The Devil's In The Details

It’s April and Easter’s around the corner, so it’s all spring cleaning and new life at this time of year, making us focus on our environments and the effects they have on us. Apart from the ongoing nature vs nurture debate, there’s not a lot of material in the West about how powerful an effect your environment can have on you, despite thousands of years of traditions covering precisely that in the East, via Feng Shui from China and Vastu from India. At last, a Stanford University Professor Emeritus has stepped into the breach and written an important study on how good people turn evil, which reveals that we are much more influenced by the conditions that surround us than previously thought. In effect, good and evil may be far more a product of circumstance than of character.

In his new book, The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo gives a detailed study of his own oft-quoted and extremely notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where a group of young men were paid to act as prisoners and guards for a fortnight in a mocked-up jail at the university. Assigned randomly to their roles, within 48 hours those chosen as guards were showing the kind of sadism and bullying recently demonstrated by the US forces in Abu Ghraib and those selected as prisoners were terrified into mute submission. The experiment had to be halted after only six days because it had become so out of control.

But this is not the only incident cited by Zimbardo. A Palo Alto experiment showed that liberal, laid-back Californian high-school students could be turned into budding neo-Nazis in a matter of days, simply by changing their situation. A further Yale study showed that seemingly moral individuals could turn homicidal, given the right sort of environment and authority figure.
What this raises is the question of how often we seek to lay the blame wholesale on individual characters – as in the case of the guards at Abu Ghraib – allowing us all to sleep easy assuming we are now rid of the bad apples, when in actuality we are perpetuating the kinds of environments where those types of behaviour will continue to occur.

Of course this is a multi-layered argument, that is as much about the system of management in a particular circumstance than the physical environment, but it does point the finger at environment as a much stronger influence on behaviour than we would like to think.
We’ve all experienced this on a lesser scale in our work environments, which – on the whole – tend to operate like small kingdoms ruled by tyrants or dysfunctional families where the rules are hazy and everyone lives in fear. The rot starts at the top, so whatever behaviour the CEO tacitly endorses tends to cascade down and create a corporate sub-culture. I call it a sub-culture advisedly, because rarely would the participants recognise it as a consciously-sanctioned system of behaviour, yet it tends to operate powerfully within the organisation as a whole. Having rarely been on the receiving end of a particularly positive corporate culture personally, I find Philip Zimbardo’s findings even more compelling.

Let’s say you’re in a job that you find stimulating and rewarding, which you enjoy and are successful at, but you’re not a natural self-promoter. You hope that your work will speak for itself and you will receive the kind of recognition that is appropriate for your efforts. However, the work culture is one where only he who shouts loudest is heard and nice guys finish last. You become increasingly frustrated with the lack of appreciation and the times you’re passed over for pay rises or promotion, but you feel powerless to alter the situation.

Given the Zimbardo findings, the most realistic option in this scenario is to jump ship post haste and find yourself an environment more conducive to your own personality style, because an endemic corporate culture will not only not change, but continue to reward those who go with the tide. Even those who may enter with entirely different characteristics will eventually learn to flow in the same current of corporately-endorsed behaviour. Whether we like it or not, environment will out.

So what exactly are we meant to do with this knowledge on a personal level? It’s not all doom and gloom – and in fact it’s quite liberating. If you’ve experienced a scenario like the one described above, or any other where you’ve tried your hardest but have ultimately been undone by a corporate culture that was a massive mis-match to your own personality, then rather than blaming yourself for the failure to succeed in those circumstances, you can begin to see that the dice were loaded from the very beginning. What we need to learn from this is to choose wisely when we choose our environments, be they corporate, educational or social.

This week, take a look at the prevailing mores of the groups you find yourself in, whether for work or socialising. Is the environment conducive to your own particular personality or are you swimming against the tide, fighting a losing battle? If you’re thinking about making changes on the work front, don’t just look at what the job entails, take a very good look at how the company operates and the main characters who run it. That will tell you a lot about the corporate culture before you even walk in the door.

For example, much as I find it hugely entertaining to watch all the applicants jump through the various hoops involved in becoming Sir Alan Sugar’s Apprentice, the very thought of working for him leaves me ice-cold. His berating and bombastic style of management would totally kill my creativity. Iknow that I work best in a much more emotionally-tranquil environment, without the diva-esque antics – I can do high-stress with ease, but unnecessary high-drama is just wearing and counterproductive for me.

Easter always brings to mind some kind of renewal, so if you’re making changes in your life right now, think beyond the obvious and pay careful attention to the environment involved – it may be much more crucial than you’d ever imagined!

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right or by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material © 2007 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 2 Apr 07)