Understanding behavioral ethics can strengthen your compliance program

Jeffrey Kaplan
The FCPA Blog
Originally posted October 21, 2019

Behavioral ethics is a well-known field of social science which shows how — due to various cognitive biases — “we are not as ethical as we think.” Behavioral compliance and ethics (which is less well known) attempts to use behavioral ethics insights to develop and maintain effective compliance programs. In this post I explore some of the ways that this can be done.

Behavioral C&E should be viewed on two levels. The first could be called specific behavioral C&E lessons, meaning enhancements to the various discrete C&E program elements — e.g., risk assessment, training — based on behavioral ethics insights.   Several of these are discussed below.

The second — and more general — aspect of behavioral C&E is the above-mentioned overarching finding that we are not as ethical as we think. The importance of this general lesson is based on the notion that the greatest challenges to having effective C&E programs in organizations is often more about the “will” than the “way.”

That is, what is lacking in many business organizations is an understanding that strong C&E is truly necessary. After all, if we are as ethical than we think, then effective risk mitigation would be just a matter of finding the right punishment for an offense and the power of logical thinking would do the rest. Behavioral ethics teaches that that assumption is ill-founded.

The info is here.

Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements

Lisa Fazio David Rand Gordon Pennycook
PsyArXiv
Originally created February 28, 2019

Abstract

Repetition increases the likelihood that a statement will be judged as true. This illusory truth effect is well-established; however, it has been argued that repetition will not affect belief in unambiguous statements. When individuals are faced with obviously true or false statements, repetition should have no impact. We report a simulation study and a preregistered experiment that investigate this idea. Contrary to many intuitions, our results suggest that belief in all statements is increased by repetition. The observed illusory truth effect is largest for ambiguous items, but this can be explained by the psychometric properties of the task, rather than an underlying psychological mechanism that blocks the impact of repetition for implausible items. Our results indicate that the illusory truth effect is highly robust and occurs across all levels of plausibility. Therefore, even highly implausible statements will become more plausible with enough repetition.

The research is here.

The conclusion:

In conclusion, our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that repetition increases belief in all statements equally, regardless of their plausibility. However, there is an important difference between this internal mechanism (equal increase across plausibility) and the observable effect. The observable effect of repetition on truth ratings is greatest for items near the midpoint of perceived truth, and small or nonexistent for items at the extremes. While repetition effects are difficult to observe for very high and very low levels of perceived truth, our results suggest that repetition increases participants’ internal representation of truth equally for all statements. These findings have large implications for daily life where people are often repeatedly exposed to both plausible and implausible falsehoods. Even implausible falsehoods may slowly become more plausible with repetition.

Community Standards of Deception

Levine, Emma
Booth School of Business
(June 17, 2019).
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3405538

Abstract

We frequently claim that lying is wrong, despite modeling that it is often right. The present research sheds light on this tension by unearthing systematic cases in which people believe lying is ethical in everyday communication and by proposing and testing a theory to explain these cases. Using both inductive and experimental approaches, I demonstrate that deception is perceived to be ethical, and individuals want to be deceived, when deception is perceived to prevent unnecessary harm. I identify nine implicit rules – pertaining to the targets of deception and the topic and timing of a conversation – that specify the systematic circumstances in which deception is perceived to cause unnecessary harm, and I document the causal effect of each implicit rule on the endorsement of deception. This research provides insight into when and why people value honesty, and paves the way for future research on when and why people embrace deception.

The New Science of How to Argue—Constructively

Jesse Singal
The Atlantic
Originally published April 7, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Once you know a term like decoupling, you can identify instances in which a disagreement isn’t really about X anymore, but about Y and Z. When some readers first raised doubts about a now-discredited Rolling Stone story describing a horrific gang rape at the University of Virginia, they noted inconsistencies in the narrative. Others insisted that such commentary fit into destructive tropes about women fabricating rape claims, and therefore should be rejected on its face. The two sides weren’t really talking; one was debating whether the story was a hoax, while the other was responding to the broader issue of whether rape allegations are taken seriously. Likewise, when scientists bring forth solid evidence that sexual orientation is innate, or close to it, conservatives have lashed out against findings that would “normalize” homosexuality. But the dispute over which sexual acts, if any, society should discourage is totally separate from the question of whether sexual orientation is, in fact, inborn. Because of a failure to decouple, people respond indignantly to factual claims when they’re actually upset about how those claims might be interpreted.

