Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Email addition - why companies can't break free

Email addiction: Why the enterprise can't break free
by Howard Baldwin, March 19, 2013 1:13 PM via Computerworld

Atos CEO Thierry Breton caught a lot of flak last year when he announced he wanted his employees to give up email, but he may have been on to something.
Kids these days don't use email -- digital market research company comScore found that use of Web-based email dropped 31% among 12- to 17-year-olds and 34% among 18- to 24-year-olds in the period between December 2010 and December 2011.
And consumers are off email as well. The Radicati Group, which tracks use of email and other messaging media, projects the number of consumer emails will decrease by 3% to 4% each year between 2012 and 2016.

The Office Is Dying: Get Ready For Bring Your Own Workplace (BYOW)

Then again, there was a reason Breton came in for so much derision: Email in the enterprise isn't going anywhere. Or more precisely, it isn't going anywhere but up. Radicati is projecting the number of business emails to increase by 13% every single year between now and 2016.
For enterprise employees, that means more time spent in the inbox, not only on PCs and laptops but now on tablets and smartphones, wading through newsletters, social media notifications and unfiltered spam in search of the mail they truly need to do their jobs, to say nothing of the time spent filing, archiving and retrieving those messages.
For IT, that means more screams from users about storage limits being too low (especially when Google lets them keep everything), as well as worries about security, archiving, retention, e-discovery, deletion, and syncing mail between mobile devices. And then there's the cost: In 2010, Gartner estimated associated email costs of $192 per user per year.
Why do we subject ourselves to this madness? Because for all its aggravations, email works. "It's still an efficient way of communicating, almost in real time," says Phil Bertolini, CIO of Michigan's Oakland County, who's responsible for 10,000 email boxes.
"It does what it's designed to do quite well, which is allow us to securely communicate on a one-to-one or one-to-few basis," says Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
Simply put, we may hate email, but we can't work without it. But if enterprise email volume is going to boom the way Radicati's numbers indicate, something's going to have to change, CIOs and messaging experts agree. Email is going to have to get more sophisticated and, at the same time, easier to use. And the people doing the using, who often make life harder for themselves, need to evolve, too.
Why we love email
We love email because it has utility and ubiquity. It keeps us connected and updated without requiring sender and recipients to be online at the same time, thanks to its asynchronous nature. Everyone doing business today can reasonably be expected to have an email address, where only some use communication alternatives like chat, videoconferencing or SMS texting.
Beyond that, email creates a de facto audit trail as it goes, tracking who sent what to whom when, one that is easily stored, forwarded and, barring space limitations, readily available on one's computer.
The result of this success? "Nobody can live without it for more than two minutes," says Sara Radicati, president and CEO of The Radicati Group.
From Unix mail (b. 1972) to IBM PROFS (b. 1981) and DEC All-In-1 (b. 1982) to email clients and integrated email (think Lotus Notes) to Web-based mail to today's cloud-based options, email has evolved because we needed it.

Oakland County's Bertolini is a big fan of email -- given that the public sector is still heavily paper-based, email still counts a big technological step forward. "We can chase new technologies, but I need something that's trusted and used by the masses. Even though there are people clamoring for newer ways to communicate, email is our main form of communication."

Unfortunately, email's positives -- its utility and ubiquity -- have become its negatives as well.

Consider this complaint: "It doesn't matter if the message comes from a spammer hawking Viagra, your wife asking you to pick up some wine, your boss telling the company that Monday is a holiday, or a client asking for a meeting at his office at 11 a.m. In today's inboxes, all email messages are equal." Journalist Om Malik wrote that ...in 2007. If anything, the situation has only gotten worse.

The problem, says Forrester's Koplowitz, is that "we use email for things it wasn't designed to do." Hooked on email, users default to it for scheduling, workflow, resource management, archiving, document management, project management, and even knowledge management, where ideas that should be shared widely are instead locked up in an email chain among a narrow list of recipients. "The things it does poorly have become problematic," Koplowitz sums up.

Email's people problem

Is the enterprise's email addiction rooted in technology or in user behavior? Both, analysts say.

"Email is only as good as the person who organizes it," observes Sara Radicati, president and CEO of The Radicati Group, which tracks use of email and other messaging media.

Over the years, enterprise email systems have added an ever-increasing number of sophisticated organizational tools, but "users still have to train the system, which is where it breaks down," Radicati explains. "Users forget how they set it up a certain way, and why. Somebody who is highly organized and structured will do well with these tools, and someone who is naturally chaotic will be chaotic."

Adam Glick, Microsoft product manager for Exchange and Outlook, acknowledges, "You can change the tools, but you can't change the people." Just one example -- the current version of Office 2013 includes an option that lets users ignore any email with a particular subject line if that thread has become irrelevant to the recipient. On a grander scale, Exchange and Outlook are becoming more of a communication hub, with greater integration of chat and unified communications, Glick says.

But no matter what gets integrated or how communications evolves, IT needs to help users make the most of the new platforms, and users need to turn that assistance into action.

"IT needs to explain how and when to use these features in email," says Radicati, "and people need to learn to improve their efficiency."

Over the years developers have tried to break through users' dependence on email with software that's more sophisticated and better suited to the enterprise task at hand -- often with only narrow success.

Knowledge management systems, touted in the 1990s as the next big thing, failed to catch on, while collaboration systems such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft SharePoint have been variously successful; the inclusion of Chatter into Salesforce works in the sales arena for specific needs.

But typically these systems have failed to attain email's level of ubiquity because they offered a solution that may indeed be superior to email, but only for a narrow population of enterprise users.

"There's a high correlation in the success of these tools when they're aligned with recognizable business value," says Koplowitz. Unfortunately, he adds, there's frequently an organizational mismatch. The tools that work for one department (e.g., sales) may not suffice for another (e.g., customer service).

Even when new communications tools like Yammer and Chatter do take hold throughout the enterprise, what happens? Users route their notifications to the one place they're most likely to see them first -- the ubiquitous email inbox.

IT's email burden

For IT, email is an ongoing headache. Niraj Jetly, CIO at EdenredUSA, the U.S. division of a global developer of employee benefits and incentive solutions in Newton, Mass., cites a quartet of hassles: the volume of data; compliance and security; corporate email on user devices; and international routing.

