SALS Conference 1989: Tape 10 Unknown speaker and part of sound is defective

Speaker A Your starting point that doesn't make a lot of sense and that is still the dominant theory in the field and the way ethicists and other people who deal with that will relate to moral development. We'll be around Kohlberg's hierarchy of cognitive types. Any other comments or questions before we play with this little bit? What I must do is pass out a one page little flyer that has a little scenario on it. That's one of the scenarios that I used. And what I'd like for you to do is so you have a fresh batch of data to work. Have your tension back up here again, the reason I gave you this exercise and asked you to do this at this point is so you'll have some fresh experience with trying to do that as opposed to me talking completely in the abstract about applying these concepts. Let me take just a minute. Let's talk about the first question and hear some of your responses and some of your efforts to classify that or categorize that type of reasoning that your partner demonstrated. First of all, it's a very open ended kind of question where you're asking someone to describe the situation. And I've seen people go from one word kind of descriptions, oh, that's normal. Sure, that's just normal, that's just business. And that's their whole way of describing it up to someone who can spend will spend paragraph after paragraph giving a review or a scenario as they've interpreted it many times. As long as the little pieces of data that were included in this makeup.

Speaker B Story.

Speaker A I have seen very intelligent people give very simple kind of answer level one kind of reason they know that situation. I've seen people that I didn't think had near the capacity or the real mode struggle and work up and work up into some higher kinds of reasons. One of the reasons I wanted to start off by saying if you think in level two doesn't mean you're mode two. None of you all would ever admit to having used mode two reasoning or type two reasoning if it were the implication that's what you were. Let's take this minute. Somebody share with me the response you got and how you classify that. I'm going to ask for several of those. If you think you have one that is either particularly good or troublesome and share those and go chew them a little bit, somebody have one of the answers?

Speaker C The first one answer was given our shorter permit for clients, sales department agreements and other people make delivery needed communication with production department quality control can be viewed or cannot. Someone must have falsified the document creation.

Speaker A Basically what she did was listed a series of the category, a series of the things and described those things as making up the situation. Define that as containing those elements which by your description and by your own classification, I think that's a pretty clear kind of level too. What I've done is taken each question let me read the strict definition that I would use a label defined by one or more specific elements where you say the situation or you hear it, you somehow say this is the situation and these are the characteristics of that.

Speaker B Which is just what we have here.

Speaker A Okay, how did you classify that.

Speaker B Trouble? There seemed to be that was an open situation you treatment.

Speaker A And so we're not really doing what we that's my sense of your suit. They said read the words again. I thought from my hearing what we have here's a case of a clash between long term objectives here's this case this is the thing. The characteristics of this thing are it has a clash between long term, term short objectives that's this thing pretty straightforward, level Two kind of understanding of the situation anybody else want?

Speaker C Conflict between quality and delivery has been translated into.

Speaker A How'D you classify that.

Speaker B Dealing.

Speaker A Just roughly. That's what I look for structurally, whether it's a two or three, because it moves on for it is very often people will describe a two, create a set and then start drawing implications. And then we'll start extrapolating, therefore, which leads into moves along words like that that show that, okay, we've got a set, but I don't see it in action. I see it dynamically until you start picking up those three types of sets where it is moving along over time there's interaction between these various things. Anybody have one?

Speaker B There was two.

Speaker D Initial response is fairly short, oh, fairly difficult situation under certain circumstances. And then there was this long silence. I was trying to think about it, thinking in several different ways. Categorize they say word small sounds and I categorize sounds as three plus.

Speaker B I'm.

Speaker D Too tired to figure out the word.

Speaker A Several things then come back to your I think that obviously you're looking at the structure of language as insight into the structure of thought that you're limited to the thought that is translating the language. And so that people, I think, can have extremely complex abstract thought processes that are not accessible by analyzing the structure of language. I've done this and asked people and after long studied thought, they'll say no. And so clearly their thought process was much more but I don't know that they could have sort of drifted off and talked about something else. So this methodology is limited to the language that's used. So that's obviously a caveat there. Let me make one other comment that adds some complexity as we start playing with this. Your comment that I was just too tired to mess with it. What I find is that it takes energy, psychic or mental energy or whatever to ramp one of these babies up to get a situation pumped up so you can start dealing with it. And oftentimes on the job or dealing with my kids or other places I still have that energy that time and I treat it like a one. I just want it just like all the situations that I've already known like that because I don't have the energy or the time. Right then to try to flesh it out in this unique situation. Go back to your answer. My sense is that first part of that was a one because it was a nondescribed, say this and more technically a label without definition or specification. It's just a typical situation. Well, what is that? The person just assumes, you know, what a typical situation is. They're not trying to tell you in any way what makes up that set. They're referring to it by label and assuming that you understand what's in it because it's obvious that it's one of these and you all know what one of those things is. And so when you say it's a typical situation or some kind of label without telling me what's in that set, that's one where you're just using a concept that you constructed previously.

