![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgtI've been a bit busy, sorry this is late:
When Death Is on the Docket, the Moral Compass Wavers
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, February 7, 2006
Burl Cain is a religious man who believes it is only for God to say when a person's number is up. But in his job as warden and chief executioner at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Mr. Cain is the one who gives the order to start a lethal injection, and he has held condemned inmates' hands as they died.
He does it, he said in an interview, because capital punishment "is the law of the land."
"It's something we do whether we're for it or against it, and we try to make the process as humane as possible," he said, referring to himself and others on the execution team.
But he concedes, "The issue is coping, how we cope with it."
Common wisdom holds that people have a set standard of morality that never wavers. Yet studies of people who do unpalatable things, whether by choice, or for reasons of duty or economic necessity, find that people's moral codes are more flexible than generally understood. To buffer themselves from their own consciences, people often adjust their moral judgments in a process some psychologists call moral disengagement, or moral distancing.
In recent years, researchers have determined the psychological techniques most often used to disengage, and for the first time they have tested them in people working in perhaps the most morally challenging job short of soldiering, staffing a prison execution team.
The results of this and other studies suggest that a person's moral judgment can shift quickly, in anticipation of an unpalatable act, or slowly and unconsciously.
Moral disengagement "is where all the action is," said Albert Bandura, a professor of psychology at Stanford and an expert on the psychology of moral behavior. "It's in our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards, and it helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next."
The crude codes of behavior that evolved to hold early human societies together — taboos against killing, against stealing — would have been psychologically suffocating if people did not have some way to let themselves off the hook in extreme situations, some experts argue. Survival sometimes required brutal acts; human sacrifice was commonplace, as were executions.
The innate human ability to disconnect morally has made it hard for researchers to find an association between people's stated convictions and their behavior: preachers can commit sexual crimes; prostitutes may live otherwise exemplary lives; well-trained soldiers can commit atrocities.
Investigators can identify the precise kinds of thoughts that allow people to do things that defy their personal codes of ethics.
Now, psychologists at Stanford have shown that prison staff members who work on execution teams exhibit high levels of moral disengagement — and the closer they are to the killing, the higher their level of disengagement goes. The trailblazing research grew out of a high school project.
In the late 1990's, Michael Osofsky, then a teenage student in New Orleans, began interviewing prison guards at the penitentiary in nearby Angola. His father, a psychiatrist who consulted with the prison, collaborated, as did the warden, Mr. Cain.
By the time Mr. Osofsky graduated from Stanford in 2003, he had conducted in-depth interviews with 246 prison workers from penitentiaries, including Angola, in three states. They included guards who administer the lethal shots, counselors who provide support during the execution, members of the strap-down team, and guards not involved in executions. The people on the execution teams "come together, do the execution, then go back to their regular jobs" in the prison, Mr. Osofsky, now on a fellowship in Asia, said in a telephone interview. "They never really talked about this part of their job, even with their families; even with each other."
Working with Mr. Cain, Dr. Bandura and Philip Zimbardo, another Stanford psychologist, Mr. Osofsky administered a moral disengagement scale to the execution team members and the guards not on the execution team.
This questionnaire asked workers to rate how much they approved or disapproved of 19 statements, including: "The Bible teaches that murders must be avenged: life for a life, eye for an eye"; "Nowadays the death penalty is done in ways that minimize the suffering"; and "Because of the nature of their crimes, murderers have lost the right to live."
In an analysis of the answers published late last year in the journal Law and Human Behavior, the psychologists reported that members of the execution team were far more likely than guards not on the team to agree that the inmates had lost important human qualities; to cite the danger that "they can escape and kill again;" and to consider the cost to society of caring for violent criminals.
The team members were also more likely than other guards to favor religious support for the sentence: an eye for an eye.
"You have to sanctify lethal means: this is the most powerful technique" of disengagement from a shared human moral code, said Dr. Bandura, who has expressed serious moral reservations about capital punishment. "If you can't convince people of the sanctity of the greater cause, they are not going to carry the job out as effectively."