"No one can support ever-increasing mailbox sizes," he says. "At the same time, we have to ensure the safety and security of sensitive data being transmitted. We have to ensure the availability of emails archived by users on their laptops or desktops."

As a divisional CIO within a multinational organization, Jetly also cites as a challenge getting email from continent to continent. "It gets very tricky when different government [regulations] and private-sector contracts restrict email routing," he explains. For instance, certain PCI-DSS regulations require that emails originating in the U.S. stay in the U.S.

The oncoming trend of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) also worries him. "If an organization needs encrypted email but also supports BYOD, supporting access to corporate email on personal devices becomes a never-ending challenge," Jetly says. "And if a user loses a personal device, who has liability for the loss of data?" he asks.

Pete Kardiasmenos, systems architect at SBLI USA, the New York City-based insurance company, manages the firm's Exchange servers and gets involved with "anything relating to email." His biggest issue: users turning to external, free email systems, such as Yahoo and Gmail, to circumvent the company's storage limits.

"They don't have bad intentions. They want to know why they're limited to 500 megabytes when Gmail is unlimited. It's because the more space you have, the more time backup takes, the more complicated disaster recovery is. We have to constantly communicate our policies," he says. Like a lot of enterprise organizations, SBLI USA has had to block the use of public email systems from company-owned computers as a security measure, and limit space in Exchange for most users because of storage cost issues.

Even then, he says, email is still a headache for the company. "People keep email in their inbox the same way they keep files on their desktop, to keep them handy. They send the same file back and forth as an attachment until you have 10 versions that you have to store."

For Oakland County's Bertolini, it's the management that's the challenge -- managing passwords, and managing Outlook's .pst backup files when they get too big. At least, he says, when those files get too large, they start to generate error messages. "We find out about it when [users] have a problem," sighs Bertolini.

"In one case, we discovered thousands of emails dating back to 2001," Bertolini relates. "And the real problem is that most of them dealt with trivia like meeting for lunch. There's a cost to maintaining and managing email over time."

The largest burden for IT, Radicati says, is simply uptime. "The overriding concern for IT is making sure that it's up and running and available," she says.

Email in the cloud

So what's IT supposed to do? Certainly, cloud is one of several ways to view email differently. Radicati is highly optimistic about email in the cloud. "It's absolutely the way to go," she says. "A lot of cloud-based email providers have archiving and compliance capabilities in place, and if you want more features, you can purchase them as an additional capability."

In Oakland County, Bertolini is investigating using Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud. "There's still a cost associated with storage, but part of our ROI analysis will be comparing the cost of storage in the cloud versus letting people keep more email," he says, adding that he's worried that if "you give them more storage, they will fill it up."

But he also sees other advantages. "If I can host email externally and still have the safety and security the county government needs, I can save millions in the long term. We'd need two to three people to manage Microsoft Exchange, but if I go to the cloud, I don't need those people. And in three or four years, I'm not replacing my mail servers."

Still, questions remain. "A lot of IT departments are investigating moving email to the cloud," Radicati says, "but there is still concern about whether it will be private enough, secure enough, and reliable enough."

Merging communications tools

Like many technologies IT has to deal with, email's boundaries are expanding, which means IT needs to begin thinking about email less as a silo and more as one component of a multi-modal communications system.

Bertolini notes that the new generation of employees clamors for instant messaging -- and he's not against it. "They use it to collaborate more. When they have chat, they can get things done in realtime." He's also looking at more videoconferencing, first on a one-to-one basis from desktop to desktop, and then from conference room to conference room, and then into a multipoint video arraignment system for the public safety team, because it saves having to transport the county's prisoners among facilities.

Fortunately, these communication mechanisms will start to merge together, analysts predict. Radicati believes that email in the next two to five years won't look tremendously different, but we won't talk about email so much as a stand-alone tool. Instead, we'll have a communications dashboard that includes email, instant messaging and social media.

These hubs will all come about thanks to new open APIs, not only for social media applications like Facebook and LinkedIn, but also for unified communications protocols like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

Forrester's Koplowitz concurs. "Over the next few years, we'll see greater integration across these tools. Think about how messaging is integrated into Gmail -- you don't have to switch back and forth because they're all integrated together," he says, citing work that IBM (with Connections and Notes), Google (with Gmail and Gchat), Microsoft (with SharePoint and Yammer) and Facebook are doing.

"We'll have a new environment with new aspects of communication," Koplowitz predicts. "Today they're different tools, but in the next three to five years, they'll be integrated."

Experimental philosophy is not an elephant

Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2013 http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2013/03/experimental-philosophy-is-not-elephant.html

Experimental philosophy is not an elephant

by Massimo Pigliucci

There has been quite a stir in philosophical circles over the last several years caused by the emergence of a new sub-field referred to as experimental philosophy (colloquially, “XPhi”). I was actually at one of the first symposia that a young crowd of energetic philosophers had organized to get things started back in the early aughts. More recently, I had a nice chat on my podcast with one of the movers of experimental philosophy, Joshua Knobe. Despite my initial sympathies, however, I’ve developed a bit of weariness for the whole approach, and I recently had to confront my reservations head on.

The occasion for the confrontation has been the fact that I am writing a book for Chicago Press on whether and how philosophy makes progress, and the last chapter (yet to be written) features a discussion of philosophical methods, including XPhi. The fodder for the considerations that follow was conveniently provided by a recent popular defense of XPhi by Mark Phelan, which appeared in the magazine Philosophy Now, entitled “Experimental philosophy as an elephant.”

The thrust of Phelan’s article is that XPhi is a growing elephant whose observers can’t seem to grasp more than a part at a time, while they are stumbling in the dark trying to figure it all out. It’s a bit of an uncharitable characterization of critics of the approach, which together with its description as a “movement” (why not just a field of inquiry?) by its supporters contributes to irritating rather than welcoming people from the outside. Be that as it may, let’s get to the meat of Phelan’s defense of XPhi.

Phelan takes on four common criticisms — or misconceptions, depending on how you see them — of XPhi in turn: the charge that it is really a bunch of social science surveys attempting to settle philosophical issues by majority vote; the idea that it really consists of a type of meta-philosophy; the perception that it deals only with the role of intuitions in philosophy; and the conclusion that whatever XPhi is, it just isn’t philosophy.

