Legitimating the legitimate: A grounded theory study of legitimacy work among Ethics and Compliance Officers

Organizations have responded to ethical scandals in part by creating the Ethics and Compliance Officer (ECO) role to help insure employee ethical and legal behavior. Because ECO work is so fundamental to behavioral ethics in organizations and we know very little about it, we conducted a grounded theory study to learn more. We learned that, although most ECOs were hired to help their organizations respond to external legitimacy challenges, ECOs face major legitimacy challenges inside their organizations. Facilitating conditions may reduce these challenges and help ECOs reach internal legitimacy. But, we also found that ECOs engage in what we term legitimacy work that relies on a number of tactics to help them gain legitimacy in the eyes of their constituents. We tie our findings to the broader legitimacy literature and draw implications for the behavioral ethics literature.     

On the rationality of pluralistic ignorance

Pluralistic ignorance is a socio-psychological phenomenon that involves a systematic discrepancy between people’s private beliefs and public behavior in certain social contexts. Recently, pluralistic ignorance has gained increased attention in formal and social epistemology. But to get clear on what precisely a formal and social epistemological account of pluralistic ignorance should look like, we need answers to at least the following two questions: What exactly is the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance? And can the phenomenon arise among perfectly rational agents? In this paper, we propose answers to both these questions. First, we characterize different versions of pluralistic ignorance and define the version that we claim most adequately captures the examples cited as paradigmatic cases of pluralistic ignorance in the literature. In doing so, we will stress certain key epistemic and social interactive aspects of the phenomenon. Second, given our characterization of pluralistic ignorance, we argue that the phenomenon can indeed arise in groups of perfectly rational agents. This, in turn, ensures that the tools of formal epistemology can be fully utilized to reason about pluralistic ignorance.     

Kin rejection: social signals,neural response and perceived distress during social exclusion

Across species, kin bond together to promote survival. We sought to understand the dyadic effect of exclusion by kin (as opposed to non‐kin strangers) on brain activity of the mother and her child and their subjective distress. To this end, we probed mother–child relationships with a computerized ball‐toss game Cyberball. When excluded by one another, rather than by a stranger, both mothers and children exhibited a significantly pronounced frontal P2. Moreover, upon kin rejection versus stranger rejection, both mothers and children showed incremented left frontal positive slow waves for rejection events. Children reported more distress upon exclusion than their own mothers. Similar to past work, relatively augmented negative frontal slow wave activity predicted greater self‐reported ostracism distress. This effect, generalized to the P2, was limited to mother‐ or child‐rejection by kin, with comparable magnitude of effect across kin identity (mothers vs. children). For both mothers and children, the frontal P2 peak was significantly pronounced for kin rejection versus stranger rejection. Taken together, our results document the rapid categorization of social signals as kin relevant and the specificity of early and late neural markers for predicting felt ostracism.     

A graphical user interface for infant ERP analysis

Recording of event-related potentials (ERPs) is one of the best-suited technologies for examining brain function in human infants. Yet the existing software packages are not optimized for the unique requirements of analyzing artifact-prone ERP data from infants. We developed a new graphical user interface that enables an efficient implementation of a two-stage approach to the analysis of infant ERPs. In the first stage, video records of infant behavior are synchronized with ERPs at the level of individual trials to reject epochs with noncompliant behavior and other artifacts. In the second stage, the interface calls MATLAB and EEGLAB (Delorme & Makeig, Journal of Neuroscience Methods 134(1):9–21, 2004) functions for further preprocessing of the ERP signal itself (i.e., filtering, artifact removal, interpolation, and rereferencing). Finally, methods are included for data visualization and analysis by using bootstrapped group averages. Analyses of simulated and real EEG data demonstrated that the proposed approach can be effectively used to establish task compliance, remove various types of artifacts, and perform representative visualizations and statistical comparisons of ERPs. The interface is available for download from http://www.uta.fi/med/icl/methods/eeg.html in a format that is widely applicable to ERP studies with special populations and open for further editing by users.     

