[taneem]

As a child in primary school (in Lesotho, southern Africa): when a teacher left the classroom everyone was supposed to silently complete work. To enforce this, one student would be appointed "name taker". This person would write down the names of anyone who spoke while the teacher was out. Punishment for being on the list was often physical.

One day I was made the name taker while the teacher was out. Most kids stayed quiet, but two other segments emerged: the scycophants and the outlaws.

The sycophants would attempt to "help" me identify noise makers by pointing them out. In exchange they would hope to be safe from the list, and would use that immunity/privilege to lord over other kids.

The outlaws were kids who, once they were added to the list, talked and joked freely, knowing that they were doomed anyway. They felt they were fearless, and they goaded others to join them.

I've always remembered this experience, for how quickly a group of children organized themselves into social dynamics that echoed human systems more generally.

[wruza]

Oh, that looks familiar. But I still can’t tell if that was a good thing in terms of social experience or just a misuse of our behavior. Neither is it clear if a teacher knew what s/he doing or was just lazy.

I usually refrained from these activities, but most interesting was that physics teacher took few well-learning people from our class and suggested to create homeworks and then evaluate everyone’s success on it (scores were official). Social heat raised pretty quickly and two of us refrained from that openly. The punishment was that we went to the passive group. Obviously we got A’s, since we were good in physics. For a few that seemed like an act of heroism. Though it wasn’t really – we should have say fck it from the beginning.

Another case was that a teacher who knew me personally asked me to watch for another problematic class. I was around 16 back then and it was somewhat clear that once someone’s name is on the list, I couldn’t prevent them from doing anything. Nobody did make it there, but it was a pretty hard game of authority leverages and group behavior. I wasn’t much stressed, but... it is interesting experience since in a school you rarely have tasks that have no clear answer. 2+2 is 4, F is ma, but there is no answer to what you do with people to make them obey the rules. (edit: grammar)

Thanks for making me remember all that! (And for leaving that neverending zimbardo/milgram discussion at the bottom)

[billpg]

If I were appointed name-taker in that situation, I would never actually take any names, only ever reporting that everyone remained silent.

Reporting someone for punishment, even if deserved, would only ever come back badly on me. (Unless I'm missing some incentive for reporting someone, in which case I need to ask what would deter me from wrongly reporting someone just to get the reward.)

[potatote]

Your suggested approach was exactly what I did when I had gone through a similar system in Myanmar as the OP described above, where lazy teachers leave managing the class to students among themselves.

Stay as neutral as possible so that it doesn't bite back at you when the name-taker is someone else. It worked for the most part because my classmates would start recommending me to be the name taker and in return, I told them to not make too much noise when talking during teacher's absence.

[xxs]

Even if you'd be able to keep your integrity and not play the "game", likely there would be another one to rat anyways.

Similar system did exist in east Europe before the wall fell. Major part of population used to report one another...

[lambdadmitry]

It's not that simple. There are two very different kinds of "ratting out":

1. Reporting a crime to the police so they can check and sort it out if needed. This is extremely prevalent in Western societies and seems predicated on trust in the police to do the right thing. Examples: people reporting screams for help they overhear from a street; drivers reporting erratic behavior of other drivers on the road.

2. Knowingly reporting a thought crime to overzealous authorities that will severely punish for that crime, sometimes knowingly falsely, sometimes for your own benefit. Example: telling your local uchastkovuy that your noisy neighbors were doing anti-soviet jokes in the hope of getting rid of them.

In a lot of post-soviet countries there was a lot the latter and none of the former (in fact, a lot of Russians think the former is "ratting out" and is immoral). In Russia there were numerous cases of people being killed or raped in places where dozens or hundreds could hear the screams for help, with no one actually calling the police. On the other hand, you can be pretty sure that shady stuff happening on a Western city street will lead to police response.

It's kinda hard to tell where the exact boundary between those two kinds of behaviors is, especially lately with all the pushback against drug prohibition (is reporting someone smoking a spliff in Stockholm moral?). But it exists.

[Fnoord]

The "you don't rat" mentality is also very prevalent in ghettos or "the street" (as well as in left-wing activism circles). A well written account on it is the HBO series The Wire.

[sarah180]

Integrity means lying to your teacher? I'm not sure that's the word I'd use.

[Retra]

Integrity doesn't mean what you think it means then. You can be honest in upholding your principles by lying to an authority.

[checkyoursudo]

I think it's pretty commonly understood that integrity can include not compromising your values in the face of consequences. Often, the value against lying is fairly weak compared to other values. In fact, contemplating lying to authorities to prevent another's (often unjust) punishment is a pretty common topic in explaining different philosophical systems.

It's really just a variation on the trolley problem.

[pc86]

> I've always remembered this experience, for how quickly a group of children organized themselves into social dynamics that echoed human systems more generally.

Which makes perfect sense when you remember than children are, in fact, human.

[jplayer01]

Going to need a source for that claim.

