Talk:Moral blindness

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 September 2020 and 14 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Rianahen.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 01:12, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Did you know nomination
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Getting the article up to GA standard
I'm a big supporter of educational assignments that improve Wikipedia, especially in the area of psychology, and I'm grateful for your work improving and reviewing this article. I appreciate that it took a lot of work. In terms of quality, this article is an okay student essay that summarises someone's initial learning in the field of the philosophy and psychology or morality, though it has an important factual error. It seems to have been rushed through the Good Article review process and falls far short of the GA standard.

Looking at the version of this article that passed Good Article review, the two main problems that stand out:
 * 1) It's not clear which if any of the article's references are actually about moral blindness. Ref 1 is about ethical blindness, and that's fine. A lot of the rest of the article is about how ethics are researched in philosophy and psychology. It's good practice to have a background section in a Wikipedia article to explain the basics of the subject, but almost the whole article is like this. A GA should cover at least the basics of the topic, but there's hardly any specific statements about moral blindness. Which of the sources cited by the article actually mention moral blindness? For example Ref 15 "Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty" does a lot of work in this article, but I looked at it and it has no mention of moral or ethical blindness.
 * 2) The meat of the article is written in a vague style which says that research exists but holds back from making specific, verifiable claims about it. I point out examples below.
 * "moral blind spots, ethical fading, and ethical erosion" Don't assume the reader understands these technical terms; they should be defined when they first appear, not right at the end of the article.
 * "wide-ranging areas" What does this phrase mean? I've cut it down.
 * "This behaviour can be due to situational or other factors." This is getting close to insight about moral blindness: what situations promote it? Is it dependent on personality? As it stands, this is a statement that could apply to any behaviour.
 * "Interest in the idea of moral blindness increased after Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem." How can the source justify this, when the cited source is Eichmann in Jerusalem?
 * The heading "Origins and early theories" implies that the section will explain the origins and early theories of moral blindness, but it doesn't seem to do this. The section is about early theories of morality in general.
 * "The above cognitive focus was found to be in contrast to some of the observed behavior." This needs to be rephrased in an understandable way. This is the first mention in the article of "cognitive focus" so it's hard to find what "the above cognitive focus" refers to. What behaviour contrasted with that focus, and what citation is this claim based on?
 * "In his obedience studies in 1961-62, Milgram had subjects administer electric shocks to a confederate." No, he didn't. Wikipedia shouldn't promote a misconception about this research. A more correct explanation is in any explanation of the Milgram studies, including the linked Wikipedia article.
 * "Later in 1971," There's a quotation in this sentence. Who is being quoted?
 * Although it used to be a staple of psychology courses and textbooks, the Stanford Prison Experiment is now regarded as very controversial: there are extensive recent criticisms listed in its Wikipedia article, so a good article should reflect those criticisms.
 * "The experiment was designed to see how far subjects would go to internalise their roles and obey external orders and later raised some ethical concerns about the nature of the study itself." This convoluted sentence is trying to pack far too much in. It even skips over the results of the experiment!
 * "A lot of the early thought on ethics and morality was normative in nature" I know what each word means, but what does this sentence mean? The long, multi-clause sentence that this is a part of is hard to make grammatical sense of. It's also weird to give this bit its own subheading, as it's part of the philosophical background.
 * "they were more prescriptive in nature" The wikilink goes to an article about prescriptive grammar, which is not going to be helpful in understanding this statement. The normative/prescriptive distinction needs to be explained in this article.
 * "The focus on a normative approach to moral behaviour led to research focused on the cognitive and developmental context" What does this mean in plain English? What statement of fact is being asserted here? This isn't a terminology problem. Is it saying that, if people in the past had been more interested in prescriptive morality than normative morality, there wouldn't have been psychological research on moral reasoning? If so, who is claiming this, and how can they know?
 * "Bandura argued that moral disengagement could arise out of various forces" There's a whole other article about moral disengagement, but no explanation in this article about the relation to moral blindness. How are the two concepts different? Is moral disengagement a kind of moral blindness?
 * "More recent research has led to the development of the concept of 'bounded ethicality"" What kind of research? "Studies on individual unethicality" What kind of studies? What did they say?
 * "research looking at a wide range of topics such as corporate transgressions, business ethics, and moral disengagement at work" What did the research say? What form did it take? To summarise research, you need to do more than say that research was done.
 * "Law and justice is another area where moral blindness, especially when it comes to lawyers, is seen as a concern." This again is so vague it does not tell us anything. Two sources are cited for this statement: there needs to be a summary of what those sources say about moral blindness.
 * "Some research has also referred to psychopathy being a specific kind of moral blindness although the findings are not conclusive" This isn't a Wikipedia-style summary but a personal interpretation. If there's a controversy, we need to set out what the differing positions are and what evidence they are based on.
 * The hatnote has no links. This is using a hatnote for explaining terminology, which should be done in body text.

