IS TRUMP A -3 NOT-OK MONSTER LOSER-SURVIVOR?

By Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA

A purpose of transactional analysis is to help individuals and groups insert new fair causes into unfair natural cause-effect chains so as to increase the probabilities and proportions of winner outcomes occurring in the populace by non-violent means.

Changing a non-winner or loser script into a winner script requires hard work but it can happen if a person somehow acquires new script messages powerful enough to control frustrating, debilitating, or hamartic script messages instilled in his or her sub-conscious mind by a naturally-occurring concatenation of infinite cause-effect chains before s/he was eight years old. TA can provide people basic concepts and tools for attempting such a thing, requiring learning new time structuring patterns and learning to use different ego states and transactional patterns and learning how to communicate in more effective ways psychologically and socially.

Most people seem to think if only Earthian humans could solve their economic, political, military, and religious troubles, beat their competitors and enemies, etc., then everything would be just hunky-dory swell and the bluebirds would start chirping again. Not so, many people would not be happy and successful living in paradise because of script messages instilled in their sub-conscious minds before they were eight years old. In order for everyone to live happily and successfully humans would have to solve not only economic, political, religious, and social problems, but also psychological problems.

Changing a loser or non-winner script into a winner script generally requires changing  the Ego States one uses and how much time one spends daily pastiming, performing rituals, doing work, playing psychological Games, and being intimate with others. It entails changing a Not-OK life position into an OK life position.

Here is what Martin Groder, MD, a founder of transactional analysis who studied with Eric Berne, the best transactional analysis teacher and mentor I experienced at Chapel Hill, NC in the late 1970s taught about individual and group OKness that I called Groder’s People Map, in a passage I wrote and published in my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds (2011), Effective Learning Publications, Statesboro, Georgia,  pp. 148-150:

Martin Groder’s People Map

“Humans generally give little thought to what kind of human they are and where they fit in the spectrum of various types of humans. Innumerable philosophers, writers, social scientists, and others have categorized humans in various ways. Following is a schema developed by Martin Groder, MD, a psychiatrist, organizational development consultant, and entrepreneur (Groder, 1977).

“Groder developed this schema while working with hardcore inmates at the maximum security federal prison at Marion, Illinois in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. He was involved in a process of changing hard-core criminals into law-abiding citizens. Such a process would challenge the abilities of the most skillful and powerful of change agents.

“According to Groder, humans vary on two fundamental spatial dimensions. One dimension is Okness, which is estimated on the horizontal axis of Figure 1 (I could not get the Figure 1 image to copy and paste here); the other dimension is the energy level of the individual estimated on the vertical axis.

“People vary in terms of how OK they see, feel about, and experience, (1) themselves, (2) the other individual, (3) their group, (4) other groups, and (5) the world. In Groder’s terms, they are OK or not-OK with respect to I, You, We, They, and It (the world). Groder estimates how OK they are on each of these five existential dimensions on a scale of -1 to +1, -1 being as not-OK as possible and +1 being as OK as possible.

“Thus people with extremely high self-esteem might exist at the +1 level regarding themselves; someone with extremely low self-esteem might exist at the -1 level regarding themselves. People could exist at any level in between, at -.5, 0, +.25, etc. The same would be true of the positions of specific individuals with respect to buddies on a one-to-one basis, groups with which one belongs, other groups with which your group cooperates or competes, and the world in general.

“Summing the 5 existential OKness positions for an individual, I, You, We, They, and It, the highest possible OKness rating would be +5 and the lowest possible would be -5. A +5 person would have the highest possible feelings of Okness regarding his OKness, the OKness of his buddy, the OKness of his group, the OKness of other groups, and the OKness of the world. Such an individual would have very positive feelings and thoughts for self and others. On the other end of the spectrum, a -5 person would have the lowest possible feelings and thoughts for self and others. Very negative people tend to end up in prison. Very positive people tend to end up cultural heroes.

“Probably the most profitable attitude for an entrepreneur in a capitalistic economic system would be I’m OK, my employees are OK, my company is OK, the world is OK, but my competitors aren’t worth a damn, since this attitude would motivate his or her sales employees to steal more business from competitors to increase the profits of his company.

