— The importance of forgiveness, in a list of 18 values as ranked by a sample of American managers.  (Source)

There’s evidence to believe that people value forgiveness in their personal lives.  But when it comes to economic contexts, they seem to leave that value at the door.  I’ve been reading quite a bit recently about the way that our expectations, judgments, and moral reasoning seem to differ when we think of our interactions as belonging to the ‘work’ domain.

For instance, in a wonderful experiment by Liberman, Samuels and Ross (source), they had participants play an n-move prisoner’s dilemma (PD) game.  In all cases, the structure of the game was exactly the same:  The payoffs, rules and procedures were identical for all participants.  But some participants were told that the game was called “The Community Game”, while others were told the title was “The Wall Street Game”.  The players in the “Community” game cooperated more than two thirds of the time; players in the “Wall Street” game cooperated less than a third of the time.

In a series of recent studies, Sanford Devoe has uncovered what I view as a related set of findings.  When people are charged with dividing time or food, they tend to support egalitarianism.  But when they’re charged with dividing the same value in money, their egalitarianism disappears (source).  And though people may be willing to volunteer their time to help others, the minute they start to think of themselves as ‘economic evaluators’, their willingness to volunteer plummets.  Just like the ‘Community Game’, all it takes is a subtle prime:  In one of the studies, willingness to volunteer dropped as a simple function of having read money or economics-related words from a list (source).

The idea that subtle cues can activate social versus economic behaviour is not new, of course:  Blau (Exchange and Power in Social Life, 1964) made the argument that different norms govern economic exchange and social exchange.  Associations in social exchange are “ends in themselves”, while in economic exchange, associations are means to other, self-serving ends.  And so, we expect different things out of each type of relationship.  In a social exchange relationship, Blau writes, ”…a time consuming service of great material benefit to the recipient might be properly repaid by mere verbal expressions of deep appreciation.”  In social exchange, it would be crass and might undermine the relationship to try to account and fully repay the cost of a favour received in material terms.  But in an economic exchange relationship, the same accounting and repayment might be entirely expected.

I think all this research bears considerably on the ongoing debate about so-called “social entrepreneurship”.  The usual distinctions used to separate firms from charities (for-profit vs non-profit, for instance) aren’t particularly useful when trying create a crisp definition of social entrepreneurship, as Ana Maria Peredo argues.  Perhaps we ought to give as much consideration to the distinct psychological differences between traditional and ‘social’ enterprise as we do to the traditional structural, strategic and regulatory ones.  It strikes me that the degree to which people in any given situation conceive of themselves as economic versus social actors could have a considerable impact on the choices they make and the behaviours they enact.

Kurzynski, M. (1998). The Virtue of Forgiveness as a Human Resource Management Strategy Journal of Business Ethics, 17 (1), 77-85 DOI: 10.1023/A:1005762514254

Earlier this year, Genome Canada had its funding yanked, to the dismay of the Canadian and international scientific communities.  On the day of the announcement, the Genome Canada president agonized:

“We got nothing, nothing, and we don’t know why.  We’re devastated.”

Then, a day later, the Genome Canada website has a message from its Board of Directors reading,

“Genome Canada is pleased with the federal government’s 2009 budget in which millions will be invested in research infrastructure over the next two years.”

This week, Researcher Forum has a comparison of NSERC’s statements to its applicants before and after a series of budget cuts.  Before the cuts, the NSERC admits to a tight budget, with competition for funds getting tighter year to year.  After the cuts, the NSERC crows about how all the major core programs were protected.

It would seem that the current administration is getting pretty good at keeping its departments on-message as it wields the knife.

“Diane Sieber, an associate professor [at the University of Colorado at Boulder] identified 17 students in one of her classes who were using laptops most frequently. After the first test, she told them that they did 11 percent worse, on average, than their peers who did not have their faces in their computers as much. Lo and behold, the number of laptop-nosed students dropped to a half dozen, and the test scores of those who stopped using their computers during class went up.”

(Source)

As a task-performance study, it’s kind of lacking.  Hard to separate the effect of task feedback from the changes in laptop use.  But it’s still interesting for those of us who encourage note-taking and other course work using laptops.

The blogosphere is abuzz about a survey conducted by the Boston Public Health Commission found that teens had strikingly permissive attitudes toward domestic violence.  The Commission conducted an informal poll of 200 Boston youths, aged 12-19, asking them about their attitudes toward Chris Brown’s abuse of Rihanna.  Nearly half the teens thought fighting was normal in relationships, that Rihanna was to blame for the incident, and that Chris Brown was being treated “unfairly” in the wake of the incident. Based on the poll, the Boston Globe described teenagers are a “… generation of youths who seem to have grown accustomed, even insensitive, to domestic violence.”

But of course, the four scariest words in social science are “an informal poll concluded”. I spent a bit of the evening chatting with my friend Carol-Ann, who is a sociologist, and I figured might be able to tell me if these findings were kosher or not.  Carol-Ann pointed me to the summary of some Eurobarometer data that stood in stark contrast to the Boston findings.  In those data, some 94% of Europeans aged 15 and older found domestic violence to be “unacceptable in all circumstances.”

