 So I'm giving a talk this morning that I've been wanting to give for a long time It's interesting that Aaron just said that if you Talk to him in public you should use his real name because people won't understand And it's true for all of us, right? Like I don't know about you, but I have that feeling when I walk into a conference Like when I walk when I got out of the uber this morning and saw that crowd of us on the sidewalk I was like Relax, right? We're home. These are people who understand us It's very cool that we're a community absolutely, but we're also a collection of individuals and We think of ourselves we like to think of ourselves as We're proud to think of ourselves as autonomous human beings that make our own decisions uninfluenced by others But the truth is the weird science if you will is that we're incredibly influenced by everyone else And we're fundamentally unaware of the shape that that influence takes it means in many ways we are We do not understand our motivations, and we don't know why we made the decisions we made so some of you may know that I'm a I'm a recovering psychology student like many of us. I don't have a CS degree So is a psychology student one of the things you have to do is you have to part of your course credit is to be Subjects and experiments like you'll sign up for a class which is like being experiments And so I was experimented on quite a bit in my college days, and I Was always a little bit suspicious about what was going on, but I never lost my interest in research And so there's a bunch of research that I think matters a lot to us that people are sort of tangentially Familiar with but they don't really know the details up, so I'm going to show you today three experiments I have there's a lot of Compressed film clips here. This is a little bit like science class, but it doesn't mean you can see While the film is going on so I'm gonna show you three experiments and talk about what they proved about human nature And then we're gonna talk about how that applies to us as practitioners of open-source software The one other thing I want to tell you before I get started is that I have I'm insufficiently clever, and I didn't realize when they promised me this lab code that they were gonna put whatever I told them on the pocket So you might know is that lots of people have cool names, but that I am seeing And so I have a bunch of Sharpies. I'm a little bit sick So I'm gonna leave pretty soon after this so I don't affect you all But I have a lot of I have a whole pocket full of Sharpies And I invite you to come and help me be more clever on my coat Once I get off stage just ask me for a Sharpie. There's a lot of colors. So all right so experiment number one experiment number one This was done in the 1950s by a guy named Solomon Ash It's a it's the it's a really well-known classic experiment in social psychology and what people refer to it as the line-length study Here's how it works. It's soul. They tell the experimental subjects that it's a test of visual perception And here's your task The line on the left on your left is what is called the reference line The other three lines are the choices that you can make and so your job is an experimental subject is to choose the line A, B, or C that is the same length as the reference line I have still photos from the original experiment started There's such a bad resolution that I didn't blow them up very much, but here you can see this is how it works This is the experimenter and this is a table full of purported subjects Now the truth is these of these seven people only one is actually a subject they lie It's this guy. Here's a close-up of the look on his face All right now like I said, I don't have actual film of this subject this from the 50s But they ran or they recreated this experiment in the 70s, and I have a little film of that So have a look at this experiment begins uneventfully as subjects give their judgments here on the third trial Something happens All right, it ain't to the experiment begins uneventfully as Sorry, so he's the experimental subject right the poor confused guy here All right now, let's do this So I'm gonna I think right here There's about a third of the audience and I think maybe right here put yourself on one side of the other of this line All right, if you're in the middle third raise your hand You're the people who conformed You agreed this many people agreed with that wrong line They did 18 trials when they ran this experiment on 12 of them all other six people lie They had their can they call them Confederates in this sort of research model and a third of the time Does the experiment the one experimental subject actually went along with the group the experiment begins uneventfully Sorry, okay, so that's experiment number one ash and conformity and so about a decade later We see the second experiment This is done by Stanley Milgram. It's got it was a behavioral study of obedience This happened here about 1961 and it was when this man was on trial In Jerusalem for war crimes. So this is Adolf Eichmann He was his boss Reinhard Heinrich had charged him according to Wikipedia with quote facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German occupied Eastern Europe So he's basically in charge of logistics for an operation that kills six million people He did his job with vigor and enthusiasm And during his trial here's what he had to say. This is not a heartfelt apology These are not expressions of remorse. These are statements of a man who does not feel responsible He was just doing his job And so in this environment