Is it just philosophy by survey? That perception, as Phelan acknowledges, comes from papers that explore how people (often lay people, not professional philosophers) assess the concept of knowledge. This, as is well known, has classically been defined by Plato as “justified true belief.” As philosophers also know very well, Edmund Gettier published a paper back in 1963 in which he provided (very, very convoluted) examples of situations that seem to satisfy Plato’s definition, and yet that do not really seem like they should count as actual knowledge. (No need to get into the specifics here, but you can learn more about it, as usual, over at the SEP.)

Phelan summarizes the results of one of the relevant XPhi papers, using a thought experiment featuring the hypothetical characters of Bob and Jill: “[the authors] found that around 60% of people from East Asia and the Indian Subcontinent think – unlike most professional philosophers in the West – that Bob does not merely believe but really knows that Jill drives an American car in the above case. On the other hand, three-quarters of Westerners share with the (Western) philosophers the intuition that Bob does not know but only believes that Jill drives an American car.”

Phelan correctly interprets this to mean that we now have (interesting) empirical evidence [1] that (lay) people in Asia have a different concept of knowledge from professional philosophers in the West. But notice that this isn’t a particularly illuminating comparison at all: what we want to know — philosophically speaking — is whether Asian philosophers have a different conception of knowledge than Western ones, and if so why (i.e., how they justify it by argument).

Moreover, while Phelan’s point was that XPhi studies of this sort do not pretend to settle philosophical issues by survey, he then turns around and suggests precisely that: “[the results] challeng[e] the purported universality of analytic philosophy’s methodology and findings ... [the authors] argue from their results to a challenge for analytic epistemology.” If that’s not doing philosophy by survey I don’t know what is!

My take on this first part is that lay people’s opinions about technical philosophical issues are entirely irrelevant to the practice of philosophy, just like the opinions of lay people on Fermat’s last theorem, or on the structure of Hamlet are entirely irrelevant to the practice of professional mathematics or literary criticism. It is interesting to know how (lay) people think of philosophical, mathematical, or literary questions, in terms of the social science of common knowledge, but social science of common knowledge is not philosophy (or math, or literary criticism).

Is it “just” meta-philosophy? Apparently, one of the things XPhi is “accused” of is being a type of meta-philosophy, rather than philosophy per se. That sounds strange to me, however, because meta-philosophy — i.e., reflecting on the practices, methods and goals of philosophy — is a type of philosophy anyway. Here Phelan’s “defense” is that some XPhi is meta-philosophical, but not all of it. Fair enough. The problem is with the examples he picks to illustrate the non-meta-philosophical aspects of XPhi. For instance, he refers to research by Eddy Nahmias and collaborators on “the phenomenology of free will.” The authors interpreted the results of their survey of (lay) people’s conceptions about free will as providing some support for a compatibilist notion of free will. But, just as above, why on earth would lay opinion about a technical philosophical issue provide “evidence,” slight or not, for that position? The survey is interesting because it tells us about the variety of people’s intuitive positions about something like free will, of course. But that seems to me to qualify as philosophically-inspired social science, not as philosophy.

Is it all about intuitions? The problem with the use of intuitions in philosophical discourse isa vexing one, although I think there is a bit of confusion even among philosophers about what we mean by philosophical intuitions and what role do they actually play in philosophical arguments. Phelan admits that quite a bit of the XPhi literature is, in fact, about intuitions, and has the goal of “broadening the sample class of those whose intuitions matter” (although, one more time, why exactly is it that the intuitions of non-philosophers should matter at all when it comes to technical discussions within philosophy?). But his strategy is, again, to argue that that’s not all that XPhi practitioners do. Here he cites the work of Eric Schwitzgebel, who published a number of papers on whether moral philosophers are more ethical than other people. The answer, disturbingly, seems to be no (though see footnote 1 for the possibility of quibbling about the proper contrast groups, the way the research is conducted, etc.). For instance “Schwitzgebel and colleagues found that professional ethicists are no more likely to vote, or respond to student emails, than are non-ethicist philosophers and professors. Audiences in ethics sessions at philosophical conferences are generally just as likely to behave discourteously as audiences in non-ethics sessions. And ethics books (even obscure ones) are more likely to be missing from library collections than are books from other philosophical sub-disciplines.” It isn’t entirely clear to me that not responding to students’ emails is unethical (it depends on the specifics of the context), and there are rational arguments against voting. It’s also debatable that other professors are the best contrast group here, since the range of behavior is likely to be much smaller than in the population at large, which means that one would need very large sample sizes to pick up a statistically significant difference. And perhaps it is students of ethics who steal books about ethics, because they haven’t learned their stuff yet!

The point is: what are we supposed to make of such findings? The idea, I take it, is to challenge statements by some moral philosophers that studying ethics makes someone a better person (Socrates comes to mind). But how often is such statement made anyway? And shouldn’t we be testing it in the population at large, rather than just among academics? And which understanding of ethics would that be? Does it make no difference whether the ethicist in question is a utilitarian or a deontologist? At any rate, this kind of research can certainly function as a corrective against facile broad statements by philosophers about the utility of what they teach (but then why pick on philosophers and not educators in general?). But is it philosophy? No, it’s social science of philosophical statements.

Is it not philosophy? And we finally get to the crux of the matter, the criticism that whatever XPhi is, and however valuable some of this research may be, it simply isn’t philosophy. Phelan’s strategy here is twofold. On the one hand, he says that XPhi practitioners do deploy the standard tools of philosophical reasoning, they simply wish to augment the tool kit. On the other hand, he questions the idea that philosophy is “essentially normative” and that XPhi violates principles such as the famous is/ought distinction made by Hume.

Unlike some critics of XPhi, I do not think that its practitioners are poor philosophers or are otherwise deficient technically or intellectually. But none of the examples discussed above — or the additional ones brought forth by Phelan in his article — seem to me to augment standard philosophical practice. The results of XPhi inquiries are often interesting, and sometimes even surprising, but they all fall much more naturally under the rubric of social science research (carried out on philosophically inspired topics).

