the Stanford Prison experiment was really interesting, however it raises questions for me about the ethics of it all. The thing that struck me the most was the ability to create such intense power dynamics, even though all participants knew that the prison was fake. Not only did the guards take their role seriously, perhaps too seriously, but also the prisoners did not question the guards’ authority. Also, the psychologists behind the study started to act more as prison wardens than psychologists. When they heard rumors of the prisoners trying to escape, they focused all of their energy into trying to foil the plan, instead of studying the prisoners trying to escape. Also, even outsiders, such as family visitors, did not question the authority of the prison guards/ superintendents. It is shocking how real the situation became for everyone, and how quickly the power dynamics strengthened.

This study makes me question the ethics behind it. Although they cut the study short, when it became clear that the prisoners were suffering mentally and the guards were becoming increasingly abusive, prisoners were still tormented severely throughout the experiment. The participants did agree to become prisoners in the study, but I doubt that it was enclosed just how degradingly they would be treated. Also, when one prisoner tried to quit the experiment, he was convinced to stay. Another one was pressured into staying by the other prisoners just to prove that he wasn’t a “bad prisoner.” He had forgotten that he was not even a prisoner at all. Just a college student who had agreed to participate in a study. It struck me when the psychologist reminded the prisoner of this and said “it was as if he had waken up from a bad dream.” Any experiment that makes participants forget who they are cannot be ethical. Also, the guards became abusive, when likely they are good, respectful people.

I recognize that this study was done a long time ago, before there may have been more strict ethical guidelines for psychological studies, but I would hope that after this experience, stricter guidelines were put into place.

COVID-19 Warning:
I thought both readings were very interesting and relevant to what is going on in the world currently. In the Dorner reading, a central theme is how taking action to alleviate short term issues can lead to greater issues long term. When elected officials make these decisions, the decision can ripple into other areas that were not expected. In the reading, an interesting example that stuck out to me is the example of changing the speed limit and placing speed bumps in a downtown district to limit pollution and make the area safer for pedestrians. While this may seem logical, pollution rose because cars were in second gear instead of third gear which causes more pollution, and people ended up going to nearby malls instead to avoid new traffic and congestion issues. While this plan was supposed to help downtown businesses, some businesses ended up going out of business in the long term. I think if the elected officials did trials before enacting this change and considered more long term changes, they could have prevented this from happening and found a more effective way to limit traffic while keeping businesses busy.

I think the examples made in this reading can serve as an allegory to all of the preventative measures being passed due to COVID-19. When the virus was spreading in China and factories, communities, and cities with millions of people were being shut down, the United States spectated as an outsider, and did not take preventive measures at that time to alleviate the inevitable spread of the virus. Now that the virus is in all fifty states and case rates are growing daily, the measures local governments and businesses make cannot keep up with the virus, which will have serious long term implications on society on a micro and macro basis, as employment patterns will change and certain industries will likely not be able to recover. This serves as a reminder to show how critical it is to take threats seriously and consider the long term ramifications for not considering the different outcomes.

COVID 19- Warning

In the Logic of Failure, the game simulation replicates political power in towns and how exercising that power affects the common people. In the issue with Tanaland, every population contains a carrying capacity. Factors like food supply, water source, and medical aid can affect how much a population is able to handle before a population declines. It’s interesting to read how the Tsetse fly affected the Southern African population because the biology lab I currently work in tests on tsetse flies. The tsetse fly can be carriers of a parasite that causes African Sleeping sickness in mammals. We test certain genes to mutate to determine if it would cause less transmission of the disease. A question my lab and our partner labs have asked is how would discovering the gene that affects transmission affect the population of cattle and humans in Africa? We would first have to find the gene that affects transmission but it is important to ask what would we do with that information once we have discovered it.

