“Ethicists’ and Nonethicists’ Responsiveness to Student Emails: Relationships Among Expressed Normative Attitude, Self-Described Behavior, and Empirically Observed Behavior”, 2013-04-03 (; backlinks; similar):
Do professional ethicists behave any morally better than other professors do? Do they show any greater consistency between their normative attitudes and their behavior?
In response to a survey question, a large majority of professors (83% of ethicists, 83% of non-ethicist philosophers, and 85% of non-philosophers) expressed the view that “not consistently responding to student e-mails” is morally bad. A similarly large majority of professors claimed to respond to at least 95% of student e-mails.
These professors, and others, were sent three e-mails designed to look like queries from students. Ethicists’ e-mail response rates were not statistically-significantly different from the other two groups’. Expressed normative view correlated with self-estimated rate of e-mail responsiveness, especially among the ethicists. Empirically measured e-mail responsiveness, however, was at best weakly correlated with self-estimated e-mail responsiveness; and professors’ expressed normative attitude was not statistically-significantly correlated with empirically measured e-mail responsiveness for any of the three groups.
[Keywords: attitude-behavior consistency, ethics, experimental philosophy, moral psychology, morality, social psychology]