RE: Red Bead "simulator"

[jmsiegel@sbcglobal.net]

I think the Red Bead Experiment is best described and remembered, not as
a statistics experiment, for its statistical outcome is not in the least
bit surprising, but fundamentally as an experiment in social psychology.
Its essence is the observation of how ordinary people behave when
immersed in a largely random process but motivated by an authority
figure to believe that the process result is both systematic and under
their control. Accordingly, I believe it should be considered and
critiqued along with social psychology experiments such as Milgram's
experiments with obedience to authority and Seligman's experiments on
learned helplessness. In this type of experiment, the purpose is not to
observe, demonstrate, or simulate the experimental set-up, which is
pre-determined and simply not intended to be very surprising or
informative. The purpose to observe the experimental subjects' -- here
the Willing Workers' -- psychological reactions to it. 

I believe it would be difficult for a computer to aid an experiment of
this nature, because the experiment is fundamentally one of SOCIAL
psychology, and the presence of the authority figure and group
environment is essential to its social context. Just as it is doubtful
that subjects in Milgram's authority experiments would respond to a
computer simulation in the same way they would respond to a human
authority figure, so it is highly questionable whether Willing Workers
would respond to a computer simulation in the same way they would
respond to a human manager in a physical work situation. The two
environments would simply not be anything like the same. Any effort to
use one an environment as a substitute for the other might serve only to
cast doubt on the reliability of the results. 

The Red Beads experiment permits observation of the psychological
effects of a certain style of management in the presence of systematic
variation in the production environment. The management style simulation
is as critical to the experimental effect as the production environment
itself.

While the Willing Workers attempted to extract white beads, Deming would
demonstrate the standard motivational techniques American managers have
customarily used to get workers to work harder -- encouragement,
threats, rewards, punishments, firings, slogans, recognition, and so on.
It is this experience -- being in a stochastic situation while
psychologically motivated under a theory that the work is entirely in
their control and they need only buck up and work harder to succeed --
that caused the intense pyschological anxiety, helplessness, anger, and
other feelings that the Willing Workers, and the audience who watched
them, often experienced.

I don't believe any simulation could replicate the effect of these
reactions, because it is observing them that makes it possible,
psychologically and scientifically, for people who have been taught a
certain way of thinking all their lives to be willing to consider the
possibility that it doesn't work. 

I suspect these types of paradigms can get shifted, if at all, only by
hard, raw, emotion-laded evidence. I don't think a simulation can be
probative in this way either psychologically or scientifically. One can
always believe and feel, in the back of ones head, that what is being
demonstrated is just a video game, just somebody's might-be being
demonstrated on a computer. It isn't really real, and it doesn't feel
real, either. 

Jonathan Siegel
1204 Banbury Rd
Kalamazoo, MI, 48188
(269) 381-0829
jmsiegel@sbcglobal.net