The custom, or really requirement, of wearing an
identification badge at work is part of the accepted routine for millions of
workers worldwide. But recently,
psychology researchers have teamed up with engineers to develop something
called a “sociometric badge.” As
reported in the December 2012 issue of IEEE
Spectrum, the developers claim to be able to measure all sorts of
remarkable things with these badges, ranging from the truth about how an
organization really functions (as opposed to what the organization chart says)
all the way up to worker happiness.
Well, maybe not happiness in the broad philosophical sense, but one
particular work-related aspect of it called “flow”: that state of mind sought by high achievers everywhere in
which you are fully engaged in what you’re doing, and worries about the rest of
the world seem to fall away.
How do these badges work? The Hitachi Business Microscope was one of the first ones to
be developed, and it’s quite impressive.
Each employee to be studied is issued an card-shaped sensor on a lanyard
to be worn around the neck. Inside
the card are a variety of sensors:
accelerometers to measure relative movement, infrared transmitters and
receivers to detect when the card is near other cards, a microphone to pick up
conversations, a wireless interface, and a flash memory, along with a lithium
battery to run the thing. During
the day, it senses movements, conversations, and proximity to others, and logs
all these things in a format that is downloaded at night to a central
data-gathering location where, after a suitable amount of data has accumulated,
researchers can consolidate the information in various ways.
In early experiments, users were also asked to keep their
own diaries of daily activities.
Using the sociometric-badge data, the researchers identified certain
times in which they said the users were experiencing “flow” or a similar
pleasant immersion in productive tasks.
The correlation to what the subjects were actually doing, as recorded in
their own personal diaries, was quite good. In another study, two organizations that were thrown
together by a corporate merger were examined to see how well the merger was going. Network diagrams based on the
sociometric data retrieved by the sensors showed that a month after the merger,
the supposedly unified organization was still functioning like two independent
outfits: hardly anyone from
Organization A was interacting with Organization B and vice-versa. When the managers were shown this
problem, they “took steps” (unspecified in the article) to fix it, and the
success of their actions was also reflected in later data.
It’s understandable that working for a private company
involves the giving up of certain rights and privileges that one would be
reluctant to cede to the government, for example. Companies have a right to snoop into one’s email or phone
conversations that use company-owned facilities. But it seems that a new line has been crossed with the
sociometric badge.
For example, if anyone tried to do such an experiment at a
university, the researchers would first have to get approval from the
university’s Institutional Review Board, which is charged with the task of
protecting the rights of human subjects in experiments. If the researchers in the corporate
world are publishing papers on their work, which they appear to be doing, they
are performing research on human subjects, but nothing in the article says
anything about permission being asked or granted for the experiments. Presumably, wearing the badge was a
condition of employment.
Why would anyone have qualms about wearing a sociometric
badge? Well, put it in
old-fashioned terms, and imagine it was being done before the electronics was available to do this sort of
thing unobtrusively. What if you got to work one day and found a private detective taking
pictures of you every minute and writing down everything you said and the names
of everyone you spoke with all day?
Most people would be creeped out by such intrusiveness, yet that is only
a little more extreme than the kind of data the sociometric badge
collects. It may not be possible
to reconstruct entire conversations or your exact location at all times from
the badge data, but determined persons with ulterior motives could extract
something close to that level of detail if they tried.
So far, no journalist to my knowledge has requested any
sociometric-badge data under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). But if this research is as effective as
its proponents claim, sooner or later it will make its way into the
public-service sector, where FOIA requests must be honored. A rather cynical old professor I knew
once told me that you should never write anything down that you would not want
to show up on the front page of the New York
Times. If sociometric-badge
data is ever subject to an FOIA request, public officials could have their
every move for a given day show up in the newspapers, or whatever will pass for
newspapers in the future. This may
be a disquieting prospect for some.
The branch of psychology used in this research is called
“positive psychology,” meaning it studies the more appealing aspects of our
psyches: happiness, success,
productivity, and so on, rather than the grimmer sides of our nature observed
by abnormal psychology. While that
is all very well, even the definition of happiness itself is still a matter of
dispute in philosophy, so the fact that some researchers are only trying to
make people happier should not give them blanket permission to do anything they
want. Issues of privacy and
freedom of association at least need to be addressed before the sociometric
badge becomes more popular in both the corporate and the public sectors. So far, that doesn’t seem to be
happening.
Sources: “Sensing Happiness” by K. Yano, S.
Lyubomirsky, and J. Chancellor, appeared in IEEE
Spectrum for December 2012 on pp. 32-37.
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