CHAPTER 1

Using Science, Humanism, and Technology to Finally Fix Our Harassment Problem

Question

Can we use science, ethical philosophy, and technology to finally fix the problem of harassment in the workplace?

Overview

Harassment in the workplace is a global problem. It negatively impacts productivity, well-being, diversity, ethical governance, and corporate culture. The social and economic cost of harassment in the workplace is so great that countries around the world mandate harassment training in the hopes that it will fix the problem. Despite all our efforts at education, the problem persists. Our failure is a good indication that we are trying to fix a proxy problem. It is time we take a different approach.

Behavioral scientists have known for decades how to extinguish unwanted behavior. This knowledge can and should be applied to the problem of abusive workplace behaviors. The technique required to get unwanted behavior to stop is easy to teach and learn. Our challenge is to change what we teach and how we teach it so the education we provide actually works to fix the problem.

I will first review the global nature of the problem and review the impact of abusive workplace behavior on human development and participation in society, as well as its impact on employee well-being. Why should we solve it is an ethical question.

I will then review the behavioral conditioning techniques required to extinguish unwanted behavior and how to apply this to bullying and harassment situations paying special attention to the retaliation dynamic. Finally, the educational challenges of dealing with harassment in the workplace will be discussed by reviewing existing educational efforts, the behavioral science reasons why those efforts fail, and how to get better results by integrating behavioral psychology with humanistic philosophy combined with a healthy dose of enlightened self-interest.

Harassment Causes Real Harm

Sexual harassment is in the news a lot. Powerful men are being exposed as serial harassers. Their companies, it turns out, have been spending a lot of money to “fix” the problem. Fix is the wrong word for what they are doing as they do not really fix the problem, they just pay someone to not talk about the problem.

Anita Hill, who was one of the first public figures in America to speak openly about harassment in the workplace, wrote an essay in response to the Harvey Weinstein scandal.1 She asked, what if we treated harassment like we treat embezzlement? Imagine if instead of rumors being that he had sexually assaulted people, that the rumors were that he was embezzling funds. How would his board have responded differently?

The cost to society of allowing harassment to continue is immense. Not only is it costly to businesses to pay out on harassment claims, the quality of the work being done suffers, as effective problem-solving is nearly impossible when individuals with knowledge relevant to the ­problem are not allowed to contribute to problem-solving.

There is also the problem of lost productivity, which is the money spent to pay employees to work around the problem instead of fixing it. The Australian government estimates that bullying costs the Australian economy over 36 billion U.S. dollars a year in lost productivity.2

Places where harassment flourishes have higher employee turnover, more sick days and other problems. Harassment in the workplace is bad for employee well-being, and it is bad for the bottom line.

Additionally, decision-making should be a rational process. If bullying and harassment are allowed to flourish, then decisions are being made by whoever has the most power, as opposed to what is best for the organization or project. A harassment or bullying dynamic has a negative cascading impact on the quality of work being done throughout an organization.

The Global Nature of the Problem

Harassment is a global problem affecting companies all over the world. A paper published in 2013 in the Journal of Business Research documented what they called “counter productive workplace behavior” on six ­continents.3 While they found bullying occurs everywhere, they found that some countries and cultures tolerate it more than others.

Bullying and harassment in the workplace is of global concern. In total, 152 counties currently have laws prohibiting gender discrimination in the workplace, but only 122 provide legal protection against sexual harassment, leaving a full 68 countries (or approximately 235 million women) with no legal protection against sexual harassment.4 There are clearly gaps in legislation that need to be filled.

Among the countries that do provide legal protection against sexual harassment, some require employers to provide training to prevent harassment in the workplace. For instance, the United States,5 Canada,6 Japan,7 India,8 the United Kingdom,9 and Australia10 all have laws making harassment illegal and mandating training to prevent harassment in the workplace. Some states go further. In California, employers must not only provide a sexual harassment training, they also must provide specific information on how to prevent abusive workplace behavior in general and information specific to gender identity harassment.

