This is the second part of my idea sketch on privacy and integrity. The first part can be found here. There is also an interesting comment on that post by Michael Dahlén where he talks about information symmetry, a theme that I’ll adress later in this post.
In this second part I will show you two talks, the first of which happens to be one of my favorite talks ever, by the phenomenal writer and psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The second talk is a rather graphic and frightening one by Philip Zimbardo, and I will only present the link here and not embed it since there are some very graphic images in the presentation.
Anyway, I wrote in the first part about how we psychologically maintain moral behavior in a self-regulating way, by rewarding and punishing each other in more or less subtle ways to maintain moral equilibrium. It’s an extremely impressive distributed control system, much like the self balancing control system of a market economy, but much more refined and granular.
In Haidt’s talk, five moral foundations are listed as ones that we have with us from birth. These five are:
1. Harm/care
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. Ingroup/loyalty
4. Authority/respect
5. Purity/sanctity
If any one of these foundations are challenged, we react quickly to restore equilibrium. At least until we shift the equilibrium by fundamentally changing the rules of the system. There are several ways of changing the rules of the system, but I will focus only on one of these here. The one I will focus on it the introduction of anonymity.
If we remove personal responsibility from the system by introducing anonymity, studies have shown that several of these moral foundations seem to fail. Some of these studies are presented briefly in the talks below. Personally I’m most intrigued by the first two of these foundations. It seems that people can turn evil and cause harm when power is introduced in combination with the removal of personal responsibility. Consider uniforms in war for example, or hoods worn by executioners through all time. And people in many systems seem to loose sense of reciprocity by cheating when individual contributions are unclear. We also seem less prone to do good under such circumstances.
So is this view highly cynical? Well, perhaps not. Perhaps it’s just how civilized group behavior evolved. How else would something like this be governed? The peer to peer equilibrium control system is perhaps the only viable path for evolution to take (Darwin would say that the present state is proof of that. I would too).
This view would explain why religion was a really good idea for keeping up moral behavior. Because even when nobody was watching, god was. But the notion of god created a huge information asymmetry which was quite scary, and often abused throughout history.
But as the internet removes anonymity in a (more) symmetrical way, it is much more difficult to abuse this information. I don’t mean to be bombastic, but I can truly see us moving into a new era of higher moral standards and a better world – simply because we increase communication efficiency and information symmetry. And I would like to encourage you to consider this the next time you read a negative article about the breakdown of privacy.
It also puts a new spin on Google’s “Do No Evil”-tagline, doesn’t it?
Now watch these two amazing talks and consider what I just said:
Talk number 1 by Jonathan Haidt:
Click here for talk number 2 by Philip Zimbardo.
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