Early in my blogging career I wrote an entry called "A Bad Day for Ethics" in which I recounted several depressing news stories about academic and political dishonesty. I found that finding articles about bad behavior and decisions was easy, and wrote other entries about news accounts of issues like plagiarism and shady business practices. In the last twenty-four hours, however, I've run across three positive stories and wanted to bring them to your attention.
Good Training May Mean Good Ethics
The first story was reported by National Public Radio, and concerned the heroism of employees of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai in the wake of the terrorist attacks in 2008. "Apparently, something extraordinary had happened during the siege. According to hotel managers, none of the Taj employees had fled the scene to protect themselves during the attack: They all stayed at the hotel to help the guests." Some risked their own lives as they made sure guests of the hotel left the hotel safely.
The news report highlighted an article in the Harvard Business Review called "The Ordinary Heroes of the Taj," written by Rohit Deshpandé and Anjali Raina. The authors were interested in how the Taj creates a culture of consistent and outstanding customer service, and they found that creating a positive ethical culture might be possible. The NPR report quoted Deshpandé: "I am absolutely convinced that corporations can enable ethical behavior, and I think what happened at the Taj on [Nov. 26, 2008] is a great example."
One way the Taj created such an ethical climate: It recruits employees not for their grades, but for personal characteristics including respect and empathy. Indeed, the hotel does not recruit from first-tier schools, but from second-tier schools, in which students may as focused on making money as their major motivation. Recruiting for character. What a concept. In their field of psychology, some authors have talked about selecting graduate students on more than GPA and GRE scores, and of the difficulty of assessing and prioritizing character.
Another practice of the hotel utilizes basic psychological principles of reinforcement: Employees are rewarded quickly when customers remark on their good service. By accumulating good customer reviews employees earn progressively higher levels of recognition and benefits from the hotel. How different is this from telling employees that if they screw up they're going to be punished!
65 Years of Service to Society
The very next story I heard on NPR yesterday was about a collective birthday party held for participants in the world's longest running health study which was started in Britain in 1946. The study is called the National Study of Health and Development, and it has followed 5,362 British citizens from their birth in March 1946 until the present. Thus, all of the attendees at the party were 65 years old.
The NPR report noted that only 11% of the participants dropped out of the study. I was particularly struck by the comment of one attendee when asked if it was an imposition to be "periodically poked, prodded and questioned by researchers." She said: "As we get the study results, we can see sometimes they've actually influenced even governments. I feel very privileged to be involved with it." Wow. Doing something for the benefit of society. Another interesting concept!
More Humane Medical Training
This morning's New York Times ran an article entitled "A Medical School More Like Hogwarts." The article starts with some grim statistics about how many medical students suffer from stress, depression, suicidal ideation or attempts, and other problems. The article then introduces us to Vanderbuilt Medical School's attempts to deal with the stresses that medical students routinely face.
Many medical schools have wellness programs, but one problem is that students don't participate. Vanderbuilt, however, has a better participation rate in their program, partly because they've enlisted students as partners in designing the program. The article describes an advising system designed around four "colleges," and how the students, taking cues from the Harry Potter stories, have designed crests for each college and organized friendly competitions between them. They have also suggested, helped design, and engaged in activities including "yoga classes, community service events, healthy cooking classes, forums on nutrition and sleep, and a mentoring program that pairs senior students with newer ones."
The article describes some critics of the wellness program saying that there's so much to learn in medical school that there is no time for such frivolous activities. Advocates of the program, however, say that students are learning how to "balance academic dedication with the self-care that will sustain them in the long run." As a prospective patient, I know that much of what students are learning in medical school today will be obsolete by the time I need treatment. I'd prefer to go to a physician who (a) is a human being, (b) knows that they don't know everything, and (c) takes care of their own physical and psychological needs.
I'd encourage you to take a look at these three stories in more detail. Inspiring stuff for the New Year!
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Mitch Handelsman is a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado Denver and the co-author (with Sharon Anderson) of Ethics for Psychotherapists and Counselors: A Proactive Approach (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is also an associate editor of the two-volume APA Handbook of Ethics in Psychology (American Psychological Association, 2012).
© 2011 Mitchell M. Handelsman. All Rights Reserved
