ethics – Montessori Muddle

Turning off the Lights: How we Behave in the Darkness

Darkness can conceal identity and encourage moral transgressions.

— Zhong et al., 2010: Good Lamps Are the Best Police: Darkness Increases Dishonesty and Self-Interested Behavior in Psychological Science.

My students asked me today if we could turn off the lights during biology class and just use the natural light from outside. I’m usually not opposed, but it was overcast, so it would have been a little dark.

I put it to a vote and we had just one or two students who were against it. My policy in these cases, where we’re changing the working environment, is to respect the wishes of the minority unless there’s a compelling argument about why we should change things.

One student proposed a compelling argument. At least he proposed to try to find a compelling argument.

“If I can find a study that says lower light is better for learning can we do it?” he asked, with his hands hovering over his iPad.

“Sure,” I replied, “But not today. You can do it on your own time.”

We’ll see what he comes up with tomorrow. I, however, ran into this article that describes a study (Zhong et al., 2010) that found that, “participants in a dimly-lit room cheated more often than those in a lighter one,” (Konnikova, 2013).

While both groups performed equally well on a set of math problems, students in the darker room self-reported that they correctly solved, on average, four more problems than the other group—earning $1.85 more as a result, since they were being paid for each correct answer. The authors suggested that the darkness created an “illusory anonymity”: even though you aren’t actually more anonymous in the dark than in the light, you feel as though you are, making you more likely to engage in behaviors you otherwise wouldn’t.

–Konnikova, 2013: Inside the Cheater’s Mind in The New Yorker.

Konnikova’s New Yorker article is worth the read, because it summarizes other factors that encourage cheating as well as things to prevent it. Things that encourage cheating:

a messy environment,
if your peers all do it,
when the people you’re stealing from seem to have a lot,
when you’re thinking that your behavior is set in your genes and your environemnt (and you have less free will),
when you’re in (or even think you’re in) a position of power,
when you have achievement goals (think test scores), as opposed to mastery goals,
when you’re tired, or sleep-deprived.

The things that discourage cheating are the things the encourage some self-reflection, like:

the feeling of being watched (even just the presence of mirrors or pictures of eyes,
writing down an honor code,
being asked to think about your previous immoral behavior.
having a strong moral compass (some people are just much less likely to cheat than others.

And finally, it’s important to note that we will tend to rationalize our cheating, so we’re more likely to do it later.

So, I think it’ll take a lot of convincing to get me to turn off the lights, except perhaps on very sunny days.

Situational Morality

“Stealing is always wrong,” versus, “If I were starving, I’d steal from A. no problem.” That was the gist of our discussion the evening after spending a night in the Heifer’s global village.

The “slum dwellers” had started off with very little in the way of resources, and two of them decided, on their own initiative, to steal some “milk” for their “baby” from the “Guatemalans” who were significantly better off. However, the rest of the slum group found out there was quite a bit of dissension in the ranks.

The thieves also stole most of the rest of the milk while they were at it to trade with the other groups. Their logic — I think — was that since all the groups needed milk, and they would be distributing it, then everyone could ultimately get what they needed, while if they had not stolen the milk then the slums might not have gotten any.

The reverberations throughout the all the houses in the global village were profound, however, lots of distrust and animosity developed that had not been there before. It made it more difficult for the slums to get the other resources that they needed, because the other groups could not trust their motivations.

In fact, the other groups ended up having a harder time trading and communicating with each other because of the breakdown in trust. One other group started to lie about what they had and did not have. At first this was to deter theft, but they quickly realized that they could use this to their advantage.

Interestingly, it all worked out in the end. The slum dwellers felt guilty enough to exhibit real concern when they thought their plan had gone wrong and one of the other groups did not have any milk. The Guatemalans ended up with enough resources of their own to have a decent dinner, and even passed on some of their left-over vegetables to the slums. The slums invited everyone over to the “christening” of their water-balloon baby and everyone came. And we got to have a richer discussion than if everyone had just been nice to everyone else.

Encouraging Academic Honesty

Dan Ariely concludes (video by RSA) that making people think about morality increases the likelihood that they’ll act honestly.

