Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Exploitation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Exploitation. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 2, 2023

The dark side of generosity: Employees with a reputation for giving are selectively targeted for exploitation


Stanley, M. L., Neck, C. P., & Neck, C. B. (2023). Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 108, 104503.

Abstract

People endorse generosity as a moral virtue worth exemplifying, and those who acquire reputations for generosity are admired and publicly celebrated. In an organizational context, hiring, retaining, and promoting generous employees can make organizations more appealing to customers, suppliers, and top talent. However, using complementary methods and experimental designs with large samples of full-time managers, we find consistent evidence that managers are inclined to take unfair advantage of employees with reputations for generosity, selectively targeting them for exploitation in ways that likely, and ironically, hamper long-term organizational success. This selective targeting of generous employees for exploitation was statistically explained by a problematic assumption: Since they have reputations for generosity, managers assume that, if they had the opportunity, they would have freely volunteered for their own exploitation. We also investigate a possible solution to the targeting of more generous employees for exploitative practices. Merely asking managers to make a judgment about the ethics of an exploitative request eliminates their propensity to target generous employees over other employees for exploitation.

The article is behind a paywall.

Here is a summary:

The research suggests that organizations should be aware of the potential for managers to exploit employees with a reputation for generosity. They also suggest that organizations should implement policies and procedures to protect employees from exploitation.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the study:
  • Employees with a reputation for generosity are more likely to be targeted for exploitation by managers.
  • Managers are more likely to make exploitative requests of employees who they have a personal relationship with.
  • Organizations should be aware of the potential for managers to exploit employees with a reputation for generosity and implement policies and procedures to protect employees from exploitation.
The study also suggests that there are a number of factors that may contribute to the exploitation of generous employees, including:
  • The manager's perception of the employee's willingness to comply with exploitative requests.
  • The manager's personal relationship with the employee.
  • The organization's culture and policies.
It is important to note that the study did not find that all managers exploit generous employees. However, the study does suggest that it is a phenomenon that organizations should be aware of and take steps to prevent.

Sunday, March 7, 2021

Why do inequality and deprivation produce high crime and low trust?


De Courson, B., Nettle, D. 
Sci Rep 11, 1937 (2021). 
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-80897-8

Abstract

Humans sometimes cooperate to mutual advantage, and sometimes exploit one another. In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust. We created a model of cooperation and exploitation to explore why this should be. Distinctively, our model features a desperation threshold, a level of resources below which it is extremely damaging to fall. Agents do not belong to fixed types, but condition their behaviour on their current resource level and the behaviour in the population around them. We show that the optimal action for individuals who are close to the desperation threshold is to exploit others. This remains true even in the presence of severe and probable punishment for exploitation, since successful exploitation is the quickest route out of desperation, whereas being punished does not make already desperate states much worse. Simulated populations with a sufficiently unequal distribution of resources rapidly evolve an equilibrium of low trust and zero cooperation: desperate individuals try to exploit, and non-desperate individuals avoid interaction altogether. Making the distribution of resources more equal or increasing social mobility is generally effective in producing a high cooperation, high trust equilibrium; increasing punishment severity is not.

From the Discussion

Within criminology, our prediction of risky exploitative behaviour when in danger of falling below a threshold of desperation is reminiscent of Merton’s strain theory of deviance. Under this theory, deviance results when individuals have a goal (remaining constantly above the threshold of participation in society), but the available legitimate means are insufficient to get them there (neither foraging alone nor cooperation has a large enough one-time payoff). They thus turn to risky alternatives, despite the drawbacks of these (see also Ref.32 for similar arguments). This explanation is not reducible to desperation making individuals discount the future more steeply, which is often invoked as an explanation for criminality. Agents in our model do not face choices between smaller-sooner and larger-later rewards; the payoff for exploitation is immediate, whether successful or unsuccessful. Also note the philosophical differences between our approach and ‘self-control’ styles of explanation. Those approaches see offending as deficient decision-making: it would be in people’s interests not to offend, but some can’t manage it (see Ref.35 for a critical review). Like economic and behavioural-ecological theories of crime more generally, ours assumes instead that there are certain situations or states where offending is the best of a bad set of available options.

