Thread · 4 tweets · 25 Jun 2021

"Everyone" being everyone who has to use the technology system in question? Consensus by exhaustion might factor in — that's a good question. One thing I'm looking at are dynamics of "crowding out". There is evidence that when decision are made for them, people cooperate less.

There's a bunch of literature on this, but the core experiment is that you have a few control groups playing variants on the Prisoners Dilemma, and one group doing the same with an "enforcer" who provides strong motivation for people to cooperate rather than defect.

Predictably, the enforcer group does better because they cooperate more (but more or less forced). So they can see and internalise that cooperation works better. But then if you *remove* the enforcer, that group will cooperate a lot less.

It looks from experiments like being made to be good "crowds out" intrinsic motivations to be good, and those get durably depleted/damaged. This feels like a problem next door to consensus fatigue?