Why do people cut you off in traffic? Why would these same people never do it standing in line at your local Wal-Mart? Perhaps the exception to this is the man that punched a teenager this week after she accused him of cutting in line at McDonalds. That being said, most people are civil and obey the unwritten rules of our society. That is, until they can become anonymous where many people change over to Mr. Hyde. This past week, the southeast saw what it would be like to live in a world of scarcity. Normally, we live in a world of abundance where you can go out and buy anything you want; even gas. On the south side of Atlanta, I didn’t have much of a problem finding gas with short lines. The other sides of town reported up to an hour wait, assuming you could actually find gas to begin with. The vast majority of the people were nice and willing to wait their turn. That is until they got back on the highway and then it's back to "Get out of the way you #$%^& idiot". Anonymity seems to make us do things that we wouldn't normally do. I started to think about using the 1980's Streaking fad as an example but common sense got the better of me.

The idea of people doing bad things because they can remain anonymous isn’t really new. In the 1960's, Staley Milgram ran an interesting experiment on 1,000 subjects. Prior to the research study, he polled the experts that said only 1% of people would actually go so far as to electrocute another human being. Although the study involved three people, two of the participants were actors. Subjects were brought in and told of the three roles and that random chance would assign them to one or the other. The first role was an experimenter that orders the teacher (2nd role) to administer a reward and punishment (i.e. shock) to the learner (3rd role). Remember the learner is an actor separated from the other two individuals and much of the responses were actual recordings so they could be timed to the shock treatment. The basic idea was to understand how far the average person would go to harm another person. The experiment started at 15 volts and worked up from there, administering higher and higher levels of electricity. Where would the test subjects stop? Turns out that 65% of the test subjects didn't stop until they reached 450 volts which would kill some with heart problems. Keep in mind, the test subject could hear the screams of pain that were pre-recorded by the actor at each level. The results indicate that anonymity and authority can make us do things we wouldn’t normally do in a civil society.

When we talk about Web 2.0 and the concepts of transparency then we are putting everyone in the same room and removing the possibility of anonymity. While there may be some element of authority, the ability to hide behind structures, polices, and politics is reduced. They say character happens when no one is watching but character can be influenced by many factors and can be elusive if we are to agree to the prior research. However, if we understand what happens when you mix anonymity with authority, then it seems an imperative that we embrace 2.0 technologies. The people of Enron and the folks involved with the current economic crisis are not bad people, just people put into structures that enable bad behavior. Trasparency provides oversight and it looks like we need more and more of it.