The role of partial knowledge in statistical word learning

A critical question about the nature of human learning is whether it is an all-or-none or a gradual, accumulative process. Associative and statistical theories of word learning rely critically on the later assumption: that the process of learning a word’s meaning unfolds over time. That is, learning the correct referent for a word involves the accumulation of partial knowledge across multiple instances. Some theories also make an even stronger claim: Partial knowledge of one word–object mapping can speed up the acquisition of other word–object mappings. We present three experiments that test and verify these claims by exposing learners to two consecutive blocks of cross-situational learning, in which half of the words and objects in the second block were those that participants failed to learn in Block 1. In line with an accumulative account, Re-exposure to these mis-mapped items accelerated the acquisition of both previously experienced mappings and wholly new word–object mappings. But how does partial knowledge of some words speed the acquisition of others? We consider two hypotheses. First, partial knowledge of a word could reduce the amount of information required for it to reach threshold, and the supra-threshold mapping could subsequently aid in the acquisition of new mappings. Alternatively, partial knowledge of a word’s meaning could be useful for disambiguating the meanings of other words even before the threshold of learning is reached. We construct and compare computational models embodying each of these hypotheses and show that the latter provides a better explanation of the empirical data.     

The Relation Between Parental Mental Illness and Adolescent Mental Health: The Role of Family Factors

Children of parents with a mental illness are often found to be at high risk of developing psychological problems themselves. Little is known about the role of family factors in the relation between parental and adolescent mental health. The current study focused on parent–child interaction and family environment. This cross-sectional questionnaire study included 124 families with a mentally ill parent and 127 families without a mentally ill parent who at the time of the study had children aged 11–16 years old. Parents completed questionnaires about their mental health, parent–child interaction (i.e., parental monitoring and parental support), and family environment (i.e., cohesion, expressiveness, and conflict). Adolescents reported their internalizing and externalizing problems. Path analyses were used to examine the direct associations between parental mental illness and adolescent problems as well as the indirect relations via parent–child interaction and family environment. The results showed that interaction between parents with a mental illness and their child was significantly worse compared to parents without a mental illness. The family environment of parents with mental illness was also more negative. Mentally ill parents monitored their adolescents less, which in turn related to more externalizing problems of the adolescents. No factors mediated the relation between parental mental health and adolescent internalizing problems. Moreover, no direct effects of parental support, family cohesion, and family expressiveness with externalizing problems were found. These findings imply that parental monitoring should get a specific focus of attention in existing interventions designed to prevent adolescents with a mentally ill parent from developing problems.     

Preachers who are not believers

There are systemic features of contemporary Christianity that create an almost invisible class of non-believing clergy, ensnared in their ministries by a web of obligations, constraints, comforts, and community. Exemplars from five Protestant denominations, Southern Baptist, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian, Methodist and Church of Christ, were found and confidentially interviewed at length about their lives, religious education and indoctrination, aspirations, problems and ways of coping. The in-depth, qualitative interviews formed the basis for profiles of all five, together with general observations about their predicaments and how they got into them. The authors anticipate that the discussion generated on the Web (at On Faith, the Newsweek/Washington Post website on religion, http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith//2010/03/disbelief_in_the_pulpit/all.html) and on other websites will facilitate a larger study that will enable the insights of this pilot study to be clarified, modified, and expanded.     

Analysis of individual variations in the classical horizontal-vertical illusion

In the horizontal-vertical illusion (HVI), the length of the vertical line is overestimated, whereas in the bisection illusion (BI), the horizontal bisecting line is expected to be overestimated. Here, only half of our 22 observers showed the expected BI, whereas the other half underestimated the bisecting line. Observers also differed in their judgments of the strength of the HVI: The HVI was stronger for observers showing the classical bisection effect, and weaker or absent for those underestimating the bisecting line. To account for these results, we used a linear model to individually estimate the strength of two putative factors underlying both illusions. Whereas the strength of the HVI and BI were highly correlated, the estimated factors were uncorrelated. Therefore, in two control experiments, we then measured the pure horizontal-vertical (pHVI) and bisection (pBI) illusions. A significant correlation between the estimated factors and the measured illusion variants was found. Results were robust against variations of contrast, repetitive presentations, and choice of adjusted line. Thus, the classical HVI as an additive combination of two independent factors was confirmed, but we found considerable interindividual variations in the strength of the illusions. The results stress the importance of analyzing individual data rather than taking sample means for understanding these illusions.