Moral Intuitions and Organizational Culture

Many efforts to understand and respond to a succession of corporate scandals over the last few years have underscored the importance of organizational culture in shaping the behavior of individuals. This focus reflects appreciation that even if an organization has adopted elaborate rules and policies designed to ensure legal compliance and ethical behavior, those pronouncements will be ineffective if other norms and incentives promote contrary conduct. Responding to the call for creating and sustaining an ethical culture in organizations requires appreciating the subtle ways in which various characteristics of an organization may work in tandem or at cross-purposes in shaping behavior. The idea is to identify the influences likely to be most important, analyze how people are apt to respond to them, and revise them if necessary so that they create the right kinds of incentives when individuals are deciding how to act. This can be a tall order even if we assume that most behavior is the result of a deliberative process that weighs multiple risks and rewards. It’s even more daunting if we accept the notion that conscious deliberation typically plays but a minor role in shaping behavior. A focus on what two scholars describe as “the unbearable automaticity of being” posits that most of a person’s everyday life is determined not by conscious intentions and deliberate choices but by mental processes outside of conscious awareness. In this article, I discuss a particular strand of research that is rooted in the study of non-conscious mental processes, and consider its implications for ethics and culture in the organizational setting. This is work on the process that we use to identify and respond to situations that raise what we think of as distinctly moral questions. A growing body of research suggests that a large portion of this process involves automatic non-conscious cognitive and emotional reactions rather than conscious deliberation. One way to think of these reactions is that they reflect reliance on moral intuitions. When such intuitions arise, we don’t engage in moral reasoning in order to arrive at a conclusion. Instead, we do so in order to justify a conclusion that we’ve already reached. In other words, moral conclusions precede, rather than follow, moral reasoning. If this research accurately captures much of our moral experience, what does it suggest about what’s necessary to foster an ethical organizational culture? At first blush, the implications seem unsettling. The non-conscious realm is commonly associated with irrational and arbitrary impulses, and morality often is characterized as the hard-won achievement of reason over these unruly forces. If most of our moral judgments are the product of non-conscious processes, how can we hope to understand, much less influence, our moral responses? Are moral reactions fundamentally inscrutable and beyond appeals to reason? If reason has no persuasive force, does appreciation of the non-conscious source of our moral judgments suggest that any effort to promote ethical conduct must rest on a crude behaviorism that manipulates penalties and rewards? I believe that acknowledging the prominent role of non-conscious processes in shaping moral responses need not inevitably lead either to fatalism or Skinnerian behaviorism. Research has begun to shed light on how these processes operate. Related work has suggested how our moral responses may be rooted in human evolution. This perspective focuses on the ways in which our capacity for moral judgment is embedded in physical and mental processes that have provided an adaptive advantage in human evolution. These bodies of research contribute to a richer portrait of human cognition and behavior that can be valuable in thinking about how to promote ethical awareness and conduct. As Owen Flanagan has put it, “seeing clearly the kinds of persons we are is a necessary condition for any productive ethical reflection.” If there were such a thing as a normative theory of human movement, it would be futile if it exhorted us to fly. Efforts to create an organizational culture that encouraged people to fly would be doomed as well. In thinking about ethics, we need to have a sense of what lies between simply accommodating what we tend to do and demanding that we fly. My hope is that this article takes a small step in that direction

Building Ethics into Artificial Intelligence

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly ubiquitous, the topic of AI governance for ethical decision-making by AI has captured public imagination. Within the AI research community, this topic remains less familiar to many researchers. In this paper, we complement existing surveys, which largely focused on the psychological, social and legal discussions of the topic, with an analysis of recent advances in technical solutions for AI governance. By reviewing publications in leading AI conferences including AAAI, AAMAS, ECAI and IJCAI, we propose a taxonomy which divides the field into four areas: 1) exploring ethical dilemmas; 2) individual ethical decision frameworks; 3) collective ethical decision frameworks; and 4) ethics in human-AI interactions. We highlight the intuitions and key techniques used in each approach, and discuss promising future research directions towards successful integration of ethical AI systems into human societies

How Should Academics Engage in Policymaking to Achieve Impact?