[JimboOmega]

What incentive is there for you to take names properly, instead of using the power to compel others - talking or not - to do as you wish?

[torben-friis]

I had a similar experience in primary school in Spain (though punishment was never phisical).

The incentive is that if the class is made of, say, 30 kids, you are appointed once and then suffer through the appointments of the other 29 kids (a little less in practice since known troublemakers won't be put in 'power' for obvious reasons). There are plenty of opportunities for mob punishment if your mates don't feel you're being fair.

[jaclaz]

>I had a similar experience in primary school in Spain (though punishment was never phisical).

Same in Italy, though I never recall any actual punishment (not physical nor on paper) was ever administered on the base of these - let's say "opinionated" - reports.

The blackboard was divided in two columns by a vertical chalk line, on the left one would write at the top "good" and on the right "bad".

It was mostly a game (I believe it was intentional to just keep us kids busy while the teacher was briefly away) and a way for the kids to exercise in knowing the names of all the kids and reading and writing them, the "name taker" would start writing all the kids names and surnames on the "good" side.

Then he/she would write among the bad ones someone (for whatever reason), who would try to convince the "name taker" to delete his/her name and re-write it on the "good" side.

After a few minutes the blackboard was full of deletions/rewrites on both sides.

The teacher already knew anyway which one were the "good" and which one were the "bad" ones and at the most made a verbal reprimand (of two types) to the kids that were on the "bad" column finally:

1) "I knew you were going to ...., why don't you stop it for a change" (to the ones re-known as troublemakers)

2) "I am surprised you did ...., you won't go far by doing this" (to the ones re-known as being tranquil)

[anonytrary]

The N-1 could name-take the name-taker on the same day if they can achieve consensus before the teacher comes back.

The N-1 simply have to wait for the teacher to come back, then explain that the name-taker was abusing his position, hoping the teacher will release them from punishment for name-taking the name-taker. AFAICT, there's no incentive for the N-1 to lie about whether or not the name-taker was taking advantage of them.

[SiempreViernes]

Eould you trust the N-1 if they suddenly started speaking with a unified voice? This from a class you don’t trust to keep working without supervision.

[anonytrary]

What incentive is there for them to unify against the name-taker if the name-taker was being fair? N-1 people aren't just going to cry wolf in synchrony, because they don't trust each other. Can't a set of untrusted nodes still achieve consensus assuming more than half are good players? It's unlikely that over half of the class consists of class clowns.

[mcguire]

Yes. It's hard to get many people to agree on anything.

On the other hand, it's hard to get many people to agree on anything.

[r_c_a_d]

Presumably there is a different "name taker" each time. So if you "cheat" when you are "it" then next time you will get some comeback.

[eeZah7Ux]

None: the bullies would never get reported. The unpopular kids would get reported even if they behaved.

[grenoire]

Civic duty, of course!

[hrktb]

Am I summarising this right ? There's an order given by your teacher, some kids break it and will continue breaking it from that point on, some faked cooperation, and the rest of the kids were just silent.

Is this really an organisation, in the sense that one "group" is trying to reach a goal ? For instance the "fearless" kids don't seem to have anything to care about to me, and don't need to join forces for anything.

Same for the "sycophants" who could be alone or a number of people, it wouldn't change their behaviour.

Or the rest of the kids who could be sleeping, it wouldn't change much for them.

Perhaps to put it in a different way, what was your main takeaway from the situation ? it seems you had more insight that what is conveyed here.

[kriro]

The only winning move is not to play.

Why not always report "nothing happened"

[irishbro]

Most likely if you had no names on the list and the teacher came back and had heard noises from outside the door you would receive the punishment

[taneem]

I do vaguely remember "good kings" and "bad kings" ... some kids were forgiving and more than fair, and others were vindictive. So not everyone gravitated towards tyranny and some did report "nothing happened" more or less.

[wruza]

It could be viewed as egoism though, when at specific angles. What win is? That everyone chit-chats instead of learning on a regular basis? Is your teacher a foe? You make friends of who?

It is hard to define a long-term win. In my story above we two refused our position not because we didn't like to create homeworks. In fact, what we did wasn't much different from school books; we even categorized tasks and watched that they weren't too hard, leaving only a couple of pieces that required some thinking. What we didn't like was scoring our friends, non-friends and whatever these relationships were back then. But still I think that seeing how they learn and provide a feedback is, well, a slightly better than just throwing books at them and wait for a success. Our class actually knew some physics as a result. It is a social price that was questionable, not a learning process. Despite being viewed as a 'good guy', now I don't have strong relationships with any of my then buddies anyway. Sum up? Our teacher could be not as unthoughtful as it seemed.

tl;dr while everyone is on their own, someone has to think of the group as a whole. It doesn't mean you all end up in a better place, but at least you tried and had an opinion instead of a denial. People are pretty forgiving if your intents are good-natured.

[curiousgal]

Maybe someone familiar with Game theory can analyze this.