Nerst believes that the world can be divided roughly into “high decouplers,” for whom decoupling comes easy, and “low decouplers,” for whom it does not. This is the sort of area where erisology could produce empirical insights: What characterizes people’s ability to decouple? Nerst believes that hard-science types are better at it, on average, while artistic types are worse. After all, part of being an artist is seeing connections where other people don’t—so maybe it’s harder for them to not see connections in some cases. Nerst might be wrong. Either way, it’s the sort of claim that could be fairly easily tested if the discipline caught on.

The info is here.

It’s Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have to Be Kind

Ryan Holiday
www.medium.com
Originally posted on March 20, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Reason is easy. Being clever is easy. Humiliating someone in the wrong is easy too. But putting yourself in their shoes, kindly nudging them to where they need to be, understanding that they have emotional and irrational beliefs just like you have emotional and irrational beliefs—that’s all much harder. So is not writing off other people. So is spending time working on the plank in your own eye than the splinter in theirs. We know we wouldn’t respond to someone talking to us that way, but we seem to think it’s okay to do it to other people.

There is a great clip of Joe Rogan talking during the immigration crisis last year. He doesn’t make some fact-based argument about whether immigration is or isn’t a problem. He doesn’t attack anyone on either side of the issue. He just talks about what it feels like—to him—to hear a mother screaming for the child she’s been separated from. The clip has been seen millions of times now and undoubtedly has changed more minds than a government shutdown, than the squabbles and fights on CNN, than the endless op-eds and think-tank reports.

Rogan doesn’t even tell anyone what to think. (Though, ironically, the clip was abused by plenty of editors who tried to make it partisan). He just says that if you can’t relate to that mom and her pain, you’re not on the right team. That’s the right way to think about it.

The info is here.

OpenAI's Realistic Text-Generating AI Triggers Ethics Concerns

William Falcon
Forbes.com
Originally posted February 18, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Why you should care.

GPT-2 is the closest AI we have to make conversational AI a possibility. Although conversational AI is far from solved, chatbots powered by this technology could help doctors scale advice over chats, scale advice for potential suicide victims, improve translation systems, and improve speech recognition across applications.

Although OpenAI acknowledges these potential benefits, it also acknowledges the potential risks of releasing the technology. Misuse could include, impersonate others online, generate misleading news headlines, or automate the automation of fake posts to social media.

But I argue these malicious applications are already possible without this AI. There exist other public models which can already be used for these purposes. Thus, I think not releasing this code is more harmful to the community because A) it sets a bad precedent for open research, B) keeps companies from improving their services, C) unnecessarily hypes these results and D) may trigger unnecessary fears about AI in the general public.

The info is here.

When and why people think beliefs are “debunked” by scientific explanations for their origins

Dillon Plunkett, Lara Buchak, and Tania Lombrozo

Abstract

How do scientific explanations for beliefs affect people’s confidence in those beliefs? For example, do people think neuroscientific explanations for religious belief support or challenge belief in God? In five experiments, we find that the effects of scientific explanations for belief depend on whether the explanations imply normal or abnormal functioning (e.g., if a neural mechanism is doing what it evolved to do). Experiments 1 and 2 find that people think brain based explanations for religious, moral, and scientific beliefs corroborate those beliefs when the explanations invoke a normally functioning mechanism, but not an abnormally functioning mechanism. Experiment 3 demonstrates comparable effects for other kinds of scientific explanations (e.g., genetic explanations). Experiment 4 confirms that these effects derive from (im)proper functioning, not statistical (in)frequency. Experiment 5 suggests that these effects interact with people’s prior beliefs to produce motivated judgments: People are more skeptical of scientific explanations for their own beliefs if the explanations appeal to abnormal functioning, but they are less skeptical of scientific explanations of opposing beliefs if the explanations appeal to abnormal functioning. These findings suggest that people treat “normality” as a proxy for epistemic reliability and reveal that folk epistemic commitments shape attitudes towards scientific explanations.

The research is here.

Sex talks

Rebecca Kukla
aeon.co
Originally posted February 4, 2019

Communication is essential to ethical sex. Typically, our public discussions focus on only one narrow kind of communication: requests for sex followed by consent or refusal. But notice that we use language and communication in a wide variety of ways in negotiating sex. We flirt and rebuff, express curiosity and repulsion, and articulate fantasies. Ideally, we talk about what kind of sex we want to have, involving which activities, and what we like and don’t like. We settle whether or not we are going to have sex at all, and when we want to stop. We check in with one another and talk dirty to one another during sex. 

