Ted talk what makes people go wrong

Indeed, open as TED is, pieces of its ecosystem are highly managed. Apple manages its mobile platform in a similar way. The platform is closed in its hardware design but open to app store contributions, so it allows in a wide range of ideas and solutions from developers. Today talent is increasingly untethered. Value is being created by all categories of people—workers and volunteers, paid and unpaid, contributors and consumers. Organizations that still believe they can and should keep the crowd out may find themselves in an undesirable position—alone and apart.

What TED faced is the new reality for all of us. Today we have to create scale for our mission by being open. The TEDx construct is an example of how being in a community lets us learn, adapt, and grow together. Even though management experts have long argued for looser organizational models and against command-and-control leadership, most executives are still ill equipped to manage crowds.

As humans, we want to be perfect and in control. We like knowing more than we enjoy learning. We want to get it right the first time rather than iterate. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. Brand management. Photography: Curtis Steinback. TED has different approaches for different contributors and audiences.

Open Access to TED. Closed TED. A version of this article appeared in the April issue of Harvard Business Review. Read more on Brand management. Today, she lectures at Stanford, gives talks around the world, and has been ranked one of the most influential management thinkers in the world by Thinkers Partner Center.

They could not be more wrong. Two thirds go all the way to volts. This was just one study. Milgram did more than 16 studies. And look at this. In study 16, where you see somebody like you go all the way, 90 percent go all the way. In study five, if you see people rebel, 90 percent rebel. What about women? Study 13 — no different than men.

So Milgram is quantifying evil as the willingness of people to blindly obey authority, to go all the way to volts. And it's like a dial on human nature. A dial in a sense that you can make almost everybody totally obedient, down to the majority, down to none.

What are the external parallels? For all research is artificial. What's the validity in the real world? He persuaded them to commit mass suicide.

And so, he's the modern Lucifer effect, a man of God who becomes the Angel of Death. Milgram's study is all about individual authority to control people.

Most of the time, we are in institutions, so the Stanford Prison Study is a study of the power of institutions to influence individual behavior. I did this study with my graduate students, especially Craig Haney — and it also began work with an ad. We had a cheap, little ad, but we wanted college students for a study of prison life.

We did interviews. Picked two dozen: the most normal, the most healthy. Randomly assigned them to be prisoner and guard. So on day one, we knew we had good apples. I'm going to put them in a bad situation. And secondly, we know there's no difference between the boys who will be guards and those who will be prisoners.

To the prisoners, we said, "Wait at home. The study will begin Sunday. Student: A police car pulls up in front, and a cop comes to the front door, and knocks, and says he's looking for me. So they, right there, you know, they took me out the door, they put my hands against the car.

It was a real cop car, it was a real policeman, and there were real neighbors in the street, who didn't know that this was an experiment. And there was cameras all around and neighbors all around. They put me in the car, then they drove me around Palo Alto.

They took me to the basement of the police station. Then they put me in a cell. I was the first one to be picked up, so they put me in a cell, which was just like a room with a door with bars on it. You could tell it wasn't a real jail. They locked me in there, in this degrading little outfit. They were taking this experiment too seriously. Here are the prisoners, who are going to be dehumanized, they'll become numbers.

Here are the guards with the symbols of power and anonymity. Guards get prisoners to clean the toilet bowls out with their bare hands, to do other humiliating tasks. They strip them naked. They sexually taunt them. They begin to do degrading activities, like having them simulate sodomy. You saw simulating fellatio in soldiers in Abu Ghraib. My guards did it in five days. The stress reaction was so extreme that normal kids we picked because they were healthy had breakdowns within 36 hours.

The study ended after six days, because it was out of control. Five kids had emotional breakdowns. Does it make a difference if warriors go to battle changing their appearance or not? If they're anonymous, how do they treat their victims? In some cultures, they go to war without changing their appearance.

In others, they paint themselves like "Lord of the Flies. In many, soldiers are anonymous in uniform. So this anthropologist, John Watson, found 23 cultures that had two bits of data.