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Sharing Patient Data Without Exploiting Patients

McCoy MS, Joffe S, Emanuel EJ.
JAMA. Published online January 16, 2020.
doi:10.1001/jama.2019.22354

Here is an excerpt:

The Risks of Data Sharing

When health systems share patient data, the primary risk to patients is the exposure of their personal health information, which can result in a range of harms including embarrassment, stigma, and discrimination. Such exposure is most obvious when health systems fail to remove identifying information before sharing data, as is alleged in the lawsuit against Google and the University of Chicago. But even when shared data are fully deidentified in accordance with the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act reidentification is possible, especially when patient data are linked with other data sets. Indeed, even new data privacy laws such as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation and California's Consumer Privacy Act do not eliminate reidentification risk.

Companies that acquire patient data also accept risk by investing in research and development that may not result in marketable products. This risk is less ethically concerning, however, than that borne by patients. While companies usually can abandon unpromising ventures, patients’ lack of control over data-sharing arrangements makes them vulnerable to exploitation. Patients lack control, first, because they may have no option other than to seek care in a health system that plans to share their data. Second, even if patients are able to authorize sharing of their data, they are rarely given the information and opportunity to ask questions needed to give meaningful informed consent to future uses of their data.

Thus, for the foreseeable future, data sharing will entail ethically concerning risks to patients whose data are shared. But whether these exchanges are exploitative depends on how much benefit patients receive from data sharing.

The info is here.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

How Could Commercial Terms of Use and Privacy Policies Undermine Informed Consent in the Age of Mobile Health?

AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(9):E864-872.
doi: 10.1001/amajethics.2018.864.

Abstract

Granular personal data generated by mobile health (mHealth) technologies coupled with the complexity of mHealth systems creates risks to privacy that are difficult to foresee, understand, and communicate, especially for purposes of informed consent. Moreover, commercial terms of use, to which users are almost always required to agree, depart significantly from standards of informed consent. As data use scandals increasingly surface in the news, the field of mHealth must advocate for user-centered privacy and informed consent practices that motivate patients’ and research participants’ trust. We review the challenges and relevance of informed consent and discuss opportunities for creating new standards for user-centered informed consent processes in the age of mHealth.

The info is here.

Thursday, July 11, 2019

The Business of Health Care Depends on Exploiting Doctors and Nurses

Danielle Ofri
The New York Times
Originally published June 8, 2019

One resource seems infinite and free: the professionalism of caregivers.

You are at your daughter’s recital and you get a call that your elderly patient’s son needs to talk to you urgently.  A colleague has a family emergency and the hospital needs you to work a double shift.  Your patient’s M.R.I. isn’t covered and the only option is for you to call the insurance company and argue it out.  You’re only allotted 15 minutes for a visit, but your patient’s medical needs require 45.

These quandaries are standard issue for doctors and nurses.  Luckily, the response is usually standard issue as well: An overwhelming majority do the right thing for their patients, even at a high personal cost.

It is true that health care has become corporatized to an almost unrecognizable degree.  But it is also true that most clinicians remain committed to the ethics that brought them into the field in the first place.  This makes the hospital an inspiring place to work.

Increasingly, though, I’ve come to the uncomfortable realization that this ethic that I hold so dear is being cynically manipulated.

By now, corporate medicine has milked just about all the “efficiency” it can out of the system.  With mergers and streamlining, it has pushed the productivity numbers about as far as they can go.

But one resource that seems endless — and free — is the professional ethic of medical staff members.

This ethic holds the entire enterprise together.  If doctors and nurses clocked out when their paid hours were finished, the effect on patients would be calamitous.  Doctors and nurses know this, which is why they don’t shirk.  The system knows it, too, and takes advantage.

The demands on medical professionals have escalated relentlessly in the past few decades, without a commensurate expansion of time and resources.  For starters, patients are sicker these days.  The medical complexity per patient — the number and severity of chronic conditions — has steadily increased, meaning that medical encounters are becoming ever more involved.  They typically include more illnesses to treat, more medications to administer, more complications to handle — all in the same-length office or hospital visit.