In this essay I explore the language of sexual negotiation. My specific interest is in what philosophers call the ‘pragmatics’ of speech. That is, I am less interested in what words mean than I am in how speaking can be understood as a kind of action that has a pragmatic effect on the world. Philosophers who specialise in what is known as ‘speech act theory’ focus on what an act of speaking accomplishes, as opposed to what its words mean. J L Austin developed this way of thinking about the different things that speech can do in his classic book, How To Do Things With Words (1962), and many philosophers of language have developed the idea since.

The info is here.

Happy Valentine's Day

What Could Be Wrong with a Little ‘Moral Clarity’?

Frank Guan
The New York Times Magazine
Originally posted January 2, 2019

If, in politics, words are weapons, they often prove themselves double—edged. So it was when, on the summer night that Alexandria Ocasio—Cortez learned that she had won a Democratic congressional primary over a 10-term incumbent, she provided a resonant quote to a TV reporter. “I think what we’ve seen is that working—class Americans want a clear champion,” she said, “and there is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.” Dozens of news videos and articles would cite those words as journalists worked to interpret what Ocasio—Cortez’s triumph, repeated in November’s general election, might represent for the American left and its newest star.

Until recently, “moral clarity” was more likely to signal combativeness toward the left, not from it: It served for decades as a badge of membership among conservative hawks and cultural crusaders. But in the Trump era, militant certainty takes precedence across the political spectrum. On the left, “moral clarity” can mean taking an unyielding stand against economic inequality or social injustice, climate change or gun violence. Closer to the center, it can take on a sonorous, transpartisan tone, as when Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, and former Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, each called for “moral clarity” in the White House reaction to the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And it can fly beyond politics altogether, as when the surgeon and author Atul Gawande writes that better health care “does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity.” We hear about moral clarity any time there is impatience with equivocation, delay, conciliation and confusion — whenever people long for rapid action based on truths they hold to be self—evident.

The info is here.

Changing the way we communicate about patients

Abraar Karan
BMJ Blog
Originally posted August 29, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

There are many changes that we can make to improve how we communicate about patients. One of the easiest and most critical transformations is how we write our medical notes. One of the best doctors I ever worked with did exactly this, and is famous at the Brigham (our hospital) for doing it. He systematically starts every single note with the person’s social history. Who is this patient? It is not just a lady with abdominal pain. It is a mother of three, a retired teacher, and an active cyclist. That is the first thing we read about her, and so when I enter her room, I can’t help but see her this way rather than as a case of appendicitis.

This matters because patients deserve to be treated as people—a statement that’s so obvious it shouldn’t need to be said, but which physician behaviour doesn’t always reflect. You wouldn’t expect to know the most sensitive and vulnerable aspects of someone before even knowing their most basic background, yet we do this in medicine all the time. This is also important because in many clinical presentations, it provides critical information that helps deduce how they got sick, and why they may get sick again in the same way if we don’t restructure something essential in their life. For instance, if I didn’t know that the 22 year old opioid addict had just been kicked out of his house and is on the street without transportation to get to his suboxone clinic, I will not have truly solved what brought him to the hospital in the first place.

The info is here.

Implicit Bias in Patient Care: An Endemic Blight on Quality Care

JoAnn Grif Alspach
Critical Care Nurse
August 2018 vol. 38 no. 4 12-16

Here is an excerpt:

How Implicit Bias Is Manifested

A systematic review by Hall and colleagues revealed that implicit bias is manifested in 4 key areas: patient-provider interactions, treatment decisions, treatment adherence, and patient health outcomes. How a physician communicates, including verbal cues, body language, and nonverbal behavior (physical proximity, frequency of eye contact) may manifest subconscious bias.7,10 Several investigators found evidence that providers interact more effectively with white than nonwhite patients. Bias may affect the nature and extent of diagnostic assessments and the range and scope of therapies considered. Nonwhite patients receive fewer cardiovascular interventions and kidney transplants. One meta-analysis found that 20 of 25 assumption method studies demonstrated bias either in the diagnosis, treatment recommendations, number of questions asked, or tests ordered. Women are 3 times less likely than men to receive knee arthroplasty despite comparable indications. Bias can detrimentally affect whether patients seek or return for care, follow treatment protocols, and, perhaps cumulatively, can influence outcomes of care. Numerous research studies offer evidence that implicit bias is associated with higher complication rates, greater morbidity, and higher patient mortality.

The info is here.