Execution teams are organized so as to divide the grisly tasks, enhancing what researchers call a diffusion of responsibility. A medical technician provides the lethal drugs; a team of guards straps the inmate down, with each guard securing only one part of the body; another guard administers the drugs. "No one person can say he is entirely responsible for the death," Mr. Osofsky said.
Firing squads draw on this same idea. Everyone in the squad fires but no one can be sure whose shot was deadly.
The level of disengagement, as measured by the scale, was about as high in prison workers who participated in one execution as in those who had been party to more than 15, the study found. This suggests that, while the job may get easier over time, "moral disengagement is an enabler, rather than merely the result of performing repeated executions," the authors conclude.
The pattern was strikingly different in members of the execution support staff, particularly the counselors working with the families of inmates and victims.
These staff members were highly morally engaged when they first joined the execution staff, deeply sympathetic to everyone involved, including the condemned. "I'm in a helping profession, but there isn't a damn thing I can do for these guys," one of them said to Mr. Osofsky. "I hate it, but I do it. I am required to do it."
That ambivalence seemed to affect the counselors' moral judgment over time, the study found. After they had been involved in 10 executions, the counselors' scores on the disengagement scale almost matched the executioners'.
The finding stands as a caution to the millions of people who work in the service of organizations whose motives they mistrust, psychologists say: shifts in moral judgment are often unconscious, and can poison the best instincts and intentions.
"This really gets at the idea of people working in corporate structures that are involved in selling, say, weapons or tobacco, and saying, 'Well, I just keep the books,' " when they disapprove of the business, said Susan Ravenscroft, a professor of accounting at Iowa State University in Ames who has studied business ethics.
Moral distancing can also be seen in the language of war, politics and corporate scandal. Pilots euphemistically "service a target" rather than bomb it; enemies are dehumanized as "gooks," "hajis" or infidels. Politicians and chief executives facing indictments deflect questions about ethical lapses by acknowledging that "mistakes were made," or that they were "out of the loop."
These remarks reflect internal methods of self-protection, as well as public evasions, research suggests.
Yet it is in the mundane corner-cutting of everyday life that moral disengagement may be most common and insidious, and least conscious.
In a 2004 study, professors at Iowa State University and the University of Arkansas tested the moral judgment of 47 college students who had cheated on a take-home exam, a complex accounting problem.
Many of the students found a solution to the problem online — posted by another professor who was unaware it was part of an exam — and reproduced the solution as their own, though it used techniques they had not yet learned. Others had clearly collaborated, which their professor had explicitly forbidden. Another 17 students had not cheated, as far as their teacher could determine.
The professor threw out the test scores and got permission from the students to ask about their behavior. The cheaters' scores on a standard test of moral judgment did not correlate at all with their level of plagiarism or collaboration. On the contrary, it was the most dishonest male students who scored highest on the morals test.
"Clearly, this is not what you want to find in a test of moral judgment," said Dr. Ravenscroft, a co-author of the study, with Charles Shrader of Iowa State and Tim West of the University of Arkansas.
Only by conducting in-depth interviews with students about their behavior did the researchers begin to see clear, familiar patterns. One was displacing the blame: "I think it's hard for people not to look at the answer manual if it's available," said one student. "Maybe you should have taken the problem off so people wouldn't be tempted."
Another was justifying the behavior by comparison: "I really don't consider working with another person that unethical," one student commented. "Taking and copying answers from the key was highly unethical." Many students "rationalized cheating behavior as a necessary defense to the cheating of others," the researchers concluded in their analysis, to appear this year in the Business and Professional Ethics Journal. "Yet in an extreme example of moral exclusion, none of the students discussed this impact on others."
Recognizing these kinds of selfish evasions in oneself is hardly proof of moral collapse, psychologists say. Rather, they say, moral disengagement is evidence that a sound moral sensibility is trying to assert itself, warning against a situation it finds suspect. As a rule people don't like to cheat or lie, studies find, and they are extremely reluctant to inflict pain on others, no matter the circumstances.
