skip to main content
Explore Scholarly Publications and Datasets in the NSF-PAR

This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2023

Title: Familial Guilt: A Cross-Society Comparison of Judgments of Collective Family Responsibility
When a group member commits wrongdoing, people sometimes assign responsibility and blame not only to the wrongdoer but also to other members of the same group. We examined such assignment of collective responsibility in the context of exploitation of one family by another. Participants were recruited from the United States and South Korea, which are known to vary in cultural norms and endorsement of collectivistic values. Participants in both countries rated the degree to which an agent (grandson) should be held responsible for his grandfather’s exploitation of a victimized family, while varying the closeness of familial connection. Participants’ responsibility judgments showed sensitivity to whether the grandson received financial benefit from the wrongdoer and to the perceived closeness between the grandson and the wrongdoer. Korean participants imposed greater responsibility on the agent than did American participants. Implications for understanding the influence of social norms on moral judgments are discussed.
Authors:
;
Award ID(s):
1827374
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10330142
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ( , Memory cognition)
    We created practical moral dilemmas for which participants imagined witnessing a transgression by a target person. The identity of the transgressor was manipulated to be either a stranger or the participant's brother. In Experiment 1, whether the target person committed a violation was left ambiguous. Participants made factual (how strongly they believe the target person actually committed a transgression) and unethicality judgments regarding the incident, and rated their willingness to report the transgressor to the police. Given ambiguity (Experiment 1), participants interpreted the facts in favor of their brother, but not in favor of a stranger. This interpretation led tomore »moral judgments and willingness to report that favored family over strangers, while creating overall coherence in reasoning. In Experiment 2, we eliminated the ambiguity of the factual situation so that the possibility of achieving coherence between unethicality of an act and leniency toward a family member was blocked. Nonetheless, participants were less willing to report their brother to the police. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of the first two experiments within an integrated study design. Results from path analyses indicated that the factual judgment depended on factual understanding of an event, but willingness to report depended on identity of the target (i.e., brother vs. stranger), even at the cost of reduced coherence in reasoning. Moral decisions are thus strongly influenced by agent-relative obligations, such as duty to protect a family member.« less
  2. ; ; ; ( , Journal of Institutional Economics)
    Abstract The exploitation of radio-electric spectrum bands for wireless transmission purposes has some features of the commons: it is subject to congestion and conflict without rules governing its use. The Coasean approach is to assign private property rights to overcome the tragedy of the spectrum commons. The process of assigning these rights is still centralized, with governments assigning property rights through agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and National Telecommunications and Information Administration in the USA. We consider the possibility of self-governance of the spectrum. We use insights from the study of common pool resources governance to analyze themore »emergence of property rights to spectrum in a ‘government-less’ environment in which norms, rules, and enforcement mechanisms are solely the product of the repeated interactions among participants in the network. Our case study considers the spectrum-sharing arrangement in the 1,695–1,710 MHz band. Using agent-based modeling (ABM), we show that self-governance of the spectrum can work and under what conditions it is likely to improve the efficiency of the allocation of property rights.« less
  3. ; ( , Berkeley technology law journal)
    A quiet revolution is afoot in the field of law. Technical systems employing algorithms are shaping and displacing professional decision making, and they are disrupting and restructuring relationships between law firms, lawyers, and clients. Decision-support systems marketed to legal professionals to support e-discovery—generally referred to as “technology assisted review” (TAR)—increasingly rely on “predictive coding”: machine-learning techniques to classify and predict which of the voluminous electronic documents subject to litigation should be withheld or produced to the opposing side. These systems and the companies offering them are reshaping relationships between lawyers and clients, introducing new kinds of professionals into legal practice,more »altering the discovery process, and shaping how lawyers construct knowledge about their cases and professional obligations. In the midst of these shifting relationships—and the ways in which these systems are shaping the construction and presentation of knowledge—lawyers are grappling with their professional obligations, ethical duties, and what it means for the future of legal practice. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews of experts in the e-discovery technology space—the technology company representatives who develop and sell such systems to law firms and the legal professionals who decide whether and how to use them in practice—we shed light on the organizational structures, professional rules and norms, and technical system properties that are shaping and being reshaped by predictive coding systems. Our findings show that AI-supported decision systems such as these are reconfiguring professional work practices. In particular, they highlight concerns about potential loss of professional agency and skill, limited understanding and thereby both over- and under reliance on decision-support systems, and confusion about responsibility and accountability as new kinds of technical professionals and technologies are brought into legal practice. The introduction of predictive coding systems and the new professional and organizational arrangements they are ushering into legal practice compound general concerns over the opacity of technical systems with specific concerns about encroachments on the construction of expert knowledge, liability frameworks, and the potential (mis)alignment of machine reasoning with professional logic and ethics. Based on our findings, we conclude that predictive coding tools—and likely other algorithmic systems lawyers use to construct knowledge and reason about legal practice— challenge the current model for evaluating whether and how tools are appropriate for legal practice. As tools become both more complex and more consequential, it is unreasonable to rely solely on legal professionals—judges, law firms, and lawyers—to determine which technologies are appropriate for use. The legal professionals we interviewed report relying on the evaluation and judgment of a range of new technical experts within law firms and, increasingly, third-party vendors and their technical experts. This system for choosing technical systems upon which lawyers rely to make professional decisions—e.g., whether documents are responsive, or whether the standard of proportionality has been met—is no longer sufficient. As the tools of medicine are reviewed by appropriate experts before they are put out for consideration and adoption by medical professionals, we argue that the legal profession must develop new processes for determining which algorithmic tools are fit to support lawyers’ decision making. Relatedly, because predictive coding systems are used to produce lawyers’ professional judgment, we argue they must be designed for contestability— providing greater transparency, interaction, and configurability around embedded choices to ensure decisions about how to embed core professional judgments, such as relevance and proportionality, remain salient and demand engagement from lawyers, not just their technical experts.« less
