SIO429: Artists Punished More Than Scientists for Same Misconduct

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:15 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 429. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. And, oh my gosh, I know I say this a lot, but this is a really fascinating one. Today I'm speaking with the authors of a study about how personal misconduct elicits harsher consequences for artists versus scientists. So interesting. I feel like that's something that feels intuitively pretty true, just like based on experience, and it kind of makes sense for certain reasons. But the ways they have studied it is also very fascinating. And I'll tell you, there was so much of this that was unexpected for me, but this is something that I bet is relevant to almost everybody. It has so many implications for how we think about personal consequences or professional consequences or, know, how we even change our attitudes of people based on who they are and what their job is and their misconduct.

0:01:06 Thomas: It's, it seems like that shouldn't matter. Like it shouldn't mater what job a person has. If they do something wrong, they do something wrong. But it turns out it's not so simple. I love this study and I could talk about it forever. So I'm really excited to get to that. Trust me. You're going to want to listen to this one. As usual, just a couple of things. First, please support the show on patreon.com/seriouspod. You can avoid the auto ads and we have a patron hangout for the top patrons coming up. That's the 27th. So this is Tuesday, the 27th at 3 PM Pacific. That is 6 Eastern. Good time to, you know, edit up your pledge or go pledge on patreon.com/seriouspod. Also note due to a couple factors, one being this month I had to relaunch Opening Arguments and we did a hundred episodes because there was so much to cover and we're so excited to be back on that combined with the fact that it's freaking February, which, you know, I've been shorted a day or two in a month.

0:01:55 Thomas: The leap year helps, but all that means probably going to be posting a lot of episodes this week effect of that is if you're a lover of podcasts, you're going to get a bunch of podcasts. And they're great because Lydia is in charge of booking for these, for this show. And that's why the guests are so incredible and interesting and diverse. And there's so much ground covered. So just a little shout out to Lydia, who's doing an amazing job. Another reason, please share the show with someone. You know, word of mouth is pretty much it these days in terms of podcast growth. The market is so flooded and really word of mouth is the way to go. You know, if you personally share the show with somebody, that's like the best thing you can do. And that goes for any and all of my shows if you feel so inclined. But anyway, let's get to this really fascinating study by going to patreon.com/seriouspod.

0:02:41 Thomas: And I'm joined by Dr. Joe Siev and Dr. Jacob Teeny. Thank you so much for joining us today.

0:02:46 Jake: Yeah. Our pleasure.

0:02:49 Thomas: This is going to be really interesting. I am so excited to dig into this. Before we do, do you mind giving a little background? Start with Joe, maybe? I How love hearing the personal kind of background and journey of how you got into the area you're in, if you don't mind a little bit.

0:02:47 Joe: For having us Totally. So I'm Joe. I'm a consumer psychologist. I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow in marketing at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. And And before that, I got my PhD in social psychology from the Ohio State University, and I gravitated toward the consumer domain over the course of grad school for reasons that I think will become more apparent as we go, but that's a little bit about my background.

0:03:27 Thomas: Excellent. They

0:03:28 Jake: Yeah, I graduated from the same Ohio State University, because there could be no other, and a few years ahead of Joe, and before that I have been, yeah, there

0:03:37 Thomas: Could just make another one. I'm just saying, Like if they made one more, then you wouldn't be able to say that anymore, right?

0:03:44 Jake: Would be the A's. Yeah, yeah, I don't know how to say it, uh, I've been interested in psychology since the sixth grade, uh, and then pursued it pretty single-mindedly, and I'm a professor of marketing at Northwestern.

0:03:44 Joe: Graduated from N, yeah, yeah.

0:03:51 Thomas: Wow. I love it. The title of the article that really, I think, caught our attention was Personal Misconduct Elicits Harsher Professional Consequences for Artists Versus Scientists, a Moral Decoupling Process. I'm already so interested in this. It also strikes me as kind of as you guys described your background, and see like pretty interdisciplinary. Is that fair to say? A lot going on here.

0:04:19 Jake: Yeah.

0:04:21 Joe: Absolutely.

0:04:22 Thomas: Yeah. Do you want to talk about that? Like what kind of goes into setting this up, like researching into this?

0:04:27 Joe: It's a great question. I mean, it is interdisciplinary. I think that we both kind of identify as interdisciplinary researchers. And, you know, we're drawing on basic principles in social psychology about moral reasoning and how people perceive others and make judgments about their behavior and applying that to a very consumer relevant question, which is about how we make judgments around, you know, public figures and work and, you know, creative products that we admire.

0:04:56 Jake: I mean, this was a project that Joe just sent me an email about one day. He's like, hey, I've got this idea. Do you think artists and scientists would be punished differently if they committed like the same personal misconduct? And it's kind of one of those things where it's like I don't know. Let's run a study and find out. And we did and the effect was whopping. And we were like, oh, my gosh. And then it just kind of set us down this path of like, Oh, I think I think we found something kind of big here.

0:05:24 Jake: And so from our backgrounds, kind of pursued it from multiple different angles, from experiments, from framing studies to real world archival data. And so it was quite the journey, uncovering what we ultimately

0:05:07 Thomas: Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, what went into that email? What went into that initial, what led to that kind

0:05:41 Jake: Did

0:05:41 Thomas: Of hunch or I guess hypothesis is some of you might call it.

0:05:46 Jake: Yeah, I

0:05:47 Joe: It's funny, I actually still have the original notepad and my little, my little pocket notepad that I carry around with me for ideas. I still have that, the little sketch that I first made with a seat of this idea, then I had a conversation about it with, uh, you know, with a friend, helped me flesh it out, and then brought it to Jake and pitched it to Jake. And, uh, as he does, he made it a lot better and sharpened it, and and we were off to the races. And like he said, you the first study that we ran, the effect just popped, and we're like, okay, this is you

0:06:15 Thomas: So there wasn't like a real life example that, like, I'm just curious what gave you that idea. Was there a case, a real-life case where, like, geez, these two things look unequal, or was it truly just abstract? Well,

0:06:24 Joe: Know, I think it probably came from just kind of observing some of the real world scenarios that we see around these issues when, you know, a public figure commits some form of misconduct, and then there's a huge public discourse that, um, seems to pop up that involves debating whether we can continue to support the the person, whether we can continue to consume the work. And I just got curious about some of the, you seeming discrepancies in the particular cases. How some would, know... Some would, you result in really severe consequences, and some would apparently not. And so, you know, I don't remember exactly where the specific idea came from, but that was kind of the curiosity that got the thought process going. And then it just turned into conversations, and one thing led to another?

