Page 113 - The Power to Change Anything

102 INFLUENCER

From this point on Bandura did not pressure subjects to use
the shock box. The decision was completely up to them. And
here’s what Bandura found: The subjects who imagined their
victims seemed like animals shocked them at increasing levels
over each trial, giving them significantly more punishment
than those who had heard the neutral phrase. The subjects who
had heard the humanizing phrase shocked their victims at sig-
nificantly lower levels.
The one-word label was enough to cause good people to
become perpetrators.
Dr. Don Berwick, head of IHI’s 100,000 Lives Campaign,
identifies still another way we routinely dehumanize people
and their circumstances by transforming them from people into
cold, hard data. In this case, Berwick explains how safety prob-
lems can be unwittingly minimized by some health-care exec-
utives as they dehumanize the problem.
“Executives aren’t ignoble, but they can become insu-
lated—a little out of touch.” And it’s no wonder. These exec-
utives are routinely overwhelmed with streams of data that
demand immediate responses. Information overload plays a
role in this problem, but more important is the abstract qual-
ity of the information that transforms human disaster into facts
and figures.
Most executives get their information in the form of cold
numbers that don’t carry much emotional weight. “Abstraction
poisons the type of energy I need,” Berwick continues to explain.
“When raw personal trauma is boiled down into the same kind
of spreadsheet or graph used to track laundry, too much of its
essence is lost. When an executive sees a number in a spread-
sheet, not a patient with a gaping wound, it’s easy to imagine
the negative outcome isn’t quite as bad as it really is.”
As a result of this dehumanization, executives can easily
view patient safety data with detachment. Instead of giving
them special treatment or priority, the executive considers
them alongside every other spreadsheet number on the desk.