Organisational Justice and Behavioural Ethics Research Group

Of all the possible superpowers, telepathy is the one most likely to double as a curse. Reading people’s minds and knowing their intentions even before they behave badly would certainly be handy, although it is telling that this scenario sounds very much like the one developed by the legendary literary paranoid, Philip K. Dick, and adapted into the Spielberg / Cruise Minority Report. Even paranoids who wish for telepathy would quickly rue the ability to read other minds.  My argument is that telepathy will just not create the hoped-for efficiencies. The temptation of rendering the lies and intentions of others transparent pales against the social chaos that would follow easy access to each others’ internal worlds. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

There’s an interesting cross-fertilization between American Westerns and Japanese Samurai films. Among others, the great Akira Kurosawa credited the American Western genre as an influence in his own films. Perhaps not surprisingly, several Kurosawa films were re-made as successful Westerns – the Seven Samurai became the Magnificent Seven and Yojimbo became A Fistful of Dollars. What the two genres share is a focus on a hero who is a powerful moral agent in a chaotic world. However the differences between the genres are interesting – in Westerns, the hero is the moral world in a context of wild lawlessness, whereas in the Samurai film the hero relies on personal honor to revitalize a corrupt and anomic moral order. In this sense, Samurais resemble film noir detectives more than Western heroes (indeed, Yojimbo is said to be an uncredited mounting of Dashiel Hammet’s novels). Interestingly, the basis of heroism for all three genres may be that the protagonists are ‘altruistic punishers’ fulfilling a role necessary for group survival (Barclay, 2006; Fehr,& Gachter, 2000, 2002; Henrich et al., 2001; Shinada, Yamagishi, & Ohmura, 2004). ↓ Read the rest of this entry…