Milgram wanted to answer the question are these people evil or are they victims of a situation? Would everyone would all of us have behaved the way they did in similar circumstances and so he device something that Was became known as a shock experiment And so they put this ad in the paper of Milgram work for Yale at university And he advertised for experimental subjects and so he tells them people sign up they get their four bucks with 50 cents car fare And they come to the basement of a bill a building in Yale and they are told that they have this task So first of all to two to pick two subject show every time two purported subjects One of which is actually a Confederate So people show up Thus the experimental subject thinks the other guys also the experimental subject But that's not true the other guys actually part of the experiment and they draw lots to see who is going to teach And who is going to learn and so the lot drawing is rigged so that the external subject always becomes a teacher Their task is the teacher is supposed to teach the learner These were pairs a bunch of work pairs and so they what they have is he gives them He'll tell them a word like blue and then the paired work might sky And they go through this whole list later what they're gonna do is say blue gonna give them a choice of four words And the learner has to pick the right word The experimental layout looks like this So there's a room that it there's a room where the learner is isolated The teacher in the experiment or himself some guy in a lab coat is in this in a separate room You can see that There's a little elect some sort of electricity to this guy and it runs back through this room to this machine now It's all lie, right? They're not actually shocking people But they have to devise a really believable machine and here I know that pictures a little out of out of focus I have some close-ups of it here so that they have these little toggle switches and little lights that blink red and a Little touch of this and use it says strong shock or a strong shock intense shock That's those extremely intense shock when you get when you get down here It says dangerous of air shock and then they run out of adjectives and just X X X All right now I Feel the need on you. I have film from the original experiment from the 60s and it's a little hard Nobody gets hurt. I can assure you that nobody's being hard. It's actually fake, right? There's not really anybody in the other room, but they would they record Responses and plan back to the teacher and that the distress of the teachers is real and what they do is real And so I'm going to show you two film clips of this experiment the first one's pretty short It'll just give you a feeling for what it does If you find that you don't want to listen to the second one I know you can't leave But when we get to the second one I'll warn you and you can like put your fingers in your ears and go La-la-la-la until it's done and I'll have your neighbor to poke you when it's finished. Okay So you don't have to watch if you don't want Here we go. So this is the first one. This is a guy who stops when the Experimental subject asks for the when a learner asks for the experiment to be stopped I'm not gonna shock of 75 volts Soft hair Just how far can you go in this thing? Sad face I Think we have to find out what's wrong Well the experiment might require that we continue, but I still think we should find out what the condition of the gentleman Look, I don't know anything about electricity, I don't profess any knowledge nor will I go any further until I find out the guys It's absolutely essential Well essential or not this program isn't quite that important to me that I should go along doing something And I know nothing about particularly if it's going to injure someone And so that that shows you all you need to know about the entire makeup in the experiment I'll go through it here. And so there's four products and these are the products the experimenter gives when the teachers Objects to going on. So first they're told please continue If they still object they're told the experiment requires that you go on If they object a third time they're told it's essential that you continue and if they object again They're told you have no further choice. You must continue now at this point if they object one final time they end the experiment So that's what it takes for the experimenter degree to quit. There's two further special prods One is it if the teacher expresses concern that the learner is being heard they tell them this right surely not hurt And then if If the learner says they want to stop and the teacher says that guy wants to quit they say he can't quit no matter whether he likes it or not He has to go on The responses are all taped. They play the same tape every time and so if you watch the whole this is from an This is an excerpt from an hour documentary at Milgram made about this experiment At 75 volts, they that you hear the first noise At 150 volts a guy says get me out of here. I told you I had heart troubles So there's there's been a prior conversation where when they meet the learner expresses some concern that he has heart trouble So the teacher knows that We go there and then at 300 volts. He says, okay, I'm not going to answer anymore And after the 350 volt mark, there's never there's neither sound nor response From the person in the other room I know it's just horrifying Okay, now here's the one this is the one that's coming It's two and a half minutes long and it shows a guy going all the way to the end All right, remember nobody