Managing Negative Interactions in Space Crews: The Role of Simulator ResearchAerospace to move beyond the limits of past equipment design is illustrative of
the shift in thinking that I am proposing as timely.
Effective behavior stems not from “good” people
It is called forth from “good” environmentsTHINKING ABOUT SPACEFARERS
In the early days of the space program, little was known about the effects of
spaceflight on humans, physically or mentally, and the equipment was rudimentary.
At that time, it made sense to experiment only with rigorously selected individuals
who were exceptional physical and mental specimens. Those days are now over. We
are about to enter an era of space tourism. The great message of social psychology
is that the behavior we usually attribute to our character is much more determined
by our environment than we ever imagined. This finding was amply demonstrated
in the following three projects.
In his famous study of obedience, Stanley Milgram showed that everyday
Americans could be made to behave cruelly by the making of subtle changes in an
academic-like environment.^12
In an infamous 1964 murder, a young woman named Kitty Genovese was
slowly killed through the night while she pleaded for help, but no one came to her
aid or even called the police. Many of the people living in her apartment build-
ing admitted hearing her but were not motivated to help. Shortly thereafter, John
Darley and Bibb Latané began their classic studies of bystander intervention and
clarified the social and environmental variables that call forth or inhibit bystander
intervention no matter who the bystander may be.^13
Finally, Philip Zimbardo, in his classic 1971 Stanford Prison experiment,
showed how social circumstances could cause a randomly assigned group of
- Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology 67 (1963): 371–378. - John Darley and Bibb Latané, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8 (1968):
377–383.