Changing the Educational Paradigm

What is obvious is that all of the laws and all the training being done because of these laws has not fixed the problem. Harvard Business Review in November 2015 acknowledged that training programs and reporting systems are not ending harassment.11 Our challenge is to figure out what will.

Human behavior seems to be intractable in this area. Some people bully and use their power to harass and assault others. The good news is that behavioral scientists have known for decades how to stop unwanted behavior. It is time we put that knowledge to use.

Behavioral psychologists not only figured out how learning and unlearning occurs, they developed protocols, known as operant ­conditioning, decades ago to create behavioral change. One of these protocols is a technique to cause behavioral extinction, or the unlearning of an unwanted behavior. A Google Scholar search on the term behavioral extinction yields over 429,000 results,12 all of which say the same thing.

To stop an unwanted behavior, remove the reward. This will cause the animal to escalate their behavior in an attempt to reclaim their reward. If the reward continues to be withheld, eventually, the animal will stop doing the behavior after a period of extreme behavior displays known as extinction burst or a blowout. All behavioral extinction in every animal ever studied (including humans), follows this pattern. There are no counter-examples. This is considered established science.

Our knowledge of what the behavioral extinction process entails and how to cause behavioral extinction to occur has important policy implications for how we approach the problem of bullying and harassment in the workplace and in society.

We know that any attempt to remove the reward received by a bully or a harasser will cause behavioral escalation, which in a harassment/­bullying situation usually manifests as some form of retaliation. This is predicted to occur, and any program designed to stop harassment or bullying should take this fact into account.

Taking a behavioral approach to harassment also has implications for education. What are we teaching? Who we are teaching it to? Why are we teaching it to them? And, how we are teaching it all needs to be re-­examined in light of the science.

Current harassment curriculum appears to have adverse effects13 and negative consequences on the people trained, including increased incidences of women being excluded in the workplace as males try to avoid harassment problems altogether. What we are currently doing is not working.

A Humanist Approach to the Problem

For ethical and practical reasons, Humanists want bullying and harassment to stop. Not only is it harmful to the individuals who experience it, it is also bad for society and bad for business. For both ethical and pragmatic reasons, we need to fix this problem.

The question is, how? For that, we need science to understand what causes bullying behavior and how to stop it. Science provides us with answers to both questions. People harass others, because it works. They get a reward. Science also tells us how to make it stop using operant conditioning techniques.

The science of how we create behavioral extinction as it applies to harassment behavior should be integrated into our legal structure, our training programs, and our management approaches.

Our goal should be to provide training that integrates behavioral science into the training and provide it to the people most motivated to learn it.

Creating a Strategy to Stop Harassment

Any strategy to fix a harassment problem must take into account not only how to make it stop, but also what resources are required.

Companies are already compelled to provide sexual harassment training to their employees. There are resources already being dedicated to this. If we change what is being trained to incorporate behavioral science, we should be able to have a positive impact on the problem.

Why the Current Training Programs Do Not Work and How to Fix Them

The current training mandates contain an assumption. The assumption is that the way to stop harassment is to convince the harasser to stop. The trainings are aimed at managers. They almost exclusively consist of legal reasons why harassing people is bad. In other words, it is illegal, do not do it. The assumption that scaring people with legal consequences will in any way change behavior is not grounded in science. We should not be surprised that these trainings not only do not cause serial harassers to have a change of heart, they also cause well-meaning people to be so scared; they overcompensate by excluding women in an effort to avoid legal consequences. We are seeing exactly the results one would expect from this sort of training.

We need to abandon the underlying assumption behind these legal trainings and get back to basics. We want the behavior to stop. To do that, we need to remove the reward. Where exactly is the reward coming from? And, how can we change the dynamic to remove it? And, can we do that with training?

The reward for bullying comes from three places. The victim, the bystanders, and from oversight. If a victim responds in a submissive way, the bully or harasser gets what they want. If bystanders look the other way or enable the behavior and reward it by giving the harasser continued social status, the harasser is rewarded. If the people responsible for oversight promote the harasser, despite their behavior, the harasser is rewarded.