“Entrepreneurs have higher energy levels than middle managers and normal people. It takes less energy to be a normal person than anything else. Entrepreneurs in Groder’s schema have approximately the same energy level on the vertical axis of Figure 1 as Monsters, the -3 OKness level convict leaders of other convicts. Monsters have the attitude “I’m OK, my buddy is OK, but everything else is not OK, and I am going to make the world pay.” According to Groder, it’s more difficult to change the energy level of a human than the OKness position.

“In rehabilitation work, Groder attempted to arc people across the gap of Figure 1, and make +3 OKness level entrepreneurs out of -3 monsters, +2 OKness middle managers out of -2 OKness creeps, slobs, lunch buckets, etc. Sometimes people arc across the gap the other way. Honest entrepreneurs can turn criminal. Entrepreneurs are winner-survivors; Monsters are loser-survivors. Winners achieve goals and objectives; losers do not.”

There is no doubt that Trump has a high energy level, but unfortunately he could become a -3 Monster.  He is close to having a -3 OKness level rating now. Whether he is a loser-survivor remains to be seen. There is no doubt that he has been a loser as a business entrepreneur. His father gave him about seven hundred million dollars to play with when he started out, that he mostly squandered one way or another. He has started many businesses and schemes, most legal and some not. Five of them went bankrupt. Along the way he accumulated three failed marriages. He was a successful player in a survivor tv reality show. He did not win a majority popular vote but became US president anyway in 2016 because of the undemocratic USian electoral college. He lost both the popular vote and the electoral college vote running for a second term as US president, having in effect been fired from the job of US president after one term. He claimed the second election in 2020 was a fraud and the election was stolen from him. He has told this lie over and over since and still says it running again for a second term as US president now in 2024. So far he has been a loser as a president. If he somehow becomes US president again and installs himself as the first US dictator as he says he will he will no doubt consider himself a winner. If only he could have encountered Martin Groder one on one in his earlier life the current Earthian human OKness level might be a little higher than it is.

See Martin Groder, MD. Business Games: How to Recognize the Players and Deal With Them (1980), Boardroom Books, New York and Graham Barnes, PhD, “Groder’s 5-OK Diagrams,” in Transactional Analysis After Eric Berne: Teachings and Practices of three TA Schools (1977), Harper’s College Press, New York.

And, by the way, the way to deal with Donald Trump now is to vow now not to vote for him November 5, 2024, if you read this before you vote in the USian presidential election dead ahead.

Trump inherited a more or less standard loser dictator script with Don’t Be Close, Don’t Belong, Don’t Think, Don’t Feel for Others, Don’t Be Intellectual, Don’t Be Moral, and Don’t Be Honest Injunctions and script messages at the Child-Child level, along with Be Smart, Be Superior, Be Powerful, Be Sexually Attractive, Be Right, and Be Rich counter-injunction script messages at the Parent-Parent level. 

According to Martin Groder, the only real sin in TA is lying.

A bitter pill to swallow found embedded in my books Business Voyages and Born to Learn is that everything that happens is either predetermined or accidental, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and therefore no one is to blame or praise, since everything that happens is caused by accidental or inevitable concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains.

Believing and acting otherwise will perpetuate the same sorry I’m OK–You’re Not OK life position that has bedeviled humankind since time immemorial contributing to if not causing repeats of historical abominations such as genocides, wars, slavery, economic depressions, famines, mental illnesses, and social collapses.

The Prayer of Serenity goes something like this: Lord give me the intelligence and strength to change what needs changing, and the wisdom to know what I can and cannot change, knowing full well that some suffering, losing, and grieving is inevitable.

Using TA in some cases can help people become more serene, by enabling them to see more clearly what is going on to make salutary changes, or by learning to accept one’s script and focus on finding a niche in which it fits. On the other hand, a basic problem or question is whether serenity is possible in today’s world, beset by global warming and climate change and by escalating tensions and agitations among nations around planet Earth who have nuclear weapons and Game-infested Not OK leaders.

