Why Being Kind Helps You, Too—Especially Now

Elizabeth Bernstein
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted 11 August 20

Here is an excerpt:

Kindness can even change your brain, says Stephanie Preston, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who studies the neural basis for empathy and altruism. When we’re kind, a part of the reward system called the nucleus accumbens activates—our brain responds the same way it would if we ate a piece of chocolate cake. In addition, when we see the response of the recipient of our kindness—when the person thanks us or smiles back—our brain releases oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone. This oxytocin boost makes the pleasure of the experience more lasting.

It feels so good that the brain craves more. “It’s an upward spiral—your brain learns it’s rewarding, so it motivates you to do it again,” Dr. Preston says.

Are certain acts of kindness better than others? Yes. If you want to reap the personal benefits, “you need to be sincere,” says Sara Konrath, a psychologist and associate professor at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, where she runs a research lab that studies empathy and altruism.

It also helps to expect good results. A study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology in 2019 showed people who believed that kindness is good for them showed a greater increase in positive emotions, satisfaction with life and feelings of connection with others—as well as a greater decrease in negative emotions—than those who did not.

How can you be kind even when you may not feel like it? Make it a habit. Take stock of how you behave day to day. Are you trusting and generous? Or defensive and hostile? “Kindness is a lifestyle,” says Dr. Konrath.

Start by being kind to yourself—you’re going to burn out if you help everyone else and neglect your own needs. Remember that little acts add up: a smile, a phone call to a lonely friend, letting someone have the parking space. Understand the difference between being kind and being nice—kindness is genuinely helping or caring about someone; niceness is being polite. Don’t forget your loved ones. Kindness is not just for strangers.

The info is here.

The media needs to do more to elevate a national conversation about ethics

Arthur Caplan
Poynter.com
Originally December 21, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Obviously unethical conduct has been around forever and will be into the foreseeable future. That said, it is important that the leaders of this nation and, more importantly, those leading our key institutions and professions reaffirm their commitment to the view that there are higher values worth pursuing in a just society. The fact that so many fail to live up to basic values does not mean that the values are meaningless, wrong or misplaced. They aren’t. It is rather that the organizations and professions where the epidemic of moral failure is burgeoning have put other values, often power and profits, ahead of morality.

There is no simple fix for hypocrisy. Egoism, the gross abuse of power and self-indulgence, is a very tough moral opponent in an individualistic society like America. Short-term reward is deceptively more attractive then slogging out the virtues in the name of the long haul. If we are to prepare our children to succeed, then attending to their moral development is as important as anything we can do. If our leaders are to truly lead then we have to reward those who do, not those who don’t, won’t or can’t. Are we?

The article is here.

Teaching Ethics In The Trump Era

Kelly Richmond Pope
Forbes Magazine
Originally posted January 15, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Ethical leadership should be a nonpartisan value that we all share. Ethics is under attack and I am no longer sure how we defend it. In class, we often have discussions about conflicts of interests and the dangers conflicts of interest have on the auditor-client relationship. According to the AICPA website. ‘accountants in public practice should be independent in fact and appearance when providing auditing and other attestation services’. When my students see New York Times headlines like ‘Scott Pruitt, Trump’s EPA Pick Backed Industry Donors Over Regulators’, what should they think? Do ethics rules apply to everyone or only a few?

I spend my time teaching future CPAs that we must continue to adhere to a strict code of ethical conduct but I fear they are growing weary of this message. The headlines that my students are now seeing is very confusing and really causes them to question the role of ethical leadership. If we operate under the mantra of ‘do what I say and not what I do’ I fear that will be revisiting the 2008 financial crisis in the very near future.

The article is here.

Four Ways Your Leadership May Be Encouraging Unethical Behavior

Ron Carucci
Forbes.com
Originally published June 14, 2016

Most leaders would claim they want the utmost ethical standards upheld by those they lead. But they might be shocked to discover that, even with the best of intentions, their own leadership may be corrupting the choices of those they lead.