The information is here.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

How Much Do A Company's Ethics Matter In The Modern Professional Climate?

Larry Alton
Forbes
Originally posted September 12, 2017

More than ever, a company’s success depends on the talent it’s able to attract, but attracting the best talent is about more than just offering the best salary—or even the best benefits. Companies may have a lucrative offer for a prospective candidate, and a culture where they’ll feel at home, but how do corporate ethics stack up against those of its competition?

This may not seem like the most important question to ask when you’re trying to hire someone for a position—especially one that might not be directly affected by the actions of your corporation as a whole—but the modern workplace is changing, as are American professionals’ values, and if you want to keep up, you need to know just how significant those ethical values are.

What Qualifies as “Ethics”?

What do I mean by “ethics”? This is a broad category, and subjective in nature, but generally, I’m referring to these areas:
  • Fraud and manipulation. This should be obvious, but ethical companies don’t engage in shady or manipulative financial practices, such as fraud, bribery, or insider trading. The problem here is that individual actions are often associated with the company as a whole, so any individual within your company who behaves in an unethical way could compromise the reputation of your company. Setting strict no-tolerance policies and taking proper disciplinary action can mitigate these effects.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Cryonics: hype, hope or hell?

Neera Bhatia & Julian Savulescu
The Conversation
Originally posted November 22, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Is cryonics ethical?

There are some arguments in favour of cryonics, the simplest of which is one of free will and choice. As long as people are informed of the very small chance of success of future re-animation, and they are not being coerced, then their choice is an expression of their autonomy about how they wish to direct the disposal of their bodies and resources after death.

In this light, choosing cryonics can be seen as no different to choosing cremation or burial, albeit a much more expensive option.

However, this case raises several other ethical and problematic concerns. There is the issue of potentially exploiting vulnerable people. Some might argue vulnerable people are trading hype for hope.

But if we were to replace the science of cryonics with the promises of religious or spiritual healers made at the bedside of the dying – of earlier access to “eternal life” in return for large payments known as indulgences – would this be so different?

Serious regulatory problems ahead

Legal and ethical issues aside, there are other serious issues to consider.

How can dying people have confidence in the ability of a company to keep their remains intact? If the cryonic company were to cease operating because of financial difficulties, what would happen to the frozen body?

The article is here.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield

By Daniel Engber
The New York Times Magazine
Originally published October 20, 2015

Here are two excerpts:

Then there was a lull in the conversation after Wesley came back in, and Anna took hold of D.J.’s hand. ‘‘We have something to tell you,’’ they announced at last. ‘‘We’re in love.’’

‘‘What do you mean, in love?’’ P. asked, the color draining from her face.

To Wesley, she looked pale and weak, like ‘‘Caesar when he found out that Brutus betrayed him.’’ He felt sick to his stomach. What made them so uncomfortable was not that Anna was 41 and D.J. was 30, or that Anna is white and D.J. is black, or even that Anna was married with two children while D.J. had never dated anyone. What made them so upset — what led to all the arguing that followed, and the criminal trial and million-­dollar civil suit — was the fact that Anna can speak and D.J. can’t; that she was a tenured professor of ethics at Rutgers University in Newark and D.J. has been declared by the state to have the mental capacity of a toddler.

(cut)

Sitting at the keyboard, D.J. also seemed to have a lot to say. His messages were simple and misspelled at first, but his skill and fluency improved. Eventually he could hit a letter every second, and if Anna guessed the word before he finished typing, he would hit the ‘‘Y’’ key to confirm. Anna brought books for him to read, Maya Angelou and others, and discovered that he read like a savant — 10 pages every minute. (She turned the pages for him.) They discussed the possibility of his enrolling in a G.E.D. program.

As D.J. came into his own, Anna kept her mother posted on his progress. In the spring of 2010, Sandra asked if D.J. might like to give a paper for a panel she was organizing at a conference of the Society for Disability Studies in Philadelphia. The panel was on Article 21 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, which lays out the right to freedom of expression and opinion. D.J. wasn’t sure he could do it, Anna said, but she convinced him he should try.

The entire article is here.