Do they change their appearance? Do they kill, torture, mutilate? If they don't change their appearance, only one of eight kills, tortures or mutilates. The key is in the red zone. If they change their appearance, 12 of 13 — that's 90 percent — kill, torture, mutilate. And that's the power of anonymity. So what are the seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil? Mindlessly taking the first small step. Dehumanization of others.

De-individuation of self. Diffusion of personal responsibility. Blind obedience to authority. Uncritical conformity to group norms. Passive tolerance of evil through inaction, or indifference. And it happens when you're in a new or unfamiliar situation. Your habitual response patterns don't work. Your personality and morality are disengaged.

Understanding is not excusing. Psychology is not excuse-ology. So social and psychological research reveals how ordinary, good people can be transformed without the drugs. You don't need it. You just need the social-psychological processes. Real world parallels? Compare this with this. James Schlesinger — I'm going to end with this — says, "Psychologists have attempted to understand how and why individuals and groups who usually act humanely can sometimes act otherwise in certain circumstances.

And he goes on to say, "The landmark Stanford study provides a cautionary tale for all military operations. They knew that, and let that happen. So another report, an investigative report by General Fay, says the system is guilty. In this report, he says it was the environment that created Abu Ghraib, by leadership failures that contributed to the occurrence of such abuse, and because it remained undiscovered by higher authorities for a long period of time.

Those abuses went on for three months. Who was watching the store? The answer is nobody, I think on purpose. He gave the guards permission to do those things, and they knew nobody was ever going to come down to that dungeon. So you need a paradigm shift in all of these areas.

The shift is away from the medical model that focuses only on the individual. The shift is toward a public health model that recognizes situational and systemic vectors of disease. Bullying is a disease. Prejudice is a disease. Violence is a disease. Since the Inquisition, we've been dealing with problems at the individual level.

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We often think of bias and prejudice as rooted in ignorance. But as psychologist Paul Bloom seeks to show, prejudice is often natural, rational … even moral. The key, says Bloom, is to understand how our own biases work—so we can take control when they go wrong. Which career should I pursue? Should I break up—or get married?!

Where should I live? Big decisions like these can be agonizingly difficult. She offers a powerful new framework for shaping who we truly are. Paul Craven is a coach, consultant and public speaker in the area of Behavioural Economics. As a member of the exclusive Magic Circle, Paul appreciates how the mind can play tricks, and delivers a talk that is highly interactive with the audience. He concludes by offering practical advice on how firms and individuals can use behavioural economics for their competitive advantage.

Take a bold stance, an active role in big life situations. Calculate the risk, and take control! Stanford professor Itamar Simonson spent much of his career showing that consumers tend to act irrationally and their preferences are highly malleable. But a few years ago he started having second thoughts in light of the Internet and the changing consumer environment. In this talk he will discuss the rise in consumer rationality and the decline of current marketing mantras about branding and loyalty.

Contrary to the now prevalent belief that consumers usually make irrational decisions and can be easily influenced which he helped establish , Simonson will show how everything changes when consumers base their decisions on reviews from other users, easily accessed expert opinions, price comparison apps, and other emerging technologies.

She completed her Ph. She investigates the psychological influences on economic decision making: why do people make their economic decisions the way they do it. She creates her own mathematical model, which is a simulation of the interaction between rational objectivity and emotional subjectivity in economic decision making. Behavioral economist Colin Camerer shows research that reveals how badly we predict what others are thinking. Bonus: He presents an unexpected study that shows chimpanzees might just be better at it.

He earned a Ph. He has published more than articles worked on four books, most notably Behavioral Game Theory Colin has been the past president of the Economic Science experimental economics , the Society for Neuroeconomics, and was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Now, she collaborates with academic and industry colleagues to use behavioral economics to help people avoid temptation and make decisions that will benefit them in the long run.

He has also applied his innovative theories to complex social issues such as obesity, binge drinking and climate change. Today human behaviour is the biggest threat to mankind. We keep driving too fast, even though we know it kills us. We do. But changing actual human behaviour calls for good design solutions that take basic human instincts, flaws and habits into consideration. That is design to nudge.

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