As for the second point, XPhi here hasn’t really invented anything new. W.V.O. Quine, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, already put forth a model of philosophy as a kind of science, going as far as (mistakenly, I think) suggesting that epistemology, for instance, is but a branch of psychology.

It isn’t - and that’s not so much because philosophy is prescriptive (though it certainly is, in many cases — epistemology and ethics being two obvious ones), but because philosophical analysis is a matter of critical reflection on empirically underdetermined issues. If an issue can be univocally resolved empirically, it’s science.

For instance, the question of, say, how many planets are present in the solar system is an exquisitely empirical one, and the answer is found in astronomy, not in any branch of philosophy. The only philosophical aspect of said question, as far as I can see, is a discussion of why astronomers count certain celestial bodies as planets and others as “planetoids” (give me back Pluto, damn it!), which is informed by (philosophical) considerations about the definition of concepts characterized by fuzzy boundaries.

Take, in contrast, the question of how to think about ethical problems. While empirical input from science is certainly pertinent (e.g., in discussions about abortion, when, exactly, does the fetus begin to feel pain?), the bulk of the activity is one of critical reflection based on logically constructed arguments — i.e., it’s philosophy.

The model that I have been proposing for a while, then, is one of weak continuity between philosophy and science, where the practice of each does inform the other, without either being encompassed by the other. Science is (no longer) a branch of philosophy, and philosophy isn’t a branch of science, pace Quine and the XPhi practitioners.

The positive lesson to be taken from XPhi is that philosophers need to be careful when they make what are essentially empirical statements, things like “it is common intuition that...” Well, is it common? How do you know? Ask XPhi! But this doesn’t license the leap to the idea that lay people’s intuitions are pertinent to anything other than social science and that they somehow augment or provide additional tools for the understanding of technical philosophical matters. At least, no more than the opinions of lay people in cosmology, mathematics, or literary criticism do in those respective fields.

————

[1] Throughout this post I will take XPhi’s empirical results at face value, because I am concerned with what the role of the field is with respect to philosophy in general, not with its specific findings. But of course, as in the case of any empirical finding — especially if it pertains to social science — there can be quite a bit to quibble about in terms of representativeness and size of samples, the way questions are posed, the statistical analyses of the data, etc.

Mere Exposure to Bad Art

http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/22/aesthj.ays060.short?rss=1

Mere Exposure to Bad Art

+Author Affiliations

University of Leeds
Lawrence University
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
University of Leeds

Next Section

I

Why do we make the aesthetic judgements that we do? Luck and happenstance—our environment, our upbringing, our friends—presumably play some role. But most philosophers of art presume that works of art have stable aesthetic or artistic values to which judgement is also sensitive. Hence the standard philosophical (and perhaps commonsensical) view that artistic value is a primary determinant of canonical status.

By contrast, many scholars from other disciplines are sceptical about the aesthetic domain: they presume that sociocultural processes are the primary determinants of aesthetic judgement, ‘value’, and canonicity.¹ In addition to the power of art insiders, or socio-political forces which favour privileged groups and exclude outsiders, an aesthetic sceptic might also suggest that our (putatively) carefully cultivated aesthetic tastes are largely a product of contingencies and chance encounters. Such a sceptic might even marshal recent evidence from psychology on her behalf. A recent set of studies by the psychologist James Cutting demonstrated that merely exposing people to certain Impressionist paintings produced an increase in their liking for them.²

Cutting’s research prompts important questions about the conditions under, and the extent to which, exposure influences aesthetic preference and judgement. Is it the case that no matter what images people are exposed to, they will grow to like the ones they see the most? This would suggest at best an extremely limited role for aesthetic value in determining our aesthetic tastes. Perhaps Cutting’s study might be taken to support such extreme scepticism. Alternatively, the study might suggest that exposure only works under fairly limited constraints. Perhaps it is only when all other factors are kept equal that mere exposure plays a role; that is, among paintings of equal quality, people will prefer those they have seen most often.³ While less extreme than the sceptical view, such a reading nonetheless puts pressure on the soundness of many of our comparative judgements. Perhaps we mistake the effects of mere exposure for superior artistic quality much more commonly than we would like to think.

This paper addresses the interaction between mere exposure and the quality of the artworks to which we are exposed. It focuses on an experiment we conducted to test whether mere exposure increases or decreases liking for bad visual artworks. The results indicate that mere exposure to bad art makes people like it less. We argue that these results suggest that exposure itself is sensitive to value. If this is correct, sceptics about aesthetic value and the canon cannot straightforwardly rely on Cutting’s results to support their position. Even when exposure makes a difference, aesthetic value appears to remain in the picture.

Section II briefly introduces the mere exposure effect. Section III considers in detail Cutting’s experimental studies concerning preferences for Impressionist artworks. Section IV discusses the potential philosophical implications of Cutting’s results. Section V describes the experiment we ran and provides an extended account of the results of that experiment. We found that mere exposure decreased liking for the bad paintings to which we exposed our subjects. Section VI explores potential explanations for our results—results which seem to be in tension with the extreme sceptical position described above. Section VII discusses our study in relation to earlier research on mere exposure and ‘negative’ stimuli. We argue that there are good reasons to resist characterizing the stimuli used in our study as ‘negative’—at least in the sense in which that term is ordinarily used by psychologists. Section VIII explores the potential philosophical significance of our results, and Section IX comprises a brief conclusion.

Previous Section Next Section

II... go to

British Journal of Aesthetics

to see the rest

Monday, March 11, 2013

The Immigration-Detention-Industrial Complex

Privately Run Immigration Detention System

In the United States (and other countries where the ideal of privatization is held up as a goal to break public employee unions and reduce the size of government), the government hires private security companies to detain immigrants.

Governments are giving contracts to private companies to expand detention and show voters that they are enforcing tough immigration laws.

Private companies now control nearly half of all detention beds in the United States.

In Britain, 7 of 11 detention centers and most short-term holding places for immigrants are run by for-profit contractors.

No country has more completely outsourced immigration enforcement, with more troubled results, than Australia. Under unusually severe mandatory detention laws, the system has been run by a succession of three publicly traded companies since 1998.