gets hurt, but it's extreme. It's the interesting thing about this is how Terribly distressing it is to the man who's given the shocks So if you can't take it now's the time to shut your eyes. All right, get someone to poke you when we come back Here we go 135 answer woman answer That's all kept me out of here I can't go ahead. I told my heart story to bother me now Continue on a 65 volt All right shot 180 volts That's that a lot I said before the shocks made me painful That's not the end of the experiment requires you to continue whether the learner likes it or not We must go on until you have all the work. Uh, I refuse. That's what the essential is to continue All right, next one slow Walk dance truck music Answer please 95 volts 85 volts I have to let me refuse to answer anymore. Get me out of here. You can't hear me there. Get me out 315 volts 330 volts 60 volts Not once we started please continue Answer please are you all right in there? Something's happened to that man in there Hey answer, please. Are you all right five volts 420 volts 435 volts That's dangerous a big shock here. Next, next on that will continue clear 435 volts That's what brain woman soldier dog horse 250 volts so Milgram pulled pulled 40 psychologists from a local medical school before he visits experiment and he asked him how many he thought We continue all the way to the end and they predicted They predicted that when the subjects demanded that the experiment be stopped Demanded to stop the experiment that Almost everyone would Then only 3.73 percent of the people would continue past that point And they also predicted only one tenth of one percent of the subjects would enter the highest dose on the scale All right remember we divided up in thirds And where you were here here People in those two thirds raise your hands You're the ones that shocked All the way to work with you under these experimental conditions two-thirds of the subjects Shocked all the way to 450 volts And so now you think that these these The outcomes from this experiment are so dramatic. You think that we would all know about them and yet And also there was a lot of concern there weren't really good ethical review boards and institutions have something called an IRB an institutional review board Which determines uh, whether the external protocol is ethical like what does it mean if you're the guy? Right like because they debrief them later. They tell them. Oh, you didn't really kill them Okay, you didn't really don't All right, and but what does it mean if you're that person? What does it mean for the rest of your life to know that you would do it and so So these experiments they don't get done anymore They don't get done by research institutions, but but they're so compelling that sometimes other groups do and so just in case you think that This only happened in black and white days There's a recreation of this for the a show called the heist. It was on british tv in 2006 There's another little clip 405 volts I don't know. Is someone gonna check them or something. Does he not make any noise now? And he was before and I'm quite happy to go on but I just a bit worried about If you wouldn't continue. Yeah, I was a bit worried because he was But no harm. No harm will come to him. But he's not making any noise. It's essential to be continuing with the experiment Incorrect 450 volts We promise he's not That you say it hurts but isn't Because it's like It says that dangerous We'll be right Please continue It's just the truth right There's there's certain situations you can construct a situation that despite the fact that it is deeply distressing to us that people will Be caving waste of our money and so that's Milgram and it was true then it was true in 1963 and it's true today And so I'm going to show you one more experiment to the more happy notes Okay, one more So this is uh, I know so those two experienced were decade apart ash was in uh the 50s Milgram was in the 60s this experiment happened in the 70s and it was done. It's something done by a guy named, uh, Fibb, latin and john darley They started looking at how bystanders behave in emergencies And they were, uh, motivated to do this research by two things. One is they were aware of the milman research But also they were motivated by the death of this woman. Katie jenovici She died and she lived in brooklyn. She in new york city. She died in 1964 And she was stabbed to death by a guy named winston mosley near her home in i'm sorry queen and so He attacked her someone got out of the window and told him to leave her alone He went away came back attacked her again. He had a knife eventually. She dies of renters The part then later because of the series of miscommunications It was reported in the old times that 38 people Were aware of the attack for the half hour that it happened and that no one did anything Now and there was a now cry. There was a huge outcry in new york city and around the country about sort of the apathy of modern life Now turned out this has all been debunked. People really did do stuff So it's not as bad. That is not at least that part is not as bad as it sounds But at the time in 1968 everyone believed it the the alternate theories of the alternate information about what happened had not come out And so latin and darley are in their research guides and i have a little clip Now it's not that a person got murdered in shot. This is neighbors watched And nobody did we read about the murder as did everybody else Here we were two young social psychologists starting our research careers No, not standing algorithms set of experiments