Frances has worked for a pharmaceutical company for a year, a role which she has enjoyed. She is assigned a new project to create social media content for her company with two colleagues, Andrew and Pat, with whom she has not previously worked. Although Frances is excited to take on the new challenge, she finds that collaborating with Andrew and Pat is very difficult and takes a lot of energy. She takes the lead on the project and is glad when it is finished. Frances tells her boss, Maya, about her difficulties, and Maya reveals to her that actually, the social media project was fake and was intended to test Andrew and Pat, who have been having performance issues at work. Frances feels she has been mis-led and isn’t sure what to do next.
Marketing Misrepresentation
Martha lives with her boyfriend, Cameron, in a small one-bedroom apartment. After Martha’s hours were cut due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cameron, who works in marketing for hospice care, agreed to take on more hours at his job to supplement his income. One day, while Cameron was working from home, Martha overheard him tell a prospective client's family that he was a doctor. Martha knows full well that Cameron is not a doctor at all, and she was surprised to hear him misrepresent himself in this way. Martha confronted Cameron after the call, and he said that he was just doing his job and getting a new patient to sign up for services. Martha feels conflicted. On one hand, she knows that Cameron is doing his best to be good at his job, and part of his job is to convince more people to sign up for hospice care. Cameron’s success at work is more important than ever because his hard work is making up for the pay cut she suffered earlier in the year. On the other hand, she can’t help but be seriously bothered by the fact that Cameron has pretended to be a doctor to get new patients.
An Appropriation of Identity
Sofia recently moved to a new city to start a new job. She didn’t know anyone in her neighborhood, but she quickly became friends with one of her neighbors, Jenny. Sofia found out that Jenny is very talented at making clothes and jewellery and has a small online store with a modest group of customers. Sofia supported her new friend by purchasing items and even modelled some pieces on her own Instagram account. One day, Sofia noticed that Jenny had added the descriptor “Latina-owned small business” to her site. Sofia was surprised because Jenny is not Latina. Sofia is herself Latina and does not understand why Jenny, a white woman, deemed it necessary to advertise her brand as Latina-owned. After confronting Jenny about the descriptor and receiving an uninspired explanation, Sofia is not sure what to do.
The Diagnosis Dilemma (*Sensitive)
Thomas is a genome scientist and geneticist at a pharmaceutical company. He works on identifying gene targets for drug development. When Thomas was finishing up the last couple of months of his residency during medical school, he was asked by his favorite doctor, someone he viewed as a mentor, to assist with his private practice patients. One night soon after Thomas started this work, one of Thomas’s professors was brought into the hospital in the middle of the night in a deep coma after having attempted suicide. Fortunately, Thomas and his mentor were successful in saving the professor’s life. However, when Thomas’s mentor looked over the notes on the case, he said that Thomas had “missed the diagnosis,” and that the patient had been brought to the hospital due to “an acute asthmatic attack.” Thomas quickly realized that he was being asked to help cover up a suicide attempt. Although he followed his mentor’s directions and changed the diagnosis in the patient’s file, he did not feel at all comfortable about the situation.
A Tale of Two Lawyers
Joseph is a lawyer in a large corporate law firm and, above all, values maintaining personal loyalty. Many years ago, Joseph was offered the job of representing a bank in an upcoming acquisition deal. Joseph was told that if he wanted to represent the bank, he would have to keep his involvement a secret from the other members of his firm: one of his colleagues was representing one of the bank’s major competitors. Joseph accepted the offer; however, as part of this, he was required to establish a “wall” between himself and several of his colleagues that would block them from even talking with him. Joseph felt as though he needed to tell the main partner who was being “walled off” what was going on, so he told her as much of the truth as he felt able to do. However, when news of the deal Joseph was representing broke, the partner he had “walled off” was furious, and felt personally betrayed and hurt. To this day, Joseph feels that he should have acted differently.
Honest to Goodness
Karen is a young newspaper reporter. As an entry-level journalist, her primary source of competition comes from summer interns who are recruited from undergraduate journalism programs. Karen believes that competition is “good for the soul,” and some of her best work has been produced in response to the competitive atmosphere and her reluctance to be outdone by the interns. However, this competitiveness has a downside: Karen believes that “the cardinal rule of journalism is truth-telling,” yet her desire to provide readers with important information has at times led her to use dishonest means to get stories. For instance, she has misrepresented herself in order to get interviews. She says that “there are times for dishonest tactics” if these tactics are in the service of telling the truth in a story.
Beyond the Science Club
Allison is a high school student who worked in a neurobiology lab one summer with the intention of submitting her project to a science competition. Allison decided on her own to work on a learning experiment involving mice, despite the fact that her supervising professor had warned her that projects based on neurology and behavior of “live” animals do not seem to capture the fancy of the judges. Allison maintains strong values about the ways in which scientists should work. However, knowing that she was unlikely to win the Intel competition because she worked directly with animals, Allison decided to hide the truth in her research paper. Allison phrased her paper carefully to make it seem as though she had not actually handled the mice directly. In the end, Allison was named a semifinalist and won a college scholarship worth $2,000. She was accepted to college, where she has chosen to pursue scientific research.