Communication and Ethics

Here is an interesting case that would work well in any communication class dealing with ethics. 

In Sunday's New York Times, Chuck Klosterman, the Ethicist, was asked if it was ethical for a beer company to bottle the exact same beer but package it in two different type bottles with different labels, one “regular” and one “premium.” The answer from the ethicist was that this was not unethical since the brewer didn’t say these beers were different; it was left it up to the customer to make the inference.  “It only becomes unethical,” says Klosterman, “if the brewer claimed the premium beverage was literally different.” This is nonsense, IMHO. The brewer did say, claim, communicate that the beers were different by the different bottles and the different labels. The label “premium” means that the product is different from one that is not labeled “premium.”  To limit communication to words seems a bit naïve and leaves us with a conclusion that is intuitively incorrect and unacceptable. This was clearly an act of deception—the intention of the brewer was to fool the buyer—but this goes unrecognized and unidentified because the way in which communication works is misunderstood.  

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Power, ethics, and chairs

 

Here’s an interesting study I found in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review (November 2013). It should prove useful in nonverbal communication but really in any course in which ethics, power, or environment are considered. In brief, the study explored the relationship between the size of one’s chair (which allows for body expansion or encourages contraction) and the tendency to engage in unethical behavior. For example, random selected participants were placed in large or small chairs. All the participants were purposely overpaid but 78% of those in expansive postures kept the extra overpayment while only 38% of those in contractive postures did. Well, there is much more to the study which you can read at http://www.andyjyap.com/#!reserach/cm8a--thewebsite of the lead author, Andy Yap. The HBR discussion, however, is also interesting because it’s a part of their feature, “Defend Your Research” and so there’s a brief 2-page interview with Yap in which he explains some of the implications and limitations of the study.

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