I’d be interested to see if a simulation like this could show the events leading to an outbreak, like the pandemic were currently living in. A simulation like this could have the option of being the highest power (president of the United states) or something below it like a senator or governor. I would like to see how many would react upon knowing about the virus initially and what decisions would be made to combat the outbreak. I wonder if people would keep the decisions that many governors have made of ordering a mandatory curfew and lockdown of the state. It would be nice to see if there was a possibility to have prevented this virus from becoming the pandemic that it has to be able to prevent it from happening again in the future.

” Some analysts complain that all our difficulties stem from the fact that we have been turned loose in the industrial age equipped with the brain of prehistoric times.”

The simplicity of chains of cause and effects is how the author, Dorner says our brains work. In many ways this is true. Our brains constantly love to simplify. It is a technique that makes this vast world, easier to understand. However, over simplification is many times dangerous. We create groups and subgroups and place people in them. This leads to stereotyping and categorization. What was once was a sorting technique now becomes a way to make racial assumptions. For example, the label of the “Dark, tall and black criminal” comes from a way of sorting types of people into groups. Then taking those groups and assuming the actions of the groups. Caveman brains or lizard brains stem from a response to protect ourselves, but we are far from prehistoric times, so why haven’t we caught up?

We haven’t developed because we are constantly acting on instinct. Brains are muscles and so they react to what we have trained them to do. For example, if you train your body to run in the wrong form then it won’t fix itself until you untrain it. The brain is a muscle and we need to untrain the Caveman inside.

In the introduction, I was struck by the section concerning values and motivations. A common phrase I hear (and use) when someone’s actions have undesired consequences is, “Well, your intentions were good!” Up until this reading, I didn’t realize how much of a crutch and excuse that phrase can be. It also made me think of a documentary we recently watched in my LDST 101 course about Whitney Young, one of the most important and unknown agent in the civil rights movement. People regarding him as a man of action and specifically, “a man that accomplished what other people were for”. In this context, while most supported the idea of civil rights (good intentions), few strategized and acted successfully on these values. I kept the story of Whitney Young’s critcial thought processes and solutions in the back of my head the entire time I read this article, and found it fascinating how it supported Dorner’s argument that “people court failure in predictable ways”.

Another example this reading made me think of was the engineering design process. Having an extensive background in the field of engineering, I found myself comparing the examples of “good” and “Bad” participants in the Tanaland or Greenvale simulations to thought processes I had been taught in the past. Specifically, the Project Lead The Way (PLTW) Engineering Design Process. After each step, students are taught to question the ideas they are generating and think critically about what they are proposing. Engineering students are trained to reanalyze situations continuously and discover how smaller systems are interrelated to comprise one design. After following this system for four years, it was interesting to see how this method compared with that of  the “mistakes of cognition” made in the examples presented.

I was thoroughly shocked by Forsyth’s article revealing the correlation of bolstering student’s self-esteem and their academic performance. In my pre-k-12 career, I attended nine schools and each of them valued – to some extent- encouraging student’s to believe in themselves for the sake of improving their success in the classroom. I was never given a reason to question it until now. After reading this article, I am wondering how stereotype threat fits into this equation. If stigmatized groups do not perform well, because that is what is expected of them, then wouldn’t assuring them they are capable improve their performance? And isn’t that an example of bolstering self-esteem? Also, if “weak students may maintain self-esteem best by withdrawing effort” then why do we sometimes see these stigmatized groups (some who may have low self-esteem) overcompensating to break stereotypes?

In the article The Logic of Failure it described a multitude of failed experiments that were implemented in place to improve the quality of life for people in that community. In the introduction, it gave an example where state officials wanted to place speed bumps to reduce pollution in the air as well as reduce noise levels. So they as mentioned above-implemented speed humps and reduced the speed limit by twenty miles per hour in an attempt to reduce emissions and decrease the noise. What ended up happening is pollution increased, there was more noise, and shopping in that area became so hectic that it discouraged many shoppers from attending those stores again. What ended up happening is everyone migrated to suburban stores which caused a whole other influx of problems. They give a multitude of examples similar to this one both of which occurred in real life as well as in a computer simulation. They discovered that through these examples the best way in which to solve these problems is more thinking and less acting. Another example that stands out to me was a town in Southern Africa that decided to drill more wells to increase their water supply and a series of events transpired because of this. The increase in water supply meant their soil grew better grass which led to larger herds which led to overgrazing which led to their land becoming barren and depleting the cattle population. In addition, all of the remaining groundwater had been exhausted. Showing how implementing new ideas has a variety of effects both positive as well as negative.