This has become a huge multinational industry. Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they claim they can meet demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.

But the explosion of private detention led to reports of terrible abuse, documented by the New York Times.

Human rights groups, such as the International Detention Coalition, say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend.

Immigration lawyers and pro-human rights groups worry that the development of an immigration-detention-industrial complex” has created a momentum pushing governments to detain immigrants for the profit of private companies.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Zimbardo

Peter A. Georgescu There's a Prison Guard in Each of Us

As a child in Romania, I watched the Communist authorities come into our house and pull my grandfather from my grandmother's arms -- taking him to a prison where he was eventually kicked to death by a guard. My brother and I, along with my grandmother were then put to work in a labor camp for years, beyond the ability of our parents to save us. They'd been on a trip overseas when we were seized and had no choice but to stay in America, trying one ploy after another to free us, all of it in vain. Eventually Romania released us, but only when President Eisenhower interceded on our behalf, after months of shaming publicity from the world media, which took up our cause with vigor. Yet this happened only after we were put through years of life-threatening labor. We came to America to live with our parents, and were blessed to have happy lives thanks to the goodness of countless people who helped us. Yet I've spent decades trying to understand the origin of evil in human behavior -- what was it that prompted the authorities to put two small, innocent children through years of forced labor?

So when I first read about Philip Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment, it fascinated me. When you read about how ordinary human beings can be induced to act in a way most of us would consider evil, it's easy to think it's unnatural. Or that the conditions of the experiment must have created unusual pressures most people wouldn't ordinarily encounter in life -- and that the experiment itself must be to blame for the results. Yet, my own experience led me to see in this experiment an exposure of what is, in reality, tendencies innate to all human beings. I'd seen ordinary villagers adapt to a new Communist regime and commit evil against innocent people -- it seemed this experiment was exploring precisely the kind of questions that had obsessed me all my life. It spurred me in my effort to comprehend why people can so quickly find themselves doing evil.

I found a way to forgive my Romanian captors by seeing evil as something built into the brain itself. It's our heritage from countless years struggling to survive in the tall African grass, among our predators, after our primate ancestors descended from the trees.- Peter Geogescu

I write about this experiment and what it now means to me, and the road of personal exploration that led me to understand what I'd experienced as a child, in The Constant Choice. As it turns out, I found a way to forgive my Romanian captors by seeing evil as something built into the brain itself. It's our heritage from countless years struggling to survive in the tall African grass, among our predators, after our primate ancestors descended from the trees. Most of what we consider evil was actually perfectly sensible behavior if you go far enough back in history. It kept us alive in a primitive world with scarce resources and tribal conflict. Our culture has evolved into something far more sophisticated with codes of action based on universal moral law -- yet this moral law stands in direct conflict with what the older portions of our brain urge us to do under stress. Civilization has largely become an effort to evolve our culture and our behavior in a way that helps nullify these impulses that once enabled us to survive but now threaten our future as a race. Zimbardo showed that evil is integral to human nature, lurking in all of us. Yet, once we realize this, we can freely chose to move beyond these impulses -- if we are on the watch for them in ourselves. But we need to recognize how close we all are to becoming a prison guard and then chose instead to be something far better -- and that means recognizing how accurate Zimbardo's experiments were and what they mean for all of us, when we consider all the choices we make every day.

Bryan Wood The Social Influence of Good vs. Evil

When I ponder the concept of good versus evil, I pause for a moment to recognize that the words have varying meanings to different people. While one culture may view the stoning of women for sexual behavior perfectly acceptable, others will view it as being despicable and an abomination to humanity. The important fact is to isolate and define a form of evil that is all-encompassing for the human species and not varied between individual cultures.

As humans, we precariously straddle two worlds. One world is based on our genetic hard-wiring which is geared towards survival and aggression -- our animal instincts. Our other world is the modern, civilized society based on rules and conformity which we have created and enjoy. The vast majority of people reside prominently in civilized society, and they dismiss their instinct for aggression and dominance. Being a part of the group ensures safety and prosperity, and the group strongly influences and defines individual behavior.

This relationship between the group and the individual is a two-way street. The group defines rules and limitations, and the individual complies for the purpose of integration. The end result of this is mutually beneficial to the good of one and the good of many. Evil acts occur when one aspect of this system breaks down and either the motivations of the group as a whole become corrupted or an individual rebels against the norms created by society.

As a whole, we recognize evil acts as being those committed by individuals who have abandoned society. Deranged individuals who commit rampage style shootings, those who target children for sexual exploitation, those who target vulnerable women for rape, and so on. These are acts which, regardless of their root cause, have no seed of good within them. They are committed solely for the purpose of delivering pain, suffering, and torture to the victims, with no redeeming value to society, and without remorse.

When the individual breaks away from the group in this manner, there is very rarely any chance for true rehabilitation.

When the failure of good is on the side of the group as a whole, however, the result can be much different. If good people are subjected to degraded values within the group, even the best person can become subject to committing the worst acts. This is often highlighted in examples of heroes-turned-criminal in the military and police officers who find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

A war veteran is often revered as a hero in our society today, and most soldiers hold themselves to the highest standards of conduct while in battle. However, if the group as a whole becomes broken, the strength of the brotherhood between soldiers can drive many to do things which later carry grave regret. In January of 2012, such an example came to light in America.

A group of soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines rose to infamy when a video surfaced on the internet depicting them urinating on dead Taliban fighters. The soldiers are heard saying "Golden like a shower," and "Have a great day buddy," while desecrating the remains. In our modern, civilized world, we would rank this act as evil under almost any terms, but it's important to remember this didn't take place here. It took place in the less civilized, less modern world of war, and it took place under conditions most would never dare to imagine much less experience. So, what went wrong?

Soldiers, while legally adults, are very often still within a very impressionable age. If I dare to think back to myself at the age of 19 or 20 years old, I hardly recall a mature adult. If people at such an age are removed from an environment of order, structure and safety, and placed in an environment of disorder, chaos, and fear, the motivation of the group shifts, and the results can devastate lives.

