Dear White People: Here Are 5 Uncomfortable Truths Black Colleagues Need You To Know

Dana Brownlee

Forbes.com

Originally posted 16 June 2020

While no one has a precise prescription for how to eradicate racial injustice in the workplace, I firmly believe that a critical first step is embracing the difficult conversations and uncomfortable truths that we’ve become too accustomed to avoiding. The baseline uncomfortable truth is that blacks and whites in corporate America often maintain their own subcultures – including very different informal conversations in the workplace - with surprisingly little overlap at times. To be perfectly honest, as a black woman who has worked in and around corporate America for nearly 30 years, I’ve typically only been privy to the black side of the conversation, but I think in this moment where everyone is looking for opportunities to either teach, learn or grow, it’s instructive if not necessary to break down the traditional siloes and speak the unspeakable. So in this vein I’m sharing five critical “truths” that I feel many black people in corporate settings would vehemently discuss in “private” but not necessarily assert in “public.”

Here are the 5, plus a bonus.

Truth #1 - Racism doesn’t just show up in its most extreme form. There is indeed a continuum (of racist thoughts and behaviors), and you may be on it.

Truth #2 – Even if you personally haven’t offended anyone (that you know of), you may indeed be part of the problem.

Truth #3 – Every black person on your team is not your “friend.”

Truth #4 – Gender and race discrimination are not “essentially the same.”

Truth #5 – Even though there may be one or two black faces in leadership, your organization may indeed have a rampant racial injustice problem.

Bonus Truth #6: You can absolutely be part of the solution.

As workplaces tackle racism with a renewed sense of urgency amidst the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, it’s imperative that they approach the problem of racism as they would any other serious business problem – methodically, intensely and with a sense of urgency and conviction.

The information is here.

When Helping Is Risky: The Behavioral and Neurobiological Trade-off of Social and Risk Preferences

Gross, J., Faber, N. S., et al.  (2021).

Psychological Science, 32(11), 1842–1855.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211015942

Abstract

Helping other people can entail risks for the helper. For example, when treating infectious patients, medical volunteers risk their own health. In such situations, decisions to help should depend on the individual’s valuation of others’ well-being (social preferences) and the degree of personal risk the individual finds acceptable (risk preferences). We investigated how these distinct preferences are psychologically and neurobiologically integrated when helping is risky. We used incentivized decision-making tasks (Study 1; N = 292 adults) and manipulated dopamine and norepinephrine levels in the brain by administering methylphenidate, atomoxetine, or a placebo (Study 2; N = 154 adults). We found that social and risk preferences are independent drivers of risky helping. Methylphenidate increased risky helping by selectively altering risk preferences rather than social preferences. Atomoxetine influenced neither risk preferences nor social preferences and did not affect risky helping. This suggests that methylphenidate-altered dopamine concentrations affect helping decisions that entail a risk to the helper.

From the Discussion

From a practical perspective, both methylphenidate (sold under the trade name Ritalin) and atomoxetine (sold under the trade name Strattera) are prescription drugs used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and are regularly used off-label by people who aim to enhance their cognitive performance (Maier et al., 2018). Thus, our results have implications for the ethics of and policy for the use of psychostimulants. Indeed, the Global Drug Survey taken in 2015 and 2017 revealed that 3.2% and 6.6% of respondents, respectively, reported using psychostimulants such as methylphenidate for cognitive enhancement (Maier et al., 2018). Both in the professional ethical debate as well as in the general public, concerns about the medical safety and the fairness of such cognitive enhancements are discussed (Faber et al., 2016). However, our finding that methylphenidate alters helping behavior through increased risk seeking demonstrates that substances aimed at changing cognitive functioning can also influence social behavior. Such “social” side effects of cognitive enhancement (whether deemed positive or negative) are currently unknown to both users and administrators and thus do not receive much attention in the societal debate about psychostimulant use (Faulmüller et al., 2013).

The research is here.

Delphi: Towards Machine Ethics and Norms

Jiang, L., et al. (2021). 

ArXiv, abs/2110.07574.