This reading brought me back to one of our first readings this semester “Doing Good Better”. In this article, officials thought it would benefit many rural African towns if they took out their regular water pumps and implemented Play Pumps instead. The idea was for these pumps to be similar to a merry go round so children could play on the pumps and get water. What ended up happening was the pumps needed constant force in order to turn which was exhausting to the children thus leading adults to turn the pump. This was much less efficient and gave them much less water than they were originally getting. The reason for this as The Logic of Failure describes is 1. “Acted without prior analysis of the situation, 2. failed to anticipate side effects and long-term repercussions, 3. assumed that the absence of immediately obvious negative effects meant that correct measures had been taken, 4. let overinvolvement in “projects” blind them to emerging needs and changes in the situation, 5. were prone to cynical reactions.”  Whereas when careful analysis and research is conducted such as the deworming project a huge positive impact is made.

The Dorner reading was extremely fitting for the situation of the world today. Early on, it discussed how problems can be subtly linked to each other. Only in worst case scenarios do we see how these connections arise. We cannot solve problems one by one anymore, but instead we need to think of the situation as a whole. The reading mentioned that real world decision-making processes are rarely well documented. A lack of this information likely causes us to repeat the same mistakes and stop us from pinpointing common flaws in our train of thinking. Computer simulations, specifically, are a part of this reading that is utilized in the COVID-19 crisis. In real life, they are modeling the spread of the virus under different policy decisions. In the reading, the models tracked success of fictional societies, but also modeled the decisions of different leaders. Figure 7 shoes that leaders who made good decisions, made more and more good decisions, whereas leaders who made bad decisions were more inclined to make bad decisions. In a pandemic situation, it is extremely disconcerting to think that leaders who do not start off making good decisions are unlikely to ever start doing so.

The Forsyth reading, though not directly related, still makes an interesting point of how the solution may make the problem worse than it began. As good as high self-esteem sounds, it is not good in all situations. The study found that bolstering the students who performed poorly made them preform worse. This concept is something that I have been hearing a lot with the pandemic, specifically with the solution of vaccines. Scientist have apparently been rushing and cutting corners in the hope of creating a vaccine to help people as quickly as possible. However, some people are worried that due to the rush, the vaccine that is produced may have negative symptoms that are worse than the actual disease. This is a legitimate concern, but it does not mean there is a clear answer. Is it better to start testing a rushed vaccine or not try at all, and accept not finding a vaccine for many many years. Every solution of the pandemic is essentially facing the same dilemma. As I said before, we will not know the success of solutions until very far in the future.

I found the Dörner chapters intriguing as he evaluated shortsightedness to perpetuate more complex issues in the long-term.  Particularly, I enjoyed reading about the Greenvale experiment.  Dörner drew a distinction between his good participants and bad participants based on individual’s approaches to the social issues in the hypothetical Greenvale.  He noted that good participants made more decisions, addressed more “why” questions rather than “what” questions, considered the potential effects a decision has on other sectors of the society,  and reflected on their own behavior.  All of these characteristics have larger implications for what kind of leader these good participants would make.

In my 102 course, we discussed how much leaders reflect on their actions and how willing individuals are to receive criticism as a key characteristic of an effective and trustworthy leader. In reading the Dörner chapters, I was reminded of this; Dörner considered the participants to be good if they were critical of their own actions and made sure to modify their approaches the next time.  Their work was focused on finding the root of the social issues and creating a reliable plan for the town, rather than impulsively making a decision and failing to take responsibility for the negative consequences afterwards.  In combination with the concluding pages, he poses that individuals in positions of high power need not rely only on intuition; they should embrace criticisms and one’s expertise should not inflate his or her esteem to believe they are immune to flaws – it is quite the opposite.