TA never promised anyone any rose gardens, or eternal bliss in heaven, but it does advertise that it can help individuals, groups, and organizations become more OK, OK not only in terms of achieving goals but more OK transacting with others so as to live with more dignity, satisfaction, peace, and tranquility, based on Adult mutually agreed-to contracts.

No one can blame you if you believe in tuning out TA and articles such as this one. Maybe the best strategy is to tune out the world as much as you can, inexorably inching through your life’s wormhole tunnel, reading no newspapers and not watching television, with no Internet. The problem however if you do that is boredom. Most humans have an innate need for stimulation, achievement, and recognition.

Regardless of what sort of cognitive structures humans might use, TA or whatever, sooner or later they have to take action, and this entails defining problems, delineating alternatives, making recommendations, choosing things, trying new things, over and over, till something works.

1 – What is the problem?

2 – What are the alternatives?

3 – What do you recommend?

We live in precarious times that probably encourage people to play more frequently AIN’T IT AWFUL, a psychological Game in which Game players collect strokes for making the world seem worse off than it is, complaining about the evils and troubles of the world, positioning themselves as Victims of obsolete economic, religious, and political policies and systems manipulated and exploited by greedy self-interested power-mad narcissistic sociopathic oligarchs and their corrupt bought and paid for cronies, lackeys, and knaves, such as lobbyists, politicians, religious leaders, and judges, however true this state of affairs might be in reality in various societies.

By the same token, it will do no good for humans to passively pretend the world is just hunky-dory and swell, better off than it really is, with everything coming up roses for everyone, living in small imaginary Candide-like best of all possible worlds, playing a psychological Game called GREENHOUSE by transactional analysts, in which players are rewarded with plastic strokes for making nonsensical positive cheerful upbeat comments about the environment and social, economic, political, and religious states of affairs, regardless of how bleak they are in reality.

It seems to me the most dangerous psychological Game played politically right now around planet Earth is IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, involving polarized individuals, groups, and organizations who experience increasing insecurity and hopelessness causing them to blame others and find scapegoats for their plights, escalating their anger as they transmit threats from their angry and fearful Parent and Child ego states to the Parent and Child ego states of others, sometimes attacking others verbally and physically for their perceived misdeeds and beliefs. Some of the threats include the threat of international and civil war. Israel and Palestine are playing a third-degree IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU Game right now in the Middle East. In most cases wars entail the parties also playing another psychological Game called YOU STARTED IT.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU is a Game that entails aggrieved humans psychologically acting as if opposing warring or competing parties maliciously and arbitrarily decided using free will to commit the harmful or heinous actions and deeds they are accused of committing, instead of realizing the others were caused to exist and do what they did by concatenations of infinite cause-effect chains just like you were. Getting rid of the other will not solve problems caused by poor educational systems, poor family scripts, poor religions, and hamartic economic and political policies and systems.

For more information regarding the use of Transactional Analysis https://www.itaaworld.org/ to create better discussion groups and democratic processes read my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactional-Analysis-Learning/dp/0692584331

For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using TA read my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810

See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an idealistic democratic bottom-up economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK – You’re OK life position.

This entails human Earthians never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.

This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form

Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj <, =, or > Bi

as explained in my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/

Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet, what would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system and auto-pilot or the human pilot and co-pilot, looking out their windows with their hands on their steering devices, seeing nothing but clouds and lightning below? Thanks are due to Buckminster Fuller for creating this airplane-landing metaphor, that he published in his 1964 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

It’s not easy to see what’s really going on, impossible some say, while being inundated and intimidated with fake news daily around Spaceship Earth, made public in mass media and the Internet and in internal communication processes of various types of organizations. To see what’s really going on, Earthian humans have to use inductive and analogical reasoning, based on probability, not deductive logic. Almost never can anyone prove with deductive logic that a general proposition about economic, social, psychological, religious, or political states affairs is absolutely true. About the best humans can hope for is to develop consensual answers that are generally acceptable and true based on probability.

