The Minority Report

I love reading Jeff Atwood. He’s the blogger that I wish I could be…straight…uh…smart. Anyway, he happens to blog about this study performed by Wil Felps, a professor at the University of Washington School of Business. It happened to be featured on “This American Life”, NPR, hosted by Ira Glass. I happen to also enjoy This American Life very much and am sorry I missed it.

However, due to this posting and the magic of National Public Radio (NPR) making everything they due available online, I get to listen to it and get to point you guys to both Jeff Atwood AND Ira Glass.

A recent episode of This American Life interviewed Wil Felps, a professor who conducted a sociological experiment demonstrating the surprisingly powerful effect of bad apples.

Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions in 45 minutes. To motivate the teams, they’re told that whichever team performs best will be awarded $100 per person. What they don’t know, however, is that in some of the groups, the fourth member of their team isn’t a student. He’s an actor hired to play a bad apple, one of these personality types:

1. The Depressive Pessimist will complain that the task that they’re doing isn’t enjoyable, and make statements doubting the group’s ability to succeed.

2. The Jerk will say that other people’s ideas are not adequate, but will offer no alternatives himself. He’ll say “you guys need to listen to the expert: me.”
3. The Slacker will say “whatever”, and “I really don’t care.”

The conventional wisdom in the research on this sort of thing is that none of this should have had much effect on the group at all. Groups are powerful. Group dynamics are powerful. And so groups dominate individuals, not the other way around. There’s tons of research, going back decades, demonstrating that people conform to group values and norms.

But Wil found the opposite.

Coding Horror: The Bad Apple: Group Poison