[EL] Interesting Research on Disclosure in Non-Electoral Setting

[Daniel Schuman]

I thought a key point in the Boston Globe article was on how to improve
disclosure:

"Sah’s research, meanwhile, points to a number of ways disclosures can be
improved. She found that people were more likely to discount biased advice
from doctors if disclosures were made by a third party, if they were not
made face-to-face, or if patients had a “cooling off” period to reconsider
their decisions."

Research by other behavior scientists makes a similar point. I wrote about
it here, http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/03/07/trust-me/, but here's
the short version:

Politicians, lobbyists, and many others are required to file reports on
everything from travel
expenses<http://www.senate.gov/legislative/Public_Disclosure/Rule_35_Travel.htm>
 to campaign finances <http://www.fec.gov/disclosure.shtml> to conflicts of
interest <http://www.usoge.gov/ethics_officials.aspx>. In many instances,
government devotes few or no resources to enforcing those rules. Enforcement
should be stepped up, but in this era of tight budgets, it is fiscally
prudent to do everything we can to make sure that the filings are accurate
in the first place.

In Prof. Ariely’s experiments, the trick to improving compliance came from
requiring participants to sign a short ethics statement before starting the
task. By contrast, many governmental forms have either an ethics pledge as
the final step in completing a form, or don’t have any such requirement at
all. A minor change in these forms could have a major effect on completeness
and accuracy.

It is a very interesting line of inquiry.

Daniel

Daniel Schuman
Director | Advisory Committee on Transparency<http://transparencycaucus.org/>
Policy Counsel | The Sunlight Foundation <http://sunlightfoundation.com/>
o: 202-742-1520 x 273 | c: 202-713-5795 | @danielschuman
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On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 2:33 AM, RuthAlice Anderson <
ruthalice.anderson at comcast.net> wrote:

> While this article is not looking at the effect of disclosure on the
> behavior of electeds or voters, I thought it might still interest Election
> Law readers.
>
> Deeply Conflicted - Boston Globe -
>
> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/05/15/deeply_conflicted/?page=full
>
> A few excerpts:
>
> But recent research by experimental psychologists is uncovering some
> uncomfortable truths: Disclosure doesn’t solve problems the way we think it
> does, and in fact it can actually backfire. Coming clean about conflicts of
> interest, they find, can promote less ethical behavior by advisers. And
> though most of us assume we’d cast a skeptical eye on advice from a doctor,
> stockbroker, or politician with a personal stake in our decision, disclosure
> about conflicts may actually lead us to make worse choices.
> ....
>
> No surprise there: People with a conflict gave biased advice to benefit
> themselves. But the twist came when the researchers required the experts to
> disclose this conflict to the people they were advising. Instead of the
> transparency encouraging more responsible behavior in the experts, it
> actually caused them to inflate their numbers even more. In other words,
> disclosing the conflict of interest?—?far from being a solution?—?actually
> made advisers act in a more self-serving way.
>
> “We call it moral licensing,” Moore says. “After having behaved honestly
> and virtuously, you then feel licensed to indulge in being a little bit
> bad.” Other recent findings on ethical behavior, he says, show that people
> compensate for virtuous acts with vice, and vice versa. “People behave as if
> they have a moral ‘set point,’?” Moore says. Indeed, it appeared that
> disclosing a conflict of interest gave people a green light to behave
> unethically, as if they were absolved from having to consider others’
> interests.
> ....
>
> Sunita Sah, a researcher at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, has
> conducted experiments focusing on doctor-patient interactions, in which a
> doctor prescribes a medication but discloses a financial interest in the
> company that makes the drug. As expected, most people said such a disclosure
> would decrease their trust in the advice. But in practice, oddly enough,
> people were actually more likely to comply with the advice when the doctor’s
> bias was disclosed. Sah says that people feel an increased pressure to take
> the advice to avoid insinuating that they distrust their doctor.
>
>
> It's thought-provoking and I wonder if it plays out the same way in
> election law. Does disclosing financial contributions give electeds moral
> license to more brazenly serve the interests of donors? Does disclosure make
> voters resist being influenced by that disclosure?  I would love to know.
>
> RuthAlice
>
>
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