Today Michelle (my wife) sent me details of an article from the NY Times “When Talking About Bias Backfires” by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg on Discrimination at Work. It is based on a recent publication by Duguid & Thomas-Hunt in J of Applied Psychology “Condoning Stereotyping?: How Awareness of Stereotyping  Prevalence Impacts Expression of Stereotypes.” and an older one by Cialdini (2006) .

It’s perhaps not surprising that just telling people that many do the wrong thing doesn’t improve their behaviour – in fact it often makes it worse.  My comment was that we need to be careful when we assume a set of ‘typical moral standards’ because unlike the 1950s and before where the biblical mores (e.g. the 10 commandments) were the measuring stick, many today just don’t have any. It is about fitting in or being popular/famous etc. (after all it is the latter we reward). The ‘whatever it takes’ mentality isn’t a big step further from this as explained nicely by Brendan McKeague at the Qld UCA Synod. Paul Clark noted that many years ago, one of the last subjects an undergraduate studied was ethics; they were saying  ‘with all your knowledge now let us give you the key rubric/rules on what you should do with it.’  Today ethics is making a comeback, but for many it is still an elective or non existent.

With that background, the findings of the studies make perfect sense. Everyone is listening to the info to know ‘what is everyone else doing?’ not ‘what should I be doing?’   The extra line by Grant “I don’t want to see this happen again” got the desired results because it added back the moral/ethical element to counter the ‘everyone thinks this is OK.’

Whether it is the thought that assistive technology has been going along fine – so why change, or that foreign aid is discretionary spending, perhaps now is the time for us to be clear that just because others do it, or we’ve done it before, doesn’t make it right. We need to say now ‘We expect better than this.’