Tag Archives: conferences

The line between persuasion and manipulation.

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As this year’s ScienceOnline Together conference approaches, I’ve been thinking about the ethical dimensions of using empirical findings from psychological research to inform effective science communication (or really any communication). Melanie Tannenbaum will be co-facilitating a session about using such research findings to guide communication strategies, and this year’s session is nicely connected to a session Melanie led with Cara Santa Maria at last year’s conference called “Persuading the Unpersuadable: Communicating Science to Deniers, Cynics, and Trolls.”

In that session last year, the strategy of using empirical results from psychology to help achieve success in a communicative goal was fancifully described as deploying “Jedi mind tricks”. Achieving success in communication was cast in terms of getting your audience to accept your claims (or at least getting them not to reject your claims out of hand because they don’t trust you, or don’t trust the way you’re engaging with them, or whatever). But if you have the cognitive launch codes, as it were, you can short-circuit distrust, cultivate trust, help them end up where you want them to end up when you’re done communicating what you’re trying to communicate.

Jason Goldman pointed out to me that these “tricks” aren’t really that tricky — it’s not like you flash the Queen of Diamonds and suddenly the person you’re talking to votes for your ballot initiative or buys your product. As Jason put it to me via email, “From a practical perspective, we know that presenting reasons is usually ineffective, and so we wrap our reasons in narrative – because we know, from psychology research, that storytelling is an effective device for communication and behavior change.”

Still, using a “trick” to get your audience to end up where you want them to end up — even if that “trick” is simply empirical knowledge that you have and your audience doesn’t — sounds less like persuasion than manipulation. People aren’t generally happy about the prospect of being manipulated. Intuitively, manipulating someone else gets us into ethically dicey territory.

As a philosopher, I’m in a discipline whose ideal is that you persuade by presenting reasons for your interlocutor to examine, arguments whose logical structure can be assessed, premises whose truth (or at least likelihood) can be evaluated. I daresay scientists have something like the same ideal in mind when they present their findings or try to evaluate the scientific claims of others. In both cases, there’s the idea than we should be making a concerted effort not to let tempting cognitive shortcuts get in the way of reasoning well. We want to know about the tempting shortcuts (some of which are often catalogued as “informal fallacies”) so we can avoid falling into them. Generally, it’s considered sloppy argumentation (or worse) to try to tempt our audience with those shortcuts.

How much space is there between the tempting cognitive shortcuts we try to avoid in our own reasoning and the “Jedi mind tricks” offered to us to help us communicate, or persuade, or manipulate more effectively? If we’re taking advantage of cognitive shortcuts (or switches, or whatever the more accurate metaphor would be) to increase the chances that people will accept our factual claims, our recommendations, our credibility, etc., can we tell when we’ve crossed the line between persuasion and manipulation? Can we tell when it’s the cognitive switch that’s doing the work rather than the sharing of reasons?

It strikes me as even more ethically problematic if we’re using these Jedi mind tricks while concealing the fact that we’re using them from the audience we’re using them on. There’s a clear element of deception in doing that.

Now, possibly the Jedi mind tricks work equally well if we disclose to our audience that we’re using them and how they work. In that case, we might be able to use them to persuade without being deceptive — and it would be clear to our audience that we were availing ourselves of these tricks, and that our goal was to get them to end up in a particular place. It would be kind of weird, though, perhaps akin to going to see a magician knowing full well that she would be performing illusions and that your being fooled by those illusions is a likely outcome. (Wouldn’t this make us more distrustful in our communicative interactions, though? If you know about the switches and it’s still the case that they can be used against you, isn’t that the kind of thing that might make you want to block lots of communication before it can even happen?)

