NACAC Agrees to Change Its Code of Ethics

Scott Jaschik
insidehighered.com
Originally published September 30-, 2019

When the Assembly of the National Association for College Admission Counseling has in years past debated measures to regulate the recruiting of international students or the proper rules for waiting lists and many other issues, debate has been heated. It was anything but heated this year, although the issue before the delegates was arguably more important than any of those.

Delegates voted Saturday -- 211 to 3 -- to strip provisions from the Code of Ethics and Professional Practice that may violate antitrust laws. The provisions are:

• Colleges must not offer incentives exclusive to students applying or admitted under an early decision application plan. Examples of incentives include the promise of special housing, enhanced financial aid packages, and special scholarships for early decision admits. Colleges may, however, disclose how admission rates for early decision differ from those for other admission plans."

• College choices should be informed, well-considered, and free from coercion. Students require a reasonable amount of time to identify their college choices; complete applications for admission, financial aid, and scholarships; and decide which offer of admission to accept. Once students have committed themselves to a college, other colleges must respect that choice and cease recruiting them."

• Colleges will not knowingly recruit or offer enrollment incentives to students who are already enrolled, registered, have declared their intent, or submitted contractual deposits to other institutions. May 1 is the point at which commitments to enroll become final, and colleges must respect that. The recognized exceptions are when students are admitted from a wait list, students initiate inquiries themselves, or cooperation is sought by institutions that provide transfer programs."

• Colleges must not solicit transfer applications from a previous year’s applicant or prospect pool unless the students have themselves initiated a transfer inquiry or the college has verified prior to contacting the students that they are either enrolled at a college that allows transfer recruitment from other colleges or are not currently enrolled in a college."

Before they approved the measure to strip the provisions, the delegates approved (unanimously) rules that would limit discussion, but they didn't need the rules. There was no discussion on stripping the provisions, which most NACAC members learned of only at the beginning of the month. The Justice Department has been investigating NACAC for possible violations of antitrust laws for nearly two years, but the details of that investigation have not been generally known for most of that time. The Justice Department believes that with these rules, colleges are colluding to take away student choices.

The info is here.

The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab

Justin Peters
www.slate.com
Originally published September 8, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

I made my final emotional break with the Media Lab in 2016, when its now-disgraced former director Joi Ito announced the launch of its inaugural “Disobedience Award,” which sought to celebrate “responsible, ethical disobedience aimed at challenging the norms, rules, or laws that sustain society’s injustices” and which was “made possible through the generosity of Reid Hoffman, Internet entrepreneur, co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, and most importantly an individual who cares deeply about righting society’s wrongs.” I realized that the things I had once found so exciting about the Media Lab—the architecturally distinct building, the quirky research teams, the robots and the canisters and the exhibits—amounted to a shrewd act of merchandising intended to lure potential donors into cutting ever-larger checks. The lab’s leaders weren’t averse to making the world a better place, just as long as the sponsors got what they wanted in the process.

It is this moral vacuity that has now thrown the Media Lab and MIT into an existential crisis. After the financier Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in July on federal sex-trafficking charges, journalists soon learned that Epstein enjoyed giving money to scientists almost as much as he enjoyed coercing girls into sex. The Media Lab was one beneficiary of Epstein’s largesse. Over the past several years, Ito accepted approximately $1.725 million from Epstein, who was already a convicted felon at the time Ito took charge of the place in 2011; $525,000 was earmarked for the lab, while the rest of the money went to Ito’s private startup investment funds. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow further reported on Friday that Epstein helped secure an additional $7.5 million for the Media Lab from other wealthy donors, and that the lab sought to hide the extent of its relationship with Epstein. Ito was Epstein’s contact at the Media Lab. The director even visited Epstein’s private Caribbean island as part of the courtship process.

The info is here.

Connecting the dots on the origins of social knowledge

Arber Tasimi
in press, Perspectives on Psychological Science

Abstract

Understanding what infants know about social life is a growing enterprise. Indeed, one of the most exciting developments within psychological science over the past decade is the view that infants may come equipped with knowledge about “good” and “bad,” and about “us” and “them.” At the heart of this view is a seminal set of studies indicating that infants prefer helpers to hinderers and similar to dissimilar others. What a growing number of researchers now believe is that these preferences may be based on innate (i.e., unlearned) social knowledge. Here I consider how decades of research in developmental psychology can lead to a different way to make sense of this popular body of work. As I make connections between old observations and new theorizing––and between classic findings and contemporary research––I consider how the same preferences that are thought to emanate from innate social knowledge may, instead, reflect social knowledge that infants can rapidly build as they pursue relationships with their caregivers.  I offer this perspective with hopes that it will inspire future work that supports or questions the ideas sketched out here and, by doing so, will broaden an understanding of the origins of social knowledge.

