We’ve had some interesting discussions here about “experts” here of late, notably this post. I am rapidly reaching the point where anyone who appeals to authority to justify his or her position, particularly if the authority is a study, a report, an “expert” or a scientist, immediately inspires my skepticism and even suspicion. Now what?
Once again, Duke professor and researcher Dan Ariely is in the news, and not in a good way. Ariely, professor of business administration in the Fuqua School of Business is named 636 times in the more than 3 million additional Epstein files released on January 30. He may be innocent of any wrong-doing and he and Epstein may have just played in a Fantasy Baseball league together, but the problem this creates for me is that I have been using Ariely’s work as authority in my ethics seminars for as long as I can remember.
For more than a decade, I told incoming members of the D.C. Bar as part of their mandatory ethics training that such sessions as mine were essential to making their ethics alarms ring. To support that thesis, I related the finding of research performed by Dan Ariely when he was at M.I.T. Ariely created an experiment that was the most publicized part of his best-selling book “Predictably Irrational,” giving Harvard Business School students a test that had an obvious way to cheat built into it and offering small rewarde for the students who got the highest scores. He tracked how many students, with that (small) incentive to be unethical, cheated. He also varied the experiment by asking some students to do simple tasks before they took the test: name five baseball teams, or state capitals, or U.S. Presidents.
None of these pre-test questions had any effect on the students’ likelihood of cheating, except for one question, which had a dramatic effect. He discovered that students who were asked to recite a few of the Ten Commandments, unlike any of the other groups, never cheated at all. Never. None of them. Ariely told an NPR interviewer that he had periodically repeated the experiment elsewhere, with the same results. No individual who was asked to search his memory for a few of the Ten Commandments has ever cheated on Ariely’s test, though the percentage of cheaters among the rest of the testees is consistently in double figures. This result has held true, he said, regardless of the individual’s faith, ethnic background, or even whether they could name one Commandment correctly.
The classic moral rules, he concluded, reminded the students to consider right and wrong. It wasn’t the content of the Commandments that affected them, but what they represent: being good, or one culture’s formula for doing good. The phenomenon is called priming, and Ariely’s research eventually made me decide to start “The Ethics Scoreboard” and later this ethics blog.
Ethics Alarms 
It’s my understanding that Stalin used to pressure his scientists to come up with the approved result of experiments and research, regardless of what the actual results were.
And, I suppose, trying to explain the science behind genetics to Adolf Hitler regarding how people are born with blond hair and blue eyes wouldn’t have worked either. When bias – political bias, racial bias, religious bias – enters the picture, no one is immune.
Ever heard of the Institute in Basic Life Principles? During the ’80s and ’90s, conservative churches were all agog about it. It’s founder, Bill Gothard, would stand on stages in convention centers across the south and the Midwest, chalk in his hand as he colored a beautiful nature picture on a large paper pad while breaking down the principles that lead to a properly working Christian home where kids don’t rebel and divorce doesn’t happen.
I attended one of his seminars, invited by my father and stepmother who were attending with a large group from their church. I listened to reasonable messages about teaching children about making wise choices so they aren’t influenced by peer pressure. About how their researchers had demonstrated that music with certain beats – aka rock music – was unnatural and had an adverse affect on plant growth; whereas, classical music and traditional hymns caused plants to thrive.
Yeah, he was old-fashioned. He thought women should stay home and birth as many kids as God let them. He opposed even men going to college because of the radical atmosphere on campuses.
I sat next to him once, purely by accident, at a local church event. He wondered why I was attending college. It wasn’t mean or harsh, just more of a gentle rebuke. I just figured he was a man of his time who hadn’t yet realized that some ideas were best left in the past.
The Duggars followed some of his teachings. You remember them. 19 kids they exploited on a TV show while following Bill’s teachings to own your own business so you aren’t forced to work on Sundays or follow sinful corporate HR guidelines. Their oldest son is in prison; two or three of his sisters have written books about learning to adult on their own. I understand Jim-Bob Duggar is kinda, sorta running the Institute now.
Because Bill got into trouble grooming teenage girls who worked and studied at his campuses.
I can’t say it’s a surprise. I got that vibe from him during that one brief Sunday I sat next to him. But it’s disappointing when authorities you look to in order to bolster the worldview upon which you base your life fail miserably.
Especially, when it came out that the music/plant experiment was bogus and the researchers for the Institute just told Bill what he wanted to hear. Uncle Joe would have been proud.