alt Hacker NewsThere is this famous experiment with 9 monkeys in a room with a banana attached to the ceiling and a scale.
First day, a monkey climbs the scale, gets the banana and is happy.
Second day, they start spraying whomever gets on the scale. Monkeys hate this. They learn not to climb.
Third day, they take a monkey out and replace with another. The new monkey sees a banana up there and tries climbing the scale. He literally gets beaten out by the others, like "seems like you're new here".
Days 4-12, they've replaced one monkey per day, so that no monkey was here when it was possible to get the banana. None of them have ever been sprayed either. Still, they enforce the rule not to climb up there.
I am putting this example because in our society as well, there are many rules that are enforced without anyone questioning the "why". Yet the "why" is often more important to know than the rule itself.
Designers know this dichotomy between the "why" and the "how". Most people don't.
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It's funny how this monkey experiment is often trotted out as "people blindly follow the rules without knowing why," when the rule learned by the monkeys is a really good rule (it prevents a malevolent entity beyond your understanding from attacking you!), and the only reason the monkeys don't understand the "why" at the end of the experiment is because they don't have language.
The lessons I'd take away from the experiment would be 1) be sure to tell people why the rules exist, but also 2) follow the rules even if there's no apparent reason for them, otherwise you might get smacked down by some unimaginably powerful entity you're barely even aware of.
I've heard that story. I've yet to see evidence it actually happened though. I don't the experiment with pass a modern ethics panel either.