on obedience to authority And we started to think about in an offhand way What could have produced the genomicity effect? Perhaps the genomicity might have been alive today a few fewer people have seen that We decided to try to create We're also in the ambiguous situation To which we would see how people started. We thought that One kind of thing that comes up that's often hard to tell whether it's a real emergency or not has to do with fire Emergencies and whether or not they're ambiguous right so they advise this experiment called a smoke filled room And i'll tell you how it goes I saw original film of this which was what i could find it what i could probably have to show you is a recreation of the bpc So this is another experiment that relies on lying to the subjects So you sign up to be an experimental subject you show up and you're in a waiting room And there's a whole bunch of other people in the waiting room You think they also have signed up to the experiment you're waiting to someone's gonna come out like a doctor's office And i'm gonna call you and take call your name and take you through a door Unbeknownst to you that is the experiment and everyone else in the waiting room is confederate just like in the ash experiments So you're sitting in there you're waiting you're waiting you're filling out some form and what happens is smoke starts coming out the vents Hey, that's not so bad, but the other thing that happens is no one else does anything No one moves And so the question is what do you do? What do you do smokes coming out the vent and everybody else is ignoring? um They did so here. Let me show you a clip from a recreation of this for the bpc from the bpc This time we planted seven actors who are all in on the experiment We said to them when you see the smoke do nothing Our second participant is lauren hevenham also a student. What will she do? What will happen to her script when we make a slightly unusual situation very unusual Nothing to start with so we get her attention So How long before she dashes out to the room So here i'm gonna stop this a minute. How long you think how long does it take you to leave? Smoke's coming up a vent the smoke alarm's going on Yeah, you think so right and it indeed does happen. I'll show you clip what happens in the next clip is what happens when people are alone Okay, let's watch I had to clip a lot of this out because it took a really long time Oh, no, not even They finally come and get her now And it seems impossible doesn't but the truth is here we go We tried the experiment 10 times and the same thing happened over and over again If the person was on their own they left quickly If they were in a group of three or more they stayed rooted to the spot The average length of time they stayed 13 minutes They all stayed I don't even have to divide you up and make you raise your hands now Right if you're in a group, but if you're in a group and there's an emergency And people act as if nothing is going on That's the rule and you do it Okay, and so that this research in 1960 basically what they discovered was this The more onlookers there are In an emergency if you need help the more onlookers there are the less likely it is that any one will come to your aid Um, this becomes Notice of the bystander effect and it's such an important idea On the they use it actually when I was researching the bystander effect in the stocking There's a article or after article after article article on the web about bullying about kids and bullying because the bystander effect There's been component of that It became such a big idea that the guy that killed kitty genesee Walter mos Winston mosley At one of his parole hearings he tried to assert that he should be that out early Because without him we would never have discovered it I'm just that didn't really it was I didn't find that a convincing argument Okay, so we have these three experiments the worst part's over everything's uphill from here Right, so we have ash on conformity milgram on authority in latin and darly on what happens in uh on bystanders and they describe A disturbing picture of our species But the coin has two sides And all of these experiments give us great hope as long as you understand as long as you know that you Are the people that suffer from these effects And so all of these experiments it turns out I just showed you the worst cases Because they were like more interesting and compelling All right, it turns out they all have they all these experiments come in other variations and the variations are really Revealing about what might go on ash did a variant where There was one confederate in that room as they go around the table Answering it waiting where the experimental subject is waiting to give his answer One person out of all the people in front of him says the right thing and and conformity decreases markedly in that case Now one of the interesting things about this They ask the people that the the experimental subject who gave the right answer in this case They ask him why he gave the right answer these because these are all guys everything I saw so I'm using he correctly here um They asked him why he gave the right answer and while they reported feeling warm having warm feelings about the other guy That said the same thing that they did they all asserted that that that that other person's answer had no influence on their behavior But they would have said it no matter what and and we know that's not true right the data proves that that's not true The next thing that happened is that They did a variant where the they set everything