0:07:08 Thomas: Already, I can think of a lot of, uh, a lot of variables to that. I mean, there's certainly like how it's handled as well. There's, know, there's, I'm sure there's a lot in all of that. How did you tease apart the different issues there, whether it's like, like the perceived intensity of the offense, or the way it was handled, or that kind of stuff, versus what you're trying to get at, which is artists versus scientists.

0:07:32 Joe: Yeah, that's a great question, because there are definitely a variety of factors that are going to come into play. You mentioned the severity of the misconduct. Obviously, we would assume and hope that consequences for misconduct are going to be responsive to how severe the misconduct was. And so we had to take some steps in our research to try to address that. And some of those methods were about designing studies where we could very carefully control for some of these other factors by, for example, conducting an experiment where the misconduct was held constant, but we just manipulated the field that the person worked in. So we just randomly had one perpetrator be an artist, or even just take an artistic approach to whatever kind of work they were doing, versus a scientist. And in other studies, we, we measured how severe the misconduct was and used statistical methods to try to separate that out so that we could just focus in on the art versus science part of it.

0:08:28 Joe: The severity is one piece. It's obviously a really important one. But there are some other things that could also come into play that we had to try to distinguish art versus science from. So I don't know Jake has further thoughts to add on that. But those were some of the steps that we took to try to address that.

0:08:44 Jake: Mean, you know, in research, when you initially come up with an idea, you run a couple studies to see if there's any viability to it, and then pretty quickly after that you try to present it to people other than yourself, to be like, hey, are we crazy, or is this like something worth pursuing, and like what are we missing. And I remember, uh, Joe presented it to, uh, some people we used to do research with. And they're like, well, isn't it just the fact that people think science is more important than art? Like, you know, the Mona Lisa is great, but I'd rather have penicillin than that painting. And we're like, yeah, I think that's fair, right? You know, people see science and technology.

0:09:21 Thomas: Oh, that's funny. I wouldn't think that at all.

0:09:24 Jake: Yeah, yeah, right.

0:09:25 Joe: Oh, that's interesting. Thing.

0:09:26 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:26 Jake: We had to like kind of be like, is that what's going going on? Do people just like think science is more important, and so, you know, don't punish them, and there is some like innate preferences for science over art in terms of like its consequences for the real world. But we did a number of studies and statistical approaches like Joe mentioned to kind of take that into account, and still this effect emerged, still scientists were getting away with lighter professional consequences.

0:09:53 Thomas: I should have asked maybe at the beginning, was but this all like just hypotheticals that you question people about? Were there real cases or was it a combination?

0:10:01 Joe: It was a combination. Yeah. Had a series of experiments, but we also analyzed archival data of actually university faculty who had been investigated for sexual misconduct. And, you know, there were some consequences imposed by their university or their academic society. So we did have some real world data, and we were able to find the effect in that context too. We could talk a little bit more about what that involved if you're curious.

0:10:02 Jake: Mm-hmm.

0:10:27 Thomas: For Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's so funny that that was the thought, because my immediate thought was just it's all going to depend on the feeling of personal connection to the person. Like, I can't think of, apart from a few of my favorite scientists, and this is a skewed audience because it's a science show and people who probably do have personal like attachment to scientists as as figures.

0:10:27 Joe: Right. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

0:10:45 Thomas: But your average person, I doubt, has that much of a personal connection To any scientists like it's yeah, penicillin is great. I will forget the name of who invented what and where. I love Richard Feynman. I feel like he did have some problematic past, probably.

0:10:44 Jake: No. Mm

0:11:01 Thomas: And I don't remember that well. I haven't followed it. But if he was still alive and I was following him and there was some sort of thing, I would feel really disappointed. But it would actually be more because I've consumed so much of his personalized content, his video that I've seen explaining stuff and connected on that human level. If it was just somebody that I knew had a scientific accomplishment to their name, I don't know that I would really, you know, like, oh, okay, don't care that much. Where if it's an artist, you've connected to their art, you made that personal connection and it just seems such a violation of that personal connection to then find out something bad about them. I know we've all gone through it with different artists.

0:10:59 Jake: Hmm. Mm hm.

0:11:41 Jake: Mm. I mean, there's lots of factors that influence, you know, whether or not we want to punish someone or ban or cancel their work. The more you have a personal connection, the more you like them, of course, the less you want to punishment. The higher quality the work is. So, you know, we're much less likely to punish the scientist, again, who invented the microwave than someone who discovered how spiders reproduce or something like that. Because the more important We think the quality, okay, you know, the more they get away with it.

But if you hold all of that constant, even still scientists get off with, you Now, fewer, lighter professional consequences compared to artists. And we talk about science and art kind of like this binary distinction, distinction. You're either a scientist or you're either an artist, but it's really a spectrum. Like you take something like a lawyer and sometimes they're seen as a little more scientific. Sometimes they're seeing this a little bit more artistic and you can push these around a little bit. And depending on where people kind of emphasize their framing as a science or an artist affects the consequences that they want to impose following their personal misconduct.

0:11:43 Joe: Yep, yep.

0:12:09 Thomas: Interesting.

0:12:49 Thomas: Yeah, why don't you take us through some of the hypotheticals, some of the data, because I am curious about how these things were framed, because Because I could think of so many ways that that might change what's going on. I'd love to hear some of the specifics.

