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When Misconduct Goes Unnoticed:Acptblty of Grad Erosion in Unethical Bhvr (2009)
- xoa 6y agoHad to torture the title a bit (lot) to get with HN character limits, but I was rereading this following some of the recent debates around Google and other companies, and it's still an interesting study 11 years on. I'm sure a lot of people will say they already considered this sensible, but there is definitely a lot of debate about if/when Slippery Slope is a fallacy vs something genuinely watch out for. Given our nature as social animals and our frequent dependency on using social cues and webs of trust to determine acceptability and norms for small level day-to-day behavior, it certainly seems like there is room for cultural corrosion in organizations. And there are plenty of hard historical examples of companies and agencies sleep walking into disaster through a large number of small steps. I wonder if it's another form of the classic resource invisibility problem so many in IT encounter, like with security or ops. When the ideal state for something is steady-state and invisible, it can be very hard to show to outsiders (and in particular those that tend to be in charge of strategic and financial decisions) when there is decline, under investment, etc. Most long lasting institutions end up developing a certain degree of redundancy to buffer against normal deviation. But if we think of "redundancy" itself as a specific resource one could attach a number too, then unlike the ups and downs it's meant to deal with continuous systemic erosion is only down and inevitably depletes it. Then "all of a sudden" things get real bad, but are very hard to fix because the problems have been building under the surface for years or even decades. "The Normalization Of Deviance", applied by Vaughan to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster seems like another take on this.