Four Rules for Learning How to Talk To Each Other Again

Jason Pontin
www.wired.com
Originally posted

Here is an excerpt:

Here’s how to speak in a polity where we loathe each other. Let this be the Law of Parsimonious Claims:

1. Say nothing you know to be untrue, whether to deceive, confuse, or, worst of all, encourage a wearied cynicism.

2. Make mostly falsifiable assertions or offer prescriptions whose outcomes could be measured, always explaining how your assertion or prescription could be tested.

3. Whereof you have no evidence but possess only moral intuitions, say so candidly, and accept you must coexist with people who have different intuitions.

4. When evidence proves you wrong, admit it cheerfully, pleased that your mistake has contributed to the general progress.

Finally, as you listen, assume the good faith of your opponents, unless you have proof otherwise. Judge their assertions and prescriptions based on the plain meaning of their words, rather on than what you guess to be their motives. Often, people will tell you about experiences they found significant. If they are earnest, hear them sympathetically.

The info is here.

The Road to Pseudoscientific Thinking

Julia Shaw
Scientific American
Originally published January 16, 2017

Here is the conclusion:

So, where to from here? Are there any cool, futuristic, applications of such insights? According to McColeman “I expect that category learning work from human learning will help computer vision moving forward, as we understand the regularities in the environment that people are picking up on. There’s still a lot of room for improvement in getting computer systems to notice the same things that people notice.” We need to help people, and computers, to avoid being distracted by unimportant, attention-grabbing, information.

The take-home message from this line of research seems to be: When fighting the post-truth war against pseudoscience and misinformation, make sure that important information is eye-catching and quickly understandable.

The information is here.

Is There A Difference Between Ethics And Morality In Business?

Bruce Weinstein
Forbes.com
Originally published February 23, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

In practical terms, if you use both “ethics” and “morality” in conversation, the people you’re speaking with will probably take issue with how you’re using these terms, even if they believe they’re distinct in some way.

The conversation will then veer from whatever substantive ethical point you were trying to make (“Our company has an ethical and moral responsibility to hire and promote only honest, accountable people”) to an argument about the meaning of the words “ethical” and “moral.” I had plenty of those arguments as a graduate student in philosophy, but is that the kind of discussion you really want to have at a team meeting or business conference?

You can do one of three things, then:

1. Use “ethics” and “morality” interchangeably only when you’re speaking with people who believe they’re synonymous.

2. Choose one term and stick with it.

3. Minimize the use of both words and instead refer to what each word is broadly about: doing the right thing, leading an honorable life and acting with high character.

As a professional ethicist, I’ve come to see #3 as the best option. That way, I don’t have to guess whether the person I’m speaking with believes ethics and morality are identical concepts, which is futile when you’re speaking to an audience of 5,000 people.

The information is here.

Note: I do not agree with everything in this article, but it is worth contemplating.

How can groups make good decisions? Deliberation & Diversity

Mariano Sigman and Dan Ariely
TED Talk
Originally recorded April 2017

We all know that when we make decisions in groups, they don't always go right -- and sometimes they go very wrong. How can groups make good decisions? With his colleague Dan Ariely, neuroscientist Mariano Sigman has been inquiring into how we interact to reach decisions by performing experiments with live crowds around the world. In this fun, fact-filled explainer, he shares some intriguing results -- as well as some implications for how it might impact our political system. In a time when people seem to be more polarized than ever, Sigman says, better understanding how groups interact and reach conclusions might spark interesting new ways to construct a healthier democracy.

AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It?

Mark Wilson
Co.Design
Originally posted July 14, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

But how could any of this technology actually benefit the world, beyond these theoretical discussions? Would our servers be able to operate more efficiently with bots speaking to one another in shorthand? Could microsecond processes, like algorithmic trading, see some reasonable increase? Chatting with Facebook, and various experts, I couldn’t get a firm answer.

However, as paradoxical as this might sound, we might see big gains in such software better understanding our intent. While two computers speaking their own language might be more opaque, an algorithm predisposed to learn new languages might chew through strange new data we feed it more effectively. For example, one researcher recently tried to teach a neural net to create new colors and name them. It was terrible at it, generating names like Sudden Pine and Clear Paste (that clear paste, by the way, was labeled on a light green). But then they made a simple change to the data they were feeding the machine to train it. They made everything lowercase–because lowercase and uppercase letters were confusing it. Suddenly, the color-creating AI was working, well, pretty well! And for whatever reason, it preferred, and performed better, with RGB values as opposed to other numerical color codes.

