How People Can Get You To Do What They Want

I believe it all starts with the right people. If you have the right people in your team, i.e. open minded, willing to learn and improve etc., they will naturally tend to perpetuate the right kind of environment. It gets a lot more difficult when you have to start with people who are not necessarily open to this kind of thinking. In this situation you have to first build a whole lot of trust among the team members and management before trying to slowly introduce ideas like this. Often projects finish before such a level of trust can be established.

Having done the managerial thing in a few companies, I would say that a lot of employees are reluctant to question managers, even if they are encouraged to do so.

I've got several anecdotes of trying to press my team to question technical/design/administrative decisions but for the most part, they were quite. Yes, there would be one or two people who would do so (to my appreciation), but they were the exception.

To generalize, I would say that most people would rather take instruction, follow the rules and not question authority - Its easier.

As far as creating an environment to encourage constructive feedback - Possibly creating a system that provides anonymity might increase the level of feedback.

Though in my opinion, the idea of questioning issues of instinct vs. instruction have to be an intrinsic part of a companies culture. Tough to implement if not there from the beginning.

Who's to say it has to have a negative effect? If you told them it was fake after wards and then made them aware of how susceptible people were to that sort of thing they might be better able to resist next time they were in such a situation.

You may also be interested in The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/naziexp....

Also submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=747561

The ethical concerns about the Milgram experiment are too varied to go into much detail here (if you're interested, http://books.google.com/books?id=U44OAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA193 ) but the short, relevant, version is that the psychological impact was positive, not negative. 84% of those surveyed (out of 92% who participated) reported that they were "glad" or "very glad" to have participated in the experiment.

The point is that the listen to scientists because they are wearing white coats, despite the (play-acted) agonized yowls from the unfortunate victim, from which the experimental subject can clearly infer that they are causing suffering. If you think that tuning such information out is normal or sensible, I suggest some self-examination.

Note that in the Milgram experiment the scientist figure never tells the subject it's safe or makes excuses for the degree of shock administered, they just insist that an external authority 'the experiment' requires the subject to continue.