On March 3rd Lab fellow Dr. Julia Lee presented a collaborative project with Professor Bobby Parmar from the University of Virginia and Professor Francesca Gino from the Harvard Business School. Their research project is on learning how cheating and dishonest behavior affects how one thinks about one’s social network and how this could potentially trigger more dishonest behavior. The broader implications of this research are to better understand the mechanisms of how cheating and dishonesty become repetitive and institutionalized in the culture of an organization.
To start off the seminar, Parmar gave an introduction to his previous research and how that led to the collaborative project that they are currently working on. Parmar was interested in how disobedience to immoral orders from authorities emerges and what can be learned from this to limit the spread of unethical organizational practices. In order to study this he focused on Milgram’s obedience experiments, which were conducted and recorded in 1962 at Yale. Milgram’s experiments tested the willingness of participants to obey orders from an authority figure. Participants were told to deliver fake electric shocks to actors when they were unable to learn word pairs. The participants were unaware that the electric shocks were fake and thought they were taking part in an experiment on whether people learned better when motivated by punishment. The experiments found that people were very likely to continue to deliver shocks even after the actor complained of feeling pain and told them that they had a heart condition.
Parmar did a comparative study in which he systematically went through all the old audiotapes repeatedly looking for similarities and differences and coding different participant styles and statements. Through this process Parmar realized that no one individual had the same style of interaction and communication and so there could not be one explanation that could be used to explain the different reactions of the participants. He found four main kinds of communication. The first style was assessing consequences for the learner or for themselves. The second was procedural guidance seeking in which the participants asked how they should be enacting the experiment. The third was self-referential objections and the fourth was interruptions of protest in which the participants would talk over the complaints of the actor.
What he found is that the type of communication was predictive of whether the participant would be obedient or disobedient to the orders from the authority figure. For example, those that assessed consequences more frequently and made larger amounts of self-referential objections were more likely to be disobedient. Obedient subjects on the other hand were more likely to ask procedural guidance seeking steps and to interrupt the protests of the actors. The significance of this research is that people shape the situation and that disobedience is not a choice made at a single point in time but is a process of creating a certain type of situation in which disobedience to authority becomes necessary. Each person has agency in choosing what cues to focus on and how to act that helps them to ultimately come to a decision about whether or not to be obedient or disobedient. A meaningful takeaway is that the process of learning and structuring is an important step for an individual as they make the decision about whether or not to speak up.
The second part of Parmar’s research was on how exposure to audiotapes of obedient and disobedient participants from the Milgram experiment subsequently shaped people’s attitudes and behavior. People were recruited to listen to either two tapes of obedient participants from Milgram’s experiment or two tapes of disobedient participants. They then had to take the perspective of the person depicted in the videos, justify the person’s behavior, and rate them on various scales. Participants that listened to the tapes of disobedience were more likely to empathize with the person and believe that the person had a moral choice. Participants that listened to the tapes of obedience were more likely to justify the agent’s actions than those in the disobedient condition and also estimated that higher numbers of people in the Milgram experiment were obedient than those in the disobedient condition. The conclusion drawn from this experiment was that moral examples shape our future behavior through setting norms.
Finally, Parmar is in the process of running another study to measure actual behavior instead of just intentions. 150 participants were told to read text that contained positive, negative, or neutral moral examples and then the next day when they came into their lab they were asked to do something unethical. As this study is still in progress there were no results to discuss yet.
In the second part of the lab seminar, Lee discussed their current collaborative research project on cognitive network activation. More specifically, they are looking at what happens in your mind after you engage in unethical behavior and how that affects the way you think about your social network. Their hypothesis is that dishonest behavior will activate thoughts of a densely structured social network. Densely structured social networks are networks in which the people you know also know each other and low-density networks are networks in which the people you know do not know each other. They argue that because dishonest behavior can trigger negative emotions and threaten your moral self-concept it can trigger protective and compensatory behavior as a way of restoring your positive self-concept. This can be seen through the density of the social network that your mind activates.
The first study they did to measure this was a correlational study that showed that people who are generally more dishonest tend to trigger denser social networks. The second study was also correlational but instead of questioning about general dishonesty, they made the participants play a deception game that required them to decide whether or not to lie to another participant to earn bonus points. Those who lied were found to trigger a denser network than those who did not.
For the third study, participants were randomly assigned to write about something that either triggered their negative moral identity, their positive moral identity, or something neutral as a control. Once again those that triggered a negative moral identity were more likely to think of higher density networks. In the fourth study participants played a game in which some of them had ample opportunity to cheat. They made the assumption that those with ample opportunity to cheat people did cheat and the data supports the hypothesis that cheating triggers a high-density network. In the second part of the fourth study there was also a self-affirmation portion in which the participant had to think about the positive values that make up a core part of who they were. As self-affirmation has been shown to reduce defensiveness and stress, they hypothesized that self-affirmation would cause the differences in network density associated with cheating to disappear. This is exactly what the data showed, and so it supports their overall theory that it is the threats to a person’s self-concept that explains the relationship between cheating and a high-density network. In the final study, the participants were also asked to play a game that had two separate opportunities for cheating. What this study showed is that those that cheated at the first opportunity triggered high-density networks that actually encouraged subsequent dishonesty in the second round.
In conclusion, these studies all support the hypothesis that dishonest behavior poses a threat to one’s moral self-concept that can be restored by high-density social networks. This can create a cycle of future dishonesty, as triggering high-density networks becomes a coping mechanism to reduce a threat to one’s moral self-concept. They hope to continue research on how cheating and dishonesty become repetitive and so become institutionalized in the culture of an organization.