Psychological research on 'demand characteristics' — the subtle cues in any situation that signal to people how they're expected to behave — was formalized by Martin Orne in the 1960s, but the deeper implication has barely been absorbed by anyone who designs organizations or products. Orne showed that experimental subjects don't just respond to explicit instructions; they read the implicit script of the situation itself and perform accordingly. The room tells people who to be. This is where George Herbert Mead's idea of the 'generalized other' becomes unexpectedly useful in a business context: people don't simply act from internal preferences, they are constantly rehearsing an imagined audience's expectations, and that imagined audience is constructed almost entirely from environmental cues — the meeting format, the chat tool, the org chart, the seating arrangement. When a company cannot figure out why people behave in ways that contradict stated values, the diagnostic question is almost never about the people. It's about which imagined audience the environment is silently teaching employees to perform for. The values on the wall say 'take risks,' but the post-mortem process says 'be defensible.' People read the process.

What behavior in your team or organization keeps recurring that everyone agrees is counterproductive — and what specific ritual, format, or tool is quietly rewarding it?

Drawing from Social psychology / Symbolic interactionism — George Herbert Mead (Mind, Self, and Society, 1934) combined with Martin Orne's demand characteristics research (1962)