Speaker B So what's new? Not the first time.

Speaker A My sense of that kind of response, although I did do this, that's not a response. It's a sort of an off roll comment almost to the situation. He didn't really describe the situation other than sort of a reference to get my life in general. That's almost an unaddressed one. Wasn't really an effort to describe a situation, sort of a statement about the situation.

Speaker B Any others?

Speaker A There's a potential emotional point that was.

Speaker B Kind of oh God, here we go again. I'm going to take a hike this time.

Speaker A Again, I would hypothesize that there are a lot of environmental issues, environmental issues and personal issues that dramatically affect the type of reasoning we use. That if you're in a situation where you're comfortable or you've done it a number of times, then you may feel free to extrapolate more, to have more abstract kind of things. If you're in time pressure or you're under some kind of psychic pressure, or you're an organization that doesn't want the answer that you're preaching. There's a lot of things, both externally and internally in your previous experience and your own preferences and so forth, that will affect the type of reasoning that you use that moment. Not that you couldn't use something else or yesterday you wouldn't use something else, you would have used a different type. But right now the type of reasoning the level of abstraction is using will be reflected in one of these patterns. Let's take just a minute and go to the next one. Won't drag you all the way to all four, but let's take just a minute, go to the next one. I'll make a couple comments. Somebody have an answer to the next question you'd like to share? And share your assessments of the type of reasoning reflected in that response. The response question too, was that the marketing department believes that long term sales growth is a criteria success of the company. And I suspect that that's because top management has given rise, that's the cause of the situation. How would you classify, I'm not sure, personal, secondary or secondary? Really looking at something way behind business strategy. Again, I think that classification reflects to me a jump to an effort and complexity. This person obviously is seeing a much more complex picture. Started with the two and by your brief reading, implied level three, talked a little bit about top management style or priorities and that's the cause. It's a thing. Again, if you create something like what caused, what top management because they set this up and they define that, you're defining the cause of these issues that you're specifying. In many cases you just say top management. One of the most common questions I got to this question was the competition. Anybody come over that a lot of people who what caused this, the competition, they're just using that contract. Other people said, well the competition, and then define the competition, why and how they thought that worked in looking at cause at level three, again, looking for the movement, people don't see the cause as a thing. It's not the thing that's the cause. What caused this? Well, A caused B which caused C, which caused D, which is going to cause E, which this is a cause, it's not a cause as if that it's a single thing that I'm specifying. But the cause is a serial thing that is not a set, but it's a series of interaction among various sets and it's a pretty big distinction and it jumps out pretty clearly usually whether you're talking about the cause as a thing. And it can be extremely complex in the thing that you're profiling and still be a level two kind of reason. It can be fairly brief when you look at a series of things that caused it. And then level four, what people often will do as level four, I don't know if any of you have that is that they'll look at possible causes. Well, this could have influenced and it could have been this. And there's a whole series of things that are in tandem here that create this. And it's difficult to specify completely the process or the things that influenced this, but someone will describe a whole series of things that may have or could have and probably did influence that as it sort of moved through its causal process. I had another example of your cause statement, you'd like to share.

Speaker B It?

Speaker A I wanted to push it to do this one more. We couldn't do that to alternative construction or judgment. I played with different ways of asking the question and would do it somewhat differently if I had to do it again and probably will when I did it again. But to me there's a rationale behind the four questions. I have observed that people use oftentimes use very different type of reasoning when describing a situation?

Speaker B Yes.

Speaker A And describe it then if you ask them to look back and talk about a causal process or causal kind of explanation for something about looking back sometimes causes people to change the type of reasoning they're using and vice versa. When you ask somebody to look forward and say well, what do you see as your alternatives? If someone sees no alternatives but A or not A, I can either do what's being pushed on me by the system or not. Those are my choices. At level two, what you do create choices? Well, I can do A, which involves this, or I could do B or I can do C. These are choices among alternatives. Whereas level one is always A, not A. Level two is a choice. You'll construct some alternatives. Level three will typically see someone move down serially. Well, you could go to this point and then depending upon things, you might move to this point and then depending.

