[MUSIC] Welcome to this fourth video of week three, of our course on unethical decision making. In the last video, we have argued that language can drive ethical blindness. In this, video we will elaborate on this idea and share evidence from various scientific disciplines with you that support our claim. In this session, you will learn about research in various disciplines that demonstrate the power of language over decisions. You will understand in particular how the selection of metaphors and labels influences what we believe and do. And you will learn that language is not just a powerful instrument for the manipulation of perceptions, but also for revealing manipulation and creating mutual understanding. In our last video, we made a very strong claim. The corruption of behavior might start with, or might get reinforced by the corruption of language. It is easier to engage in bribing if you call it facility payment, or an accounting fraud if you call it creative accounting. Language can distort our thinking. We have argued that narrow framing, which drives ethical blindness, is promoted by the use of aggressive language. For example, when managers speak as if they were in a war with their competitors. If competition is perceived as war, it requires a behavior appropriate to the special situation. We illustrated this by the story of Lehman Brothers and it's CEO. But Lehman Brothers is not an exception. Of course, it is well known since millennia that language is very powerful when it comes to influencing others. Rhetoric was a key domain of philosophy for ancient philosophers like Aristotle who knew that what you say can be less important than how you say it. One of the key abilities of great leaders is to find the appropriate words to craft strong motivational and visionary messages. Just listen to Martin Luther King's powerful I Have A Dream speech of 1963. Or Barack Obama's Yes We Can election victory speech of 2008, and you understand the motivational power of words. Or read Shakespeare's Imagine speech of Marcus Antonius to the people of Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Language can influence what others think and eventually do. What we claim here, however, goes deeper. Language is a representation of thinking, and it goes deep into our belief systems that shape who we are and what we do, not just ad hoc when we hear an inspirational speech, but constantly. We build imaginary worlds in our minds and then we enact them. Depending on the metaphors we choose, these worlds can be corrupted. Coming back to our critique of war language, this kind of verbal aggression's widely spread in corporations. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, used war metaphors when communicating with shareholders and employees. War rhetorics appears often in markets characterized by strong competition. The cutthroat competition. It appears in hostile takeovers, or in emerging markets with high uncertainty. Textbooks for strategic management use war metaphors. In fact, corporate strategy emerges from an adaptation of military strategy. Key approaches like Michael Porter's approach for strategic management are based on the assumption that companies are in a constant struggle for domination, fighting not only against their competitors but against governments, customers, employees, suppliers. It is the nightmarish situation of a war of everyone against everyone that Thomas Hobbes describes which builds the context for management strategy. And war metaphors promote a negative, even a hostile perception of others. Neuroscientists like Alice Flaherty have shown that metaphors create a powerful physiological connection between reason and emotions in our brain. Metaphors can make one feel. The give, as Flaherty says, emotional resonance to abstract ideas. Making someone feel is often the pre-condition for making someone act. The cognitive linguist George Lakoff has argued that the purpose of a metaphor is to inference patterns from one domain to another. And war metaphors make an inference between the practice of warfare and the practice of management. They implicitly or explicitly structure our understanding and our evaluation of managerial decision making, along the thinking of army leaders in war situations. Metaphors, therefore, create frames. We have talked about framing already on several occasions in this course. Here, we focus on the linguistic aspect of it. In this sense, framing can be understood as the use of text for the promotion of particular perspectives, evaluations or facts. The formulation of a statement thus consciously or unconsciously manipulates perception and interpretation of a statement by particular audiences. This has been called framing effect, and psychologist like Daniel Kahneman have widely examined it. While metaphors are very powerful in putting our mind on a particular track, framing effects always result from seemingly harmless decisions on how to name or label something. One interesting example of such a framing effect can be found in the discussion on global warming. While 97% of all scientists agree on the evidence of man-made climate change, the public opinion in some countries is split. Many people deny the phenomenon. Whether we believe in global warming or not, does not depend on the exposure to scientific evidence. It depends on how the discussion resonates with our values and beliefs. If there's a contradiction between our beliefs and scientific evidence, we stick to the beliefs not the evidence. And what is the role of language in this game? You might have noticed that I used two different terms here. Global warming, and climate change. Research shows that people react differently to these words, depending on what they believe. The term global warming is preferred by those who deny the phenomenon, because it somehow seems to neutralize the fear that the word climate change creates. If you want to convince people who are torn between believing and denying the phenomenon, as a denier you will use the word global warming, as a believer, climate change. Our beliefs reveal themselves in the language we use. They are embedded in what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein calls language games, and his colleague Wilfrid Sellars calls battery of concepts. Beliefs about global warming build on beliefs about God or science. Our perception of the world comes from inferences of beliefs leading to new beliefs. And all this is expressed in our own speech acts. As the philosopher Richard Rorty has argued, we act