As a side note, I acknowledge that there might be some compelling extreme cases in which the goal of getting the audience to end up in a particular place — e.g., revealing to you the location of the ticking bomb — is so urgent that we’re prepared to swallow our qualms about manipulating the audience to get the job done. I don’t think that the normal stakes of our communications are like this, though. But there may be some cases where how high the stakes really are is one of the places we disagree. Jason suggests vaccine acceptance or refusal might be important enough that the Jedi mind tricks shouldn’t set off any ethical alarms. I’ll note that vaccine advocates using a just-the-empirical-facts approach to communication are often accused or suspected of having some undisclosed financial conflict of interest that is motivating them to try to get everyone vaccinated — that is, they’re not using the Jedi mind trick social psychologists think could help them persuade their target audience and yet that audience thinks they’re up to something sneaky. That’s a pretty weird situation.

Does our cognitive make-up as humans make it possible to get closer to exchanging and evaluating reasons rather than just pushing each other’s cognitive buttons? If so, can we achieve better communication without the Jedi mind tricks?

Maybe it would require some work to change the features of our communicative environment (or of the environment in which we learn how to reason about the world and how to communicate and otherwise interact with others) to help our minds more reliably work this way. Is there any empirical data on that? (If not, is this a research question psychologists are asking?)

Some of these questions tread dangerously close to the question of whether we humans can actually have free will — and that’s a big bucket of metaphysical worms that I’m not sure I want to dig into right now. I just want to know how to engage my fellow human beings as ethically as possible when we communicate.

These are some of the questions swirling around my head. Maybe next week at ScienceOnline some of them will be answered — although there’s a good chance some more questions will be added to the pile!

Careers (not just jobs) for Ph.D.s outside the academy.

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A week ago I was in Boston for the 2013 annual meeting of the History of Science Society. Immediately after the session in which I was a speaker, I attended a session (Sa31 in this program) called “Happiness beyond the Professoriate — Advising and Embracing Careers Outside the Academy.” The discussion there was specifically pitched at people working in the history of science (whether earning their Ph.D.s or advising those who are), but much of it struck me as broadly applicable to people in other fields — not just fields like philosophy, but also science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The discourse in the session was framed in terms of recognizing, and communicating, that getting a job just like your advisor’s (i.e., as a faculty member at a research university with a Ph.D. program in your field — or, loosening it slightly, as permanent faculty at a college or university, even one not primarily focused on research or on training new members of the profession at the Ph.D. level) shouldn’t be a necessary condition for maintaining your professional identity and place in the professional community. Make no mistake, people in one’s discipline (including those training new members of the profession at the Ph.D. level) frequently do discount people as no longer really members of the profession for failing to succeed in the One True Career Path, but the panel asserted that they shouldn’t.

And, they provided plenty of compelling reasons why the “One True Career Path” approach is problematic. Chief among these, at least in fields like history, is that this approach feeds the creation and growth of armies of adjunct faculty, hoping that someday they will become regular faculty, and in the meantime working for very low wages relative to the amount of work they do (and relative to their training and expertise), experiencing serious job insecurity (sometimes not finding out whether they’ll have classes to teach until the academic term is actually underway), and enduring all manner of employer shenanigans (like having their teaching loads reduced to 50% of full time so the universities employing them are not required by law to provide health care coverage). Worse, insistence on One True Career Path fails to acknowledge that happiness is important.

Panelist Jim Grossman noted that the very language of “alternative careers” reinforces this problematic view by building in the assumption that there is a default career path. Speaking of “alternatives” instead might challenge the assumption that all options other than the default are lesser options.

Grossman identified other bits of vocabulary that ought to be excised from these discussions. He argued against speaking of “the job market” when one really means “the academic job market”. Otherwise, the suggestion is that you can’t really consider those other jobs without exiting the profession. Talking about “job placement,” he said, might have made sense back in the day when the chair of a hiring department called the chair of another department to say, “Send us your best man!” rather than conducting an actual job search. Those days are long gone.

And Grossman had lots to say about why we should stop talking about “overproduction of Ph.D.s.”