0:13:02 Joe: And uh, we'd love to hear some of your thoughts about those specifics too, um, as we go. Uh, I'll start with a brief summary of this archival data set. Because this is, this is where we were able to examine our hypotheses in the real world. As I mentioned, in this data set called the Academic Sexual Misconduct Database, which is publicly available online. It's great resource. It could be used for lots of things in addition to what we did with it. But what it has is records going back more than 40 years now of university investigations of faculty for sexual misconduct on publicly available archival information, so news articles and that sort of thing.

0:13:09 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, where did this come from? Who made this? What is this?

0:13:40 Joe: It's great. It's great resource. You can just Google academic sexual misconduct database. The organizer and the lead is a person named Julie Labarkin, who's an academic and has a team of volunteers who periodically update this as information comes out. So yeah, it

0:13:58 Thomas: Do you know why? I'm just kind of curious of that story. It's like someone really took the time to want to look into that. That's interesting. That seems labor intensive.

0:14:07 Joe: Definitely is labor intensive. We were not involved in compiling that data set, But I think it's to facilitate research on related topics, but there might be other goals that they have in mind as well.

0:14:10 Thomas: Sure. Topic for another day. Interesting.

0:14:20 Jake: I'm Sure, it's about open dialogue and accountability in these things, and I, And you we ran some experiments first because those are often easier and you can control the variables. And Joe and I had a discussion, we're like, you know, we need some evidence that this is not just a hypothetical sort of situation thing. And I remember one day he sent me an email like, "Hey, I found this like crazy database on academic sexual misconduct." So we started talking about it.

And then we had to go through this huge process of like, OK, there's all these people in there, all these different professors, we have to figure out is their profession more of an art or more of a science. So we got hundreds of people to like norm or code all of these different professors' disciplines on this scale of it's more of art or it's a science. Joe did a ton of work pulling these studies together, and then we looked at how severe the punishments were. And I remember I was actually just at the gym, like shooting basketball, and I got a text from Joe, and it was like, "Oh my god, the art versus this science effect emerged in this data set, too." And I was just like,

0:14:20 Joe: That's right.

0:15:24 Thomas: Wow.

0:15:24 Jake: Oh, wow, this is big stuff.

0:15:25 Thomas: Right.

0:15:27 Joe: That was an exciting moment.

0:15:27 Thomas: Yeah, because he's probably winning the basketball game. He's like, this is awesome. I don't care about that. We're up by 10. Don't bother me. No. Yeah, because my question was going to be, I mean, especially going back historically 40 years, the dynamics have changed so much in terms of who is doing the punishing and what are they using to make that decision? Like what kind of public pressure? You know, you just have to imagine the age of social media. That has to have changed quite a lot. And that was going to be my question is like, well, that seems like a tough thing to evaluate and stack against like, oh, you know, our favorite singer got canceled or whatever. But if you're saying even within that data set, just discipline creates that effect, that is really fascinating.

0:15:47 Jake: Yeah,

0:15:51 Joe: Yeah.

0:16:13 Joe: Yeah, that's exactly what we found. And, you know, that is kind of a fun little nugget, I think, that in with the paper is these normative ratings that Jake mentioned. So we have, I think, 134 different fields rated in terms of art and science. So just how people by default tend to perceive the artistic versus scientific nature of these things. But within that data set, we found that regardless of when at what period of time you're looking at, we find this difference emerging where the punishments are more severe for the artists than the scientists. Or as a field becomes seen as more artistic and less scientific, the punishments become on average more severe. And as I said, that doesn't seem to depend on when it was. It has been the case that there are lots more investigations nowadays than there were 40 years ago, for sure, but even 10 years ago. So that has definitely increased. There's more accountability, but it doesn't seem like the art versus science difference depends on that.

0:17:02 Thomas: Sure. Oh, that's good. Very interesting.

0:17:12 Jake: We looked at a number of different controls, like how prestigious is the professor? You know, what's the ratio of men to women in that specific discipline? Because again, Again, all of this is correlational data, so we can't draw any kind of causal inferences, but we at least wanted to make sure that the correlation or association we emerged wasn't due to some of these other maybe secondary factors.

0:17:23 Thomas: Sure. Sure.

0:17:36 Jake: And after you control for all of those and take them into account, again, this art-science effect still comes out.

0:17:43 Thomas: And do you think, I mean, and again, maybe this is something you can't tell from the data, but what are your thoughts on like, do you think it's the case that the people, so like the kinds of people in charge of these decisions, because that's the thing I'm trying to think of just structurally how this works. I mean, who is making these decisions? It's going to be like what administrators of the area of the like university that they're in, right? Or who, or what, what, how do you, this would work on average? Who's making those decisions?

0:18:10 Joe: Yeah, that's a good question. I think that it probably varies some, but many cases, there's going to be a committee formed to investigate misconduct and they're going to come to a determination about what occurred and are going to decide on some kind of consequence. But it's probably not always structured the same way. So for example, some of the punishments that we examined in the data set were things that that are gonna come down from National Science Foundation or from an academic society, such as being banned from applying for federal grant money.

So there can be consequences that come directly from the university, and there can consequences that might come from a different body. And so the way that we dealt with multiple consequences when someone had them, there weren't usually multiple consequences recorded, but there were some cases of that. And we defaulted to more severe the consequence in those cases. But I think that oftentimes, just to get back to your question, I think it's going to be a university committee that's formed for this. But there can also be a role for academic societies that are at the field level rather than the university level.

0:18:36 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:19:16 Thomas: Wow, really interesting. So I, I'm trying to put my finger on something, and this may be a total, like, just not a great point. But for a second, I have intuition this that could there be a distinction between the kinds of people making these decisions would have certain feelings about punishment versus their reaction to people having these infractions that also have those qualities of being art more than science? If that, does that make sense? Is that something that I could try to rephrase it, but like I could imagine it being on one hand, if it's how does the average person react to when a scientist misbehaves versus when an artist misbehives, but couldn't it also be, how does a panel of artists react to misconduct of any kind versus a panel of scientists react to misconduct of any type? Like, wouldn't that kind of be a distinction?