The paper is here.

An Admissions Group Is Scrambling to Delete Parts of Its Ethical Code. That Could Mean Big Changes for Higher Ed.

Grace Elletson
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published August 30, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

A handful of provisions are at issue. One prohibits colleges from offering incentives, like special housing or better financial-aid packages, only to students who use an early-decision application.

Another says colleges can’t recruit or offer enrollment to students who are already enrolled or have submitted deposits to other colleges. Under the NACAC ethics code, May 1 is when commitments by those students are made final, and colleges must respect that deadline.

Another states that colleges cannot solicit transfer applications from a previous applicant or prospect unless that student inquired about transferring.

According to a document sent to NACAC members, the Justice Department believes “that these provisions restrain competition among colleges” and that, if they are removed, thus allowing for more competition, the result “may lower” college costs if colleges can solicit students who have already committed.

If the provisions are removed, the changes will be significant, and turmoil in admissions offices should be expected, said Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University.

Removing those parts of the ethical code would allow institutions to recruit students from competitor colleges even after they’ve committed, and to see their own students get poached, he said.

The changes could cause colleges to enter into a precarious dance — keep students committed and simultaneously recruit others, all year long.

Given the uncertainty that the changes would cause for enrollment predictions, especially for smaller, tuition-dependent colleges, higher education’s landscape will be upended, Boeckenstedt said.

The info is here.

The brain, the criminal and the courts

Eryn Brown
knowablemagazine.org
Originally posted August 30, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

It remains to be seen if all this research will yield actionable results. In 2018, Hoffman, who has been a leader in neurolaw research, wrote a paper discussing potential breakthroughs and dividing them into three categories: near term, long term and “never happening.” He predicted that neuroscientists are likely to improve existing tools for chronic pain detection in the near future, and in the next 10 to 50 years he believes they’ll reliably be able to detect memories and lies, and to determine brain maturity.

But brain science will never gain a full understanding of addiction, he suggested, or lead courts to abandon notions of responsibility or free will (a prospect that gives many philosophers and legal scholars pause).

Many realize that no matter how good neuroscientists get at teasing out the links between brain biology and human behavior, applying neuroscientific evidence to the law will always be tricky. One concern is that brain studies ordered after the fact may not shed light on a defendant’s motivations and behavior at the time a crime was committed — which is what matters in court. Another concern is that studies of how an average brain works do not always provide reliable information on how a specific individual’s brain works.

“The most important question is whether the evidence is legally relevant. That is, does it help answer a precise legal question?” says Stephen J. Morse, a scholar of law and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is in the camp who believe that neuroscience will never revolutionize the law, because “actions speak louder than images,” and that in a legal setting, “if there is a disjunct between what the neuroscience shows and what the behavior shows, you’ve got to believe the behavior.” He worries about the prospect of “neurohype,” and attorneys who overstate the scientific evidence.

The info is here.

Morality as a Basic Psychological Need

Prentice, M., Jayawickreme, E., Hawkins, A.,
Hartley, A., Furr, R. M., & Fleeson, W. (2019). 
Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(4), 449–460. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618772011

Abstract

We investigate the long-standing yet understudied assumption that feeling moral is a basic psychological need, perhaps like the needs to feel autonomous, competent, and related (ACR). We report an empirical “entrance exam” on whether morality should be considered a need. Specifically, we applied to morality a pioneering method from which Sheldon and colleagues provided evidence that ACR are basic psychological needs. In two studies and four samples, participants recalled events in which they felt un/satisfied, meaningful, pleasurable, at their best, and at their worst. They rated how much candidate psychological needs were satisfied during them. Morality was frequently as or more satisfied than ACR during peak events. Further, it was positively related to indices of positive functioning. These findings suggest feelings of being moral may help people identify times when life is going well. Further, they suggest that morality may be a fundamental psychological need and warrants further investigation.

Conclusion

That people have a need to feel moral is a classic psychological notion, and such a need seems integral to explaining the development and maintenance of human moral cognition and behavior.  Despite this, such a need has remained somewhat controversial for mainstream psychological science. We demonstrate that morality meets many of the criteria set out by Baumeister and Leary (1995). More broadly, we see that morality provides important information about whether people’s lives are going well. This work provides a basis for a more prominent position of the moral need in future research.

