What makes good ideas go awry?
The founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, lied to investors for years because ‘the Edison’ was, still is a good idea. It started with the first rationalization — my machine, once it’s made, is for a good cause.
Project Veritas did an expose on how Google suppresses right-wing discussions in the name of preventing Trump 2020. It all started with good intention which was to curb hate speech.
That’s why these researchers say that saying yes to doing the incorrect thing for the greater good is a slippery slope. At the end of the day, it will come down to the person making this decision.
Innovators and people who have bright ideas are able to give us the tools to change our life and that’s an incredible blessing and it’s a privilege. We all want the world to be a certain way and basically, we rationalize our actions to try and make them true. Unfortunately, that leads to certain inventors turning into zealots where they want something (this idea they’re passionate about) and then they kind of bend reality or rationalize things to allow them to do abhorrent things.
What about the reasons for good?
Well, there’s this study performed by Nina Mazar, On Amir, and Dan Ariely where this murky point is tested.
People receive a six-sided dice, and they throw it 20 times.
Whatever comes up, you get that many dollars. For instance, if you get six, you’ll get six dollars.
The experiment is performed on three groups.
The control group has the first choice presented: you have to choose either the number that comes on the bottom or the number that comes on the top. The number you pick determines the number of dollars you get. You voluntarily tell the researchers the number you got, and they pay you. Now if you get 2, the bottom will be 5. Truth will be $2 and the lie would be $5.
The researchers observed that most people were extremely lucky with this experiment implying that most of the participants lied.
Luck has this really nice feature of focusing on the higher number than the lower ones.
Then the second group comes in wherein the experiment is repeated with a lie-detector attached to the participants. Now lie detectors can detect lies, not all the time, but they’re fairly accurate. The researchers now observe that the control group probably wasn’t lucky.
Lastly, the third group comes in but this time, the money people win will be given to a charity or a good cause of the participant’s choice. Surprisingly, people cheated more. Also, the lie detector stopped working multiple times because lie detectors detect attention. Generally, what happens is, “I want more money but I think it’s wrong,” and the lie gets detected. In this third instance however, what happened was, “I want more money but I think it’s wrong. But the money is going to a good cause so I think it’s okay,” and the participant thinks that they are a good person and that’s the tip of a very slippery slope.
That’s all it takes. Just this one rationalised decision. These highly passionate and motivated people fall into the rationalisation pit and just turn their psyche into a jenga tower. With every setback, they’ll lie, they’ll pull a piece out of this jenga tower and put it on the top. Now this tower will definitely get higher, but it will also get less stable.
…and that’s when good ideas go awry. When one person decides to rationalise a lie for the greater good.
