Week 11 Reflections
Socrates once said, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom”. As we look at this issue of ethics not only in the field of Human Performance Technologies but also in our daily lives, the sentiment of “knowing thyself” seems both straightforward and incredibly complex all at the same time. Most of us believe that we do have a good understanding of ourselves and what motivates how we think and act. I would say that many of us would even claim that we do a decent job at trying to be objective in how we view the world around us. How objective are we really though? How can we claim to be truly objective when we are our own judge of whether or not we are being objective? According to Banaji, M. R., Bazerman, M. H., and Chugh, D. (2003), “more than two decades of research confirms that, in reality, most of us fall woefully short of our inflated self-perception” (p. 56). Most of us would like to believe that we are more righteous than we really are. Now there are definitely people in this world who knowingly acknowledge that they believe and act in ways that are not ethical even by their own standards of what is ethical. We are not talking about those people though. We are talking about the majority of us who are trying to be objective and ethical in how we work and live. With this acknowledgement that we can never truly be objective in judging ourselves on how objective or ethical we are, how do we in the field of HPT or IST help ourselves to act in appropriate or ethical to the best extent possible? It seems like such a forbidding task, but the readings this week gave some advice.
Banaji et al. (2003) described how a major part of our issue in judging ourselves correctly is that we all have unconscious influences acting upon our mind and that they are very hard to know or counteract because they are, after all, influences that we are unconscious of. If we were conscious of them, the issue would be much more straightforward. The writers then suggest that the best way to attempt to counteract or adjust for unconscious biases is to develop conscious strategies that would compensate for these unconscious influences. One way they suggest is to consciously consider “counterintuitive options in the face of conflicts of interest, or when there’s an opportunity to overclaim, can promote more objective and ethical decisions” (p. 64). As it seems, playing the Devil’s Advocate with ourselves can not only help us to be more thorough in our decision-making but also to possibly be more ethical in it as well.
In speaking specifically of HPT, it is important to strive for being ethical for a couple reasons. First, HPT deal with a number of stakeholders in the process so it is expedient to consider what may be influencing our decision-making in determining how we go about our business and what we are trying to achieve. Second, Guerra (2006) brings up a couple excellent points emphasizing that HPT need to establish ethical standards for working with clients. Due to the service-offering nature of HPT and the fact that there are usually other stakeholders in the process besides just the main client, it would behoove us to develop core principles that will help guide us and our clients in setting expectations and in working together especially in those tricky “gray” areas of ethics. Guerra further goes on to recommend that we develop an Ethical Code or Standards by which we adhere to. According to Guerra (2006), “Both standards and codes of ethics are intended to guide professional practice in a given field” (p. 1039). It is not unusual for a profession to have such codes or standards. In the military, we have our quite famous “Military Code of Conduct” which were specifically written to help service member know what the right way was to act if captured as a prisoner of war. Another profession that is famous for its ethical standard or code is the medical field. Two of my younger brothers are doctors and they (and their fellow doctors) all took the Hippocratic Oath which serves as an ethical guide for how they do their business and make decisions in their work.
Of course, we know that just because people vow to uphold a certain ethical code does not mean that they will, but, for most people who vow to uphold it, the code serves as a guide in their work and especially when it comes to making difficult decisions. Ethics becomes an especially important topic when it comes to the difficult decisions, the decisions where it is hard to determine the right thing to do. As Smaldino, S. E., Donaldson, J. A., & Herring, M. (2018) describe it, “Ethics, by definition, can be a very subjective element as we put our values into practice. Many of the ethical decisions that we have to make are not black and white; they are gray and fuzzy” (p. 346). It is in these difficult decisions that our values and beliefs that guide how we will live our lives get put to the test. Nothing important is every easy though. We must define the standards by which we want to live and work in order to do our best to do right by others and our own conscience.
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Banaji, M. R., Bazerman, M. H., & Chugh, D. (2003). How (Un) ethical are you? Harvard Business Review, 81(12), 56-64.
Guerra, J. A. (2006). Standards and ethics in human performance technology. In J. A. Pershing (Ed.) (2006), Handbook of human performance technology (3rd ed.) (pp. 1024- 1046). San Francisco: Pfeiffer.
Smaldino, S. E., Donaldson, J. A., & Herring, M. (2018). Professional ethics: Rules applied to practice. In R. A. Reiser & J. V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (4th Ed.), (pp. 303-308). New York, NY: Pearson Education. (see also video interview with Dr. Smaldino (43:59): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOjhdH4dAE4
The Learning World Is My Oyster 