And moral engagement is dynamic. Once people stop doing what is consciously or unconsciously upsetting them, the research suggests, they engage their conscience more fully.
That is, if they have the luxury to walk away.
"I remember the one execution I attended, there was this strange heaviness in the air all day," Mr. Osofsky said. "These guards you knew were somber and detached, keeping to themselves. This wasn't something they gloried in or looked forward to at all. They didn't really seem like themselves."
Really? The Claim: Mixing Types of Alcohol Makes You Sick
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR, The New York Times, February 7, 2006
THE FACTS Too much alcohol of any kind is never a good idea, but some people claim that mixing beer and liquor, particularly in that order, can also be a hazard. Some even know it by rhyme. "Beer before liquor, never been sicker," goes one old saying.
While it is not entirely clear how this claim started, experts say it may stem from the way certain alcoholic beverages are digested. Carbonated drinks like beer and sparkling wines, for example, tend to irritate the lining of the stomach, increasing the rate of alcohol absorption. Starting with beer and then adding wine or liquor may conceivably lead to intoxication more quickly.
But in reality, that has little effect, said Dr. Roshini Rajapaksa, a gastroenterologist at the New York University School of Medicine. What matters most, she said, is the amount of alcohol consumed and whether it is combined with any food, which slows absorption and minimizes sickness.
There is also another explanation for the popular "beer before liquor" claim, said Carlton K. Erickson, director of the Addiction Science Research and Education Center at the University of Texas College of Pharmacy. "Most people do not drink a lot of beer after they've had liquor," he said.
"The pattern, more often, is that people will have beer and then move on to liquor at the end of the night, and so they think it's the liquor that made them sick," he continued. "But simply mixing the two really has nothing to do with it."
THE BOTTOM LINE It is the total quantity of alcohol consumed, not combined, that influences intoxication and sickness.
Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming Initiative
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN, The New York Times, February 8, 2006
Despite opposition from some of their colleagues, 86 evangelical Christian leaders have decided to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying "millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors."
Among signers of the statement, which will be released in Washington on Wednesday, are the presidents of 39 evangelical colleges, leaders of aid groups and churches, like the Salvation Army, and pastors of megachurches, including Rick Warren, author of the best seller "The Purpose-Driven Life."
"For most of us, until recently this has not been treated as a pressing issue or major priority," the statement said. "Indeed, many of us have required considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that climate change is a real problem and that it ought to matter to us as Christians. But now we have seen and heard enough."
The statement calls for federal legislation that would require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through "cost-effective, market-based mechanisms" — a phrase lifted from a Senate resolution last year and one that could appeal to evangelicals, who tend to be pro-business. The statement, to be announced in Washington, is only the first stage of an "Evangelical Climate Initiative" including television and radio spots in states with influential legislators, informational campaigns in churches, and educational events at Christian colleges.
"We have not paid as much attention to climate change as we should, and that's why I'm willing to step up," said Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College, an influential evangelical institution in Illinois. "The evangelical community is quite capable of having some blind spots, and my take is this has fallen into that category."
Some of the nation's most high-profile evangelical leaders, however, have tried to derail such action. Twenty-two of them signed a letter in January declaring, "Global warming is not a consensus issue." Among the signers were Charles W. Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; and Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Their letter was addressed to the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group of churches and ministries, which last year had started to move in the direction of taking a stand on global warming. The letter from the 22 leaders asked the National Association of Evangelicals not to issue any statement on global warming or to allow its officers or staff members to take a position.
E. Calvin Beisner, associate professor of historical theology at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., helped organize the opposition into a group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance. He said Tuesday that "the science is not settled" on whether global warming was actually a problem or even that human beings were causing it. And he said that the solutions advocated by global warming opponents would only cause the cost of energy to rise, with the burden falling most heavily on the poor.
In response to the critics, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Rev. Ted Haggard, did not join the 86 leaders in the statement on global warming, even though he had been in the forefront of the issue a year ago. Neither did the Rev. Richard Cizik, the National Association's Washington lobbyist, even though he helped persuade other leaders to sign the global warming initiative.
