LUCETE!

When people are in the crowd, they no longer act as individuals, but become a creature of the crowd. This is exactly what happened with Wilt Chamberlain and what Rick Berry survived from. In the ‘Revisionist History’ episode 3, ‘The Big Man Can’t Shoot’, Malcolm Gladwell explains about the threshold effect with the examples of Berry and Chamberlain. Although no one shot underhand and underhand shots were thought as ‘granny shots’, Rick Berry shot underhand and became a great free thrower. However, because of such peer pressure, another basketball player named Wilt Chamberlain quitted shooting underhand. What makes smart people do dumb things? Why does people do something that is out of their characters? At first, sociologists thought that it is because a strong force, the crowd changes one’s belief. Mark Granovetter explains it in another way. He says, “It’s not about people having belief about what’s right and that belief changing because of the crowd. It’s about threshold effect...

Have you ever eaten a big piece of sweet chocolate fudge cake, telling yourself that it is okay after eating nothing but green veggies for a week? Have you ever increase d your energy usage after buying energy-efficient products? If you have such experiences, you have experienced ‘moral licensing’ in your life. ‘Moral licensing’ is a term used to describe the subconscious phenomenon whereby increased confidence and security in one’s self-image or self-concept tends to make that individual worry less about the consequences of subsequent immoral behavior and, therefore, more likely to make immoral choices and act immorally. It can also be referred as “How being good can make you bad” or “Permission to sin”. Simply put, it means that after one has done something good, he/she justifies himself/herself for doing something bad. You open the door to one outsider and it gives you the right to close the door on another. In the first episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast ‘Revisionist His...