In a scenario such as the soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, the motivating factor for the group became anger and rage. As the soldiers dealt with significant combat resulting in heavy casualties, the individuals responded in suit. While urinating on the remains of others may be regarded as evil, it is very important for others to form the distinction between the act itself and the people committing it. The act may be evil, but the people themselves are not. The moral compass of the group lost its way, and the natural drive for the individuals to conform brought them to a very unwanted infamy.

Violence and evil are no strangers to our world, and they are never going away. However, if we learn to recognize the sources of derelict behavior, we may be able to intervene and prevent good people from making tragic decisions.

Marina Nemat The Many Faces of Evil

In 1977, a 21-year-old political prisoner, Ali Moosavi, was tortured in Evin prison in Tehran, Iran, by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. Ali was a devout follower of Ayatollah Khomeini, whom the vast majority of Iranians, including Marxists, Islamists, liberals, seculars, etc., came to support during the revolution as the only leader who could unite everyone against the monarchy. Ali was hung from a ceiling in a torture room in Evin. He was beaten for hours and then repeatedly electrocuted. He believed in his cause, which, according to him, had to do with bringing justice and democracy to Iran. To many people, he was a hero.

In 1982, it had been about three years since Iran had become an Islamic republic, but the country was neither free nor democratic. On a daily basis, thousands of young people protested on the streets against the antidemocratic policies of the new regime. Hundreds of protestors were arrested and then tortured in Evin, which was supposed to be shut down with the success of the revolution in 1979, but it wasn't. In 1980, Ali Moosavi became an interrogator/torturer in Evin and tortured teenagers. Iran was at war with Iraq. To Ali, torturing and executing "the enemies of the revolution" was an act of justice and goodness; he believed he was defending Iran's national security and God. Even at this stage, he was a hero to many.

In front of the Iranian Embassy in Stockholm, shortly after the 2009 elections in Iran and the mass protests and arrests that followed, an Iranian woman yelled, "We'll torture you all just the way you tortured us! We'll kill you all!" She was angry because of all the terrible things that were done to her in Evin, and she didn't see that by torturing and killing, she would contribute to the same evil she was trying to defeat. To her, heroism has to do with killing and torturing the enemy. Her value system is distorted and has been overcome by hate, which has originated from her personal suffering when her dignity and survival were threatened.

Hannah Arendt wrote about Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, that even though his deeds were monstrous, he was quite ordinary. He was not stupid, but he was thoughtless, incapable of thinking independently or critically. Arendt believed that Eichmann was the embodiment of what she called the banality of evil, the capability of "normal" people to commit evil in certain circumstances. She wrote that, unlike popular belief, not all Nazis were psychopaths.

One human being intentionally harming another is an evil act. If we agree on this, we would soon have to answer some difficult questions. How about the many states in the U.S. that practice the death penalty? Are those who practice it, even when the law allows it, evil?- Marina Nemat

During his TEDTalk, titled Psychology of Evil, Philip Zimbardo, who is known for his Stanford Prison Study, in which 24 "normal," healthy individuals were randomly selected to be "prisoners" or "guards" in a mock dungeon located in a basement at Stanford University, fails to clearly define what evil is in practical terms. What kind of acts can be categorized as evil? This might seem obvious, but, in some cases, it is not. I believe, for example, that one human being intentionally harming another is an evil act. If we agree on this, we would soon have to answer some difficult questions. For example, how about the many states in the U.S. that practice the death penalty? Are those who practice it, even when the law allows it, evil? After all, they justify killing another human being. As Mr. Zimbardo says during his talk, saving the life of another is a heroic act. He gives us the example of the New York subway hero, Wesley Autrey, who jumped in front of a moving train to save a total stranger as many bystanders froze and watched. But if we allow our laws to, under any circumstances, deem the deliberate act of taking another person's life right and just, then we contradict ourselves. Mr. Zimbardo suggests that in order to counter evil, we need to have heroism classes for kids in schools. But how can we train more Wesley Autreys who jump in front of moving trains to save another person if, in the real world, the person we risk our lives to save could be condemned to death sometime in the future according to our own laws because of a crime they might have committed? If we allow violent acts like torture and murder under anycircumstances, in all practicality, we feed evil and empower it. Punishment, national security, protecting God or country, etc. can never be used as reasons to justify violence. If we justify violence in the name of good, no heroism class can ever save us from the hell we will gradually sink into. Before heroism, we need to teach our children the difference between right and wrong and the meaning of good and evil. We need to not only tell them, but also to show them with the way we live our lives and write our laws that harming other human beings can never be justified. Without this solid foundation, our talks and lectures become soulless propaganda. Evil is not simple and does not fit in a box; it manifests itself in many shapes and forms, from the victim who becomes a torturer, the Nazi who follows orders, and the psychopath who kills without remorse, to the bystander who remains silent in the face of terrible injustice. Heroism classes sound like a bad reality show; they will sell, but they will not make the world a better place. Let's start with less glamorous but much more practical anti-bullying, how-to-be-compassionate classes. Small sacrifices pave the way for big ones.
Robert Koehler Abu Ghraib Revisited

Philip Zimbardo's TEDTalk on Abu Ghraib and "The Psychology of Evil" is up to 2,374,000 hits. Apparently people are hungry to know about the deep psychology of American foreign policy.

And perhaps they're hungry to look, again... again... at the Abu Ghraib torture photos that first surfaced in 2004. Cruelty and evil inspire a twisted awe; they pull us into the black hole of our own heart, where we see ourselves in hideous distortion.

"Nothing is easier," said Dostoevsky (quoted by Zimbardo in his presentation), "than denouncing an evildoer. Nothing is more difficult than understanding him."

Zimbardo, the psychologist who conducted the famous, or infamous, Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, and subsequently wrote a book called The Lucifer Effect, has devoted his career to studying the systemic nature of human violence and the corrupting effect of power, especially anonymous power, over others. The experiment, using college-student volunteers, had to be called off after five days, well ahead of its planned duration, because the abuse of power had gotten so thoroughly out of hand.

All of which has a certain relevance to real life, you might say. When the Abu Ghraib scandal hit the fan nearly a decade ago, the Bush administration immediately singled out and prosecuted a few low-ranking guards for committing such garishly photogenic, PR-damaging abuses against their Muslim prisoners. No matter that their orders were to "soften up" the prisoners for interrogation. No matter that they had been encouraged and praised by their superiors until the photos were leaked to the public.

