The December 8, 2010, seminar was presented by Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow Sreedhari Desai. Sreedhari's research examines the ways that moral cues in our environment may discourage unethical behavior. Her presentation provided an overview of the empirical evidence demonstrating automaticity in ethical decision making, and the possible role that specific moral cues may play in affecting our behavior. She is particularly interested in the ways that Western associations of children and moral purity may affect our ethical...

The December 1, 2010, seminar was presented by Lisa Cosgrove, Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow and Associate Professor in the Department of Counseling and School Psychology at University of Massachusetts, Boston. Lisa's research deals with institutional corruption in the field of psychiatry. This is a particularly vulnerable area because, unlike most other fields in medicine, there are no biological markers, leaving more room for interpretation and abuse. Lisa's presentation explored the ways that industry influence may distort...

The November 17, 2010, seminar was presented by Marc-André Gagnon, Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow and Assistant Professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University. Marc-André's presentation provided an overview of the political economy of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. He described the shift that has taken place in the last several decades, with pharmaceutical innovation declining even as profits are soaring. The discussion that followed his presentation touched on...

The November 10, 2010, seminar was presented by Jonathan Marks and Donald Thompson. Jonathan is an Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow and Associate Professor of Bioethics, Humanities and Law at Pennsylvania State University. Donald is Professor of Food Science at Pennsylvania State University. Jonathan and Donald presented on the influence of the food industry on nutrition research, education, and practice. They provided an overview of the food industry's nutrition-based marketing to consumers, as well as the various...

The November 2, 2010, seminar was presented by Dennis Thompson, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy at Harvard University and Director Emeritus of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Thompson's working paper on two concepts of corruption (individual vs. institutional) provided the main topic of discussion, in which participants attempted to work out a satisfactory definition for the term "institutional corruption." The paper distinguishes institutional corruption from individual...

The October 20, 2010, seminar was led by Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow Seana Moran. Seana's research is concerned with the nebulous line between creativity and corruption, and the question of whether foresight is possible in determining whether a new idea is creative or corrupt. Notions of perspective, motivation, and dependency permeated the discussion as participants considered specific examples and attempted to discern when, how, and if intervention would be possible, as well as the methods that would be necessary for...

The October 13, 2010, seminar was led by Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow Abigail Brown, whose research focuses on institutional corruption in the audit industry. Abigail opened the seminar by describing the social costs of misleading financial statement reporting, and providing an overview of how such misrepresentation or fraud occurs, even in the absence of any illegal act on the part of an auditor. Participants then discussed possible alternative structures for the audit industry, as a way to address the improper dependencies...

The October 6, 2010, seminar was led by Malcolm Salter, professor emeritus of the Harvard Business School. Professor Salter's presentation focused on institutional corruption in the private sector, with a specific focus on the practice of gaming, in which ambiguous rules or laws are manipulated but not broken. Seminar participants attempted to tease out the various elements that may contribute to the practice and perpetuation of gaming, including the role of legislation in creating...

The September 29th Lab Seminar was led by Kirsten Austad, an Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow, and medical student at Harvard Medical School. While Kirsten's research specifically targets the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the education of medical students, she opened the seminar by describing the economy of influence that pervades the entire medical system. It is a complex arrangement, comprised of researchers, journals, medical schools, speaker's bureaus, consultants, advisory boards, physicians, patients, and...

The second Edmond J. Safra Lab Seminar, which met on September 22nd, 2010, featured a presentation by Professor Mahzarin Banaji, followed by a group discussion of her research. Professor Banaji presented her research on implicit bias, as determined by the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Her findings demonstrate that, despite explicit assertions to the contrary, most of us harbor implicit biases, which may take the form of racism, sexism or classism, among others. Such findings may be...

The first Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Lab Seminar of the 2010-11 academic year convened on September 14, 2010. Participants discussed a chapter from Professor Lessig's upcoming book, which aims to craft a new definition of institutional corruption. This definition goes beyond the ordinary definition of corruption as bribery, to encompass a type of corruption that occurs when institutions develop improper dependencies, resulting in a loss of public trust and a weakening of the effectiveness of...