Ethics, etiquette, and engineering

… I’m always saying it. Because it’s not enough to know the right thing to do (ethics) and the socially appropriate way of doing it (etiquette). It’s also important to be able to arrange the environment so that people do the correct thing without having to think about it too much (engineering).

The tricky bit with engineering is that it influences people’s behavior far more than they are consciously aware of. Here‘s a fun article by Malcolm Gladwell about how stores are engineered to take advantage of people’s natural movement patterns. (Read it. You want to know about butt-brush theory, you really do.) No one is immune to good engineering–obviously, you can set out for a day at the mall with a vow to spend only $20 and stick to that, no one is saying you can’t. But there’s an awfully good chance that you’ll blow your allotted $20 in a well-engineered store. And that your butt will have remained unbrushed.

I’m thinking of this now because I realize I’ve fallen prey to good engineering myself! When I asked you all to talk to me about comments policies, one of the things I asked was whether or not you liked it when the blogger also left comments. Silly me! I thought this was a matter of policy. I had actually convinced myself that on the boston.com blog, I had a philosophical rationale for not leaving comments: that I wanted this to be your space, and wanted you to feel as though the teacher had left the room, and you were free to talk amongst yourselves with minimal policing. This was my laissez-faire blog-comments policy, so I thought.

Well, hah hah on me. Turns out I only wasn’t commenting over there because the blog software is klugey! It’s easy to comment on this blog … so I do. So much for my grand philosophy of Why The Blogger Shouldn’t Comment.

That’s a thing to keep in mind. Not only do we respond to good engineering like running water following the path of least resistance–we tell ourselves stories attributing our reasons to internal psychological factors. I do this and I study this kind of self-delusion for a living. It amuses me, but it also brought me up short, to see how prone to this post-facto theorizing and storytelling I am.

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