up and had it going they gave they basically gave the experimental subject the Wrong time So he got there and they told him he was late and they put him at the end of the line And told him because he was late he could not say his answer out loud He would have thought he could write it down on a sheet of paper And again in that situation and that variant conformity goes way down. They all say two, you know, it's one you say one And in most cases when they ask people when they try to get to the root of like what happened Does it screw up your perception? Like do you really believe that it's two and it's one or Or you just don't want to say you don't want to go get some kind of turns out that some people do Come truly to believe that it must be one if they all said one But most people know that they're given the wrong answer and they do it just because they do it just because of the pressure of the crowd And so now we know the knowing these things knowing these three variants Helps us guide our behavior. It helps us guide our open source behavior It helps us guide how we run our businesses It helps us guide how we treat our peers if you want everyone to give the same answer It's really easy to do that right as long as you have a group of three or more You can make everybody say their opinions out loud And you can let the most authoritative senior people speak first So all you have to do is that look like your office? Yeah All right, if you don't want that if you want every if you want uh A kind of if you want some kind of diversity of opinion if you want more than one idea from which to choose when you're designing software Or uh working on a problem Here's what you can do it doesn't matter what the size of your group is in this case All you have to do is have people write down a set of ideas before they have to say them out loud public And then you just do something you get an egg timer and you give people the same amount of time to advocate for their positions It will dramatically change your outcomes It's really simple you have to believe in this effect In order to make this change All right, so milgram Milgram thank goodness milgram had to work a long time to get an experimental model that would make 65 percent of the people shocked people to death Thank goodness, right? He did a bunch of other variants and I think that was promised that I would have this monster screen I think can you read that? Okay, so think a minute and just look at that So it's very reassuring to me. I find it deeply comforting that when the teacher gets to choose how much to shock We don't much kill people All right, it's clearly not because they want to do it. Um That should have an s on it. Sorry So you can see here from these models, there's two big effects here One is how much authority affects us Our perceptions of authority Have a huge effects on how we behave the other is how close you are to the victim They had some other variants. Okay, these are horrible. I Mean it would be fun to make up these experiments, but still they they just see Okay, so they did one where In this model like in order to get people to really most people to shock they had to isolate the You know the person was being chucked into another room where you couldn't even see them. You could just hear They did one where they moved the Victim closer to the teacher and compliance went down And then they did another one which is really horrible where they here. I have too many things I'll show you so they in order to get a shock the learner had to put their hand down on this plate And the teacher had to go force their hand on the plate In order to to make them take the shock at certain things and now I think they I think that's this is the Teacher of four forces learners hand on shock plate and it's okay. It is a little alarming how many people did that But so But so what you know if you know this what what you know is if you want people to blindly obey you Without thought even if they disagree It's really easy, right? All you have to do is have some kind of hovering authority give commands You have to separate the the actor from the victim, which means like maybe your users are going to separate the suffer the consequences of Bad software make sure your developers never talk to a user Right separate them a long way And then don't let your developers talk to one another It's a quash descent to make it really clear that there's going to be trouble In your organization if they get together around the water cooler and have a chat All right now you can guess if you want people if you want the best ideas of people regardless of the effects of the glory Then you have to get you to be a little bit hands-off You have to give people access to the people who suffer the consequences of their choices And you have to encourage collaboration among people who might disagree It's all there is to it All right, latin and darly smoke filled room Um, this is the bystander effect right the fact that The more pain the more on lovers that are the less likely you are to get to to get help This is the model in open sources I maintain a gem and I said I ask on the listserv for help and the in the ringing dead silence came back That's what this is right and so i'm going to show you one last video clip Before I end This is again, this is a reenactment. It's from the bbc in like 2005 But this is a real thing. These aren't actors. They're doing the experiment on the streets of london Ruth another actor takes peter's place how long before she receives help Four minutes later and 34 people have passed without stopping