This article reviews the advice from the academic and ‘grey’ literatures to identify a list of dos and don’ts for academics seeking ‘impact’ from their research. From ‘how to do it’ sources, we identify consistent advice on how to engage effectively, largely because it is necessarily vague, safe, and focused primarily on individuals. We then consider the wider policymaking system in which actors make political choices and have unequal access to impact opportunities. We identify the effort it takes to have actual policy impact and how far academics should be expected to go to secure and take credit for it. </jats:p

The SLIM (Social learning for the integrated management and sustainable use of water at catchment scale) Final Report

Background: SLIM stands for 'Socuak Learning for the Integrated Management and Sustainable Use of Water at Catchment Scale'. It is a multi-country research project funded by the European Commission (DG RESEARCH - 5th Framework Programme for research and technological development, 1998-2002). Its main theme is the investigation of the socio-economic aspects of the sustainable use of water. Within this theme, its main focus of interest lies in understanding the application of social learning as a conceptual framework, an operational principle, a policy instrument and a process of systemic change

How Should Academics Engage in Policymaking to Achieve Impact?

This article reviews the advice from the academic and 'grey' literatures to identify a list of dos and don'ts for academics seeking 'impact' from their research. From 'how to do it' sources, we identify consistent advice on how to engage effectively, largely because it is necessarily vague, safe, and focused primarily on individuals. We then consider the wider policymaking system in which actors make political choices and have unequal access to impact opportunities. We identify the effort it takes to have actual policy impact and how far academics should be expected to go to secure and take credit for it

Removing Barriers and Increasing Access to Advanced Placement

Advanced Placement allows students to demonstrate college readiness while in high school and potentially earn credit or placement toward higher education degrees. However, barriers can prevent students from accessing this advanced coursework and impede student learning, limit university options, and impact career prospects. Shifting teacher mindsets to an access-centered approach offers a viable solution to removing barriers. Leading faculty to change practices in the AP program at Birchwood (a pseudonym) requires reculturing an established culture of curriculum. Three leadership approaches serve this plan: the ethical highlights these problems of access, the authentic serves to build relations with school leaders, department heads, curriculum chairs, and AP faculty, and the instructional guides teachers’ curriculum planning, instruction, and assessment. Social Cognitive Theory underpins this change process with its two concepts: triadic reciprocal causation and self-efficacy beliefs. Reculturing requires changing teachers’ behaviours and their internal competencies, which change the environment in this reciprocal relationship. Changing self-efficacy beliefs in teachers is achieved through verbal persuasion, vicarious experience, personal mastery, and emotional state. This three-year implementation plan follows a recursive process through the Change Path Model’s awakening, mobilization, acceleration, and institutionalization phases including developing the collective efficacy of an AP leadership team in year one, building AP teacher capacity for change in year two, and changing teacher practices in year three. Monitoring and evaluation frameworks track progress and judge effectiveness. Next steps close out this plan with future considerations including a focus on social justice and equitable access

Wearables at work:preferences from an employee’s perspective

This exploratory study aims to obtain a first impression of the wishes and needs of employees on the use of wearables at work for health promotion. 76 employ-ees with a mean age of 40 years old (SD ±11.7) filled in a survey after trying out a wearable. Most employees see the potential of using wearable devices for workplace health promotion. However, according to employees, some negative aspects should be overcome before wearables can effectively contribute to health promotion. The most mentioned negative aspects were poor visualization and un-pleasantness of wearing. Specifically for the workplace, employees were con-cerned about the privacy of data collection

Popular saying and moral judgment : the influence of proverbs on moral intuitions

