Saturday, March 20, 2010

Misguided Social Engineering Erodes Societal Trust

New rules and increasing attempts to control the public reflect a steady erosion of public trust in ordinary men and women.

At gas stations, we must now pay for gas before pumping it. When this law was first changed, customers were asked to leave credit or bank cards with the cashier before they fueled up.

The message was clear: gas station owners no longer trusted their customers but customers were obliged to trust gas stations if they wanted gas.

Unfortunately, around the same time, gas stations were among the places where credit card and bank card numbers were being harvested for fraudulent reasons.

Besides, shouldn't trust go two ways? Hasn't that kind of goodwill always been the basis of sound business relationships?

At the gas station where I'd been pumping before paying for twenty years, the manager was sympathetic.

"We don't like it either," he said, "But it's the law now." Then he assured me that he would make sure his staff knew that I could just leave my BCAA card and they would turn on the pumps.

That was more like it: a manager who understood the value of relationships with customers and was willing to be accommodating. I decided that day that it was worth remaining a loyal customer.

The law was conceived by well-meaning people with poor thinking skills. It changed after a young clerk was killed trying to pursue a thief who pumped gas and ran. Tragic as the case was, it was no justification for routinely treating customers like criminals.

It's just one among many cases of the tail wagging the dog. Society should be based on the assumption that most people are well-meaning, honest and civil, yet more and more stupid rules are made to catch the people who aren't.

Making laws specifically to stop lawbreakers doesn't work very well. After all, they are by definition, people who break rules. Meanwhile, the rest of us suffer inconvenience, distrust and disrespect.

The socially engineered public washroom is a similar case. Apparently people using the facilities can no longer be trusted to flush the toilet, turn the tap off, or decide how much soap to take from the dispenser.

Was this done with the intention of economizing on supplies? It hasn't worked. In many washrooms now, the toilets, drunk with the new-found power to flush themselves, do it two or three times each time someone uses a cubicle. Negative progress, definitely.

Signs on the washroom walls now tell us to wash our hands with soap. Being assumed to be ignorant as well as dirty is another irritant. And as for those unfortunate few who didn't learn in kindergarten to wash their hands after using the toilet, a sign on a bathroom wall is unlikely to induce them to change.

Then we have to contend with the automatic tap and soap dispenser. We wave our hands in frantic circles to induce a brief spurt of water. The soap dispenser is perfectly timed to delay until the hands are moved away, whereupon a blob of soap falls on the counter. Messy as well as inefficient and user-unfriendly. And again, irritating.

Such misguided attempts to control people represent a worrying trend. The self-fulfilling prophecy identified by psychologists suggests that we get what we expect. If our self-styled social engineers expect ignorance, rudeness and incompetence, isn't that what they'll likely produce?

Public behaviour is not perfect. Still, for a long time, most people have behaved quite civilly in public. Experiments with game theory have even demonstrated that the most productive approach to life is to assume that most others will treat you well until you have proof to the contrary.

The antisocial behaviour of the few shouldn't be allowed to unduly constrain the simple freedoms of the many. Besides, rules have very questionable influence on the few determined rule-breakers who spoil it for the rest.

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