  4. ; ; ; ( , Proceedings of the 2021 American Society of Engineering Education Virtual Annual Conference)
    Amidst growing concerns about a lack of attention to ethics in engineering education and professional practice, a variety of formal course-based interventions and informal or extracurricular programs have been created to improve the social and ethical commitments of engineering graduates. To supplement the formal and informal ethics education received as undergraduate students, engineering professionals often also participate in workplace training and professional development activities on ethics, compliance, and related topics. Despite this preparation, there is growing evidence to suggest that technical professionals are often challenged to navigate ethical situations and dilemmas. Some prior research has focused on assessing the impactsmore »of a variety of learning experiences on students’ understandings of ethics and social responsibility, including the PIs’ prior NSF-funded CCE STEM study which followed engineering students through the four years of their undergraduate studies using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. This prior project explored how the students’ views on these topics changed across demographic groups, over time, between institutions, and due to specific interventions. Yet, there has been little longitudinal research on how these views and perceptions change (or do not change) among engineers during the school-to-work transition. Furthermore, there has been little exploration of how these views are influenced by the professional contexts in which these engineers work, including cultures and norms prevalent in different technical fields, organizations, and industry sectors. This NSF-supported Ethical and Responsible Research (ER2) study responds to these gaps in the literature by asking: RQ1) How do perceptions of ethics and social responsibility change in the transition from undergraduate engineering degree programs to the workplace (or graduate studies), and how are these perceptions shaped or influenced?, and RQ2) How do perceptions of ethics and social responsibility vary depending on a given individual’s engineering discipline/background and current professional setting? This paper gives an overview of the research project, describing in particular the longitudinal, mixed-methods study design which will involve collecting and analyzing data from a large sample of early career engineers. More specifically, we will present the proposed study contexts, timeline, target subject populations, and procedures for quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. We will also describe how this study leverages our prior project, thereby allowing unique longitudinal comparisons that span participants’ years as an engineering undergraduate student to their time as an early-career professional. Through this project, we aim to better understand how early career engineers’ perceptions of social and ethical responsibility are shaped by their prior experiences and current professional contexts. This paper will likely be of particular interest to scholars who teach or research engineering ethics, social responsibility, and professional practice.« less
  5. ; ; ( , 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)
    Recognizing the need to attract and retain the most talented individuals to STEM professions, the National Academies advocate that diversity in STEM must be a national priority. To build a diverse workforce, educators within engineering must continue working to create an inclusive environment to prevent historically underrepresented students from leaving the field. Additionally, previous research provides compelling evidence that diversity among students and faculty is crucially important to the intellectual and social development of all students, and failure to create an inclusive environment for minority students negatively affects both minority and majority students. The dearth of research on the experiencesmore »of LGBTQ individuals in engineering is a direct barrier to improving the climate for LGBTQ in our classrooms, departments and profession. Recent studies show that engineering can be a “chilly climate” for LGBTQ individuals where “passing and covering” demands are imposed by a hetero/cis-normative culture within the profession. The unwelcoming climate for LGBTQ individuals in engineering may be a key reason that they are more likely than non-LGBTQ peers to leave engineering. This project builds on the success of a previous exploratory project entitled Promoting LGBTQ Equality in Engineering through Virtual Communities of Practice (VCP), hosted by ASEE (EEC 1539140). This project will support engineering departments’ efforts to create LGBTQ-inclusive environments using knowledge generated from the original grant. Our research focuses on understanding how Community of Practice (COP) characteristics develop among STEM faculty who work to increase LGBTQ inclusion; how STEM faculty as part of the VCP develop a change agent identity, and what strategies are effective in reshaping norms and creating LGBTQ-inclusive STEM departments. Therefore, our guiding research question is: How does a Virtual Community of Practice of STEM faculty develop from a group committed to improving the culture for the LGBTQ community? To answer our research question, we designed a qualitative Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) study based on in-depth individual interviews. Our study participants are STEM faculty across all ranks and departments. Our sample includes 16 STEM faculty participants. After consulting with IPA experts to establish face validation, we piloted the interview protocol with three experienced qualitative researchers. The focus of this paper presents the results of the pilot study and preliminary themes from a sample of the 16 individual interviews. Most participants discussed the supportive and affirming nature of the community. Interestingly, the supportive culture of the virtual community led to members to translate support to LGBTQ students or colleagues at their home institution. Additionally, the participants spoke in detail about how the group supported their identity development as an educator and as a professional (e.g. engineering identity) in addition to seeking opportunities to combine their advocacy work with their research. Therefore, the supportive culture and safe space to negotiate identity development allows the current VCP to develop. Future work of the group will translate the research findings into practice through the iterative refinement of the community’s advocacy and education efforts including the Safe Zone workshops.« less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email