It’s better to be honestly wrong, saying something is true because you really don’t know it’s not true, than to say something is true when you know damn well it’s not true.

Seems to me most lying is lying by omission (people not telling people things they know are true to gain or preserve advantages in competitive situations). Whether lying by omission is more or less harmful in overall perspective than lying by commission (telling people things you know are not true for ill-gotten gains), is debatable, as is proving whether it’s getting easier or harder for most people to see what’s really going on in economic and political states of affairs.

Political parties, governments, and mainstream media often lie by omission about what is going on, presumably to protect national security and their organizational revenues, in many cases socially presenting selective true facts but omitting true analysis about what is really going on.

For whatever it’s worth, I would rather be told what to do by a well-programmed AI robot than a demented deranged unhinged human fascist dictator. On the other hand, I am convinced the best situation would be to be told what to do by a group of randomly-selected intelligent rational humans who had fully studied the facts of the case at hand and who had fully discussed and debated about what to do in an open Game-free, Adult, I’m OK—You’re OK, democratic process. For a quick mental voyage exploring how Earthian humans might change their hamartic psychological, social, economic, religious, and political states of affairs read my 2021 novel, As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMER™ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern University, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama. He taught management systems, researched, published, and conducted a small business institute at Georgia Southern University thirty-five years, 1970-2005.

All case analyses entail considering three existential questions:

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES? WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND?

 

Whomever the spinner of the Classroom De-Gamer™ selected when it wound down after spinning by an imaginary line of fire extending from the point of the spinner to a class member sitting in the circle classroom layout would become the “Leader of the Moment” required to answer the three existential questions shown above laying out the case to all class members.

The purpose of the Classroom De-Gamer™ is to de-Game the playing of OK I’LL READ IT by students in which students psychologically tell teachers they will read the assigned homework but don’t. Randomly selecting a discussion leader insures that no student can psychologically think or feel that s/he is being picked on or favored by a teacher calling on someone to start a discussion, thereby banishing from the classroom the three psychological Game roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim.

The overall purpose of the Game-free I’m OK-You’re OK Adult-Adult democratic teaching and learning process is to produce comprehension of the relevant facts and focal points of the case among class members in order to create rational policies and strategies for successfully managing the states of affairs of the case. All humans have Adult ego states that can be cathected, even children at young ages.

Cathecting an ego state is turning on energy, cognition and emotion in the human psyche for transacting with fellow humans. There are three basic types of ego states that can be cathected: Parent, Adult, and Child.

A soft drink bottle as in playing the childhood game Spin the Bottle works about as well as a Classroom De-Gamer™ to randomly select the Leader of the Moment to answer the Three Existential Questions. No one can interrupt anyone once someone has the floor. Communicating overtly or covertly with individuals in the room for the whole session is not allowed. Anyone can respond to any speaker once the speaker has finished, disagreeing or agreeing with what was said, and may bring up another problem if appropriate in the context of the discussion.

How long should a discussion last? Long enough for group members to comprehend the system under consideration, a system including interrelations between relevant focal point entities of the system—relevant facts and issues comprising the problem, alternatives and recommendations.

According to R. Buckminster Fuller in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) comprehension of a system entails separating the relevant points from the irrelevant points in the system under consideration. It takes time to do this. According to Fuller, Comprehension = (N²-N) / 2, where N = Number of total focal point entities in the system, counting the number of focal point facts or issues and all the inter-relationships between the focal point entities.

Comprehension required and produced expands exponentially as the size of the system increases. One has to wonder if most Earthian systems today are ever fully comprehended by Earthian humans. Rather than most Earthian human systems being managed today based on comprehension in general they are managed based on dogmas, doctrines, rules, algorithms, scripts, and the like, many of which are irrelevant. As matters now stand about the best Earthian humans can hope for is that somehow the smartest, wisest, most knowledgeable, most ethical, and most empathetic Earthian humans somehow manage to become top leaders in major systems.