On Tuesday, Mr. Haggard, the pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, said in a telephone interview that he did not sign because it would be interpreted as an endorsement by the entire National Association of Evangelicals. But he said that speaking just for himself, "There is no doubt about it in my mind that climate change is happening, and there is no doubt about it that it would be wise for us to stop doing the foolish things we're doing that could potentially be causing this. In my mind there is no downside to being cautious."
Of those who did sign, said the Rev. Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network: "It's a very centrist evangelical list, and that was intentional. When people look at the names, they're going to say, this is a real solid group here. These leaders are not flighty, going after the latest cause. And they know they're probably going to take a little flak."
The list includes prominent black leaders like Bishop Charles E. Blake Sr. of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, the Rev. Floyd Flake of the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in New York City, and Bishop Wellington Boone of the Father's House and Wellington Boone Ministries in Norcross, Ga.; as well as Hispanic leaders like the Rev. Jesse Miranda, president of AMEN in Costa Mesa, Calif.
The evangelical leaders are meeting Wednesday with senators or their staff members concerned with legislation on energy and the environment. Their letter commends senators who last year passed a resolution by Senators Pete V. Domenici, a Republican, and Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat, both of New Mexico, which called for regulatory measures like a cap and trade program, a system in which industries would buy or trade permits to emit greenhouse gases.
In their statement, the evangelicals praised companies like BP, Shell, General Electric, Cinergy, Duke Energy and DuPont that it said "have moved ahead of the pace of government action through innovative measures" to reduce emissions.
The television spot links images of drought, starvation and Hurricane Katrina to global warming. In it, the Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of a megachurch in Longwood, Fla., says: "As Christians, our faith in Jesus Christ compels us to love our neighbors and to be stewards of God's creation. The good news is that with God's help, we can stop global warming, for our kids, our world and for the Lord."
The advertisements are to be shown in Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia.
The Evangelical Climate Initiative, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars, is being supported by individuals and foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Hewlett Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.
The initiative is one indication of a growing urgency about climate change among religious groups, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, a clearinghouse in Amherst, Mass., for environmental initiatives by religious groups.
Interfaith climate campaigns in 15 states are pressing for regional standards to reduce greenhouse gases, Mr. Gorman said. Jewish, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox leaders also have campaigns under way.
A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, February 8, 2006
George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.
Officials at NASA headquarters declined to discuss the reason for the resignation.
"Under NASA policy, it is inappropriate to discuss personnel matters," said Dean Acosta, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs and Mr. Deutsch's boss.
The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration, particularly global warming.
"As we have stated in the past, NASA is in the process of revising our public affairs policies across the agency to ensure our commitment to open and full communications," the statement from Mr. Acosta said.
The statement said the resignation of Mr. Deutsch was "a separate matter."
Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.
According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a "Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003."
Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case.
"George Carlton Deutsch III did attend Texas A&M University but has not completed the requirements for a degree," said an e-mail message from Rita Presley, assistant to the registrar at the university, responding to a query from The Times.
Repeated calls and e-mail messages to Mr. Deutsch on Tuesday were not answered.
Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.
After Mr. Anthis read about the problems at NASA, he said in an interview: "It seemed like political figures had really overstepped the line. I was just going to write some commentary on this when somebody tipped me off that George Deutsch might not have graduated."
He posted a blog entry asserting this after he checked with the university's association of former students. He reported that the association said Mr. Deutsch received no degree.
A copy of Mr. Deutsch's résumé was provided to The Times by someone working in NASA headquarters who, along with many other NASA employees, said Mr. Deutsch played a small but significant role in an intensifying effort at the agency to exert political control over the flow of information to the public.
Such complaints came to the fore starting in late January, when James E. Hansen, the climate scientist, and several midlevel public affairs officers told The Times that political appointees, including Mr. Deutsch, were pressing to limit Dr. Hansen's speaking and interviews on the threats posed by global warming.
Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch's credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue of political control of scientific information.
"He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. " The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about."
