Why Ethical Muscle Memory Matters

TYRA SELLERS, EMILY PATRIZI, AND SARAH LICHTENBERGER

Wonder what we mean when we talk about developing “ethics muscle memory”? That’s fair! Let us tell you.

The three of us frequently chat about the need to keep ethics at the forefront of our practice as behavior analysts. We agree that ethics shouldn’t just be a set of written standards that we flip through when we think something is off. We also talk a lot about how we feel people only discuss ethics when there is an issue. Imagine waiting until a problem arose with a client or team member to start thinking about minimizing risk, maximizing outcomes, or building skills. We would never! Why, then, do we talk about ethics so infrequently in the absence of an issue? 

During our work on the book, we came across work by Dr. Mary Gentile, a professor of business ethics. She wanted to find a way to take a more active approach to developing her students’ values-based leadership skills, mainly related to acting on ethical dilemmas. She thought about how athletes work to build muscle memory. Athletes will practice how to execute movements over and over in contexts and under conditions like those in which they will perform. At sporting events, those hours of practice under varying conditions will have built a sort of muscle memory that will increase the automaticity of the movements. Hopefully, all this means the athlete is less likely to freeze under pressure. Inspired by this approach, Dr. Gentile had an idea. Her idea was not so much to help professionals identify that there was a potential issue. From her perspective, most individuals can recognize when there is an ethical issue afoot. Instead, she wanted a strategy that could help train fluency in addressing the problem, increasing the chances that an individual would act in a way that was aligned with their values. She developed a curriculum called Giving Voice to Values (GVV) that focuses on creating scripts for how a person might respond based on ethical scenarios. GVV involves identifying things like individual values and strengths and helps individual students create and practice their own scripts to hopefully prevent them from freezing under pressure.

This approach should resonate with behavior analysts. For many, facing an unfamiliar and potentially emotional or scary situation might suppress responding. We might engage in avoidance or escape behavior to get away from the discomfort and perceived risk of the situation. We might even try to avoid addressing the situation directly. Alternatively, we might engage impulsively, even harshly, to address the issue as quickly as we can. Many of us lack a well-developed repertoire of functional skills to initiate purposeful action and navigate ethical dilemmas. So, Gentile’s approach appealed to us when thinking about how to better address the need to develop these repertoires.

We thought: Most of us got one course on ethics, and that course had to cover a lot of material. Sure, we might become more familiar with our professional ethics standards and processes through the class. Will we finish the course with well-developed, at-strength skills to move away from a place of inertia or active avoidance toward purposeful and thoughtful action to address and resolve the wide variety of issues we will likely encounter in our professional careers? Let’s be honest; probably not. 

As the book’s structure developed, we wondered, what if we practiced noticing, reflecting on, talking about, and taking action related to ethics topics all the time, or at least often? In this way, maybe we can not only build fluency with noticing and talking about ethics-related topics, but perhaps we can also contact some reinforcement along the way. This reinforcement should strengthen our behavior related to responding to misconduct and ethical concerns when they arise. Like Gentile, we tried to develop an approach that facilitates engaging in applied practice by actively noticing, strategizing, preparing, and practicing how we’ll respond in tricky situations. This regular practice and engagement with ethics topics might make us better prepared to avoid pitfalls and to spot and address the messy, complicated, nuanced ethics issues that might sneak up on us, our supervisees, and our colleagues throughout our careers.

Maybe, with intentional daily practice to build our ethics muscle memory, we could avoid creating a professional culture that fears ethics or uses it as a weapon for professional bullying. Maybe with this continued, purposeful practice, we can create a collective culture that leans into the topic gently, actively, purposefully, and with compassion.

References

Gentile, M. C. (2010). Giving voice to values: How to speak your mind when you know what's right. Yale University Press.
Gentile, M. C. (2021). Featured Speaker: Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak your Mind When You Know What's Right. Vill. L. Rev., 66, 915.