When most members of the discussion group seem to generally comprehend the system it is time to stop. Most paper cases in Stapleton’s classes of about 30 students took about one hour. Real cases and systems in your organizations and groups may take more or less time, perhaps several hourly sessions for one system. Stick with the discussion until most members have comprehended the relevant problems, alternatives, and recommendations of the system under consideration as best they can. In most cases this will produce a solution considered the most rational of alternatives for most members of the group, about the best that can be hoped for at present. Perhaps at some future date supercomputers will be able to comprehend large systems well enough to develop answers that are provably true.

Since all members of the group will not have been caused to develop the same pictures in their heads about what should be done in the case before the discussion starts, a high percentage of the discussants will learn in the discussion as they comprehend what is really going on that their initial conceptions were wrong, causing both unlearning and learning. Sometimes unlearning is more important than learning for creating better Earthian human states of affairs. Unlearning, in fact, might be what is now needed most in order for Earthian humans to develop peaceful and sustainable systems around Spaceship Earth.

Most discussants will not leave the discussions with the same mental pictures they started out with caused by the greater comprehension caused by the back and forth dialectical arguing caused by the Game-free I’m OK-You’re OK Adult-Adult democratic discussion process, proving both unlearning and learning happened.

Stapleton’s De-Gaming process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being Persecuted or Rescued as a Victim if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMER. The psychological GAME Drama Triangle roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely eliminated from the course learning process. The actual grades received-A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s-were relative grades, not absolute grades, Excellent, Good, Average, Poor, and Failing relative to the class. There were no numbers ostensibly proving what percentage of the course knowledge was retained in memory for so-called objective exams.

Stapleton sat in the same circle in the same kind of chair as students, and the De-GAMING rules also applied to him. If the Classroom De-GAMER landed on him he had to lay out the case just like any other student and discuss what was the problem, what were the alternatives, and what he recommended.

Grades were based eighty percent on class participation in dialectical discussions about what to do about problems and opportunities found in cases; the rest of the final grade was based on two case write-ups. One write-up was about what the student observed, researched, analyzed, and wrote about an existing business in the local environment or a business plan the student created. The other write-up was an analysis of a case researched and written by professors about a business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses contained processes, problems, opportunities, and data occurring in all functional areas of business such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.

Stapleton published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK-You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled the Classroom De-GAMER™ he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning and management systems, policies, and practices.

He learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).

Learned how the Harvard  Business School case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA, Harvard Business School doctorates, at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette in 1969-70.

Has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).

Taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year during 1970-2005 in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students every year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses every year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course that included moral and ethical issues as well as planning, organizing, directing, and controlling issues he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major.  He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.

Class members agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.

About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.

No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-Gamer™ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.

He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor with tenure at age thirty-six and was the senior professor of the university the academic year he retired in 2005.

He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers” for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult-Adult I’m OK-You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using Parent-Child transactions, row and column classroom layouts, and so-called objective tests.  

Only former students who had worked in the real world of business ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works” published in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475. The data were also used in several refereed articles.

Ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.

For more information on related classroom management ethical issues in universities see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,” in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.

He had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation system he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.”

To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.

“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations” has by now (December 30, 2023) been cited as a reference in 89 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics and fairness of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including 21 new citations since April 2021, proving the article is still being read and used.

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.”

If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.

His latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.

Feel free to share this article any way you see fit.

BACKSTORIES

“HOW PLAYING PATHOLOGICAL POLITIAL PSYCHOLOGIAL GAMES CAN DESTROY EARTHIAN HUMAN LIFE,” by Richard John Stapleton, Effective Learning Report, 2024 https://blog.effectivelearning.net/how-playing-pathological-political-psychological-games-can-destroy-earthian-human-life/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFitCNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHX3UqystJNI1k3pzOBs6CMEBcUqSn7nD8wjWd5SnbqtJwPBCBKt86atRBQ_aem_zInoelRnTN8JReDMh8sCLQ

“RJS ANCESTRY AND SCRIPTING,” by Richard John Stapleton, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-ancestry-and-scripting/

“RJS ATHLETIC, BUSINESS, AND ACADEMIC VITA,” by Richard John Stapleton, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-athletic-business-and-academic-vita/