The dehumanized Muslim prisoners tore open our hearts with their fragile humanity, and the American guards, laughing at their pain, seemed completely devoid of humanity.-- Robert Koehler

The situation was suddenly messy. Uh oh, scapegoats needed.

And slowly the horror of the scandal dissipated. The issue became the prosecution and punishment of the isolated, low-ranking evildoers and, for some, fury at the hypocrisy of the military and the Bush administration.

But what about the torture itself? The photographs showed hell on earth, evidence of a social and spiritual cancer that had dangerously metastasized. And we were the agents. This was all happening in the middle of our war on terror... our war on evil itself, and here were American soldiers, acting, excuse me, as though they were the evil ones. The dehumanized Muslim prisoners tore open our hearts with their fragile humanity, and the American guards, laughing at their pain, seemed completely devoid of humanity.

We haven't absorbed the shock of this, much less pondered the implications, much less adjusted national policy. We've just suppressed it, normalized it (that's war for you) and moved on. Except, of course, we haven't -- any more than we've moved on from much else in our national past.

As Zimbardo notes, the proper question to ask about Abu Ghraib isn't who but what is responsible? This is the question we haven't asked at anywhere close to the level of national decision-making -- because, of course, we can't. The implications are too large. Foreign policy isn't supposed to be rational; the Department of Defense is a medieval priesthood, pursuing its ends in ritual and secrecy.

Why are we waging this war? Why are we continuing to terrorize parts of Central Asia with our drone strikes? Why did we kill five children last month, along with five adults, with a drone strike in eastern Afghanistan, within hours of President Obama's State of the Union address?

"The NATO-led coalition declined to confirm whether there had been an air strike in the area overnight, saying only that it was looking into allegations of civilian casualties," the Guardian reported the next day. And this is all we'll ever hear of the incident.

If the bodies are too public, we'll get an official expression of "deep regret," such as NATO's International Security Assistance Force gave us several days ago, after Australian soldiers killed two Afghan children during a firefight. For good measure, they added assurances that ISAF remains "committed to minimizing civilian casualties," according to Agence France-Presse.

Somewhere in the collective psyche there is unchecked internal bleeding over the killing and the indifference and the lies. We're trapped in a nation that can't stop wielding its lethal power.

And this, I think, begins to explain the consuming and continuing curiosity about Zimbardo's TEDTalk and Abu Ghraib. At a level beyond geopolitics and beyond nationalism itself, we can't let go of the question, who are we?

Pain and death should deepen us. To remain shallow and banal in the face of death is perhaps the greatest sin of all. When I look at the Abu Ghraib photos I think of a book called Without Sanctuary -- a compilation of lynching postcards and photos from the early 20th century, which came out in 2000. The same insanity is present in the photos, the same happy smiles, as corpses dangle from trees and light poles.

This is what we're capable of when we go to war and choose to live in hate. We know it because, when we look at the photos, we recognize ourselves.

Sam Sommers Life, Oversimplified

Personality is overrated.

One of our biggest misconceptions about human nature is that the people around us are of consistent, predictable character. When thinking about one another we tend to oversimplify, categorizing each individual as either a good or an evil person, a hero or a coward, and so forth.

But the reality of our social universe is far more nuanced. People are complicated and compellingly contradictory. Human nature is surprisingly context-dependent.

Zimbardo makes this case using graphic visual evidence to show us the darkest capabilities of otherwise ordinary individuals. But our tendency to explain away bad behavior as the result of "a few bad apples" isn't limited to egregious atrocities. In fact, I rely on the very same principles when speaking to corporations and other organizations about, say, the psychology of fraud and unethical behavior.

In pondering ethical lapses, there are at least three reasons why the bad apple model falls short. First, because unethical behavior is context-dependent. Frame a problem as a "business decision" and people rely on more questionable tactics to solve it than when the same exact problem is framed as an "ethical decision." Furthermore, research demonstrates that the business framing can have lingering unconscious effects, rendering people more likely to cheat on subsequent tasks as well.

Indeed, the psychology of fraud is a lot like the psychology underlying one of society's more lighthearted ills: the comb-over.-- Sam Sommers

Second, unethical behavior is contagious. Consider one study in which researchers arranged for college participants to witness another student's unethical behavior. When the cheater was from the same school as participants, observers became more likely to cheat themselves. But when the public cheater wore a shirt with another school's name on it, observers cheated less -- witnessing a rival's unethical behavior seems to remind us of the importance of holding ourselves to a higher standard.

And unethical behavior is incremental. We usually think of fraud and ethical violations as elaborate schemes deliberately plotted out in nefarious fashion. Sure, that happens. But more often you see the little white lie that snowballs out of control. The résumé half-truth that evolves into a publicly perpetuated fabrication. The fudged expense report that opens the door to unambiguous embezzlement.

Indeed, the psychology of fraud is a lot like the psychology underlying one of society's more lighthearted ills: the comb-over. The hair starts thinning, so you look in the mirror each morning and adjust a little bit here, a little bit there... every day, you do just a bit more than the day before to compensate... then, before you know it, years have passed and, without a conscious decision to do so, you're out and about sporting the full-blown Trump.

So the message of Zimbardo's talk isn't confined to military atrocity, cult suicide, or other extreme behaviors that conjure traditional notions of evil. Nor is it limited to how we react to negative behaviors. Even in the most general of terms, the influence of context is one the most important aspects of human nature to which we don't pay enough attention.

Recognizing this turns assumptions about the social universe upside-down. You're a free-thinker who does what's right, not what's popular? Of course you are. But everyone thinks that. Actually, it's surprisingly easy to be swayed by crowds unless you recognize and avoid the situations that promote the herd mentality.

Men are from Mars and women from Venus? Not so fast. Of course there are testable biological explanations for sex differences in aggression, sense of direction, who we're willing to mate with, and so on. But many of these supposedly interplanetary (read: fixed) differences between men and women shrink or even disappear with tiny tweaks to circumstance.