Ph.D.s, he noted, are earned by people, not produced like widgets on a factory line. Describing the number of new Ph.D.-holders each year as overproduction is claiming that there are too many — but again, this is too many relative to a specific kind of career trajectory assumed implicitly to be the only one worth pursuing. There are many sectors in the career landscape that could benefit from the talents of these Ph.D.-holders, so why are we not describing the current situation as one of “underconsumption of Ph.D.s”? Finally, the “overproduction of Ph.D.s.” locution doesn’t seem helpful in a context where these seems to be no good way to stop departments from “producing” as many Ph.D.s as they want to. If market forces were enough to address this imbalance, we wouldn’t have armies of adjuncts.

Someone in the discussion pointed out that STEM fields have for some time had similar issues of Ph.D. supply and demand, suggesting that they might be ahead of the curve in developing useful responses which other disciplines could borrow. However, the situation in STEM fields differs in that industrial career paths have been treated as legitimate (and as not removing you from the profession). And, more generally, society seems to take the skills and qualities of mind developed during a STEM Ph.D. as useful and broadly applicable, while those developed during a history or philosophy Ph.D. are assumed to be hopelessly esoteric. However, it was noted that while STEM fields don’t generate the same armies of adjuncts as humanities field, they do have what might be described as the “endless postdoc” problem.

Given that structural stagnation of the academic job market is real (and has been reality for something like 40 years in the history of science), panelist Lynn Nyhart observed that it would be foolish for Ph.D. students not to consider — and prepare for — other kinds of jobs. As well, Nyhart argues that as long as faculty take on graduate students, they have a responsibility to help them find jobs.

Despite profession that they are essentially clueless about career paths other than academia, advisors do have resources they can draw upon in helping their graduate students. Among these is the network of Ph.D. alumni from their graduate program, as well as the network of classmates from their own Ph.D. training. Chances are that a number of people in these networks are doing a wide range of different things with their Ph.D.s — and that they could provide valuable information and contacts. (Also, keeping in contact with these folks recognizes that they are still valued members of your professional community, rather than treating them as dead to you if they did not pursue the One True Career Path.)

Nyhart also recommended Versatilephd.com, especially the PhD Career Finder tab, as a valuable resource for exploring the different kinds of work for which Ph.D.s in various fields can serve as preparation. Some of the good stuff on the site is premium content, but if your university subscribes to the site your access to that premium content may already be paid for.

Nyhart noted that preparing Ph.D. students for a wide range of careers doesn’t require lowering discipline-specific standards, nor changing the curriculum — although, as Grossman pointed out, it might mean thinking more creatively about what skills, qualities of mind, and experiences existing courses impart. After all, skills that are good training for a career in academia — being a good teacher, an effective committee member, an excellent researcher, a persuasive writer, a productive collaborator — are skills that are portable to other kinds of careers.

David Attis, who has a Ph.D. in history of science and has been working in the private sector for about a decade, mentioned some practical skills worth cultivating for Ph.D.s pursuing private sector careers. These include having a tight two-minute explanation of your thesis geared to a non-specialist audience, being able to demonstrate your facility in approaching and solving non-academic problems, and being able to work on the timescale of business, not thesis writing (i.e., five hours to write a two-page memo is far too slow). Attis said that private sector employers are looking for people who can work well on teams and who can be flexible in contexts beyond teaching and research.

I found the discussion in this session incredibly useful, and I hope some of the important issues raised there will find their way to the graduate advisors and Ph.D. students who weren’t in the room for it, no matter what their academic discipline.

Professional communities, barriers to inclusion, and the value of a posse.

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Last week, I wrote a post about an incident connected to a professional conference. A male conference-goer wrote a column attempting to offer praise for a panel featuring four female conference-goers but managed to package this praise in a way that reinforced sexist assumptions about the value women colleagues add to a professional community.

The women panelists communicated directly with the male commentator about his problematic framing. The male commentator seemed receptive to this feedback. I blogged about it as an example of why it’s important to respond to disrespect within professional communities, even if it’s not intended as disrespect, and despite the natural inclination to let it go. And my post was praised for offering a discussion of the issue that was calm, sensitive, and measured.