Speaker B On.

Speaker A ABC as alternative but ABC as choice points as you move down. I was kind of wondering whether the questions are interventions themselves in terms of leading the response oh, I agree. As opposed to just saying providing a situation that more open ended or not described. What's going on here? It seems to me that the first one is by don't end as you get to get somebody oriented what you're looking for that I intentionally then look back with cause, look forward with creating some alternatives. Some people are very good, I have found, at giving you elaborate detail historically. But when you look into action to create into the future, they're not very good at that. And they can't create alternatives.

Speaker B Or they.

Speaker A Can create elaborate rationale for historical consequences. What led to that? They got gut down, but you say, well, okay, in the future and they'll just drop back to a level one, either A or not. I have no choices. And so I'm intentionally the reason I wanted to bring that up is I am intentionally asking them to shift between sort of an open description, causal kind of thing, a projection of creation kind of exercise. And then the fourth judgment okay, given all that, what would you do? And that requires a different kind of thinking still than just describing a situation. And one of the things I've toyed with is whether or not you got enrolled. How many of you some of you are saying well, I would do this and I would do that and I would do that. Some of you are saying well, he would do this or he would do that. You weren't talking about you never internalized it as if it were really your decision. But we're stepping back talking about someone else and experience of making a judgment about whether I should bet on this horse or whether somebody else should. I don't have a problem telling somebody else to do when it's my turn to let my bet down or whatever. It's a very different kind of thing and I think judgment brings in a different kind of reasoning. And again, what I have observed in the limited data from this is that there is a lot of what I call a dynamic quality of cognitive function. Whereas what I'll see is that somebody answers the first one using one, jump up to use three, jump back and use one, move over to use four. Next set of questions, they'll use two, two, one, and that pattern is all over the map. And that people under different circumstances will use different types of reasoning. And that there is my hypothesis, highly dynamic kind of quality as we wrestle with something and try to make sense out of it or as we problem solve and try to get other people to understand what we think. The situation is, what caused it, what we can do about it, and how do we get going to get people to communicate that people move around a lot more thinking that a three always thinks in parallel processing. I also feel like there's something I call cognitive agility, which is the ability to think in three, to shift over and sort of see everything as extrapolating, so you can relate to somebody who's dealing with it that way. Or to shift back and think in terms of definitions at level two, where we're going to agree on what words mean, what things mean. And we'll play with those till we define those. And the ability for someone to operate at different levels intentionally is an issue I think very important. And then second of it is what other influences affect where somebody operates? One of my hypotheses is that certain organizations over time adapt a preferred style of thinking. And if you specify your reasoning for why you did something at the appropriate type of abstraction, it will be bought because it can be translated if someone else, if you tried to communicate it, even at the level at which you originated or some other, it can be missed. I think it's particularly important around moral kind of issues where how you're judged morally the type of reasoning that went into what you do, I think can be dramatically influenced by the culture that you're in in that organization that prefers to hear ethics described one way. Particularly people who write up a little code of ethics move down the scale of that fraction where it's much simpler way of looking at ethical issues. Now they've got a clear definition of what one is and it often pushes the scale of reasoning to a simpler.

Speaker B More concrete kind of reasoning.

Speaker A Let me just close and then maybe take any other questions as you might come up with. Again, where I started with this was some way to make some sense in my own work around what's the type of reasoning, the category of reasoning someone is using right now, right here in this interaction, right here, solving this problem. And how can we not generalize about what they normally do or what they're potentially capable of doing? But right now, dealing with this issue, how are they thinking about it? And one of the most difficult steps, in my opinion, in trying to discuss those people is to leave the content out. I'm not really paying attention whether they thought it was okay to forge it or if big business is bad guys or the little guys, those content issues. And just listen for the structure. Listen to see if they're talking about creating a thing or if they just use a thing without ever telling you what it is except for the label. They just use it, referred to it as if you understand what that thing is and then start using it. Or do they take a moment to describe the thing?

Speaker B Is English.

Speaker A Persuasive whipping up rhetoric?

Speaker B Listen to me. Listen to me.

Speaker A British.

Speaker B Would we, under similar circumstances, have been.

Speaker A Moved, charged up, fired up by his inflammatory speeches?

Speaker B Or would we simply have.