0:20:08 Jake: Yeah, that's an interesting comparison. To Joe's point earlier, generally the panel that would be kind of doling out these punishments is going to supersede whatever discipline that the professor is coming from. So it's not like you would have scientists.

0:20:19 Thomas: Oh, OK. I was assuming it would be faculty from like, you know, related to the school of subdiscipline or something. So you don't think it would be that.

0:20:26 Jake: They might have some tie to that subdiscipline. You know, usually the people who get elevated to dean or these levels were professors broadly in the arts or professors broadly in the sciences, but it'll be made up of a committee and it won't be like the direct colleagues of the perpetrator. There'll be a little bit of separation.

0:20:45 Thomas: OK, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Then maybe it isn't about a personal connection so much in this data set. You know, I was thinking as like just a fan of different things. I would feel like that would be my feeling Like the more personal connection I Felt, but it is your feeling that like, given how for this data set, the disciplinary process is working, it really does seem to just be like the perception of a scientist doing something wrong is just for some reason less than that of an artist or what do you think is going on there? That's fascinating.

0:20:58 Jake: Yeah.

0:21:16 Joe: But the process, um, is, I think, relevant here that we think is explaining what's going on here, and it's this thing called moral decoupling, which is really just a fancy way of of talking about whether we separate a person from their work. So do you separate the art from the artist are

0:21:32 Thomas: So it's not what the Coldplay singer and Gwyneth Paltrow did or whatever that was. What was that? A conscious uncoupling. What was that? Gosh, that was weird 10 something years ago. Anyway, not that. Okay.

0:21:38 Joe: Those song lyrics. I don't think I know that. One. Oh,

0:21:45 Thomas: Now, remember that? They were like, we're doing, they divorced or something. They're like, we're having a conscious uncoucling or something. Wasn't that what it was? You guys were too busy studying. It's okay.

0:21:57 Joe: Sounds like a paper from moral decoupling to Conscious decouple. Yeah, moral dec coupling is about the relationship between the person who made the work and Their work. So, you know, when we're talking about an artist, a moral decouping is a question, question of, can you separate the art from the artist? But you can also think about that same question in the context of any professional or any public figure who has creative output of some kind. So we think that that's playing a role here. And more specifically, it seems that people have a hard time separating art from artists because there's a perception that art is very personal. It's closely tied to the artist. It's really inextricable from who they are as a person. And so they kind of infuse some of into themselves it.

0:22:00 Jake: Yeah.

0:22:00 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah.

0:22:44 Joe: Whereas we think that scientists don't have that same inextriquable type of personal connection to their work. So that's just a basic concept that I think starts to get at that. Want to add something, Jake?

0:22:55 Jake: Sure, I mean, I, you know, when, when a public figure does misbehavior, does something wrong, you, you know, if you want to still use the work, listen to the music, read the book, whatever, you kind of have two cognitive reasoning strategies. Your first strategy could be, hey, I'm going to pretend that that misbehavior wasn't as bad as people are making it out to be, so it's still okay to listen to the music.

The other strategy, which Joe just really nicely described, moral decoupling, is this idea of like, yeah, I accept that that behavior was bad, but we can separate the work from the person behind it. And when it comes for artists, it's just harder for us to do that. We're like, no, the artist infuses themselves into the work, you know, part of who they are is trapped up in that, whereas for a scientist, based on kind of our just stereotypes of scientists, we imagine it as a very cold and personal methodological process, such that no personal elements of the scientists really get transferred to their work. And so, consequently, like, oh, yeah, the guy's a jerk, but he invented this, you know, crazy theorem. And that's totally separate. And so it's easier for us to morally decouple or separate those two things. But there are times when the crime is mixed in with the work itself. And at that point, people can't morally decouple very well, whether you're an artist or a scientist. No.

0:23:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:20 Thomas: Not being a scientist and going kind of through the paper as a not scientist, I capture all those nuances. This is such a cool conversation because I, just thinking about it, I had kind of a lot of feelings about it as a consumer of whatever, of art, of whatever online, and thought about it in that context. This data set is blowing my mind with the disciplinary actions on the professor. That is like absolutely mind-blowing to me because I just don't, It's so hard to imagine why that effect would hold in those circumstances, because isn't it just like that's a professional decision about types of misconduct in the workplace and what's appropriate there? It just seems so weird that that effect Would hold in Those circumstances. Was that really surprising to you or am I coming at it just weirdly?

0:24:23 Jake: No.

0:25:04 Jake: Professional

0:25:04 Joe: It's great question. It was definitely striking to us. Yes. But I think that one thing that Jake mentioned that is worth highlighting is that moral decoupling becomes relevant, particularly when you have some motivation to continue supporting the work. So for example, like if an author whose work you admire commits misconduct, but you really like their work, this creates a dilemma because there's some motivation to continue using the work and benefiting from it, but not at the expense of feeling like a good person. People don't want to, as Jake mentioned, just rationalize it away and pretend like it's not a big deal when clearly it is a big deal. And so in the context of the academic sexual misconduct database and these university sanctions, you can, I think, also assume that in many cases there's some kind of motivation.

0:25:53 Joe: You know, particularly if you think about a star academic who's renowned and brings a lot of prestige to the university, maybe brings in grant money, whatever the case might be, you can easily imagine a situation where there's some motivation to try to decouple if possible. And so given that, I think the ease with which people can decouble becomes really relevant. And that's why I think we see that difference emerging. So if you assume that there's at least some degree of wanting to decouple if possible, then that art versus science difference constrains the the possibility of it, constrains how much people are able to actually decouple in the case of art, but when they want to for scientists, there's it's Just easier for Them To do

0:26:34 Thomas: It's just easier. So, okay. So just to make sure we're all on the same page with kind of the framework here, the idea is that, so scientists are getting less harsh punishments, right? On average. And professional punishment. Oh, okay, right. And

0:26:35 Joe: Yep.

0:26:46 Jake: Punishments Because It's worth noting Like if you look at criminal offenses, like Are they actually charged with like crimes, artists and scientists are roughly the same, but when it comes to punishing their work, whether that's keeping their job or continuing to listen to their work or buy their work, whatever the case might be, that's where you see this divide start to emerge.