To get a harasser to stop, we do not need to teach the harasser it is illegal. We need to teach the people who are currently inadvertently rewarding the harasser—how exactly to stop. The good news is all those other people actually want to learn how to make harassment stop. Most people would love to learn the science of how to get unwanted behavior to stop. This information is not just for the workplace. Parents are desperate to know how to get their kids to stop doing unwanted behavior too. It is much sought-after knowledge.

Creating a Solution to Harassment That Will Really Work

We now know what we want to do—make the harassers and bullies of the world stop. We know why we want to do that for moral and practical ­reasons. We know how to make it happen—by removing the reward. Now, we need a strategy to make that happen.

Given the current legal framework that mandates harassment training, we should be able to piggyback the needed information on to our existing harassment training programs so that everyone learns not just that it is illegal, so they should not do it, but also, if it happens to you, how exactly do you make it stop? Not just if it happens, report it. But, here are the behavioral methods required to make a bully stop bullying you. Step by step.

Is this strategy realistic? Yes. It is geared toward our real problem. It uses a science-based solution that will really work. It is also cost effective because companies are already providing this sort of training; all we are doing is tweaking the existing trainings to include the needed missing information.

Ethical philosophy compels us to solve this problem for both moral and pragmatic reasons. Science tells us how to solve it. Critical thinking helps us create a strategy that is both cost effective and implementable—piggybacking on the existing framework.

Combining Humanist Philosophy, Science, and Education to Create More Diverse Workforces

Question

How can we use science, humanistic philosophy, and education to help companies reap the benefits of diverse workplaces while avoiding the problems caused by diversity?

Overview

What are the benefits and challenges of employing a diverse workforce? Can we use behavioral science and humanistic philosophy to help ­businesses reap the benefits of a diverse workforce while avoiding the problems that arise when working with a group of diverse individuals? How can we use science to eliminate problems with discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, which make the creation of truly diverse workforces so difficult to achieve?

To successfully change corporate culture to be more inclusive, we need philosophy to provide people with adequate reasons why it benefits them personally to embrace a diverse workforce. This is a challenge that is best addressed through the use of humanistic philosophy. Once a work team has decided to embrace diversity, they then need to learn specific skills and techniques to defuse the conflicts that arise and to effectively deal with harassment and discrimination so that all employees feel protected in the workgroup. These skills and techniques are best addressed by applying behavioral science techniques to the problem behaviors.

The Problem

Diverse workforces benefit employers and employees,14 but attempts to create diverse workforces are hampered by a myriad of problems.

People coming from diverse backgrounds have different life experiences, different triggers, different world views, different assumptions, and different goals. How we talk to one another respectfully and further understand what is being said is not always easy. We all have implicit biases15 that may prevent us from accurately perceiving the other person and their motives.

Our difficulty in seeing other people accurately and without bias is hampered by the fact that humans, as a species, are tribal animals. We instinctually feel safe around people we perceive to be like us and are frightened by those we perceive to be other.16 There are a variety of ways our tribal instincts can be triggered, but once they are triggered, creating a cohesive group out of diverse individuals becomes exponentially harder.

Humanistic philosophy can help us bridge those differences. It helps us bring the other person into a common tribe, which helps us to override our tribal instincts, so we can view the other person as an ethical person grounded in dignity. Humanism also provides us with a common moral language we can use to create ethical consensus and resolve differences.

Diversity problems in the workplace manifest in a variety of ways and stem from a variety of causes. This is why, diversity is such a wicked problem to solve, meaning a problem that has so many dimensions, it does not have a single root cause. As there is no single root cause, proposed solutions to it rarely work. Even if you successful address one root cause, the others remain.

A combination of humanistic philosophy and applied science can help us fix these problems collectively so that we can reap the benefit of diverse workforces.

There are three major problems we need to solve simultaneously to create diverse yet cohesive work groups.