"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said. "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."
When Death Is on the Docket, the Moral Compass Wavers
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, February 7, 2006
Burl Cain is a religious man who believes it is only for God to say when a person's number is up. But in his job as warden and chief executioner at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Mr. Cain is the one who gives the order to start a lethal injection, and he has held condemned inmates' hands as they died.
He does it, he said in an interview, because capital punishment "is the law of the land."
"It's something we do whether we're for it or against it, and we try to make the process as humane as possible," he said, referring to himself and others on the execution team.
But he concedes, "The issue is coping, how we cope with it."
Common wisdom holds that people have a set standard of morality that never wavers. Yet studies of people who do unpalatable things, whether by choice, or for reasons of duty or economic necessity, find that people's moral codes are more flexible than generally understood. To buffer themselves from their own consciences, people often adjust their moral judgments in a process some psychologists call moral disengagement, or moral distancing.
In recent years, researchers have determined the psychological techniques most often used to disengage, and for the first time they have tested them in people working in perhaps the most morally challenging job short of soldiering, staffing a prison execution team.
The results of this and other studies suggest that a person's moral judgment can shift quickly, in anticipation of an unpalatable act, or slowly and unconsciously.
Moral disengagement "is where all the action is," said Albert Bandura, a professor of psychology at Stanford and an expert on the psychology of moral behavior. "It's in our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards, and it helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next."
The crude codes of behavior that evolved to hold early human societies together — taboos against killing, against stealing — would have been psychologically suffocating if people did not have some way to let themselves off the hook in extreme situations, some experts argue. Survival sometimes required brutal acts; human sacrifice was commonplace, as were executions.
The innate human ability to disconnect morally has made it hard for researchers to find an association between people's stated convictions and their behavior: preachers can commit sexual crimes; prostitutes may live otherwise exemplary lives; well-trained soldiers can commit atrocities.
Investigators can identify the precise kinds of thoughts that allow people to do things that defy their personal codes of ethics.
Now, psychologists at Stanford have shown that prison staff members who work on execution teams exhibit high levels of moral disengagement — and the closer they are to the killing, the higher their level of disengagement goes. The trailblazing research grew out of a high school project.
In the late 1990's, Michael Osofsky, then a teenage student in New Orleans, began interviewing prison guards at the penitentiary in nearby Angola. His father, a psychiatrist who consulted with the prison, collaborated, as did the warden, Mr. Cain.
By the time Mr. Osofsky graduated from Stanford in 2003, he had conducted in-depth interviews with 246 prison workers from penitentiaries, including Angola, in three states. They included guards who administer the lethal shots, counselors who provide support during the execution, members of the strap-down team, and guards not involved in executions. The people on the execution teams "come together, do the execution, then go back to their regular jobs" in the prison, Mr. Osofsky, now on a fellowship in Asia, said in a telephone interview. "They never really talked about this part of their job, even with their families; even with each other."
Working with Mr. Cain, Dr. Bandura and Philip Zimbardo, another Stanford psychologist, Mr. Osofsky administered a moral disengagement scale to the execution team members and the guards not on the execution team.
This questionnaire asked workers to rate how much they approved or disapproved of 19 statements, including: "The Bible teaches that murders must be avenged: life for a life, eye for an eye"; "Nowadays the death penalty is done in ways that minimize the suffering"; and "Because of the nature of their crimes, murderers have lost the right to live."
In an analysis of the answers published late last year in the journal Law and Human Behavior, the psychologists reported that members of the execution team were far more likely than guards not on the team to agree that the inmates had lost important human qualities; to cite the danger that "they can escape and kill again;" and to consider the cost to society of caring for violent criminals.
The team members were also more likely than other guards to favor religious support for the sentence: an eye for an eye.
"You have to sanctify lethal means: this is the most powerful technique" of disengagement from a shared human moral code, said Dr. Bandura, who has expressed serious moral reservations about capital punishment. "If you can't convince people of the sanctity of the greater cause, they are not going to carry the job out as effectively."
