CHAPTER 12 The Design of People
to-day lives were about to change. Not to mention, they liked how things
were.
I had tried to limit myself to smaller projects with fewer stakeholders
after my experience with Prakash and team, and this was my first big
project since then. I was nervous — after all, swimming with sharks and
coming out alive is hardly a good predictor of your ability to survive
the next expedition. But I was also excited. Thanks to an initial book
recommendation from a friend, I’d ended up immersed in the world
of human behavior — cognitive psychology, behavioral economics,
neuroscience, anthropology, evolutionary biology and so on — and had
amassed enough knowledge to warrant an experiment with a larger
sample size.
Project Unify was a good opportunity for my career, but an even better
one to put some of my newfound knowledge to the test.The PSYChologiCal effeCTS of faiR SYSTeMS
In Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, Ori and Rom Brofman wote,
“A group of researchers asked hundreds of felons from Baltimore, Detroit
and Phoenix to fill out a survey. The first part of the survey consisted of
factual questions, such as the nature of their conviction and the length of
their prison sentence. In part two, the survey moved on to the questions
about perceptions of fairness: How were you treated? How did you like the
judge? Were the lawyers nice to you?” The researchers were attempting to
deduce what factors affected inmates’ perceptions of the fairness of the
justice system.
What factor do you think most affected their perception the most? The
length and severity of the sentence, right? Not quite.
The researchers found that respondents placed as much weight on
the legal process as they did on the outcome. “One of the factors weighed
most heavily by respondents was how much time their lawyer spent with
them. The more time he or she spent with them, the more satisfied the
respondents were with the ultimate outcome,” wrote the authors. This