Tese de Mestrado, Ciência Cognitiva, 2021, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasRecent advances in the empirical study of moral psychology indicate that our everyday moral judgments tend to be guided by intuitions. These intuitions are related to heuristic processes and can be shaped by social factors. However, little is known about which social factors can shape our intuitions and how it occurs. Previous research on heuristic processes predicts that any stimulus that generates feelings of familiarity, truth, and fluency can lead to intuitive processing. Considering that proverbs have characteristics related to the generation of such feelings, the main goal of this dissertation is to investigate whether familiar proverbs can shape our intuitions, triggering heuristic processing and influencing people's moral judgments. Our secondary goal is to explore and discuss the implication of these results for normative ethics. We are specifically interested in test previous findings indicating that consequentialist theories involve more deliberation and thus are more reliable than deontological theories to conduct moral judgment. To achieve our goals, we analyzed the differences in the judgment of widely considered immoral behaviors when people are exposed to opinions that condemn or condone them through familiar proverbs versus semantically similar sentences. Based on a two-response paradigm, our results indicate that when opinions condemn immoral behavior, participants tend to agree with them. However, when proverb is used, such agreement is more extreme, generates a greater feeling of rightness and less response revision than when a semantically similar sentence is used. These indicators suggest that proverbs increase the intuitive strength of participants' initial moral convictions, which increases the insensitivity to counterarguments. However, when opinions condone immoral behavior, participants tend to disagree in general and proverbs fail to lead to more extreme responses, greater feeling of rightness and lower response revision than semantically similar sentences. This indicates that the intuitive appeal of proverbs condoning immoral behaviors generated a conflict of intuitions, leading to the observed changes in the aforementioned indicators. That is, the proverbs' effect of enhancing judgments depends on the context in which they are applied. Our results also suggest that the cognitive ease associated with proverbs helps explain their effect on the “condemning condition” but not on the “condoning condition”. Finally, considering our secondary goal, the results indicate that intuitive processes can conduct both consequentialist and deontological judgments. This contradicts previous findings, suggesting that neither deontological nor consequentialist theories are immune to social influence, persuasion and potentially biased judgments.Avanços recentes no estudo empírico da psicologia moral indicam que nossos julgamentos morais cotidianos tendem a ser guiados por intuições. Essas intuições estão relacionadas a processos heurísticos e podem ser moldadas por fatores sociais. No entanto, pouco se sabe sobre quais fatores sociais podem moldar nossas intuições e como isso ocorre. Pesquisas anteriores sobre processos heurísticos indicam que qualquer estímulo que gere sentimentos de familiaridade, verdade e fluência pode levar a um processamento intuitivo. Considerando que os provérbios possuem características relacionadas à geração de tais sentimentos, o objetivo principal desta dissertação é investigar se os provérbios familiares podem moldar nossas intuições, desencadeando um processamento heurístico e influenciando os julgamentos morais das pessoas. Nosso objetivo secundário é explorar e discutir a implicação desses resultados para a ética normativa. Estamos especificamente interessados em testar descobertas anteriores, indicando que as teorias consequencialistas envolvem mais deliberação e, portanto, são mais confiáveis do que as teorias deontológicas para conduzir o julgamento moral. Para atingir nossos objetivos, analisamos as diferenças no julgamento de comportamentos amplamente considerados imorais quando as pessoas são expostas a opiniões que os condenam ou justificam por meio de provérbios familiares versus frases semanticamente semelhantes. Com base em um paradigma de duas respostas, nossos resultados indicam que, quando as opiniões condenam o comportamento imoral, os participantes tendem a concordar com elas. Porém, quando o provérbio é usado, tal concordância é mais extrema, gera um maior julgamento de certeza e menos revisão de resposta do que quando uma frase semanticamente semelhante é usada. Esses indicadores sugerem que os provérbios aumentam a força intuitiva das convicções morais iniciais dos participantes, o que aumenta a insensibilidade a contra-argumentos. No entanto, quando as opiniões toleram o comportamento imoral, os participantes tendem a discordar em geral e os provérbios deixam de levar a respostas mais extremas, com maior julgamento de certeza e menor revisão da resposta do que frases semanticamente semelhantes. Isso indica que o apelo intuitivo de provérbios que justificam comportamentos imorais gerou um conflito de intuições, levando às mudanças observadas nos indicadores mencionados. Ou seja, o efeito dos provérbios de intensificar os julgamentos depende do contexto em que são aplicados. Nossos resultados também sugerem que a facilidade cognitiva associada aos provérbios ajuda a explicar o seu efeito na “condição de condenação”, mas não na “condição de justificação”. Finalmente, considerando nosso objetivo secundário, os resultados indicam que processos intuitivos podem conduzir tanto a julgamentos consequencialistas como deontológicos. Isso contradiz descobertas anteriores, sugerindo que nenhuma dessas teorias são imunes à influência social, persuasão e julgamentos potencialmente tendenciosos