Execution teams are organized so as to divide the grisly tasks, enhancing what researchers call a diffusion of responsibility. A medical technician provides the lethal drugs; a team of guards straps the inmate down, with each guard securing only one part of the body; another guard administers the drugs. "No one person can say he is entirely responsible for the death," Mr. Osofsky said.
Firing squads draw on this same idea. Everyone in the squad fires but no one can be sure whose shot was deadly.
The level of disengagement, as measured by the scale, was about as high in prison workers who participated in one execution as in those who had been party to more than 15, the study found. This suggests that, while the job may get easier over time, "moral disengagement is an enabler, rather than merely the result of performing repeated executions," the authors conclude.
The pattern was strikingly different in members of the execution support staff, particularly the counselors working with the families of inmates and victims.
These staff members were highly morally engaged when they first joined the execution staff, deeply sympathetic to everyone involved, including the condemned. "I'm in a helping profession, but there isn't a damn thing I can do for these guys," one of them said to Mr. Osofsky. "I hate it, but I do it. I am required to do it."
That ambivalence seemed to affect the counselors' moral judgment over time, the study found. After they had been involved in 10 executions, the counselors' scores on the disengagement scale almost matched the executioners'.
The finding stands as a caution to the millions of people who work in the service of organizations whose motives they mistrust, psychologists say: shifts in moral judgment are often unconscious, and can poison the best instincts and intentions.
"This really gets at the idea of people working in corporate structures that are involved in selling, say, weapons or tobacco, and saying, 'Well, I just keep the books,' " when they disapprove of the business, said Susan Ravenscroft, a professor of accounting at Iowa State University in Ames who has studied business ethics.
Moral distancing can also be seen in the language of war, politics and corporate scandal. Pilots euphemistically "service a target" rather than bomb it; enemies are dehumanized as "gooks," "hajis" or infidels. Politicians and chief executives facing indictments deflect questions about ethical lapses by acknowledging that "mistakes were made," or that they were "out of the loop."
These remarks reflect internal methods of self-protection, as well as public evasions, research suggests.
Yet it is in the mundane corner-cutting of everyday life that moral disengagement may be most common and insidious, and least conscious.
In a 2004 study, professors at Iowa State University and the University of Arkansas tested the moral judgment of 47 college students who had cheated on a take-home exam, a complex accounting problem.
Many of the students found a solution to the problem online — posted by another professor who was unaware it was part of an exam — and reproduced the solution as their own, though it used techniques they had not yet learned. Others had clearly collaborated, which their professor had explicitly forbidden. Another 17 students had not cheated, as far as their teacher could determine.
The professor threw out the test scores and got permission from the students to ask about their behavior. The cheaters' scores on a standard test of moral judgment did not correlate at all with their level of plagiarism or collaboration. On the contrary, it was the most dishonest male students who scored highest on the morals test.
"Clearly, this is not what you want to find in a test of moral judgment," said Dr. Ravenscroft, a co-author of the study, with Charles Shrader of Iowa State and Tim West of the University of Arkansas.
Only by conducting in-depth interviews with students about their behavior did the researchers begin to see clear, familiar patterns. One was displacing the blame: "I think it's hard for people not to look at the answer manual if it's available," said one student. "Maybe you should have taken the problem off so people wouldn't be tempted."
Another was justifying the behavior by comparison: "I really don't consider working with another person that unethical," one student commented. "Taking and copying answers from the key was highly unethical." Many students "rationalized cheating behavior as a necessary defense to the cheating of others," the researchers concluded in their analysis, to appear this year in the Business and Professional Ethics Journal. "Yet in an extreme example of moral exclusion, none of the students discussed this impact on others."
Recognizing these kinds of selfish evasions in oneself is hardly proof of moral collapse, psychologists say. Rather, they say, moral disengagement is evidence that a sound moral sensibility is trying to assert itself, warning against a situation it finds suspect. As a rule people don't like to cheat or lie, studies find, and they are extremely reluctant to inflict pain on others, no matter the circumstances.