But what about the United States?  I decided to grab a copy of the 2005 World Values Survey and see what evidence of permissiveness toward spousal abuse I could find.  The WVS uses a representative national sample of over 1,000 participants.  In other words, a touch more rigourous than the Boston poll.  One question asked participants whether a “man beat[ing] his wife” could always be justified, never be justified, or something in between.  On a ten-point scale from never to always justifiable, fully 82.9% of respondents chose ‘1’, representing the least possible willingness to treat spousal abuse as justifiable.  Count everyone who answered 5 or less on the scale (i.e., those leaning towards calling abuse unjustifiable), and you’ve accounted for 97.7% of the participants.

But what about age?  The WVS doesn’t have any of the 12-17 year olds included in the Boston sample, but it does include a large number of respondents in their late teens and early twenties.  So, are young people dramatically more likely to view domestic abuse as justifiable?  Nope.  I regressed age on attitudes toward spousal abuse, and found that the effect of age was statistically significant but small (explaining about one and a half percent of the overall variance in attitudes), and in the opposite direction from what we would predict from the Boston poll.  In other words, the younger you are, the less likely you are to consider spousal abuse acceptable.

There is an interesting and important puzzle here when contrasting the Boston poll with the WVS data.  How do we explain the Boston teenagers’ willingness to endorse the behaviour of an abuser and blame their victim?  A few suggestions spring to mind:  The first is that the effect is driven by teens and pre-teens’ susceptibility to media framing effects.  In other words, it’s less about attitudes toward abuse and more about how the media has covered the Rihanna-Chris Brown affair.  A related, broader, and more troubling explanation would be that people (and perhaps teens in particular) have strongly negative attitudes toward spousal abuse in the abstract, but much more permissive views about specific instances of abuse.

So there are certainly interesting issues raised by the Boston poll – but given the WVS data, I’m still betting against the idea that there is a generation in waiting that is “accustomed and insensitive” to domestic abuse.

Related:  The Situationist adds just-world beliefs as another possible explanation for teens’ propensity to blame the victim

Had a great chat with a visiting speaker about social network analysis as it might relate to my dissertation.  I had been toying for some time with the idea of how individual responses to trust violations are constrained or influenced by the social context of the group.  I had been thinking about the idea of whether group norms around forgiveness exist and guide individual behaviour.  The SNA perspective has got me thinking about social influence through networks in forgiveness and trust repair.  To what extent do the attitudes of the members of one’s advice network influence individual responses to trust violations?  What kind of composition model would make sense?  Do we respond to the average attitude of our confidantes?  To the strength of the beliefs (i.e. sharedness; agreement) of those in the network?  Do organizational boundaries matter when tracing the influence of confidantes’ attitudes in response to a violation in the group context?

Not likely part of the dissertation, but it’s something I’m thinking a bit about.  Yet another side project? 🙂

Photo: porternovelli

I found this interesting interactive graphic (via the Sociological Images blog) at the New York Times.  It allows you to take a look at pay inequality by gender, slicing and dicing a range of occupations to see where women are most underpaid relative to their male colleagues.  If you click around the graphic, there are some notes accompanying a handful of professions that aim to explain the gap.

The reasons for the paycheque gap was one of the topics we discussed in my Negotiation Theory and Practice course last week.  Why in a negotiation course?  I think negotiation matters for two reasons.

First, negotiation matters because, as Linda Babcock and Sara Lashever say, “women don’t ask”:  They negotiate less often and they view more situations as non-negotiable.  Babcock, Gelfand, Small and Stayn (2006) asked men and women, “when was the last negotiation you initiated?”  They found that men tended to have negotiated far more recently than women.  This is hugely consequential when it comes to pay:  The lifetime earnings gap between someone who negotiates their first salary and someone who simply takes the first offer is in excess of a million dollars.

Secondly, even when women do consider employment terms as negotiable, they have different fundamental beliefs about what can be demanded.  Barron (2006) found that women are far more likely to endorse the view that you have to prove your worth on the job.  Men, by contrast, are willing to haggle for above-average wages before they set foot on the shop floor.  Differing perceptions about the appropriateness of demands in negotiation can lead to dramatically different outcomes — and these differences may contribute to the gender disparity in wages.

Link: AOM Tweeps

I’ve started a directory to make it easier to find Academy of Management folks on Twitter.  Let me know who I’m missing.

Link: Researchers struggle as Ottawa scales back funding

Via the Globe and Mail:

“After federal funding dried up, one of Canada’s top researchers had to scramble to find private donations to continue an ambitious experiment that aims to identify children most at risk of developing serious cognitive and behavioural disorders.

At the same time, the researcher, McGill University’s Michael Meaney, was asked to establish a similar research program in Singapore, but with roughly eight times the government funding.

The contrast highlights the difficulties even the best Canadian scientists face as federal spending for research is scaled back in Canada but increases in other countries.”

Useful?  Probably not.  Pretty?  Yes.