Whistleblowing and the Fairness-Loyalty Tradeoff · \爀屲Now to compute a loyalty minus...
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Whistleblowing and the Fairness-Loyalty Tradeoff Adam Waytz Northwestern University
Whistleblowing and the Fairness-Loyalty Tradeoff · \爀屲Now to compute a loyalty minus fair\൮ess scores, we first asked questions from Jon Haidt’s moral foundations questionnaire
I know the topic for today is reporting sexual abuse, but I’m going to talk about a much more domain-general topic, which is that of whistleblowing or as I define it reporting the unethical behavior of another person to a third party. Now what you see here is a rare picture, which is whistleblowers being praised and glorified.
Difficulties • 82 % of named whistleblowers: fired, quit
under duress, or responsibilities were significantly altered (Dyck, Morse, Zingales, 2009)
• Since 2009, physical retaliation for workplace whistleblowing has increased over 25% (ethics.org, 2012)
• “Snitching” and retaliation (Jacobs & Wright, 2006)
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And this is rare, because whistleblowing is typically an action gets punished. So here are some results from whistleblowing in the workplace and in the streets
The question
What factors determine willingness to report unethical behavior?
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So, the question arises – what makes people do this?
Who blows the whistle and why • Abrupt unethical behavior prompts more whistleblowing
than gradually developing unethical behavior of the same magnitude (Bazerman & Gino, 2009)
• When organizational climate supports whistleblowing (less fear of retaliation), it is more likely (Near & Miceli, 1995)
• Whistleblowing is more likely when wrongdoing is less ambiguous (Greenberg, Miceli, & Cohen, 1987)
• Role responsibility—when whistleblowing is perceived to be part of one’s job—increases whistleblowing (Vadera, Aguilera, & Caza, 2009)
• Whistleblowers tend to have higher levels of pay, education, more years of service and higher levels of professional status (Miceli & Near, 1984;1988)
• HOWEVER very little work on psychological
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And it turns out we know a little bit about who blows the whistle and why…despite this work mostly in the organizational literature there is very little on the psychological determinants of reporting unethical behavior. And this is where I come in
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So, my background is in psychology…so I will be giving you some of my expertise in this class, but it is not this type of psychology…it is the type of psychology where we are able to quantify and measure what people report, what they do, and how their brains respond. And so what I do is use this research to determine the psychological processes underlying behavior
A Psychological Theory of Morality
Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt & Graham)
• Harm • Fairness
• Purity • Authority • Loyalty
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And it turns out that there is a pretty good theory of morality. So this is moral foundations theory, which is a theory that says. It says that traditional models of morality have suggested that humans care about only two things when deciding right and wrong. Was someone harmed and was someone treated unfairly. On the other hand, there are three other basic values that people care about when deciding right and wrong and these vary from culture to culture. These are authority, purity, and loyalty….and these two are very critical because they are inherently opposed. One cannot be loyal to one’s ingroup while also being fair to all and one cannot be fair to all while also prioritizing one’s ingroup. And it turns out these two values are BOTH very ingrained in us as humans.
• Chimpanzees show more positivity toward members of their own group (Mahajan, et al., 2011)
• Toddlers see tattling as just, but shift views in adolescence when value of loyalty increases (Ingram & Bering, 2010; Friman, et al., 2004)
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And similarly, young children and even chimps display preferences for loyalty as well, with children shifting their views about loyalty in tattling when they reach adolescence
Predictions
• Whistleblowing is a case where loyalty and fairness are brought into conflict
So, it seems that whistleblowing presents a case that brings these fundamental values into conflict, and then that generates a simple prediction for predicting propensities toward whistleblowing. When F > L whistleblowing will increase, and when L > F whistleblowing will decrease. And now let me show you how I test this.
Individual Differences 1. When deciding right and wrong, how relevant is...