Empathy choice in physicians and non-physicians

Daryl Cameron and Michael Inzlicht
PsyArXiv
Originally created on September 11, 2019

Abstract

Empathy in medical care has been one of the focal points in the debate over the bright and dark sides of empathy. Whereas physician empathy is sometimes considered necessary for better physician-patient interactions, and is often desired by patients, it also has been described as a potential risk for exhaustion among physicians who must cope with their professional demands of confronting acute and chronic suffering. The present study compared physicians against demographically matched non-physicians on a novel behavioral assessment of empathy, in which they choose between empathizing or remaining detached from suffering targets over a series of trials. Results revealed no statistical differences between physicians and non-physicians in their empathy avoidance, though physicians were descriptively more likely to choose empathy. Additionally, both groups were likely to perceive empathy as cognitively challenging, and perceived cognitive costs of empathy associated with empathy avoidance. Across groups, there were also no statistically significant differences in self-reported trait empathy measures and empathy-related motivations and beliefs. Overall, these results suggest that physicians and non-physicians were more similar than different in terms of their empathic choices and in their assessments of the costs and benefits of empathy for others.

Conclusion:

In summary, do physicians choose empathy, and should they do so?  We find that physicians do not how a clear preference to approach or avoid empathy.  Nevertheless, they do perceive empathy to be cognitively taxing, entailing effort, aversiveness, and feelings of inefficacy, and these perceptions associated with reduced empathy choice.  Physicians who derived more satisfaction and less burnout from helping were more likely to choose empathy, and so too if they believed that empathy is good, and useful, for medical practice.  More generally, in the current work, physicians did not show statistically meaningful differences from demographically matched controls in trait empathy, empathy regulation behavior, motivations to approach or avoid empathy, or beliefs about empathy’s use for medicine.  Although it has often been suggested that physicians exhibit different levels of empathy due to the demands of medical care, the current results suggest that physicians are much like everyone else, sensitive to the relevant costs and benefits of empathizing.

The research is here.

Nudging Humans

Brett M. Frischmann
Villanova University - School of Law
Originally published August 1, 2019

Abstract

Behavioral data can and should inform the design of private and public choice architectures. Choice architects should steer people toward outcomes that make them better off (according to their own interests, not the choice architects’) but leave it to the people being nudged to choose for themselves. Libertarian paternalism can and should provide ethical constraints on choice architects. These are the foundational principles of nudging, the ascendant social engineering agenda pioneered by Nobel Prize winning economist Richard Thaler and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein.

The foundation bears tremendous weight. Nudging permeates private and public institutions worldwide. It creeps into the design of an incredible number of human-computer interfaces and affects billions of choices daily. Yet the foundation has deep cracks.

This critique of nudging exposes those hidden fissures. It aims at the underlying theory and agenda, rather than one nudge or another, because that is where micro meets macro, where dynamic longitudinal impacts on individuals and society need to be considered. Nudging theorists and practitioners need to better account for the longitudinal effects of nudging on the humans being nudged, including malleable beliefs and preferences as well as various capabilities essential to human flourishing. The article develops two novel and powerful criticisms of nudging, one focused on nudge creep and another based on normative myopia. It explores these fundamental flaws in the nudge agenda theoretically and through various examples and case studies, including electronic contracting, activity tracking in schools, and geolocation tracking controls on an iPhone.

The paper is here.

Business and the Ethical Implications of Technology

Martin, K., Shilton, K. & Smith, J.
J Bus Ethics (2019).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04213-9

Abstract

While the ethics of technology is analyzed across disciplines from science and technology studies (STS), engineering, computer science, critical management studies, and law, less attention is paid to the role that firms and managers play in the design, development, and dissemination of technology across communities and within their firm. Although firms play an important role in the development of technology, and make associated value judgments around its use, it remains open how we should understand the contours of what firms owe society as the rate of technological development accelerates. We focus here on digital technologies: devices that rely on rapidly accelerating digital sensing, storage, and transmission capabilities to intervene in human processes. This symposium focuses on how firms should engage ethical choices in developing and deploying these technologies. In this introduction, we, first, identify themes the symposium articles share and discuss how the set of articles illuminate diverse facets of the intersection of technology and business ethics. Second, we use these themes to explore what business ethics offers to the study of technology and, third, what technology studies offers to the field of business ethics. Each field brings expertise that, together, improves our understanding of the ethical implications of technology. Finally we introduce each of the five papers, suggest future research directions, and interpret their implications for business ethics.

The Introduction is here.

There are several other articles related to this introduction.