Why did these simple data changes matter? Basically, the researcher did a better job at speaking the computer’s language. As one coder put it to me, “Getting the data into a format that makes sense for machine learning is a huge undertaking right now and is more art than science. English is a very convoluted and complicated language and not at all amicable for machine learning.”

The article is here.

Talking in Euphemisms Can Chip Away at Your Sense of Morality

Laura Niemi, Alek Chakroff, and Liane Young
The Science of Us
Originally published April 7, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Taken together, the results suggest that unethical behavior becomes easier when we perceive our own actions in indirect terms, which makes things that we would otherwise balk at seem a bit more palatable. In other words, deploying indirect speech doesn’t just help us evade blame from others — it also helps us to convince ourselves that unethical acts aren’t so bad after all.

That’s not to say that this is a conscious process. A speaker who shrouds his harmful intentions in indirect speech may understand that this will help him hold on to his standing in the public eye, or maintain his reputation among those closest to him — a useful tactic when those intentions are likely to be condemned or fall outside the bounds of socially acceptable behavior. But that same speaker may be unaware of just how much their indirect speech is easing their own psyche, too.

The article is here.

Rude Doctors, Rude Nurses, Rude Patients

Perri Klass
The New York Times
Originally published April 10, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

None of that is a surprise, and in fact, there is a good deal of literature to suggest that the medical environment includes all kinds of harshness, and that much of the rudeness you encounter as a doctor or nurse is likely to come from colleagues and co-workers.  An often-cited British study from 2015 called “Sticks and Stones” reported that rude, dismissive and aggressive communication between doctors (inevitably abbreviated, in a medical journal, as RDA communication) affected 31 percent of doctors several times a week or more. The researchers found that rudeness was more common from certain medical specialties: radiology, general surgery, neurosurgery and cardiology. They also established that higher status was somewhat protective; junior doctors and trainees encountered more rudeness.

In the United States, a number of studies have looked at how rudeness affects medical students and medical residents, as part of tracking the different ways in which they are often mistreated.

One article earlier this year in the journal Medical Teacher charted the effect on medical student morale of a variety of experiences, including verbal and nonverbal mistreatment, by everyone from attending physicians to residents to nurses. Mistreatment of medical students, the authors argued, may actually reflect serious problems on the part of their teachers, such as burnout, depression or substance abuse; it’s not enough to classify the “perpetrators” (that is, the rude people) as unprofessional and tell them to stop.

The article is here.

Why People Continue to Believe Objectively False Things

Amanda Taub and Brendan Nyhan
New York Times - The Upshot
Originally posted March 22, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Even when myths are dispelled, their effects linger. The Boston College political scientist Emily Thorson conducted a series of studies showing that exposure to a news article containing a damaging allegation about a fictional political candidate caused people to rate the candidate more negatively even when the allegation was corrected and people believed it to be false.

There are ways to correct information more effectively. Adam Berinsky of M.I.T., for instance, found that a surprising co-partisan source (a Republican member of Congress) was the most effective in reducing belief in the “death panel” myth about the Affordable Care Act.

But in the wiretapping case, Republican lawmakers have neither supported Mr. Trump’s wiretap claims (which could risk their credibility) nor strenuously opposed them (which could prompt a partisan backlash). Instead, they have tried to shift attention to a different political narrative — one that suits the partisan divide by making Mr. Obama the villain of the piece. Rather than focusing on the wiretap allegation, they have sought to portray the House Intelligence Committee hearings on Russian interference in the election as an investigation into leaks of classified information.

The article is here.

Why We Love Moral Rigidity

Matthew Hutson
Scientific American
Originally published on November 1, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

We don't evaluate others based on their philosophical ideologies per se, Pizarro says. Rather we look at how others' moral decisions “express the kind of motives, commitments and emotions we want people to have.” Coolheaded calculation has its benefits, but we want our friends to at least flinch before personally harming others. Indeed, people in the study who had argued for pushing the man were trusted more when they claimed that the decision was difficult.

Politicians and executives should pay heed. Leading requires making hard trade-offs—is a war or a cut in employee benefits worth the pain it inflicts? According to Pizarro, “you want your leader to genuinely have or at least be really good at displaying the right kinds of emotions when they're talking about that decision, to show that they didn't arrive at it callously.” Calmly weighing costs and benefits may do the most good for the most people, but it can also be a good way to lose friends.

The article is here.