1. We need to hire more diverse workforces.
2. We need to solve the problem of social exclusion that prevents diverse work groups from creating cohesion and leads to harassment and discrimination in the workplace.
3. We need to help people more effectively deal with and resolve disagreements so that our tribal instincts do not kick in and turn what should be a rational disagreement into an irrational divisive conflict.

The Challenge of Overcoming Implicit and Explicit Bias in Personnel Decisions

We now know that our ability and willingness to hire diverse workforces is complicated by our implicit and sometimes, explicit biases.17 We all have biases, and our biases impact our hiring decisions, firing decisions, promotion decisions, and more. We cannot fix our diversity problem without better understanding how implicit biases work so that we can take affirmative action and hire people we would not normally hire because of our biases. Otherwise, our biases will continue to control employment decisions and our businesses will suffer as a result.

Humanistic philosophy can help us work past our biases, and science can help us develop techniques so that we can work to ensure our biases don’t negatively impact our personnel decisions. There have been a number of studies on blind selection processes, and they do indeed work to improve diversity in organizations.

The Challenge of Eliminating Social Exclusion

Social exclusion is the process in which individuals or people are systematically blocked from (or denied full access to) various rights, opportunities, and resources that are normally available to members of an ingroup.

Social exclusion can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, it is a result of bias, but it can also be a result of competition for resources in the workplace where individuals may dehumanize their co-workers through bullying, a technique that helps them gain access to resources and minimize the influence their target has in the workplace.

Social exclusion appears to be the main aim of bullying or harassment. Evolutionary psychologists18 have shown that bullying is an adaptive behavior. Bullying can be thought of as a tool of group control. People who can control access to a group through social inclusion and exclusion wield a lot of power.

Humans have an instinctual need to belong to in-groups, and exclusion is felt as physical pain.19 Our instinctual fear of being socially ostracized allows bullies to manipulate group dynamics and control them. The bully might not be biased against their target; they are merely using the threat of social exclusion to control a group. They do this by marking their target tribally as other to encourage social exclusion of the target. Anyone who is perceived as different can be marked as other this way. As no one wants to be excluded, our instinct is to seek inclusion in the form of currying the favor of the person perceived to have the power to include or exclude people from the group.

To create a diverse yet cohesive workgroup, social exclusion cannot be tolerated. The challenge is how to make social exclusion behavior stop. Currently, 152 countries have laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace. Several countries and state jurisdictions mandate harassment training, and yet, harassment and discrimination continue, and vulnerable people are excluded from our workplaces as a result. Laws prohibiting discrimination are not enough.

Solving this problem will require a combination of humanistic ­philosophy and behavioral science. Humanistic philosophy will help us resist efforts by bullies to marginalize and label people as other. Behavioral science will help us extinguish the unwanted exclusionary behavior.

Scientists have known for decades how to stop unwanted behavior, including exclusionary behavior, like bullying and harassment. Specifically, the science of behavioral extinction not only explains why attempts to stop this behavior results in an escalation of behavior otherwise known as retaliation, but it provides us with the tools we need to get it to stop. We need to start applying these techniques to the problem of bullying, harassment, and discrimination so that diverse individuals are no longer subjected to social exclusion in the workplace.

The Challenge of De-Escalating Conflicts to Maintain Group Cohesion

Diverse workgroups mean that there is diversity of opinion. Problem-­solving is never an easy task. People with different skills sets, knowledge bases, and experience approach problem solving differently. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The diversity of opinion can lead to better and often more creative solutions. The downside is that these differing opinions can lead to disagreements that if they remain unresolved, can cause conflict.

When we find ourselves in conflict, our tribal biases often kick in ­making resolution of the disagreement harder. Unfortunately, some ­people have learned that, if they use bullying or aggression to stigmatize the other person, it increases the chances of their viewpoints being adopted. This technique, while a successful strategy for the person employing it, negatively impacts the problem-solving process and is experienced as harassment and discrimination by the person on the receiving end of this sort of bullying behavior. It is astonishingly harmful to rational problem-solving processes.