Unwittingly these strangers have silently formed a temporary group with a rule don't get involved They're afraid to stand out from the crowd and won't take action if no one else does This woman has clearly spotted Ruth, but she conforms to the rule and does nothing Watch what happens though when someone else helps She suddenly finds herself in a different group with a new rule to help Uh And so that notion of uh us taking cues from others behaviors incredibly powerful It's it's part of our evolutionary history, right? There's a lion Right run like when you see people running we all run when you see people looking Okay, this is keeping me weird. Sorry to tell the story. I have just enough time so i'm a cyclist And it's really common to be cycling someplace where there are let's say not ready access to facilities out in the country and so When that happens, you know, you just find a like a place that's pretty screened on bike Maybe you know walk off the woods for a minute But the problem is if your bike is land by the road every car that comes by they look that way They look toward the bike, right? And so we don't want to shock the children And so if you're if you're with other cyclists, you can combat this effect It's really easy to keep the driver of the path the passers-bying cars from looking in the direction of the bike bumps on the ground All you have to do is solicit someone else in your group to stand by your bike and look in the other direction If they just look intently in the other direction everybody that comes by looks that way Like we're a hard wire to take our cues from one another else from from one another and so here This is what we know because of latin ago if you want in action You can ask for help from a group That's what it means. Everybody thinks everybody else is going to do it if you want action Then you have to direct your requests for help to an individual The nice thing about this so It also means that if you were there the opposite of these two things is true If you're a bystander and you know about the bystander effect And someone asks someone who's hurt or someone who needs help maintaining a gym ask for help You know that you can break the break the rule of the group and form a new group by volunteer yourself So if you're harmed or you need help you have to say hey You there mr What does that shirt say something workers dallas? Pixel workers, mr. Can you help would you help me right if I ask him he would come I could get him up on stage all bad He would do it. I won't I won't torch you. You want it come on come on Come help me You can't go that way. Sorry. You have to go around that's a hole That's a hole Yeah, come back this way come this way right Had I asked for a volunteer to come up on stage there would have been I mean you guys are a little bit crazy, but it's easy to imagine no one would come And yet when I asked for a specific volunteer, I don't have any trouble getting help Here there we go Would someone please come up Oh, that's a big enough group my point exactly if you know, thank you, daniel if you know these effects What it means is when someone asks for help from the group you have to volunteer You can't wait on someone else and if you do volunteer you will make a new rule and other people will help too So what's something I you know, there's a button on my remote that does that if I clap Let's do that. Okay. Here we go. I'm almost done two more slides. So As a species We are hardwired to conform And to obey and to derive a rule from the behavior of others in the group And it is hubris for you to imagine that you're immune to this rule It's a lie. It affects you just like it affects everyone else and these tendencies they lead us to acting groups In ways that do not reflect our best selves as individuals If you deny these effects if you if you refuse to believe that you'll conform and obey and follow that rule Then you're doomed to do so The only way you can combat these tendencies is to be aware of their existence In some way there's a way in which we are all naive subjects Yeah, it's on your bingo card. Just go cross it out We're surrounded by a world that wants us to behave their way And but thankfully all it takes to combat these pressures is to know that they exist The milgram files are sealed. They're so afraid of what they effect was on the experimental subjects But some of those people have come forward over the years and here's what they say about being in that experiment Here's a here's a quote from a person who shocked someone all the way up to 450 volts He said they caused me to reevaluate my life And to confront my components I felt my own moral weakness and was appalled. So I went if you will to the ethical gym He described it as being inoculated against authority And my goal today is to inoculate you to inoculate you against conformity and authority and against obedience to the crowd What I want is for you to not to follow along with a group But to be yourself. I love our group I love being here. I'd love to get out of the uber this morning and seeing you guys on the curb But I believe in your good intentions I believe in the good intentions of the individual and I'm a little sometimes afraid of the group So this data is all you need to know to to show you how to improve the group In in order to make the best group we can be then each of you has to act as if you're the only one here Thank you Stop, okay. I I really do have to leave soon and you shouldn't shake hands with me until then I'll like bump elbows and I have markers and I've stickers Lots of stickers. So all right. Thank you