What would it take to teach a machine to behave ethically? While broad ethical rules may seem straightforward to state ("thou shalt not kill"), applying such rules to real-world situations is far more complex. For example, while "helping a friend" is generally a good thing to do, "helping a friend spread fake news" is not. We identify four underlying challenges towards machine ethics and norms: (1) an understanding of moral precepts and social norms; (2) the ability to perceive real-world situations visually or by reading natural language descriptions; (3) commonsense reasoning to anticipate the outcome of alternative actions in different contexts; (4) most importantly, the ability to make ethical judgments given the interplay between competing values and their grounding in different contexts (e.g., the right to freedom of expression vs. preventing the spread of fake news).

Our paper begins to address these questions within the deep learning paradigm. Our prototype model, Delphi, demonstrates strong promise of language-based commonsense moral reasoning, with up to 92.1% accuracy vetted by humans. This is in stark contrast to the zero-shot performance of GPT-3 of 52.3%, which suggests that massive scale alone does not endow pre-trained neural language models with human values. Thus, we present Commonsense Norm Bank, a moral textbook customized for machines, which compiles 1.7M examples of people's ethical judgments on a broad spectrum of everyday situations. In addition to the new resources and baseline performances for future research, our study provides new insights that lead to several important open research questions: differentiating between universal human values and personal values, modeling different moral frameworks, and explainable, consistent approaches to machine ethics.

From the Conclusion

Delphi’s impressive performance on machine moral reasoning under diverse compositional real-life situations, highlights the importance of developing high-quality human-annotated datasets for people’s moral judgments. Finally, we demonstrate through systematic probing that Delphi still struggles with situations dependent on time or diverse cultures, and situations with social and demographic bias implications. We discuss the capabilities and limitations of Delphi throughout this paper and identify key directions in machine ethics for future work. We hope that our work opens up important avenues for future research in the emerging field of machine ethics, and we encourage collective efforts from our research community to tackle these research challenges.

The info is here.

Opt-out choice framing attenuates gender differences in the decision to compete in the laboratory and in the field

J. C. He, S. K. Kang, N. Lacetera

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

Oct 2021, 118 (42) e2108337118

Abstract

Research shows that women are less likely to enter competitions than men. This disparity may translate into a gender imbalance in holding leadership positions or ascending in organizations. We provide both laboratory and field experimental evidence that this difference can be attenuated with a default nudge—changing the choice to enter a competitive task from a default in which applicants must actively choose to compete to a default in which applicants are automatically enrolled in competition but can choose to opt out. Changing the default affects the perception of prevailing social norms about gender and competition as well as perceptions of the performance or ability threshold at which to apply. We do not find associated negative effects for performance or wellbeing. These results suggest that organizations could make use of opt-out promotion schemes to reduce the gender gap in competition and support the ascension of women to leadership positions.

Significance

How can we close the gender gap in high-level positions in organizations? Interventions such as unconscious bias training or the “lean in” approach have been largely ineffective. This article suggests, and experimentally tests, a “nudge” intervention, altering the choice architecture around the decision to apply for top positions from an “opt in” to an “opt out” default. Evidence from the laboratory and the field shows that a choice architecture in which applicants must opt out from competition reduces gender differences in competition. Opt-out framing thus seems to remove some of the bias inherent in current promotion systems, which favor those who are overconfident or like to compete. Importantly, we show that such an intervention is feasible and effective in the field.

From the Discussion

A practical implication of our studies is that organizations could attenuate the gender gap in competitions by moving from a default, in which applicants must opt in to apply, to a default whereby those who pass a performance and qualification threshold are automatically considered but can choose to opt out. Examples include promotions in organizations, participation into start-up pitch competitions, and innovation or creativity contests. Future work could examine similar interventions that circumvent the self-nomination aspect of opt-in schemes for competitive selection processes. For instance, rather than self-nomination, peer-nomination could attenuate the gender gap. The results of Study 2 also suggest that manipulating or nudging social norms could result in a similar effect.

The research is here.

An interaction effect of norm violations on causal judgment

Gill, M., Kominsky, J. F., 

Icard, T., & Knobe, J. (2021, October 19).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/prus7

Abstract

Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judgments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interaction pattern in people's judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particular factor is a cause, there should be an interaction between (a) the degree to which that factor violates a norm and (b) the degree to which another factor in the situation violates norms. A study of moral norms (N = 1000) and norms of proper functioning (N = 3000) revealed robust evidence for the predicted interaction effect. The implications of these patterns for existing theories of causal judgments is discussed.