Even our most intimate of instincts are shaped by immediate surroundings. Take love. We pine for Mr. or Mrs. Right and pay dating websites to find "just my type." But falling in love is also about context. Like proximity: Just sitting near someone in a lecture hall makes students more attracted to certain classmates. And arousal: Don't approach that possibly special someone at the office; ask him out while he's on the elliptical at the gym. The science says you'll get a better reaction that way.

In short, our situations matter. Where you are, who you're with, what's going on around you at any particular moment... these are critical factors that shape how you think, what you do, and the person you appear to be in all walks of life. We may gravitate toward a world view based on stable personality type -- one populated by unambiguously good and bad apples -- but we don't know people as well as we think we do. That's a conclusion that reverberates from the halls of the military prison to the walls of the corporate boardroom. And it's a lesson with the power to make all of us better, not to mention more effective people.

Janice Harper What the Stanford Prison Experiment Can Teach Us About the Workplace

Next time you think about workplace bullies, you might do well to consider the Stanford Prison Guard experiments. Philip Zimbardo's ground-breaking research on the social psychology of evil has a lot to teach us about bad apples in the workplace. With so much attention on workplace "bullies" as the primary culprits of workplace aggression, there remains a tendency to look for the lone bad apple believed to be making life hell for the workforce. Yet as Zimbardo's research demonstrated, bullying is contagious and anyone can and will become a workplace bully if put into an institutional setting where aggression is encouraged and cruelty unpunished.

In the prison guard experiments, Zimbardo found that when playing the role of guards, ordinary non-sadistic people became increasingly aggressive, were arbitrary in their punishments, and exhibited pleasure at the humiliation of their "prisoners." The more they dehumanized these prisoners, acted under the cloak of anonymity, and realized there would be no accountability for their abuses, the more their aggression escalated.

Even among those guards who initially resisted the aggression,all eventually rationalized their decision to join ranks with authoritarian guards, and all soon rationalized their behavior as legitimate due to the behavior of the one being punished -- even when the one being punished had clearly done nothing wrong and the punishment was by any standard a violation of human decency. Perhaps most disturbing of all, no matter how great and arbitrary the cruelty became, none of those who inflicted the brutality expressed any remorse when they returned home and were free of the artificial "prison" in which they'd acted with impunity. By having legitimated their actions as necessary and brought on by the target, through a process of cognitive dissonance the "guards" had come to believe they acted morally and appropriately.

We must dare to step beyond the boundaries of the individual bully paradigm, to consider how group psychology contributes to workplace aggression and turns good people bad.- Janice Harper

Through his subsequent research of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Zimbardo has shown how anyone placed into a position of authority over another and assured that their actions will be tolerated so long as they please those in authority above them, will act in ways they never would in other circumstances. By applying his findings to workplace bullying, we can readily see how rapidly an entire workforce can be swept into the maelstrom of aggression when someone in a position of leadership marks a worker for elimination. Yet the current anti-bullying paradigm fails to explore this group dynamic, and consequently remains inadequate for addressing it.

A focus on interpersonal conflicts between the bad bully and the good worker focuses on seemingly inherent qualities of individuals, and fails to explain the sheer brutality that ensues when bullying expands to include multiple people engaged in shunning, gossiping about, sabotaging, and making accusations and reports against a targeted worker. The collective bullying of a worker is called "mobbing," and it typically ensues when a worker does or says something to annoy management, and management declares or demonstrates that the worker is unwanted. When that happens, it takes little effort to persuade the broader workforce to turn against the worker.

Just as Zimbardo talks about the slippery slope of evil that begins with the subject mindlessly taking the first step toward aggression through a seemingly minor action, when mobbing begins, workers are not initially encouraged to be cruel to the targeted worker. Far from it; they are told the worker must go, that it is the worker's own doing, and the worker will be better off if they just move on. The first step onto the slippery slope of mobbing behavior thus often begins with something as simple as agreeing with management that the targeted worker must go -- even if the decision to terminate the worker is clearly arbitrary or punitive or in some cases illegal, such as retaliation for reporting sexual harassment, discrimination or unlawful behavior.

As mobbing commences, workers initially distance themselves from the targeted worker, then begin gossiping. Soon gossip turns to damaging rumors and speculation, which in turn lead to false reports being made to management, refusal to cooperate or work with the worker, and depriving the worker of resources necessary to do their job. The worker is further subjected to a series of secretive investigations, damaging evaluations, allegations of misconduct, and workplace surveillance (as emails are monitored, offices and phones searched, and work scrutinized for errors).

One of the findings of Zimbardo's team was that the arbitrariness of punishments, lack of privacy, public humiliation, and increasing powerlessness led those playing the role of "prisoner" to become enraged, confused and ultimately defeated. In this same way, through the uncertainty of what has been said about them, what will be said next, and how one's past and current words or acts will be distorted and reported, the mobbing target learns to be constantly on guard and in fear of even the most benign social encounters, leading the targeted worker to appear paranoid and mentally unstable, regardless of how mentally stable they were before the mobbing began.

Just as it would have been absurd for Zimbardo to get rid of the bad guards in hopes the aggressive behavior would be stopped, getting rid of the bullies in an institutional setting that has ignited and encouraged mobbing is an impossible task, given the number of aggressive participants. By shifting from a focus on bad apple bullies, to a focus on the institutional context that ignites group bullying or mobbing in the workplace, more effective workplace policies and practices become possible.

But to get there, we must dare to step beyond the boundaries of the individual bully paradigm, to consider how group psychology contributes to workplace aggression and turns good people bad. To avoid the slippery slope of workplace aggression, we might do well to mindfully step onto the path of workplace compassion. Instead of quixotically ridding the workplace of bullies, let us reflect on how we can contribute to a kinder, gentler way of working together. It begins not with how we treat those inside the golden circle, but how we treat those who've been cast from it.

7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil.

Mindlessly taking the 1^st small step.
Dehumanization of others.
De-individuation of self (anonymity).
Diffusion of personal responsibility.
Blind obedience to authority.
Uncritical conformity to group norms.
Passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference (in unfamiliar situation)

See General Fey’s report.

Need a public health model for bullying, abuse,

Solzhenitsyn: the line between good and evil runs through the human heart.

Hero: ordinary people who act when others are passive.

Sacral nerve root is what triggers orgasm.

The Lazarus reflex