in a world with our own particular vocabulary. He calls this a final vocabulary. In his words, all human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise for our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words, in which we tell, sometimes prospectively, and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. Beyond philosophical speculation, there is, indeed, plenty of scientific evidence for the power of vocabularies over decisions. Let me give you a few examples. As argued, the use of a single metaphor can guide the way people think about social phenomenon. Stanford psychologist, Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky have demonstrated this. They confronted participants with crime statistics depending on whether they framed crime as a beast that is lurking in the neighborhood, or a virus that has infected the neighborhood. Participants reacted with different propositions with regards to potential solutions. Those who heard that crime is a beast, were more likely to propose law and order solutions. Those who heard that crime is a virus rather supported social reform measures. In another experiment, Harvard law professor was asking students what they were willing to pay to insure against the risk. For one group, he framed the risk as dying of cancer. For a second group, he argued that the death would be very gruesome and intensely painful, as the cancer eats away the internal organs of the body. It comes as no surprise. Participants of group two were willing to pay much more for the insurance. Research shows that people smoke more cigarettes if you call the cigarettes, light. And teenagers smoke more, not less, if they are told that smoking is for adults and dangerous. When fast food companies drown customers in tons of incomprehensible nutritional information, customers react by evaluating the food as rather healthy. Genocide in Germany and in Rwanda, is strongly connected to the creation of labels that highlight differences and invents threats, where such threats and differences do not exist. Tutsis and Hutus, Arians and Jews. Labels like this create the inside outside perception, that is an important first step in the process of dehumanizing others. And on to the second step relates to language. Psychologist Albert Bandura showed that an escalation of violence is strongly connected to the use of dehumanizing language with regard to the victims. Once they are dehumanized, they are no longer human beings but obstacles, animals, filth, verms. And independent from our opinion of global warming, our general perception of sustainability. The debate around sustainability. Will the with the metaphors we grab when we talk about nature. Is it a machine we can use and manipulate? Is it a living system, web of life with delicate complex feedback loops? Is it our mother? Is it God's creation intended to serve us? To test the power of words we're thinking, just look at the following formulation. I assume most of you have already driven a car, maybe you own one, and you certainly have an opinion about driving. Here comes the sentence. Due to technological progress we could all sit in self-driving cars, soon. Traffic systems will be developed around such cars. This will reduce the human risk. Millions of lives will be saved. How do you react to that? Positively? Of change? Let me rephrase it. Due to technological progress we could all sit in self-driving cars, soon. Traffic systems will be developed around such cars. We will lose our autonomy as drivers. Machines take control over our cars. What now? You still like it? Or does your skepticism grow? Self-driving cars are a great invention, but they come with a big change that deeply influences our beliefs and values. If you want to convince someone that this change is bad, let the person imagine that you are controlled by a machine, and that your freedom disappears. Richard Rorty described this as the most important philosophical discovery of our time, and he called it the linguistic turn. Language is not just a neutral tool we use to understand reality. It profoundly influences and shapes our reality. According to Rorty, we do not advance our understanding of reality by looking at the world outside in order to find a timeless truth. We better try to understand how we use language to make sense of reality and create reality in particular historic contexts. French post-modern philosophers like Michel Foucault have also advocated a linguistic turn in philosophy and started to critically deconstruct the historical, grown meaning of terms such as madness, discipline or punishment. Foucault demonstrated that our understanding of those terms is not neutral. These terms do not describe an objective reality but result from a social construction over time. And their meaning promotes particular interests now and then. This is very similar to the ideas we already discussed around George Orwell's Dystopian novel 1984 in our previous video. Language, however, is not only a means to distort meaning, and to manipulate others, but also a powerful means for revealing manipulation, removing distortion, and to find common grounds. Ethics thus, has also taken a linguistic turn. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas has argued that language has the in built function of convincing others of our arguments and the authenticity of what we claim. He calls this approach discourse ethics. Decision-making, according to him, should not result from isolated thinking about the right principles, like Foucan of all the utilitarians. Instead, it should result from the intersubjective exchange of arguments in a context where the inference of power and manipulative techniques is reduced. And ideally, the better argument will convince all participants of a discourse. Here, language is seen as the source, maybe the only remaining source of ethical decision making in a world where we do no longer share the same traditions, religion, way of life, but nonetheless have to organize our living together in a way that violence gets avoided. So let me conclude this session. Frames are constructed linguistically. There is strong evidence from research in psychology, law and neurosciences that linguistically constructed frames deeply impact what we do if they resonate strongly with our deep beliefs and values. Metaphors and labels are particularly strong frame makers. Language is at the same time the best source for critically examining manipulation and finding common ethical ground with others. Thank you for watching. [MUSIC]