General discussion

Two experiments revealed a novel interaction effect of norm violations on causal judgment. First, the experiments replicated two basic phenomena: a focal event is rated as more causal when it is bad (“inflation”) and a focal event is rated less causal when the alternative event is bad (“supersession”). Critically, the experiments showed that (1) the difference in causal ratings of the focal event when it is good vs. bad increases when the alternative event is bad (“inflation increase”) and (2) the difference in causal ratings of the focal event when the alternative event is bad vs.good decreases when the focal event is bad (“supersession decrease”).  

Experiment 1 yielded this novel interaction effect in the context of moral norm violations (e.g., stealing a book from the library). Experiment 2 showed that the effect generalized to violations of norms of proper functioning (e.g., a part of a machine working incorrectly).

This interaction pattern is predicted by the necessity/sufficiency model (Icard et al.,2017). The success of this prediction is especially striking, in that the necessity/sufficiency model was not created with this interaction in mind. Rather, the model was originally created to explain inflation and supersession, and it was only noticed later that this model predicts an interaction in cases of this type.

The Impact of Leader Dominance on Employees’ Zero-Sum Mindset and Helping Behavior

Kakkar, H and Sivanathan, N (2021) 

Journal of Applied Psychology

Abstract

Leaders strive to encourage helping behaviors among employees, as it positively affects both organizational and team effectiveness. However, the manner in which a leader influences others can unintentionally limit this desired behavior. Drawing on social learning theory, we contend that a leader’s tendency to influence others via dominance could decrease employees’ interpersonal helping. Dominant leaders, who influence others by being assertive and competitive, shape their subordinates’ cognitive schema of success based on zero-sum thinking. Employees with a zero-sum mindset are more likely to believe that they can only make progress at the expense of others. We further propose that this zero-sum mindset results in less interpersonal helping among subordinates. We test our hypotheses by employing different operationalizations of our key variables in eight studies of which four are reported in the manuscript and another four in supplementary information (SI) across a combined sample of 147,780 observations. These studies include a large archival study, experiments with both laboratory and online samples, and a time-lagged field study with employees from 50 different teams. Overall, this research highlights the unintended consequences that dominant leaders have on their followers’ helping behavior by increasing their zero-sum mindset.

From the Discussion

Second, and relatedly, our results uncover the unintentional effects that leaders can have on employees’ cognitions and behaviors. These findings reflect broader observations made by social learning theorists that “job descriptions, rules, and policies are more likely to be interpreted from watching what others do than following written directives” (Davis & Luthans, 1980, p. 284). In this way, our research reveals a more subtle way in which dominant leaders by altering employees’ cognitions of success may reduce helping behavior among team members, which could eventually affect team performance. Given the beneficial effects of employee prosocial behavior on a team’s bottom line, it is entirely possible that dominant leaders may actually want their subordinates to participate in discretionary helping behaviors—in which case, they are inadvertently undermining their own aims by fostering a zero-sum mindset.

Third, the literature on dominance and prestige has typically argued that followers copy, emulate, and look up to leaders associated with prestige rather than dominance. In contrast to this, our findings offer a more nuanced understanding of this point by revealing how dominant leaders can influence employees’ cognitions and how this can trickle down to critical employee behaviors. Thus, subordinates of dominant leaders do engage in emulating their leaders but the process underlying this emulation is cognitive and less intentional.

A pdf of the research is here.

About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated

Gregory Smith

Pew Research

Originally posted 14 DEC 21

The secularizing shifts evident in American society so far in the 21st century show no signs of slowing. The latest Pew Research Center survey of the religious composition of the United States finds the religiously unaffiliated share of the public is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago and 10 points higher than a decade ago.

Christians continue to make up a majority of the U.S. populace, but their share of the adult population is 12 points lower in 2021 than it was in 2011. In addition, the share of U.S. adults who say they pray on a daily basis has been trending downward, as has the share who say religion is “very important” in their lives.

Currently, about three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) are religious “nones” – people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious identity. Self-identified Christians of all varieties (including Protestants, Catholics, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Orthodox Christians) make up 63% of the adult population. Christians now outnumber religious “nones” by a ratio of a little more than two-to-one. In 2007, when the Center began asking its current question about religious identity, Christians outnumbered “nones” by almost five-to-one (78% vs. 16%).