People try to balance the benefiting they gain from cheating against being able to feel good about themselves by being honest. While very few people tend to cheat a lot, many people cheat a little and self-rationalize their dishonesty.

Our school has adopted a short honor code that we’ll ask students to write at the top of tests and other assignments that is intended to remind them of their moral obligations.

Based on one of Ariely’s other conclusions, I’m also considering having students confess their in-class transgressions — talking out of turn; improper use of technology — every month or so, since this type of thing also seems to encourage probity.

↬ The Dish

A Nefarious Application of Math

Cynical, but, if you consider the current “kinetic military action” in Libya, way to close to reality. Indeed, this highlights the question: When does it become too easy to go to war?

Jonathan Schell sums it up in the Guardian:

American planes are taking off, they are entering Libyan air space, they are locating targets, they are dropping bombs, and the bombs are killing and injuring people and destroying things. It is war. Some say it is a good war and some say it is a bad war, but surely it is a war.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration insists it is not a war. Why?

…, the balance of forces is so lopsided in favour of the United States that no Americans are dying or are threatened with dying. War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying, when we die. When only they, the Libyans, die, it is something else …

— Schell (2011): Libya: it’s not a war if Americans can’t get hurt

The Moral Dilemmas of High-Stakes Tests

Just in time for the standardized testing season, Gillum and Bello have a damning article on irregularities in the testing at some Washington D.C. schools. NPR has a good summary of the situation and the investigation.

Sadly, with the fates of their schools and their jobs depending on the outcome, the faculty and staff administering these tests to their own students face an unfortunate conflict of interests and are placed in a serious moral hazzard. It’s also not hard to imagine the potential for ramped-up pressure on the students.

Standardized tests can play an important role in maintaining quality in the vast network of schools that make up the US’s educational system. They also help maintain consistency, of which a certain amount is probably good, but can be awfully restrictive. But the most unfortunate aspect about the way they’re actually used, is that they create intense pressure on students and faculty that is deleterious to student performance on the tests themselves, and severely restricts the way students think about what it means to learn.

Poor Mom

My students are playing SPENT (previous post), and some of them have figured out how to easily make it to the end of the month even while living in poverty. Unfortunately, lots of moms are going without crucial medication.

At least this will contribute to a nice discussion of ethics and morality.

Velasquez and other, (2010) have a nice explanation of “What is Ethics?“.

Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. … Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one’s ethical standards. … feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one’s standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded.

—Velasquez et al., 2010: What is Ethics?

While the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a great definition of morality:

The term “morality” can be used either
1. descriptively to refer to a code of conduct put forward by a society or,
— 1. some other group, such as a religion, or
— 2. accepted by an individual for her own behavior or
2. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.

—Gert (2008): The Definition of Morality (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

In fact, given how difficult it is to win the game without making some hard moral choices, a couple very interesting questions for a Socratic dialogue would be,

“Can someone survive in poverty while living ethically?”

and, to follow up,

“Does this push poorer people into being unethical and immoral, and towards crime?”

I’m curious to see where a dialogue might lead, especially if it leads back to our discussions of wealth distribution.

Beating probability

Since we just finished doing a bit of probabilities in math, here’s an article about how one guy figured out how to beat the lottery.

The first lottery Mohan Srivastava decoded was a tic-tac-toe game run by the Ontario Lottery in 2003. He was able to identify winning tickets with 90 percent accuracy.
–Lehrer (2010) in Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

However, he decided not to just try to get rich of what he’d discovered. It’s an example of using the power of math for good:

“People often assume that I must be some extremely moral person because I didn’t take advantage of the lottery,” [Srivastava] says. “I can assure you that that’s not the case. I’d simply done the math and concluded that beating the game wasn’t worth my time.”

As a side note, my philosophy about the lottery is that it’s basically a tax on the poor:

[H]igh-frequency players tend to be poor and uneducated, which is why critics refer to lotteries as a regressive tax. (In a 2006 survey, 30 percent of people without a high school degree said that playing the lottery was a wealth-building strategy.)
–Lehrer (2010): Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code