But how much punishment do the perpetrators get — and how many people I think so they should receive — it does not depend only on the seriousness of their actions. It can also be related to their field.
Artists receive harsher professional punishment for misconduct than scientists, a new Kellogg study finds, because people have a hard time mentally separating artists’ work from their moral (or bad) behavior.
That is, people can “morally disconnect” a scientist from their research — but not an artist from their art. The result applies even if one is not an artist but is considered more artistic.
“Who are we willing to ‘cancel’ versus let slide?” says Jacob Tiny, assistant professor of marketing at Kellogg and co-author of the study. “If you come across as more scientific, you may face less severe professional consequences for misconduct, as people are more willing to separate the work from the person.”
Art—but not science—is seen as an extension of the self
Previous research has shown that, in general, the less we morally decouple someone’s work from their personal behavior, the harsher the consequences for wrongdoing we want to see. This previous work examined how moral disengagement affects perceptions of professional athletes and politicians, which led Teeny and Siev to question how scientists and artists might be perceived.
In search of this theoretical understanding, the researchers created a study in which participants judged two different perpetrators—an artist and a scientist—who had engaged in the same type of misconduct.
For this experiment, 567 participants read a news article about a prominent academic artist or a prominent academic scientist who had committed sexual misconduct. Participants then indicated their support for different consequences the professor might face, including boycotting his work, having his books removed from bookstores, and being prevented from speaking on campuses.
Participants also reported whether the perpetrator’s actions changed their appreciation of their work and whether reports such as this must affect views of his work—measures researchers used to show whether participants could “morally decouple” the perpetrator’s behavior from his work.
Although both news articles had identical details about misconduct, survey participants advocated harsher professional consequences for the artist than the scientist. They also reported that their evaluation of the artist’s work had changed more drastically.
“People had a hard time separating the artist’s work from the artist,” says Teeny.
But Teeny and Siev weren’t yet fully convinced that moral disconnection was the only thing going on—perhaps the participants just felt that science is more important than art (and therefore, that scientists deserve more leniency). In a society where government funding for Health sciences are 50 times more than humanities spendingit’s possible that people are more willing to give scientists a pass.
So, they asked the participants about the value of the work of the artist and the scientist. However, “even when one controlled for it, it didn’t explain this effect,” says Teeny.
“We knew we were onto something big”
“After we did the first study looking at artists versus scientists, we thought, ‘Oh, wow,'” says Teeny. “The effect was so powerful. We had to understand it more theoretically and understand its implications in the real world.”
To examine these real-world consequences, Teeny and Siev consulted the Academic Sexual Misconduct Database, which has compiled information on four decades of sexual misconduct research at US universities.
They focused their analysis on 619 surveys for which the faculty member’s academic field and survey outcome were known. The punishments these scholars faced ranged from receiving a warning to being banned from leadership to being fired.
Since there is no independent system for naming a field as art or science, nor for rating penalties, the researchers conducted several experiments in which they asked participants to rate each field, such as philosophy, psychology, or chemistry, on a scale of 1 (art) to 7 (science). Other participants rated the severity of professional consequences received by the academics in the data set.
The researchers found several factors that affected the severity of punishment, including seniority: senior faculty (full professors, department chairs, deans, etc.) faced lighter professional consequences than junior professors, lecturers, and assistants across the board.
And as the researchers noted in the first study, whether the field was perceived as more artistic or more scientific also significantly predicted the severity of career consequences. Professors in fields considered more artistic faced harsher punishments than those in fields considered more scientific for the same type of offense.
An artistic coach faces harsher punishment than a scientific one
The researchers found that this phenomenon even extended to professionals within a discipline, depending on whether their work was considered more artistic or scientific.
Participants were recruited to read a news article about a tennis coach who had also written several books. Some read that the coach had an “artistic intuition.” others read that he had a “scientific approach.” Participants then read a second article that said the coach had defrauded the government and his co-investors out of money.
Once again, participants advocated harsher professional consequences for the “artistic” coach than the “scientific” coach.
“Even if you’re not an artist or a scientist specifically, if you and your career consider yourself to require an artistic eye, you’ll face more professional consequences,” says Teeny.
Keep the moral disconnect in mind when you do punishment
Teeny believes the study offers important lessons for leaders in academia and beyond.
For example, managers overseeing teams that include both “creatives” and “quants” should be mindful of the effects of moral disengagement and ensure that punishment for misconduct is meted out fairly.
“Supervisors need to have that mindset to hold ‘scientific’ employees accountable for their behavior,” he says.