But honestly? I’m unconvinced that my calm, sensitive, measured discussion will do one whit of good to reduce the incidence of such casual sexism in the future, in the community of science journalist or in any other professional community. Perhaps there were some readers who, owing to the gentle tone, were willing to examine the impact of describing colleagues who are women primarily in terms of their looks, but if a less gentle tone would have put them off from considering the potential for harm to members of their professional communities, it’s hard to believe these readers would devote much energy to combatting these harms — whether or not they were being asked nicely to do so.

Sometimes someone has to really get your attention — in a way that shakes you up and makes you deeply uncomfortable — in order for you to pay attention going forward. Maybe feeling bad about the harm to someone else is a necessary first step to developing empathy.

And certainly, laying out the problem while protecting you from what it feels like to be one of the people struggling under the effects of that problem takes some effort. If going to all that trouble doesn’t actually leave enough of an impression to keep the problem from happening some more, what’s the point?

* * * * *

What does it take to create a diverse professional community? It requires more than an absence of explicit rules or standing practices that bar certain kinds of people from membership, more even that admitting lots of different kinds of people into the “pipeline” for that profession. If you’re in the community by virtue of your educational or employment status but you’re not actually part of the discussions that define your professional community, it may help the appearance of diversity, but not the reality of it.

The chilly climate women have been talking about in a variety of male-dominated professional communities is a real thing.

Being a real member of a professional community includes being able to participate fully in venues for getting your work and insights into the community’s discussions. These venues include journals and professional meetings, as well as panels or study sections that evaluate grant proposals. Early in one’s membership in a professional community, venues like graduate seminars and department symposia are also really important.

One problem here is that usually individuals without meaningful access to participation are also without the power in the community required to effectively address particular barriers to their access. Such individuals can point out the barriers, but they are less likely to be listened to than someone else in the community without those barriers.

Everyday sexism is just one such barrier.

This barrier can take a number of particular forms.

For the students on their way into a professional community, it’s a barrier to find out that senior members of the community who you expected would help train you and eventually take you seriously as a colleague are more inclined to sexualize you or full-on sexually harass you. It’s a barrier when you see people in your community minimize that behavior, whether offhandedly or with rather more deliberation.

It’s a barrier when members of your community focus on your looks rather than your intellectual contributions, or act like it’s cute or somehow surprising that someone like you could actually make an intellectual contribution. It’s a further barrier when other members of your community advise you to ignore tangible disrespect because surely it wasn’t intentional — especially when those other members of the community make no visible effort to help address the disrespect.

It’s a barrier when students don’t see people like themselves represented among the recognized knowledge-builders in the professional community as they are being taught the core knowledge expected of members of that community. It’s also a barrier when the more senior members of the professional community are subject to implicit biases in their expert evaluations of who’s cut out to be a full contributing member of the community.

Plenty of well-meaning folks in professional communities that have a hard time fully integrating women (among others) may be puzzled as to why this is so. If they don’t personally experience the barriers, they may not even realize that they’re there. Listening to lived experiences of their female colleagues might reveal some of the barriers — but listening also assumes that the community really takes its female members seriously as part of the community, when this is precisely the problem with which the women in the community are struggling.

* * * * *

Professional meetings can be challenging terrain for women in predominantly male professional communities. Such meetings are essential venues in which to present one’s work and get career credit for doing so. They are also crucially important for networking and building relationships with people who might become collaborators, who will be called on to evaluate one’s work, and who are the peers with whom one hopes to be engaged in productive discussions over the course of one’s career.

There is also a strong social component to these meetings, an imperative to have fun with one’s people — which is to say, in this context, the people with whom one shares a professional community. Part of this, I think, is related to how strongly people identify with their professional community: the connection is not just about what people in that community do but about who they are. They have taken on the values and goals of the professional community as their own. It’s not just a job, it’s a social identity.