Note to readers: The article is long, detailed and (from my perspective) creepy. This case appears to demonstrate where compassion and personal values override good judgment, research, and professional responsibilities.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Deceased clients and their wills

When a treating psychologist receives a bequest, what ethical considerations come into play?

By Stephen Behnke, JD, PhD, MDiv
The Monitor on Psychology
May 2015, Vol 46, No. 5
Print version: page 72

Here is an excerpt:

Most risk managers — people who work for insurance carriers, for example, whose primary goal is to lower a psychologist's exposure to risk — will advise the psychologist to decline the property. This advice makes good sense. The situation invites a claim that the psychologist exercised undue influence over the client, which is a relevant legal standard for overturning the bequest. The likelihood that a claim of undue influence will be made against the psychologist rises exponentially if the client had heirs, or potential beneficiaries of the estate who are found. If a complaint is made to an ethics committee or licensing board, the psychologist will bear the burden of demonstrating that there has been no exploitation:

The entire article is here.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Making capitalism more ethical: Dynamism with decency

By Jonathan Haidt
Ethicalsystems.org
Originally published January 1, l2015

When I tell people I teach business ethics, they often ask: “isn’t that an oxymoron?” Their response is not unwarranted. Much of my course is about the clever ways businesses have found to exploit their workers, sidestep regulations, and foist external costs onto others. Businesspeople are brilliant at finding opportunities and some of those opportunities are exploitative.

Yet the great majority of businesses (in developed nations with low corruption) run quite ethically and survive only because they provide a good or service that makes other people’s lives better. When you take the big picture and see those hockey-stick graphs of rising prosperity in the West since 1800, and in Asia since 1980, I think you’ve got to start with the proposition that business is fundamentally good. Creating value for other people (and keeping some for yourself) is virtuous. When people are free to create value, it unleashes the tidal wave of human dynamism. Poverty plummets. When people are not free, you get torpor, North Korea, and Cuba.

The entire blog post is here.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Therapist and Patient Share a Theater of Hurt

By Corey Kilgannon
The New York Times
Originally published November 5, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Dr. Dintino said that her behavioral approach to Ms. Powell’s condition allows for a more personal relationship with the patient than conventional psychotherapy, and for looser guidelines when it comes to patient-therapist relations.

Ms. Powell was willing to bare all as a patient, and both women felt the risks were outweighed by the potential therapeutic value, as well as the attention that the show could bring to the disorder.

As for the notion that the decision constitutes a breach of ethics, Dr. Landy said, “With certain forms of mental illness that do not respond to conventional treatment, we need a more radical approach, which therapeutic theater can provide.”

The entire article is here.

Monday, November 4, 2013

Medical research ethics: more than abuse prevention?

By Henry S. Richardson
Oxford University Press Blog
Originally posted on October 20, 2013

Scholarly and regulatory attention to the ethics of medical research on human subjects has been one-sidedly focused on the prevention of moral disasters. Scandals such the US Public Health Service (PHS)’s Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which for decades observed the effects of untreated syphilis on the participants, most of whom were poor black sharecroppers, rightly spurred the broad establishment of a regulatory regime that emphasized the importance of preventing such severe harming and exploitation of the human subjects of research. Revelations in 2011 about a similarly horrific set of studies conducted by the PHS from 1946 to 1948 on sexually transmitted diseases has renewed this kind of concern, which has been strongly underlined in a recent report by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Ethical Issues.

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

'Modern Slavery' in England Is a Prevalent Problem, Report Suggests

By Science Daily
Originally published on July 2, 2013

The first evidence of widespread 'modern slavery' in England for refugees and asylum seekers is revealed in a study published today.

The two-year study calls for an overhaul of government policy to restore asylum seekers' right to work and ensure all workers can access basic employment rights, such as National Minimum Wage, irrespective of immigration status.

Dr Stuart Hodkinson from the University of Leeds, who co-authored of the study, said: "We found that in the majority of cases, if the asylum seeker had been able to work legally then the employer or agent would not have been able to exploit and abuse them to such an appalling extent."

The entire story is here.

The original report can be found at the link below:
PRECARIOUS LIVES: Experiences of forced labour among refugees and asylum seekers in England