The Hidden Price of Progress

Source: Cruise Critic

A while back, a graduate psychology student at Duke University named Richard Schultz performed an intriguing experiment at a nearby nursing home. Schultz wanted to see how changes in their perceived sense of control would impact a person’s health and well-being. Over the course of a few months, Schultz arranged repeated social visits from volunteer college students to the often lonely residents of the facility. For some of the residents, Schultz informed them when their student friend would visit and for how long each visit would last. But he let other residents choose when the visits took place and for how long their student friend would stay.

Remarkably, the residents who were granted that small sense of control over the scheduling of their visits showed significantly greater increases in both happiness and physical health.

But the story didn’t end there.

A few years later, Richard Schultz went back to check on the elderly patients from his study. What he found surprised him. The patients who showed the most gains in their health and happiness due to their increased sense of control, were now less happy than before. Most shocking, these patients were also dying sooner than their peers.

This strange phenomenon reveals an important lesson for change agents—whether leaders, teachers, parents, or politicians. Once people have been given a taste of empowerment, they refuse to live without it.

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​The Riot Button

In his book Me, Myself, and Us psychologist Brian Little likens this strong sense of control to a kind of magical button we can push anytime we choose in order to shape events to our advantage. Scores of studies show that people who feel this greater sense of control over their lives—people with a well-used button—are happier, healthier, and more successful in just about everything they do. But Dr. Little points to Schultz's study as evidence that this button also exacts a cost when the button stops working.

What if we press the button one day and nothing happens?

For the elderly people in Richard Schultz’s study, the discovery of a faulty button led to depression and early death. For a two-year old with a newly discovered sense of autonomy, a disconnected button inspires temper tantrums. For adults in the prime of their lives, the disconnected button can lead to both depression and outbursts of anger.

Perhaps that’s what we saw in Baltimore last month? For the first time in history, Baltimoreans in Freddie Gray's neighborhood have been able to see an African-American mayor and an African-American president. Baltimore now ranks #2 on the list of America’s cities who spend the most money per student in their schools ($15,483 per pupil). In the past 20 years, they have seen poverty go down and home ownership go up. Could it be that the Baltimore protests triggered by Freddie Gray's death happened not in spite of recent progress, but because of it?

Sociologist James Davies presented compelling evidence for this argument back in the 1960s. Although common wisdom says that people are likely to protest and revolt when conditions have hit an all-time low, the facts tell a different story. Without first getting a glimpse of freedom and control, humans resign to their fate as more or less helpless pawns of greater powers. In his book Influence, Robert Cialdini shows how Davies’ theory explains why in 1991, after half a century of willing subjugation, the people of Russia so fervently rebelled against a three-day coup only after Mikhail Gorbachez had already begun dismantling communism.

To Push or Not to Push

The fact is that everyone has a button. The question is whether or not we choose to push it.

Some of us will view Richard Schultz’s follow-up study and the Baltimore riots as a cautionary tale about the dangers of empowering our employees, our neighbors, our children, and even ourselves. Indeed the power of chance and the unstoppable forces of change ensure that nobody’s button will ever have a failsafe connection. Button-pushers are virtually guaranteed to find a faulty connection from time to time. They will almost certainly experience bouts of depression or outrage when they lose their jobs or find themselves victims of unjust treatment.

However, others of us will make a different choice. In spite of the probable costs of being a button-pusher, we will remind ourselves that it’s impossible to realize our full potential as individuals, teams, or societies without regularly pushing our buttons. For us, the cost of empowerment feels like a steep discount on a life worth living.

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Nick Tasler is an organizational psychologist and the author of Domino: The simplest way to inspire change (Wiley, October 2015)