For some people, the social component of professional meetings has a decidedly carnal flavor. Unfortunately, rejecting a pass from someone in your professional community, especially someone with more power in that community than you, can screw with your professional relationships within the community — even assuming that the person who made the pass accepts your “no” and moves on. In other cases, folks within the professional community may be perfectly aware of power gradients and willing to use them to get what they want, applying persistent unwanted attention that can essentially deprive the target of full participation in the conference. Given the importance professional conferences have, this is a significant professional harm.

Lest you imagine that this is a merely hypothetical worry, I assure you that it is not. If you ask around you may discover that some of the members of your professional community choose which conference sessions to attend in order to avoid their harassers. That is surely a constraint on how much one can get out of a professional meeting.

Recently a number of conferences and conventions have adopted policies against harassment, policies that are getting some use. Many of these are fan-oriented conventions or tech conferences, rather than the kind of research oriented, academically inclined professional meetings most of us university types attend. I know of at least one scientific professional society (the American Astronomical Society) that has adopted a harassment policy for its meetings and that seems generally to be moving in a good direction from the point of view of building an inclusive community. However, when I checked the websites of three professional societies to which I belong (American Chemical Society, American Philosophical Association, and Philosophy of Science Association), I could find no sign of anti-harassment policies for their conferences. This is disappointing, but not surprising to me.

The absence of anti-harassment policies doesn’t mean that there’s no harassment happening at the meetings of these professional societies, either.

And even if a professional community has anti-harassment policies in place for its meetings, this doesn’t remove the costs — especially on a relatively junior member of the community — associated with asking that the policies be enforced. Will a professional society be willing to caution a member of the program committee for the conference? To eject the most favored grad student of a luminary in the field — or, for that matter, a luminary — who violates the policy? Shining light on over-the-line behavior at conferences is a species of whistleblowing, and is likely to be received about as warmly as other forms.

* * * * *

Despite the challenges, I don’t think the prospects for building diverse and productive professional communities are dim. Progress is being made, even if most weeks the pace of progress is agonizingly slow.

But I think things could get better faster if people who take their professional communities for granted step up and become more active in maintaining them.

In much the same way that it is not science that is self-correcting but rather individual scientists who bother to engage critically with particular contributions to the ongoing scientific conversation and keep the community honest, a healthy professional community doesn’t take care of itself — at least, not without effort on the part of individual members of the community.

Professional communities require everyday maintenance. They require tending to keep their collective actions aligned with the values members of the community say they share.

People who work very hard to be part of a professional community despite systemic barriers are people committed enough to the values of the professional community to fight their way through a lot of crap. These are people who really care about the values you purport to care about as a member of the professional community, else why would they waste their time and effort fighting through the crap?

These are the kind of people you should want as colleagues, at least if you value what you say you value. Their contributions could be huge in accomplishing your community’s shared goals and ensuring your community a vibrant future.

Even more than policies that aim to address systemic barriers to their entry to the professional community, these people need a posse. They need others in the community who are unwilling to sacrifice their values — or the well-being of less powerful people who share those values — to take consistent stands against behaviors that create barriers and that undermine the shared work of the community.

These stands needn’t be huge heroic gestures. It could be as simple as reliably being that guy who asks for better gender balance in planning seminars, or who reacts to casual sexist banter with, “Dude, not cool!” It could take the form of asking about policies that might lessen barriers, and taking on some of the work involved in creating or implementing them.

It could be listening to your women colleagues when they describe what it has been like for them within your professional community and assuming the default position of believing them, rather than looking for possible ways they must have misunderstood their own experiences.

If you care about your professional community, in other words, the barriers to entry in the way of people who want badly to be part of that community because they believe fiercely in its values are your problem, too. Acting like it, and doing your part to address these barriers, is sharing the regular maintenance of the professional community you count on.

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While this post is focused on barriers to full participation in professional communities that flow from gender bias, there are plenty of other types of bias that throw up similar barriers, and that could benefit from similar types of response from members of the professional communities not directly targeted by these biases.