Thomas and Kilmann describe five approaches humans take to resolving conflict.20 Two of these approaches are considered counterproductive. The three remaining ones form the basis of most of the advice on how to resolve conflicts.

The first step in any conflict management program is to attempt to get both sides to see each other as part of the same tribe so that the tribal aggression and defenses that are preventing rational discussion from taking place are eliminated. Humanistic philosophy is essential to this effort.

Humanism can also help us develop communication strategies to help us find common ground in the problem-solving process and to resolve disagreements by using a shared set of values and moral approach. In other words, it can help us agree on why solving the problem is important and what an ideal solution should look like. This shared grounding in morality makes discussions of possible solutions more rational and less tribal.

Science should also be employed. We can use the same behavioral techniques we use to eliminate bullying and harassment to de-escalate conflict behavior to set the stage for humanistic communication strategies to take root. We can also use what is learned from sociology on group dynamics and decision-making to help us better manage disagreements so that they do not devolve into conflict. The goal is to help teams focus on collaborative problem-solving as a team, instead of allowing the team to fracture into warring tribes.

Transformative Approach

Philosophy on its own is not enough, and science on its own is not enough. Combining philosophy, science, and education can create positive social change in corporate culture.

Humanistic philosophy helps us tweak our thinking so that we can overcome our biases, see our colleagues as members of our in-group/tribe, and encourages us to be compassionate and patient with them when disagreements arise. It also provides us with the motivation and the knowledge we need to resist attempts by bullies to manipulate us through social exclusion.

Science can provide us with a complimentary toolset needed to resist our biases, so they no longer control our decision-making processes. We can use behavioral science strategies to establish new cultural norms that reinforce respectful behavior in the workplace and collaborative problem-solving. We can also use behavioral science to help eliminate social exclusionary behavior that prevents diverse work groups from becoming cohesive.

A holistic approach that combines the best of humanistic philosophy with applied science can help us transform our approach so that the promise of social inclusion becomes a reality.

Creating a Strategy

If we were to create a strategy to create this sort of cultural change within an organization, it would be multipronged. It would need to help us recruit more diverse individuals. It would require us to build into our systems protection for those new individuals to help them stay and flourish and not allow tribal divisions to drive them out. And, we would have to nurture a culture of collaborative ethical problem-solving that focuses, not on tribal alliances, but on effective ethical problem-solving.

An implementable strategy would incorporate new hiring policies and systems. Training for all staff on the necessary skills and philosophic inclusionary thinking and benefits. Specific training for executive leadership and HR on how to help coach people through the transition. Training for mid-level management on expectations on how to manage and encourage diverse work groups. I would probably also implement culture ambassador groups that include people from all levels of the organization and have them meet regularly to discuss implementation problems and ways to fix them. This would help provide ongoing monitoring to ensure that bullying and social exclusion are not happening, and if they are, it is shut down and the problem person eliminated from the workplace, as well as help to ensure that problems at the bottom of the organization are surfaced and dealt with at the highest levels of the organization (in other words make it so that the staff have the ability to communicate directly with executive leadership if they need to bypass a problem manager.

For this to happen, it would require a commitment from executive leadership to see this process through to the end. Without that commitment, this sort of attempted organizational cultural change would ­probably fail.

For problems with multiple dimensions, a realistic strategy will require multiple sub-strategies integrated into a holistic strategy. It would also include a commitment to incorporating shared ethical values into all aspects of decision-making and problem-solving.

To solve the problem of diverse work groups, we need ethical philosophy to help us get past our biases and tribal alliances. We need science to help us understand why we are having problems and what solutions will work, and we need to provide ongoing education in the form of ­training and ongoing coaching to ensure that the cultural shifts and behavioral changes required have time to take root and grow. And we again, need ethical philosophy to help ground all discussions, decision-making, and problem-solving using the outcomes of well-being and flourishing as a guide.

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