0:26:51 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Hmm.

0:27:13 Thomas: Yeah. So the idea is that it's very easy to just say, ah, well, they still invented, you penicillin. Who cares? I don't want to disparage. What's his name? But yeah, they Still invented something. Don't care. Versus the artwork is like you can't decouple. And again, it's just blowing my mind that data set. But what So you said, I think, reveals a little bit about it. There's still going to be those incentives, perhaps, to like, oh, keep the star researcher around or or not. But gosh, it is. I'm just still so surprised that like a disciplinary panel or whatever it would be would still would still show that effect. Fact, you know?

0:27:20 Joe: Yeah. Yep. Right.

0:27:20 Jake: Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

0:27:50 Thomas: What are the types of things? So that database though was specifically sexual misconduct, right? But were you looking at other kinds of misconduct for other studies or other parts of this?

0:27:57 Joe: We Did, in our experiments, we used a few different types of misconduct. So from a theoretical standpoint, you know, the way that we think about this, it could be general to any kind of immoral behavior. So anything that kind of discredits the person morally is the kind of thing that we would expect to kickstart this process. So in addition to sexual misconduct, which we also used in one of our studies, we also had one study where we had the misconduct be racial discrimination, and another study in which it was tax fraud. So we used a few different kinds of immoral behavior. But in each case, we designed them to be not directly relevant to the work that the person was doing. Because as Jake mentioned earlier, if the misconduct is directly relevant, then it doesn't allow space for moral decoupling.

0:28:51 Joe: You can't decouple work that's been plagiarized, for example, because the work itself becomes the misconduct. But for other types of misconduct that's not kind of directly part of the work, we would make the same predictions. And so we tried three different versions of that in our studies.

0:28:57 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:07 Thomas: Did you worry about the ability to get, I guess, realistic responses when it's a hypothetical? Because if so much of this This is like, hey, if if your favorite, you know, singer was caught in some misconduct, I feel like a lot of people would be like, oh, yeah, well, I would not be OK with that. And then you're like, OK, but it's Michael Jackson. Well, all right. Well, it's Michael Jack. You know, there's not there's got to be. He was abused as a child. I don't know. You know what I feel, like with it would be hard to replicate the actual, you know, human connection there. Was that a concern in these hypotheticals?

0:29:28 Joe: Right. Right.

0:29:44 Jake: Yes and no. I mean, so first off, all of our hypothetical studies are set up as if they were real articles. So participants go in believing these are actual news articles from real scientists and artists. And we even designed the stimuli to emulate emulate exactly what you would read on AP News or, you know, one of these like big news reports. So for participants, they come and think, you Know, this is a real person. Now, it's not necessarily someone they have a personal connection to beforehand. And we do that intentionally, because, as you point out, if you have really strong attitudes or opinions of towards someone, there's probably little difference whether you're an artist or a scientist. But for most people, And for most public figures, it's not like everyone's their biggest fan. And so in thinking about kind of the mass reactions in terms of boycotts or, you know, in specific professional punishments, you see the effect emerge. Now, again, like you said, if they're a big fan, probably not going to happen.

0:29:52 Thomas: Hmm. Oh. Oh, OK. Right.

0:30:44 Thomas: That's OK. Can I be honest with you? I didn't know you were allowed to do that. I thought because like for me, maybe it's because I don't know. I wear my heart in my sleeve and I'm kind of the way I think about, things I'm a fan of. It would be kind of like, I feel like you're not allowed to do an experiment where you just tell someone like, hey, your mom died. Not, Like, isn't that like probably not kosher with the human board of whatever approving experiments? But I guess if it's a public figure, you're allowed to be like, they sucked. And then, psych, it's okay. Don't worry, it wasn't real.

0:31:07 Jake: Yeah, well, we didn't use any like famous people. So all of the names that we created were fabricated for the purposes of the study.

0:31:13 Joe: And

0:31:18 Thomas: Oh, I misunderstood you then. Okay.

0:31:20 Jake: Yeah, sorry, we presented them as if they were real scientists and if they Were real artists. And

0:31:25 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, but that's my concern. Like, without getting, I wonder how much of that would mess with this effect or, you know, because like, I really feel like people's responses when they actually know someone or a fan of them is going to be perhaps different, don't you think? Think?

0:31:28 Jake: Yeah, I mean, certainly, and I think, again, the more familiarity and the more exposure you have to this specific individual, the more it's going to color whatever kind of response you have. But I'd say for a lot of people and for even a lot of famous, you know, Taylor Swift, she's obviously not done anything wrong. She has a huge following, but there's also people who like her and know her at a more moderate level, right?

0:32:06 Jake: And for someone, even famous individual like that, we would probably still the expect effect to emerge. It's just when you have these really strong feelings about someone is where it would probably become muted to some extent.

0:32:18 Thomas: I see. So on average, you think it's still like you're able to gather the effect on average and it's just those extremes that maybe might change a little.

0:32:27 Joe: Just to add in, it's useful, I think, also just keep in mind the motivation versus ability distinction. So people might want to morally decouple, you know, somebody's work, Taylor Swift songs from, well, don't, Taylor— I mean, Taylor Swift didn't do anything wrong, but she's a running example here.

0:32:42 Thomas: Well, she's got that private jet people are mad about. Not going to lie.

0:32:45 Joe: I heard that. Yeah. There's the conspiracy theory about dating Travis Kelsey in order to get the jet emissions off the Google search results. Not endorsing that.

0:32:54 Thomas: That seems harder than like if that was a genuine conspiracy, it seems harder Than just reducing your jet emissions to me, but I don't know. Going through a fake relationship, yeah.

0:33:03 Joe: Well, the they were Jets the following week. So that was the rationale.

0:33:07 Thomas: Ah. There. You. Go. That's. That.

0:33:08 Joe: Yeah, very sneaky.

0:33:09 Thomas: Would.

0:33:09 Joe: Sneaky.