– Whether or not someone showed a lack of loyalty – Whether or not someone acted unfairly
2. Who do you want as a friend? loyal or fair person 3. Who is more morally good? loyal or fair person
=FAIRNESS-LOYALTY SCORE
Whistleblowing (1-7 scale) Would you report family, friend, acquaintance, stranger for:
–Stealing –Robbery –Embezzling –Vandalism –Cheating –Drug Use –Assault
(α = .64)
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So in a very simple initial study, we measured people’s preference for loyalty vs fairness and then assessed their willingness to be whistleblowers. And all the studies I’ll show you are conducted online on a service that Amazon.com’s marketplace called Mturk where people perform small tasks for money. I’ll explain more about this later. Now to compute a loyalty minus fairness scores, we first asked questions from Jon Haidt’s moral foundations questionnaire about when deciding right or wrong, how relevant is –loyalty, fairness. Then we asked them who they prefered as a friend a loyal or fair person, and who is more morally good, a loyal or a fair person. And we then standardized all of these measures and subtracted fairness from loyalty. Next we asked people about seven different scenarios and how likely they would be to report a family member, friend, acquaintance, and stranger for each of these offenses. From this, we computed a whistleblowing score for each category. Then we simply regressed people’s loyalty – fairness score on their whistleblowing scores and saw that the former predicted the latter.
Individual Differences
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Fair > Loyal Loyal > Fair
Will
ingn
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to W
hist
lebl
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FamilyFriendAcquaintanceStranger
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For ease of illustration, I’ll just show you the median split. On the left are people who really prioritized fairness vs loyalty, and on the right are people who showed an opposite pattern. Both groups showed a similar pattern across social categories, expressing the least willingness to blow the whistle on a family member and expressing most willingness to report a friend. But there is also a main effect of the values tradeoff. People who were more inclined to prioritize fairness vs loyalty were more inclined to blow the whistle
Individual Differences
• People who prioritize fairness > loyalty are more willing to blow the whistle vs. people who prioritize loyalty > fairness
• Whistleblowing increases as social distance increases
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So in terms of individual differences, we see that despite this main effect for wblowing increasing with social distance, it was greater for people who prioritize f vs l
Inducing Values • Loyalty
– Why is loyalty important for society – Write about behaving in a loyal manner – Write about why loyalty > fairness
• Fairness – Why is fairness important for society – Write about behaving in a fair manner – Write about why fairness > loyalty
• Whistleblowing scenarios
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In a second study, instead of measuring values, we simply manipulated these values by having people write about preferring loyalty or fairness. So in the loyalty condition, first people wrote about why loyalty is important, they wrote about a time they behaved loyally, and they wrote about why loyalty is more important than fairness. In the fairness condition, they simply wrote about why fairness is important, when they have been fair, and why fairness is more important then loyalty. What this does is it primes people with one value or another. It sort of forces them to consider the value of loyalty or the value of fairness. Then we asked them to evaluate the same scenarios as in the first study.
Inducing Values
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Fair > Loyal Loyal > Fair
Will
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to W
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Family
Friend
Acquaintance
Stranger
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And the pattern we show is exactly the same as well. People are more likely to snitch on a stranger than a friend across the board, but there is a main effect for condition where people who were induced to think about fairness endorsed whistleblowing more than people who were induced to think about loyalty.
Inducing Values
• Inducing people to prioritize fairness > loyalty increased willing to blow the whistle vs. inducing people to prioritize loyalty > fairness
• Whistleblowing increases as social distance increases
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So this shows that temporary boosting people’s endorsement of loyalty or fairness changes their overall willingness to blow the whistle…and as in the first study, wblowing increased as social distance increased. Now these are nice studies, but these are just hypothetical scenarios. What about real instances of whistleblowing.
Recalling misdeeds
• Recall a time when you blew the whistle (WB +)
• Recall a time when you could have but did not blow the whistle (WB-)
• How much was decision driven by – Fairness (1-10) – Loyalty (1-10) – Other (22%)
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So that is what we assessed in this study. We randomly assigned people to recall a misdeed that they witnessed and reported or a misdeed they witnessed and did not report. Then we asked them on 1-10 scales to state how much their decision was driven by fairness, loyalty, or an open-ended box where people indicated some other value. Only the minority did.
