environment

Listening to NPR the other week, I heard a segment about a documentary detailing the homicide of a detainee in a prison in Iraq. The researcher found a report that detailed a 'frame shift' phenomenon. When the people at the top relax the rules, they don't have to give specific or direct orders to others to do bad things, the envelope just get pushed. The environment is set by default. If no one stops a practice, the lack of a negative becomes accepted as tacit approval and the underlings tend to push the envelope even farther.

Groundbreaking findings, huh? Do these people not have children? I always find it funny when a study is funded to prove things that are obvious in actual real-life practice. Most children push against their parents to find where the wall is - where is NO, and is it the same place today as it was yesterday? I supposed one might assume that as children become adults, they no longer need to have someone else tell them how to act, but again, the real world doesn't prove this out. Why do businesses use time cards? I think we'd like to believe or hope that people will act morally without being given explicit rules to follow, but this just doesn't seem to be true much of the time. Many times people are happy to take the easy route and put their behavior off on someone else.

Breaking the speed limit generally doesn't result in any huge consequence. More times than not you won't even get a ticket. And when you do, it might make you change your behaviour for a time, but before long the needle on the speedometer begins to creep up again. In other situations, the dangers of not enforcing the rules can lead to far more drastic outcomes. This story was just a reminder to me of how important it is for the 'folks on top' - whatever they might have responsibility over, be it children or employees or guards at a prison - to be consistant and maintain their chosen boundaries for behavior.