0:33:10 Thomas: Be how she would do it. What? Okay, I love conspiracy theories. There's, they're so delightfully stupid. Yeah.

0:33:16 Joe: I know. Well, if she had done that, then there would be a question, right? Would you continue to listen to her music? And then, you like Jake was saying that motivation, how much do you care? How much do like her work? Or how much you like the work, whatever the work that we're talking about is. So people are going to vary in how much they want to decouple, but they're also going to be factors that affect how much They're able to do so. And this art, the personal nature of art, makes that difficult, even when people want to.

0:33:45 Thomas: Yeah, to think if this makes any sense, but was there any controlling for like just the raw numbers of how popular the thing might have been? Like if I'm just thinking in, in real, real world cases, I can't really think of any scientist that's remotely as popular as your average artist, you know? Like, is there anything there, or are the experiments constructed in such a way that you don't think that really matters much?

0:34:10 Jake: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, in one of our studies, we take rather than like a scientist or, you know, as you traditionally think about, we use a tennis coach and we describe him as this really popular tennis player. Again, we're using articles that look like they were taken directly from tennis.com. And also, I just want to briefly note, we always debrief participants that these were not real articles and real people at the end of the study.

0:34:34 Joe: Right.

0:34:34 Thomas: They don't start like a moral campaign. Did you hear about forehand McLove and how he, that's

0:34:41 Joe: Yep.

0:34:43 Jake: But yeah, even even when using like a tennis star, uh, and describing him either as a quote unquote scientist of the game or an artist of the game, we still get the effect, so we're keeping exactly constant like the popularity, the book sales, all of these things, um, but people are still more willing to boycott and punish the artist, tennis artist of the game than the tennis scientist of the game.

0:34:52 Thomas: Awesome. No way. That is the, OK, that is hilarious. Wow. Even when it's the same exact like job, it's just described using art words versus science words. That is that is incredible. That is so fascinating. What what an interesting study. Can you give us any sense of like this effect size or line? It's always hard. It's the thing I always try to ask and it's hard to describe.

0:35:12 Jake: Yeah, exactly.

0:35:25 Thomas: Like, can you give us a sense of, like, the magnitude of these effects? Mm-hmm.

0:35:24 Jake: I

0:35:28 Joe: We can give you a sense of what we found in our studies, absolutely.

0:35:32 Thomas: Well.

0:35:32 Joe: So the study where we just randomly presented participants with an artist or a scientist, scientist who had committed sexual misconduct and then measured moral decoupling and support for boycotting their work. That was a kind of a medium-sized effect, which is to say it was a D, a Cohen's D of about 0.45, which conventionally people call that a medium size effect. In the study with the tennis coach, which was a little bit subtler.

0:36:00 Thomas: Okay. You're gonna have to give me more than that, because nobody knows what that means, so if, if I was like in punishment units How would you evaluate this if you're like, or, yeah.

0:36:06 Joe: So that's tough.

0:36:11 Thomas: Well, it sounds like also The the effect you described wasn't necessarily like in punishment, but in decoupling, but would that just be like the gap in punishment, uh, for, for those two things? Is that how you're measuring decoupling? Hmm.

0:36:06 Jake: Mean,

0:36:11 Joe: It's a tough question.

0:36:24 Joe: We actually had a separate measure of decoupling. So just asked people two questions, to agree or to disagree that this person's immoral behavior should not affect evaluations our of their work. So we had two questions like that, which is how we measured moral decoupling. And then we measured the punishment with boycotts. So would you support boycotting this person's work, removing their books from the shelves and bookstores, taking their work out of college classrooms? Those kinds of measures, right?

0:36:26 Thomas: Oh. Okay. Okay. Okay.

0:36:54 Thomas: Well, that's interesting, because that, that strikes me as making a little bit more direct sense, because it feels like that's way more connected to the work, you know, like, like if it, if the misconduct is sexual misconduct, I guess if you're looking at that and it's like how much do you care about the work of, of their tennis coaching versus, well, I guess even that one is still crazy, but how much do you care about this person singing than their, their songwriting versus, you their beakers in the lab? I guess that seems a little more obvious, and it wouldn't surprise me that much. What, what was so surprising is the, just how much should you punish this person? Now, now I'm curious, were some of those punishments in those measures not related to work?

You know, if it's like boycotting their work, I still feel like that's really like, like, well, the product they create is just obviously affected by the thing they did wrong versus if it's like, does that make sense? Like versus like they shouldn't get funding for a thingy. It's like, well, that, that shouldn't matter because they're still doing work either way, and it feels a little less connected to, like, your personal connection with their thing. Does that make any sense?

0:37:19 Joe: Yeah, totally.

0:38:05 Thomas: Did you try to separate the work from the actual infraction? I think you mentioned that earlier. But based on what you just said, I wasn't so sure.

0:38:14 Joe: We did, yeah. Yeah. So you're right that the type of punishment definitely matters. And so the effect that we are describing is, this is what happens when we're talking about personal misconduct that's not directly relevant to the work that the person does, and then how that leads to punishments of their work. So we're Talking about the personal misconduct on the misconduct side, and a professional set of consequences that result from the misconduct. But, those vary on a spectrum. So, you as you kind of alluded, like, there are some forms of punishment that are clearly work focused.

0:38:28 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Okay. Mm-hm.

0:38:49 Joe: But then there are Some, you Know, an example of that is like, you Know, getting banned from federal grants or being fired would probably be the, you Know, the maximum version of that. But Then there's some personal consequences that are also relevant. So like criminal charges, I think you could think of as a clear personal example, because, you criminal liability is not supposed to depend on who a person is in their work life. That's supposed to be, you know, there's equality under the law. So we shouldn't see those kinds of effects come into play then. And we did run a study where we actually measured a whole variety of of different consequences. And we measured how personal or professional those different consequences were. And what we found was that as the consequences that we were focused on became more professional rather than personal, the effect emerged and grew larger. But as the consequences that were looking at became less professional and more personal, so things like criminal charges that are not kind of intended to have a professional component, then we see the effect get attenuated and eventually go away.