So ideally this wouldn't have passed GA review. Now that it has passed, I think the way to proceed, in the first instance, is to improve this article so that it is worthy of the GA rating. The main way to do that is to 1) identify sources about moral blindness and 2) summarise their content in the article, not just claim that research has been done. It would be great for Wikipedia to have an actually GA-worthy article about this interesting and important topic. MartinPoulter (talk) 10:17, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
 * You've reverted my tag on the article with an edit summary that says "The article has already been rated as Good. Some of your Talk comments seem to be complaining about your own edits." Firstly, I'm aware that the article has been rated as Good. I set out on this Talk page some strong reasons why it should not have been and I think it's definitely not Good quality despite being given the GA rating. None of my above complaints are about my own edits; I didn't introduce any of the problems I list above and examination of the article history should confirm that I had never edited the version of the article I was criticising. If you think I'm complaining about my own edits, it's up to you to show which edits you're talking about. The article is written in an essay style rather than an encyclopedic style, so the tag should be put back on the article. MartinPoulter (talk) 15:41, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

The reason I deleted the tag that you attached was because it stated "This article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay" none of which seem to be true, at least as described in your comments. The article was reviewed as Good, and perhaps your comments would have been better made during the review process. Also, calling it "an okay student essay" was a bit elitist wouldn't you say? It seems like you are somewhat expert in this area, and maybe instead of writing a lengthy criticism you could have just fixed what you thought was wrong. For example, on your first point, why didn't you cite an appropriate reference if you knew of one? And correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you edit the paragraph on Milgram's study? — Preceding unsigned comment added by VarmtheHawk (talk • contribs) 23:36, 10 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay, maybe the tag wasn't the exact one to describe the problem; how much work did you put into finding a more suitable tag rather than removing the tag entirely? Of course my comments would have been better made during the review process, but I didn't read the article until after it had passed review. There's no point discussing situations which didn't happen. On Wikipedia, and in the Good Article Review process specifically, we're concerned with quality, so if that strikes you as "elitist" you're in the wrong place. I've praised the main author of the article for sharing their learning on Wikipedia, but we have to be realistic about where the article is on Wikipedia's quality scale. "instead of writing a lengthy criticism you could have just fixed what you thought was wrong." No: fixing the problems in the article would take much longer than identifying them. You're implying that assessing the article's sources, reading new sources and substantially rewriting the article is quick to do; it's not.
 * "correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you edit the paragraph on Milgram's study?" In the article history, which you can read for yourself, there are no edits by me prior to the article passing GA. I have made some edits since the review to fix some of the problems I highlight above, including changing the Milgram mention so it's not saying something incorrect, but frankly these changes are pushing it up to C quality; getting to GA quality is a much bigger task. Do you understand now that the problems I'm raising precede in time the edits I made? MartinPoulter (talk) 12:53, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

I'll admit that "elitist" might have been taking it a bit too far, but I don't see the need to tag the article at all. You made your comments and it seems likely that those working on the article will respond accordingly. I still think you should identify an appropriate reference for moral blindness that you discussed in your first comment. VarmtheHawk (talk) 04:36, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your detailed review and comments on the article. I'm going to take a look at them in detail and do my best to address what I can. Rianahen (talk) 06:28, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your inputs as well.Rianahen (talk) 06:28, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * That's great and I'm looking at how I can help. I see that the Rendtorff refs justify the connection of the Milgram, Zimbardo and other research to the topic of moral blindness, so I'm thinking a lot can be done just by substituting references in the right place. When we are saying that Milgram's research is relevant to moral blindness, we need to then site the paper that makes that statement, not cite Milgram's research. Cheers, MartinPoulter (talk) 13:57, 2 May 2021 (UTC)