And moral engagement is dynamic. Once people stop doing what is consciously or unconsciously upsetting them, the research suggests, they engage their conscience more fully.
That is, if they have the luxury to walk away.
"I remember the one execution I attended, there was this strange heaviness in the air all day," Mr. Osofsky said. "These guards you knew were somber and detached, keeping to themselves. This wasn't something they gloried in or looked forward to at all. They didn't really seem like themselves."
Really? The Claim: Mixing Types of Alcohol Makes You Sick
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR, The New York Times, February 7, 2006
THE FACTS Too much alcohol of any kind is never a good idea, but some people claim that mixing beer and liquor, particularly in that order, can also be a hazard. Some even know it by rhyme. "Beer before liquor, never been sicker," goes one old saying.
While it is not entirely clear how this claim started, experts say it may stem from the way certain alcoholic beverages are digested. Carbonated drinks like beer and sparkling wines, for example, tend to irritate the lining of the stomach, increasing the rate of alcohol absorption. Starting with beer and then adding wine or liquor may conceivably lead to intoxication more quickly.
But in reality, that has little effect, said Dr. Roshini Rajapaksa, a gastroenterologist at the New York University School of Medicine. What matters most, she said, is the amount of alcohol consumed and whether it is combined with any food, which slows absorption and minimizes sickness.
There is also another explanation for the popular "beer before liquor" claim, said Carlton K. Erickson, director of the Addiction Science Research and Education Center at the University of Texas College of Pharmacy. "Most people do not drink a lot of beer after they've had liquor," he said.
"The pattern, more often, is that people will have beer and then move on to liquor at the end of the night, and so they think it's the liquor that made them sick," he continued. "But simply mixing the two really has nothing to do with it."
THE BOTTOM LINE It is the total quantity of alcohol consumed, not combined, that influences intoxication and sickness.
Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming Initiative
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN, The New York Times, February 8, 2006
Despite opposition from some of their colleagues, 86 evangelical Christian leaders have decided to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying "millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors."
Among signers of the statement, which will be released in Washington on Wednesday, are the presidents of 39 evangelical colleges, leaders of aid groups and churches, like the Salvation Army, and pastors of megachurches, including Rick Warren, author of the best seller "The Purpose-Driven Life."
"For most of us, until recently this has not been treated as a pressing issue or major priority," the statement said. "Indeed, many of us have required considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that climate change is a real problem and that it ought to matter to us as Christians. But now we have seen and heard enough."
The statement calls for federal legislation that would require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through "cost-effective, market-based mechanisms" — a phrase lifted from a Senate resolution last year and one that could appeal to evangelicals, who tend to be pro-business. The statement, to be announced in Washington, is only the first stage of an "Evangelical Climate Initiative" including television and radio spots in states with influential legislators, informational campaigns in churches, and educational events at Christian colleges.
"We have not paid as much attention to climate change as we should, and that's why I'm willing to step up," said Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College, an influential evangelical institution in Illinois. "The evangelical community is quite capable of having some blind spots, and my take is this has fallen into that category."
Some of the nation's most high-profile evangelical leaders, however, have tried to derail such action. Twenty-two of them signed a letter in January declaring, "Global warming is not a consensus issue." Among the signers were Charles W. Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; and Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Their letter was addressed to the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group of churches and ministries, which last year had started to move in the direction of taking a stand on global warming. The letter from the 22 leaders asked the National Association of Evangelicals not to issue any statement on global warming or to allow its officers or staff members to take a position.
E. Calvin Beisner, associate professor of historical theology at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., helped organize the opposition into a group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance. He said Tuesday that "the science is not settled" on whether global warming was actually a problem or even that human beings were causing it. And he said that the solutions advocated by global warming opponents would only cause the cost of energy to rise, with the burden falling most heavily on the poor.
In response to the critics, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Rev. Ted Haggard, did not join the 86 leaders in the statement on global warming, even though he had been in the forefront of the issue a year ago. Neither did the Rev. Richard Cizik, the National Association's Washington lobbyist, even though he helped persuade other leaders to sign the global warming initiative.