0:38:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's why the database was blowing my mind so much, because I thought of those disciplinary proceedings as more like criminal justice than a fan reaction something, like a canceling or whatever. That not accurate? Like, what on the spectrum you just described, going back to that database of disciplinary, actions related to university, staff, or I don't know if it was always professors or what it was, but my feeling was that that would be more like criminal justice-y on that spectrum, you know, because it's like, hey, this is your workplace, you've done a bad thing, what's the kind of the punishment for that? You still found that effect in that though.

0:40:30 Joe: We did.

0:40:31 Jake: It's a little tricky in the sense that oftentimes it's easy to kind of confuse a person's profession with their personal livelihood and personal experiences and things. So when you fire someone, you know, most relevantly, that's them losing their job, but it also has a bunch of personal ramifications. So, you know, in in the database that we've been talking about, the punishments range from, again, being fired to being demoted to having honors revoked to simply receiving like a professional warning or reprimand. So all of them fall within this like kind of professional umbrella. But you could still argue that they vary a little bit in the degree to which they have these personal elements.

0:41:16 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah. Now I'm just digesting. This is truly so fascinating. I have a million questions I want to ask. Well, make sure that I didn't derail you guys so hard that you didn't get to explain like a core thing to the research that I kind, you know, distracted you from?

0:41:28 Jake: Yeah.

0:41:30 Joe: That's great. Great questions. We've covered the main points, go for it.

0:41:34 Thomas: Oh, okay, good. Well then I'm going to pepper you with more weird questions. Just wanted to make sure that I wasn't keeping you guys from talking about it. No, it's so interesting. I'm just trying to, again, trying to understand this better. If there's a hypothetical of like, let's see, you've got an artist of some kind and you've Got a scientist. On one level, there's sort of like a no duh to this, which is like, well, your average artist, the thing you like about them is more them. Like, I think, you know, we've kind of talked about that. Like, they're more in their work in general. You know, you're not, whoever invented the microwave, I don't know. It doesn't matter. I'll still use a microwave every day. And doesn't, using the microwave doesn't make me think like, oh man, Steve microwave, that guy sucked, but I still use his product every day,

0:41:42 Joe: All right.

0:42:22 Thomas: You You know, versus, often artists' work that you're consuming, it's literally their voice sometimes, literally them singing or them writing or them, they're just so much more in it. You're being reminded of the person. So on some level, there's a bit of a, you kind of no duh to that. Like you wouldn't expect anything different. But what's been so interesting is to talk about some of these other, consequences imposed it still feels like there is that effect. Like people are not separating and I'm just wanting to dig into that a little more, you know, but it still also feels really hard to tease apart. Tell you what, are there more of the kind of the hypotheticals that you could take us through that showed the effect? Effect?

0:42:58 Joe: We can, let me just add though, maybe kind of put a pin in this, because I think one of the things that you're bringing up, which is really interesting, something that we've talked about as kind of a potential future direction is how some of these other factors might influence moral decoupling and these kinds of professional consequences, even within artists, right? Right. So you talked about how, you know, if you hear a person's voice right there, their kind of personality is like embodied in in the work to a certain extent. Or think of think of an actor whose face you see on the screen.

0:43:25 Thomas: Right, yeah.

0:43:30 Joe: Right. So there's variability along that dimension, just how salient the person is in their work, which isn't necessarily completely an art versus science distinction that could vary across, you different types of creativity, um, that don't track art versus science, so just wanted to kind of flag that because I thought it was interesting, um, that you mentioned, uh, as far as these scenarios go, um, you know, as Jake mentioned, all of our studies, uh, tried to make our stimuli as realistic as possible, um, and so we, you know, we created these news articles, um, that described a faculty member and gave some flavor to it. So we used real news articles as models for this to try to get a sense of how these types of incidents get reported. And we described the investigation that had taken place, the conclusion that was reached. Reached. So we did that in each of our studies and of followed the methodology that I mentioned with measuring boycotts.

0:43:46 Thomas: Sure.

0:44:27 Jake: Quick, you know, I totally agree when you can see the artist in their face, right, or the actor that is going to impart a sense of connection to the work in a way that, you know, a piece of writing wouldn't. With scientists, though, you know, there's also popular press books that they write. And that was, you know, some of our outcomes were thinking about boycotting their books and their names on the title and you're reading about them in the first person. And, you know, I think the truth of the matter is we all believe that really infuse themselves into the work, but that's not necessarily the case with nonfiction writing or biographies.

0:44:38 Thomas: Right. Sure.

0:45:03 Jake: And then you get scientists also like as much, and this I think reflects kind of the broader finding as we think of scientists being so disconnected and, you Know, not being involved in the phenomenon they uncover. But But the truth of the matter is scientists have a very biased perspective or, you know, at least unique perspective from their culture or their upbringing or their training. And that also gets imbued in the work. But we just don't really think about that as much. And because of these kind of preconceptions and what science is supposed to be and how art is supposedto be, we start to see the effect.

But you can imagine, youknow, sometimes when you think about an artist and,you know, their muse spoke to them, right? Right? It's not even them writing it. It's this like divine inspiration. And you could imagine that if you really conceptualize art in this impersonal way, they might start to look like scientists and punishing the work because you're like, well, no, they're not involved in the work. It was just kind of channeled to them. And so there are ways that you can kind of, exactly, exactly. You can play around with these a little bit and depending on kind of the ultimate delivery delivery of the

0:45:21 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:59 Thomas: It was the one-armed muse Yeah.

0:46:10 Jake: Content.

0:46:10 Thomas: That's a great point, because I think I got hung up on, like, oh, the microwave example, where it's like, you know, oh, you're just consuming their scientific output in a very non-personal way, but it sounds like that's probably not really the the typical example, Example, right? It's more like someone who's written some papers and that kind of thing. Because if it's more, like, even pop science-y stuff, I don't know, what's, – like, Malcolm Gladwell or something. He's not really a scientist. Is. But if it's something like that, then I can imagine the distinction in my mind should almost disappear, you because it's like that person really is just an author. You know, if it is that kind of scientific output, what do think about that? Does that happen or does the effect hold?

