On May 16 Bloomberg published a piece by the famed business columnist, Justin Fox, titled “Want Educated Immigrants? Let In More Africans”.
In it, he dissects the words of the WH Chief of Staff, Gen. Kelly from an interview with NPR that aired on May 11. At one point during the interview, the discussion veered onto the issue of undocumented immigrants. Gen. Kelly argued that since most undocumented immigrants were uneducated, unskilled and could not speak English, they were “not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society.”
Based on the criteria Gen. Kelly seems to prefer, Mr. Fox in the column, presented data from the census bureau, to show which immigrants are the best fit. In one graph, he presents the list of countries with the hardest working immigrants in the US and Ghana is at the top of that list.
Let that sink in – Ghanaians are the hardest-working immigrants in the US!
As I read the piece and stared dumbfounded at the graph, I thought of a debate that has occupied psychologists for decades. The question of whether human behavior in any given situation is due to personality or the circumstances. I recalled 2 experiments, that in their own way, sought to shed light on this question.
The first one was performed in the 60s. In July 1961, in the shadow of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale started an experiment to research into how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. The experiment was meant to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. His motivation came from the justification given by those tried during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, that their participation in the Holocaust was purely out of obedience to authority.
He recruited 40 men who played the role of teachers who had to test learners played by actors. There were also “experimenters”, who acted as supervisors of the teachers. The learners were taught word-pairs and then tested on them. For each wrong answer, the teacher, goaded on by the experimenter, had to give the learner an electric shock. The shocks started from 15 volts and went up in 15 V increments all the way to 450 V. Even though the teachers thought they were giving real shocks, the shock generator was connected to a tape recorder which played back prerecorded screaming sounds. The learner was in another room so the teacher could not see him. The learner also added to the drama by banging on the walls of the room when the shock intensity got above 300 V. At 450 V, there was no response.
In the initial experiment and variations of it by Milgram and other psychologists, 65% of the subjects applied shocks up to 450 V. All of them applied shocks up to 300 V. 26 of 40 subjects were prepared to shock other humans with harmful voltages just because they were asked to!
Milgram would propagate the Agency Theory from this experiment — in the autonomous state, people direct their own actions take responsibility for the results of those actions but in the agentic state, they allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders.
In the second experiment, the 1973 Stanford Prison Experiment, Philip Zimbardo sought to find out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards (trait) or had more to do with the prison environment (circumstances). He turned the basement of the psychology building into a mock prison and recruited 23 students who were asked to role play guards and prisoners. 11 of them played guards and 10 of the prisoners. The experiment was supposed to go for 14 days but by the 6th day, the guards had become so abusive and the prisoners so submissive that the experiment was terminated. One of the prisoners had had a mental breakdown!
Zimbardo would conclude that people will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play and that the circumstances made both the guards and prisoners who they were.
These two experiments, in spite of their shortcomings and biases, point to an important phenomenon — that our behaviors in certain situations can be a function of the circumstances and not our inherent personalities.
So how do these experiments and phenomenon apply to the Justin Fox piece? Well, the fact that Ghanaians are the hardest-working group immigrants in the US is remarkable.
Like my the friend, attorney, and social activist, Ace Kojo Anan Ankomah asked, “And in our own country are we the hardest working people?”
Do not get me wrong. There are plenty of very hard-working Ghanaians who will never leave the country but there is also a percentage of the workforce that exhibits a marked paucity of wanting to work hard.
A lot of business owners complain about the work ethic of some Ghanaians in Ghana but then these same Ghanaians migrate to the US and become the hardest-working group of immigrants! How is that possible?
If we assume that the personalities of these Ghanaians stayed unchanged, then the change in behavior has to be attributed to the only thing that changed – the circumstances. Thus somehow, a change in the environment brings out a better work ethic in Ghanaians.
If Ghanaians can, with a change in where they find themselves in the world, exhibit a better even great work ethic, then this trait was already present in us but had become dormant, even inert or was induced by the newer circumstances.
That will mean that there is something in Ghana that suppresses this trait and something in the US that allows it to blossom.
That “thing” is what makes Ghanaians put in their all in a strange land. The absence of that “thing” is what suppresses the work ethic when they are in Ghana.
Before we identify that “thing”, let me do a little exercise:
Say I am in downtown Lexington and witness a man collapse. Driven by my instincts as a doctor, I’ll run over and offer my help. I will start CPR, get someone to call an ambulance while I continue and I’ll keep pumping on the chest till help arrives. I know as long as I keep some blood flowing, once he gets to one of the big three hospitals in town, he’ll get the critical care he needs. Thus, I harbor some hope that my efforts are not in futility.
Now let’s transport me to Ghana. I am somewhere in Osu and notice a man collapse. I’ll rush over and start CPR. As I push on the man’s chest, I will wonder when an ambulance will show up. Even if it does, will the medics on the ambulance have a way to ventilate and monitor the patient till they get him to Korle-Bu or 37? At either hospital, will they even have a ventilator or even oxygen? How bad is traffic going to be? Can you feel my pushes waning?
Back in Lexington, I tell myself, “It is worth it!” In Ghana, there is a nagging feeling that it is not worth it. A certain hopelessness is making my efforts seem futile and with that my efforts seem to ebb. Circumstances are starting to affect my behavior.
After a year in Ghana, guess what I’ll do when I see a man keel over on the streets of Accra?
So that “thing” that induces an amazing work ethic in Ghanaians in the US but saps it when they are home might be HOPE and TRUST. Hope that in the US they will find a well-paying job and a trust that if they work hard, their efforts will be rewarded. Hope that they can make their lives and that of their families better by giving it their all. This hope is not just a pipe dream but an actuality that is borne out by the Rule of Law and institutions that work. They see this in the lives of other Ghanaians and trust that the system will work.
This work ethic is sapped away by conditions of hopelessness and mistrust. So even in this same US, African-Americans, have through years of racism and violence, neither hope not trust in the system. This hopelessness and mistrust have eaten and still eat away at the well-being of this group and may buttress reports of poor work ethic in some members.
Based on an unscientific poll I did on Facebook (above image), the majority of the 200-plus people who answered think personality is the deciding factor in how a person behaves in any given situation. The Milgram Experiment counters this. We realized that in certain circumstances, 65% of people exhibit behavior that is dependent on the situation. The Stanford Prison Experiment had even starker results!
However, the issue might not be that simple.
As far back as 1938, the Harvard psychologist, Henry Murray, posited that “situations ‘press’ individuals to exhibit traits”. Tett, Simonet, Walser, and Brown would crystallize that into the coherent Trait Activation theory in the Journal Of Applied Psychology in 2013. In short, it says that a trait will show up only in a situation where it is relevant.
Also, there is the thought that certain character traits make people seek certain situations. So a man who is promiscuous will always find himself in situations that lead to seduction. This notion was also brought up about the Stanford Prison Experiment – that sadistic people may seek out jobs as guards and be aided by that situation to realize themselves. In other words, people seek out situations that “press individuals to realize their dominant traits”. Hardworking people seek out environments that induce their work ethic.
So could it be that the Ghanaians with a strong work ethic are those who migrate, hoping to enter an environment where their strong traits are induced? Maybe!
Whatever the case is, we need to build our country so that it is a bastion of hope and trust. A place where the rule of law stands and institutions work. Even if, like me, you are one of those “working hard” in the US, you need to do the little you can to raise our motherland. Then and only then will very, very few find the need to leave so as to find themselves. Then and only then will we be “the hardest-working people in our own country.”