Coronavirus Warning

Something in the “The Logic of Failing” reading really resonated with me. With wanting to go into politics, I often see the ways to act on an issue as good intentions vs. bad (or misinformed) intentions. However, as stated by the article, it is so much more than that. You can have the best intentions and still end up messing up a situation more because you aren’t asking enough why questions and you don’t see the ramifications of all of your actions, such was the case with the various simulations that were referenced in the article. The reading made me think back to something I mentioned in the slack discussion on Monday. It is difficult to know for sure if you are acting the correct way or making the correct changes when enacting change. At the time, I claimed that you should just act on the things that you believe need to be changed and future generations may not be happy with the changes but you made the decision you needed to at the time. However, now I see that it is more complex than that. The decisions you make could end up having serious ramifications that are detrimental to future generations if you aren’t well informed. Thus, with being well informed you can see some of the future ramifications and avoid them and hopefully make better decisions than if you had just left the interpretation of the decisions completely up to future generations.

Particularly, this reading made me think about government oversight. In trying to solve an issue, especially a time sensitive issue, there is likely to be oversight. However, I wonder if some of this oversight is worthwhile when considering the necessity of the issue that leads to the inability to be completely informed despite the best of intentions. Specifically, I am thinking of the recent stimulus package for COVID-19. The stimulus package leaves out a chunk of people residing in America and paying taxes. This includes undocumented immigrants, people 18 and over and claimed as a dependent on someone else’s taxes in 2019, and the elderly and disabled claimed by someone else as a dependent. For example, a 23 year old that is living on their own, out of school, working a full time job is not included in the stimulus package because the prior year they were still in school and listed a dependent on their parent’s tax form. Nor does the parent get the additional $500 for claiming them because they are no longer a child. This creates an oversight that leaves out many Americans. Despite the good intentions of the stimulus package, there are negative ramifications that can include and expectation for people to be able to pay rent, instead of a rent freeze, despite that fact that not everyone is eligible to the stimulus check. However, is this oversight worth it? The American people needed some form of comfort quickly during this pandemic. The stimulus package gives them that. So, it is worth the negative ramifications to warrant brief comfort to those who do receive the stimulus check?

Reading this excerpt from “The Logic of Failure” was basically seeing my entire life as an Environmental Studies major (or anyone who is environmentally conscious) put on paper. So much of the climate and environmental problems today are from people making a quick solution that ends up causing more problems. When thinking about conservation or reparation, you pretty much have to think five steps ahead of yourself to prevent some kind of harmful environmental butterfly effect from happening. It’s headache inducing. Are pesky insects eating your crops? Try pesticide! Oh, congratulations, you’ve contaminated the local groundwater and some of those insects have developed a resistance to that pesticide, meaning you’re now in a lose-lose situation where you can increase the concentration of pesticide (killing more insects but increasing contamination) or try and switch methods (potentially reducing pollution but putting your crops at risk). Humans have made so many of these quick solutions over the last few hundred years that we’ve dug ourselves into an environmental grave. I think my favorite example is the cane toad in Australia; settlers there were having issues with an invasive beetle eating their sugar cane, so they introduced the cane toad to try and control it. They got what they wished for, but cane toads are literal vacuums that will eat anything in sight (conservation biologists have found ping pong balls and other inanimate objects in their stomachs), and soon the toads started threatening native small mammal populations. By not taking the time to ask the important questions and think about long-term repercussions, the settlers cursed themselves with years of ecological damage that still hasn’t been solved.

Forsyth’s article was not what I was expecting. When I read that bolstering students’ self-esteem actually decreased academic performance, I immediately thought that it must be due to some external factors. Maybe the fact that our generation greatly differs from generations past plays a big part- as Forsyth wrote, “The current generation of young adults, who comprised our sample, differs substantially and significantly from previous generations in several relevant respects. Most notably, they have higher self–esteem and lower beliefs in internal control.” (457) But now that we know this information, what do we do with it?