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1. You are making it psychologically unsafe to speak up. Despite saying things like, “I have an open door policy,” where employees can express even controversial issues, some leadership actions may dissuade the courage needed to raise ethical concerns . Creating a culture in which people freely speak up is vital to ensuring people don’t collude with, or incite misconduct.

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2. You are applying excessive pressure to reach unrealistic performance targets. Significant research suggests that unfettered goal setting can encourage people to make compromising choices in order to reach targets, especially if those targets seem unrealistic. Leaders may be inviting people to cheat in two ways. They will cut corners on the way they reach a goal, or they will lie when reporting how much of the goal they actually achieved.

The article is here.

Doctors Behaving Badly

By Roni Caryn Rabin
The New York Times - Well
Originally published

Here is an excerpt:

Nancy Berlinger, a scholar at The Hastings Center who writes about ethical challenges in health care as well as issues of power between junior and senior clinicians, disagrees. “Doctors must be respectful even if a patient is sedated,” she said. And in these cases, she said, the supervising physicians also did harm to the medical students they were responsible for training and mentoring.

“This is the worst thing a role model can do: to suggest that wrong behavior is acceptable, to nudge junior people to be callous and to misuse power,” Dr. Berlinger said. In both cases, the senior doctors made a trainee student complicit in their abuse and “made them feel dirty at an early stage of their careers.”

The entire article is here.

On holding ethicists to higher moral standards and the value of moral inconsistency

By Carissa Véliz
Practical Ethics
Originally posted February 27, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Should ethicists be held to higher moral standards? If they commit a wrong about which they know more than others, then it is seems plausible that they do have more responsibility and should be held to higher moral standards. In many cases, however, moral philosophers appear to be on a par with non-ethicists when it comes to ethical knowledge. Most people who cheat on their spouses, for example, have roughly the same knowledge of the wrong they are committing; this includes moral philosophers, since the ethics of faithfulness is not frequently discussed in academic settings; nor is it something most moral philosophers read or write about.

The entire article is here.

A similar paper, The Self-Reported Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors, by Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust can be found here.

Impressions of Misconduct: Graduate Students’ Perception of Faculty Ethical Violations in Scientist-Practitioner Clinical Psychology Programs.

January, Alicia M.; Meyerson, David A.; Reddy, L. Felice; Docherty, Anna R.; Klonoff, Elizabeth A.
Training and Education in Professional Psychology, Aug 25 , 2014

Abstract

Ethical conduct is a foundational element of professional competence, yet very little is known about how graduate student trainees perceive ethical violations committed by clinical faculty. Thus, the current study attempted to explore how perceived faculty ethical violations might affect graduate students and the training environment. Of the 374 graduate students in scientist-practitioner clinical psychology programs surveyed, nearly a third (n = 121, 32.4%) reported knowledge of unethical faculty behavior. Students perceived a wide range of faculty behaviors as unethical. Perception of unethical faculty behavior was associated with decreased confidence in department faculty and lower perceived program climate. Implications of these findings are discussed and recommendations offered.

The entire article is here, behind a paywall.

Impressions of Misconduct: Graduate Students’ Perception of Faculty Ethical Violations in Scientist-Practitioner Clinical Psychology Programs

January, A. M., Meyerson, D. A., Reddy, L. F., Docherty, A. R., & Klonoff, E. A. (2014, August
25). Impressions of Misconduct: Graduate Students’ Perception of Faculty Ethical Violations
in Scientist-Practitioner Clinical Psychology Programs. Training and Education in Professional
Psychology. Advance online publication.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/tep0000059

Abstract

Ethical conduct is a foundational element of professional competence, yet very little is known about how graduate student trainees perceive ethical violations committed by clinical faculty. Thus, the current study attempted to explore how perceived faculty ethical violations might affect graduate students and the training environment. Of the 374 graduate students in scientist-practitioner clinical psychology programs surveyed, nearly a third (n  121, 32.4%) reported knowledge of unethical faculty behavior. Students perceived a wide range of faculty behaviors as unethical. Perception of unethical faculty behavior was associated with decreased confidence in department faculty and lower perceived program climate.  Implications of these findings are discussed and recommendations offered.

The entire article is here.