0:46:46 Jake: Yeah, the effect still seems to emerge. I mean, we use literal dependent variables or outcome variables that are like, how likely would you be to like take their books off the bookshelves? And again, you know, kind of returning to our tennis example, this was just a guy who was writing books on how to play the game well. And you know he was either an artist of the game or a scientist of the game.

0:47:14 Jake: And the effect came out there. So, mm-hmm.

0:47:13 Thomas: That's truly such an interesting finding. Wow. Fascinating on that. I really really love that. That is just so funny. Just the description. Wow. So if you had someone like, I don't know, the Freakonomics guy or something, right? That feels like, is it Dubner or the other one? I can't remember. But whoever's the actual economist, feels like okay, that is a science-y thing. That's an academic Thing. Okay, I'll put it this way. Economics, economist doesn't seem like an artist. You would think like that would be more on the other end of the spectrum. But the thing he's doing is writing kind of pop books that really does feel a lot like that could just be your favorite author. And so I guess I'm wondering, do you think you would find? Maybe you had examples like that. I don't know. But what do you think you would find if you ask people, how likely are you to boycott these books? And they're both authors, but they're just in different disciplines. What do you think you would find in that case?

0:47:30 Jake: Mm-hmm, mm, mm.

0:48:14 Joe: Think that those kinds of examples are the kind of in-between ones, like the tennis coach a bit, where, you if both people that we were comparing are kind of, know, presenting scientific content but in an more artistic, artistic way, you know, adding some flavor but trying to present empirical information, then we would expect something in between. But what I think is really interesting about that is that it highlights how, you know, this varies and there are actually opportunities for professionals and creative people to try to emphasize one or the other approach and to think about how personal they want their work to be and to take a more artistic approach if they want to infused in their work and to be visible to consumers when they're using the work, to take a more detached scientific approach if they don't want that.

0:49:07 Joe: So I think it might depend just on that spectrum, that kind of middle range. What's being emphasized more? Is there more of kind of idiosyncrasy and individual creativity that's coming through, or is the person trying to emphasize really universal scientific empirical empirical, um, facts in the way that they are communicating. So I think there's a style element to it in those middle ranges that becomes really important.

0:49:31 Thomas: Yeah. Love this. This has been so fascinating. The time has flown by. I want to ask you, what areas of study are you looking at with this? What do you want to do next? I mean, this is just so fascinating, is there more you're going to do, more research planned along these lines?

0:49:47 Jake: You know, one topic that we are interested in and have, you know, kind of debated is like, well, what happens if the artist or scientist does a good act? They save a child from drowning. Does all of a sudden their work become more valuable?

According to what we've seen, the artist's work should benefit, but the scientist's really shouldn't get much of a boon so we've kind of been thinking about the flip side on there and just kind of other forms of how this might play out so Joe mentioned earlier about, you know, kind of the very popular question of when can you separate the art from the artist.

So if we look specifically within artists, what are the factors that influence whether or not you're like, we need a band that work, or nah, it's okay, we can keep listening. And so kind of further digging into to that element, because I think it has great, not only commercial consequences, but also just like philosophical ones about whose work we should still continue to uphold and listen to or enjoy versus those who we should just say, nope, we'll wait for some other artist to kind of fill that hole.

0:50:49 Joe: Completely agree. Yeah. We've been, we've been chatting about some of those potential contributors within the art domain. Um, and Thomas, I've, you know, you kind of mentioned one of the ones that we've Been talking about before, which is like the, do you hear the voice or do you see the face and, um. Those kinds of characteristics, but, but there could also be other ones that are and could also be really important.

0:50:54 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I hate to go back to a question that I feel like I meant to ask and didn't, but just in case, do you feel like there's any element of, because you've talked about separating the art from the artist. And I realize I'm also been thinking about it in terms of like a personal feeling of betrayal. Do you think that's part of it at all? Like I just feel more betrayed by an artist that does something wrong versus a scientist. Is that anywhere in the effects or the experiments or anything?

0:51:34 Jake: That's a great question. I mean, one of the things we wondered early on was like, well, is it because an artist is more in tune with their emotions that, you know, they should know better? How could they be doing this? And so you react more negatively. But what we find is that people don't think there's any difference in the wrongness of the act. Then when the scientist does the sexual misconduct or the artist does the social misconduct, people say it's equally bad.

0:51:59 Jake: Yet you still see these differences in terms of the consequences for their professional work.

0:51:43 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh. That's a great point.

0:52:07 Joe: To add, I do think what you're saying, Tom, is there could be that go beyond the punishments that we're talking about that might differ in different ways. So if you're more attached to artwork than scientific work, maybe you'd just have a more negative emotional reaction to it. But if that kind of thing is happening, it seems to be happening alongside this other difference that we're showing. But I do also think that that could be interesting to look at, you know, how uh the personal connections that people have with artists might create a sense of betrayal, um, or you have distinct consequences that aren't as common for science.

0:52:43 Thomas: Well this has been so fascinating. I'm really looking forward to those areas of further study that you mentioned. We are going to keep an eye on that. I always give guests the chance to plug anything they want to. Is there anything you want to send people to? You social media, website, anything, anything you want or a call to action of any kind.

0:53:00 Jake: I have a website, everydaypsych.com, where I cover a lot of these kind of topics, talking about how behavioral science can be used to better understand and enhance everyday life. So if you like what you heard and you want to hear more, everydaypssych.com is the place for you.

0:53:15 Joe: Check out Jake's website, lots of great content there about psychology. I also have a website, which is joesiev.com, J-O-E-S-I-E-V.com. You can find more about my research there. Read this paper and learn about my other work.

0:53:30 Thomas: Love it. Thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. Really fascinating.

0:53:33 Joe: Thank you. Really appreciate it.

0:53:34 Jake: Thank you this is a great opportunity for opportunity.

0:53:53 Thomas: Was the one-armed muse