The recent declines within Christianity are concentrated among Protestants. Today, 40% of U.S. adults are Protestants, a group that is broadly defined to include nondenominational Christians and people who describe themselves as “just Christian” along with Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and members of many other denominational families. The Protestant share of the population is down 4 percentage points over the last five years and has dropped 10 points in 10 years.

By comparison, the Catholic share of the population, which had ticked downward between 2007 and 2014, has held relatively steady in recent years. As of 2021, 21% of U.S. adults describe themselves as Catholic, identical to the Catholic share of the population in 2014.

Within Protestantism, evangelicals continue to outnumber those who are not evangelical. Currently, 60% of Protestants say “yes” when asked whether they think of themselves as a “born-again or evangelical Christian,” while 40% say “no” or decline to answer the question.

The info is here.

It's not what you did, it's what you could have done

Bernhard, R. M., LeBaron, H., & Phillips, J. S. 

(2021, November 8).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gb3q7 

Abstract

We are more likely to judge agents as morally culpable after we learn they acted freely rather than under duress or coercion. Interestingly, the reverse is also true: Individuals are more likely to be judged to have acted freely after we learn that they committed a moral violation. Researchers have argued that morality affects judgments of force by making the alternative actions the agent could have done instead appear comparatively normal, which then increases the perceived availability of relevant alternative actions. Across four studies, we test the novel predictions of this account. We find that the degree to which participants view possible alternative actions as normal strongly predicts their perceptions that an agent acted freely. This pattern holds both for perceptions of descriptive normality (whether the actions are unusual) and prescriptive normality (whether the actions are good) and persists even when what is actually done is held constant. We also find that manipulating the prudential value of alternative actions or the degree to which alternatives adhere to social norms, has a similar effect to manipulating whether the actions or their alternatives violate moral norms, and that both effects are explained by changes in the perceived normality of the alternatives. Finally, we even find that evaluations of both the prescriptive and descriptive normality of alternative actions explains force judgments in response to moral violations. Together, these results suggest that across contexts, participants’ force judgments depend not on the morality of the actual action taken, but on the normality of possible alternatives. More broadly, our results build on prior work that suggests a unifying role of normality and counterfactuals across many areas of high-level human cognition.

(cut)

Why does descriptive normality matter for force judgments?

Our results also suggest that the descriptive normality of alternatives may be at least as important as the prescriptive normality. Why would this be the case? One possibility is that evaluations of the descriptive normality of alternatives may be influencing participants’ perceptions of the alternatives’ value. After all, actions that are taken by most people are often done so because they are the best choice. Likewise, morally wrong actions are much less commonplace than morally neutral or good ones. Therefore, participants may be inferring some kind of lower prescriptive value inherent in unusual actions, even in cases where we took great lengths to eliminate differences in prescriptive value.

The research is here.

New York’s Met museum to remove Sackler name from exhibits

Sarah Cascone

artnet.com

Originally posted 9 DEC 21

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has dropped the Sackler name from its building. The move is perhaps the museum world’s most prominent cutting of ties with the disgraced family since their company Purdue Pharma’s guilty plea to criminal charges connected to marketing of addictive painkiller OxyContin in 2020.

The decision, which came after more than a yearlong review by the museum, was reportedly mutual and made “in order to allow the Met to further its core mission,” according to a joint statement issued by the Sackler family and the institution.

“Our families have always strongly supported the Met, and we believe this to be in the best interest of the museum and the important mission that it serves,” the descendants of Mortimer Sackler and Raymond Sackler said in a statement. “The earliest of these gifts were made almost 50 years ago, and now we are passing the torch to others who might wish to step forward to support the museum.”

Institutions have faced increasing pressure to sever relations with the Sacklers in recent years as part of a growing push to hold institutions and other cultural groups accountable over where their money is coming from. (Other donors that have come under fire include arms dealers and oil companies.)

Seven spaces at the Fifth Avenue flagship bore the Sackler name. The biggest was the Sackler Wing, which opened in 1978, and includes the Sackler Gallery for Egyptian Art, the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing, and the 1987 addition of the Sackler Wing Galleries.

The day of the announcement, Patrick Radden Keefe, the author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, visited the museum to find that the family’s name had already been removed.

The information is here.