Nice monkey
Do you ever run into a behavior that just truly boggles your mind? You observe it from afar and just can’t stop thinking about it? Maybe when you see something like this you are able to ignore it, but not me! I have always been interested in what motivates people to behave in certain ways. Humans are weird creatures who make fascinating choices. Often we are unable/unaware/do not care about the impact of those choices on others but this doesn't eliminate the fact that the impacts exist anyhow. That’s part of why I spent five years in a doctoral program thinking about and trying to understand why people do what they do. There I was focused on ethical behavior (often at work) but my interest goes far beyond that. It’s why I often fixate on other people’s really shitty behavior towards the people around them because it truly does not make sense to me.
When I see people being jerks I often think, what would happen to them if they were monkeys? Monkeys don’t put up with that kind of stuff. Monkeys will shun you for being unwilling to help groom everyone else. Monkeys don’t like assholes.
The behavior making me spiral at the moment is seeing people spending time (precious time!) singling out a genuinely good person as a target of malice and general ridiculousness. WHY?!?!?! Why inflict psychological aggression via rumors or purposeful undermining? Perhaps the perpetrator(s) of this behavior have yet to discover the delights of therapy and are projecting. That’s the best case scenario. The other is that maybe they are just awful and need to find joy in their lives. Whatever the case, watching this makes me so angry because it is completely unnecessary and juvenile. Because I couldn’t stop In thinking about this situation, I looked for underlying reasons for the behavior to help me make sense of it (#sensemaking). Some of my guesses of what is driving the behavior are that seeing someone happy and thriving makes them feel jealous because they themselves are neither happy nor thriving. They are bitter because their lives aren’t turning out the way they want so in order to feel better about themselves, they try to make others feel as bad as they do. Maybe they are a psychopath afflicted with a neuropsychiatric disorder that creates deficient emotional responses, a lack of empathy, and poor behavioral control.* I assume jealousy and bitterness play into this behavior, along with some other concoction I don’t understand, but then I started to think about something else: moral development. I teach moral development in my classes and it may help explain why certain people act a fool. Moral Development is a concept developed in the 1970s by a psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg. He believed that, as humans, we progress through stages and levels of moral understanding that guide our behavior. That, as we age, we learn more things about how the world works and our attitudes towards morality develop and change (i.e. get better). To understand how we develop morality throughout our life, Kohlberg created a series of vignettes that he would present to his subjects with scenarios and ask them what they would do in the situation. The classic vignette he presented was called The Heinz Dilemma. It is not a dilemma about ketchup.
Interestingly, Kohlberg wasn’t really concerned with the behavior they chose (steal the drug/don’t steal the drug). Instead, he was looking at how they justified their answer. From there, he built out these levels of moral development.
Looking at the illustration you would assume that we all just head on through these stages and end up exceptionally principled adults. We do not. Think about it, how many exceptionally principled adults do you actually know? My experience is that they are few and far between. Instead, what we find is that a lot of people get stuck at that Conventional level and this makes a lot of sense to me. I always think of the Conventional level in terms of how people in junior high and high school think and behave. Those at these stages are worried about what others think, they avoid blame, and they seek approval (from peers or society). To break it down a bit further, stage three focuses on what your friends are doing. Moral behavior is driven by a desire to be liked. It’s about approval from your social group (not so much your immediate family/caretakers like in the first two stages). Stage four expands the context for moral decision making. It goes beyond the friend group to include society. People at this stage look to societal rules to guide their behavior because they have learned that there is more to life than listening to your (potentially absurd and not very good at decision making) friends. The behavior I am witnessing falls squarely in stage three. Teenager shit. It’s often called “good boy/good girl” orientation but that goodness aligns with what one’s peers think so when your peers are a bunch of clowns you join their circus. 🤡
Fun fact: Kohlberg was all about trying to ensure that the subjects he used in his data collection were from a wide variety of backgrounds and locations. He wanted to ensure generalizability; the idea that the results you have found are not just limited to your sample but apply in other locations/contexts as well. He conducted experiments around the world, he included participants from urban areas and rural areas. He was really thoughtful in his study designs. Unfortunately, he forgot a key group in terms of generalizability. WOMEN. Seriously. The entirety of his subjects were male and you simply cannot generalize mens behavior to that of women.
Kohlberg’s graduate student Carol Gilligan pointed this out to him. I assume she said something like, “Hey genius!! You forgot half of the population in your seminal work!” She then re-ran the experiments with a female sample and found that, yes, we all progress through similar levels and stages of moral development but the things we take into consideration are very different. She called her work an Ethics of Care and explained that men make choices based on justice and fairness while women make them based on relationships. A+ for Carol!!
Operating at stage three, especially at work, has some lame consequences all around.** Those driven to behave in a way that their (other stage three) friends think is cool is likely to create counterproductive work behaviors, workplace bullying, and a toxic environment for everyone else. These are the kind of things that make people quit and when employees quit, organizations have to spend time and resources to replace them. It’s a cycle that could potentially be stopped if all of those stage three colleagues actively worked on moving up a stage (or two) of moral development. That’s possible but for it to happen, these adults have to make it a personal project rather than a collective effort. In other words, myself and all of the other people impacted by the stage three turd burgers have to hope they want to do better from a moral point of view. Unfortunately, I don’t think they care. So now what? How do we (ok I) manage the very high levels of frustration felt when seeing this behavior inflicted upon others? According to my therapist, adults are responsible for themselves and their decisions and I can’t control people’s behavior or fix situations for others (ugh!) so I guess I have to turn to the experts for dealing with this. I found a great list of suggestions for handling bad workplace behavior. And another. And another. And here are things I am personally going to try.
Address it when I see it. Don’t let it slide. Call it out. That’s never easy but there are instances where it’s worth it and suggestions on how to do it. Some might say that I should just ignore the bad behavior. It’s what we do with tantrums, right? This is particularly hard for me for several reasons. I feel like an injustice is happening and that irks me to my (Ethics Professor) core, I want to help the person being targeted, and ignoring it makes it seem like this kind of behavior is ok when it really is not.
Cage fight.
Watering the flowers. This is a parenting technique I learned about from my amazing friend Kim Rodela who introduced me to Simply on Purpose and her positive parenting. The idea is that you “water the flowers” by using positive reinforcement of the behaviors you want to encourage instead of “watering the weeds” where you are just focusing on trying to stop the negative behaviors. If it works on a toddler perhaps it will work on a man baby!! The only thing is that I find it exceptionally challenging to praise people who I know are doing shady things. I feel like it makes them think they are getting away with something and that really sticks in my craw.
It turns out that treating others badly, no matter what the reason, is actually bad for everyone involved. Study after study shows that unhappiness and anger are literal poisons to our bodies. People may think that being mean is fun (I’m looking at you Regina George) but it’s actually eating away at them. Being kind has the exact opposite effect. It reduces stress, boosts optimism and confidence, and strengthens your heart. I will freely admit that I find it difficult to be kind to those I know are not showing kindness to others and I will continue to work on this. I want to be a nice monkey not an asshole monkey.
*This one is pretty unlikely since psychopathy only afflicts .6% of the population.
**I did find this cool article talking about the stages at work.