On Tuesday, Mr. Haggard, the pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, said in a telephone interview that he did not sign because it would be interpreted as an endorsement by the entire National Association of Evangelicals. But he said that speaking just for himself, "There is no doubt about it in my mind that climate change is happening, and there is no doubt about it that it would be wise for us to stop doing the foolish things we're doing that could potentially be causing this. In my mind there is no downside to being cautious."
Of those who did sign, said the Rev. Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network: "It's a very centrist evangelical list, and that was intentional. When people look at the names, they're going to say, this is a real solid group here. These leaders are not flighty, going after the latest cause. And they know they're probably going to take a little flak."
The list includes prominent black leaders like Bishop Charles E. Blake Sr. of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, the Rev. Floyd Flake of the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in New York City, and Bishop Wellington Boone of the Father's House and Wellington Boone Ministries in Norcross, Ga.; as well as Hispanic leaders like the Rev. Jesse Miranda, president of AMEN in Costa Mesa, Calif.
The evangelical leaders are meeting Wednesday with senators or their staff members concerned with legislation on energy and the environment. Their letter commends senators who last year passed a resolution by Senators Pete V. Domenici, a Republican, and Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat, both of New Mexico, which called for regulatory measures like a cap and trade program, a system in which industries would buy or trade permits to emit greenhouse gases.
In their statement, the evangelicals praised companies like BP, Shell, General Electric, Cinergy, Duke Energy and DuPont that it said "have moved ahead of the pace of government action through innovative measures" to reduce emissions.
The television spot links images of drought, starvation and Hurricane Katrina to global warming. In it, the Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of a megachurch in Longwood, Fla., says: "As Christians, our faith in Jesus Christ compels us to love our neighbors and to be stewards of God's creation. The good news is that with God's help, we can stop global warming, for our kids, our world and for the Lord."
The advertisements are to be shown in Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia.
The Evangelical Climate Initiative, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars, is being supported by individuals and foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Hewlett Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.
The initiative is one indication of a growing urgency about climate change among religious groups, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, a clearinghouse in Amherst, Mass., for environmental initiatives by religious groups.
Interfaith climate campaigns in 15 states are pressing for regional standards to reduce greenhouse gases, Mr. Gorman said. Jewish, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox leaders also have campaigns under way.
A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, February 8, 2006
George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.
Officials at NASA headquarters declined to discuss the reason for the resignation.
"Under NASA policy, it is inappropriate to discuss personnel matters," said Dean Acosta, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs and Mr. Deutsch's boss.
The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration, particularly global warming.
"As we have stated in the past, NASA is in the process of revising our public affairs policies across the agency to ensure our commitment to open and full communications," the statement from Mr. Acosta said.
The statement said the resignation of Mr. Deutsch was "a separate matter."
Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.
According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a "Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003."
Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case.
"George Carlton Deutsch III did attend Texas A&M University but has not completed the requirements for a degree," said an e-mail message from Rita Presley, assistant to the registrar at the university, responding to a query from The Times.
Repeated calls and e-mail messages to Mr. Deutsch on Tuesday were not answered.
Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.
After Mr. Anthis read about the problems at NASA, he said in an interview: "It seemed like political figures had really overstepped the line. I was just going to write some commentary on this when somebody tipped me off that George Deutsch might not have graduated."
He posted a blog entry asserting this after he checked with the university's association of former students. He reported that the association said Mr. Deutsch received no degree.
A copy of Mr. Deutsch's résumé was provided to The Times by someone working in NASA headquarters who, along with many other NASA employees, said Mr. Deutsch played a small but significant role in an intensifying effort at the agency to exert political control over the flow of information to the public.
Such complaints came to the fore starting in late January, when James E. Hansen, the climate scientist, and several midlevel public affairs officers told The Times that political appointees, including Mr. Deutsch, were pressing to limit Dr. Hansen's speaking and interviews on the threats posed by global warming.
Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch's credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue of political control of scientific information.
"He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. " The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about."
"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said. "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."