Recalling Misdeeds
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WB+ WB-
loyaltyfairness
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Moreover what we found was an interaction where people who recalled an instance of whistleblowing were far more likely to say their decision was driven by fairness vs loyalty whereas people who recalled an instance of not blowing the whistle stated their decision was driven by loyalty more than fairness.
Recalling Misdeeds
• People who recalled witnessing misdeed/whistleblowing said decision was driven by fairness > loyalty
• People who recalled witnessing misdeed/NOT whistleblowing said decision was driven by loyalty > fairness
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So here we see real life decisions to blow the whistle or not blow the whistle were driven by competing prioritization of fairness vs loyalty and loyalty vs fairness
A whistleblowing opportunity • Amazon MTurk: Online marketplace where
workers can perform tasks for small fees. • Write about Fairness amongst MTurk
workers. • Write about Loyalty amongst MTurk
workers.
• Please complete a typing task typing all numbers 1-30 in English. First, see a prior worker’s performance on this task…
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Finally we wanted to see whether we could push around actual wb behavior, so we manipulated fairness and loyalty amongst mturk workers. Again, Mturk is an online marketplace where workers perform tasks for small amounts of money. And these workers have their own communities on message boards and elsewhere online. So what we did is we randomly assigned workers to one of two conditions. We either had them write about the importance of F or the importance of L in the mturk community. And then we told them we needed them to complete a small writing task….writing the numbers 1-30 in English. And before they did so, we wanted them to observe another participant’s work. We told them this was the work of a previous participant.
A whistleblowing opportunity
At the end of the study. Participants asked to evaluate prior participant • “Would you recommend this participant for future
studies?” (1-7) • “Did this participant violate any rules?” (1-7) (Averaged to generate WHISTLEBLOWING SCORE)
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So what they see then is someone who might have shirked responsibilities or who rushed through the study just to get paid. So they go through the study and at the very end we ask them a couple questions…think back to that previous participant. Would you recommend him, and did he violate any rules? We averaged these responses to get a measure of how much participants engaged in whistleblowing. And here is what we found.
A Whistleblowing Opportunity
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Whistleblowing
Fairness
Loyalty
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We found that people who were primed with the idea of fairness in the very beginning were more likely to blow the whistle on the shirking participant vs those who had been primed with loyalty.
A Whistleblowing Opportunity
• Workers “primed” to consider fairness vs. workers primed to consider loyalty = more willing to engage in whistleblowing
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So in sum, we were able to move around actual whistleblowing behavior by getting people to write about the norm of fairness vs the norm of loyalty
Conclusions
• Individual differences in fairness vs loyalty • Brief inductions of fairness vs loyalty
norms – Increase whistleblowing in hypothetical & real
situations • Prior decisions to blow the whistle vs not =
reportedly driven by fairness vs loyalty
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So what have we shown. Indiv differences in f vs l predict whistleblowing….brief manipulations or inductions of f vs l increase wb, and recalled decisions to blow the whistle appear to be driven by f vs l
Insights • Whistleblowing predicted better by values-
tradeoff vs. single value
• Suggests anti-whistleblowing cultures are those that are high in loyalty (collectivist, conservative, “tight” cultures)
• Suggests difficulty for whistleblowers because of validity of loyalty norm
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And what have we learned. Well, for one, we have shown that wb behavior is better predicted by the tradeoff between values rather than by a single value, suggests places to find anti-whistleblowing cultures…where loyalty is paramount, and it suggests that wb is difficulty because loyalty is a fundamental norm that people follow
Interventions to Boost Whistleblowing
• Promote justice/fairness • Reframe whistleblowing as a loyal behavior
(loyalty to the organization) • Talk about loyalty as a larger loyalty (“greater
good”)
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This also suggests some possibilities for how to encourage wb. One is to simply promote the norm of fairness. Two is to reframe wb as an act of loyalty…making the organization whole And three is to emphasize loyalty to a greater goodf
Future Directions and Questions • Becoming a well-liked whistleblower • The role of guilt • The morality of loyalty
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Finally there are some outstanding questions…on how to become a good wb that isnt punished. How guilt plays a role in enhancing responses to fairness AND loyalty. And finally studying the conditions under which loyalty might be viewed as in fact immoral rather than moral.
