If a columnist tells you something, check it out

If you make an error when speaking to others, how far should you go to correct it?

Almost 15 years ago, I was interviewed by an anchor in the studio of a morning news program about the ethics of forgiveness. Without my knowing it, the person responsible for writing the identification that appeared under my name wrote “Ethicist and Clinical Psychologist.” I couldn’t see the identification as I was speaking to the anchor and only found out on my drive home when my wife, who is a licensed mental health therapist, called me to let me know she had watched the interview and told me of the mistake.

I believed the right thing to do was to let the program know and also to let my college public affairs office know of the mistake so it didn’t misidentify me if they shared a copy of the interview on social media. (The interviewer was an alumnus of the college where I taught at the time.)

In that case, the error wasn’t mine.

A few weeks ago, I was a guest on a podcast to talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence. The interviewer asked terrific questions and we talked some of the propensity of AI chatbots to make mistakes. Turns out that and other observations in the podcast were true, but it was I who made an unforced error during our discussion. In referring to an article I had written years ago for a magazine that the podcast interviewer and I worked for, I made a passing reference to the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) when I meant to refer to the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration).

It's likely that few people listening to the podcast will notice the error. I only caught it when the interviewer sent me a link to the podcast after it had been edited and went live. The error also doesn’t change the intent of what I was saying in the sentence where I used the wrong acronym. Nevertheless, it was a mistake.

My options are to say nothing to anyone since, again, few if any are likely to notice. But that doesn’t seem the right thing to do. Instead, I let the podcast interviewer know and I am using this column to come clean and admit the error. It was my mistake, not his or anyone else’s.

In the podcast, I talk about the importance of checking the facts of anything an AI chatbot might create for you. A few weeks ago in The Right Thing column, I wrote about how various AI chatbots had gotten information about me wrong when I asked them to write an obituary for me. The chatbots created a wife who doesn’t exist along with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who had beautiful names but who also don’t exist. (My wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchild are all beautiful in real life.) I was also given credit for books I didn’t write and fellowships I never received.

There’s an old journalism saw that goes something like: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” The same thing goes for when you hear a white-haired and bearded ethics columnist tell you stuff on a podcast. Before you spread what he has to say, check it out.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Giving credit to the right person

Should you correct someone when they give the wrong person credit for something?

My mother died in August 1991, a few days after she turned 61. She was living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, at the time where she had moved a couple of years earlier with my father so they could be in the same town as my sister, her husband and their three young children. The woman I’d eat bees for and I had traveled to Grand Forks from Boston for the funeral. We stayed on for a bit to try to help my father sort things out.

Nancy and I noticed there was a large turkey in my father’s freezer and we decided to prepare it along with other dishes that are more traditional to Thanksgiving than to a 99-degree day in Grand Forks. Nevertheless, we persisted and the eight of us ate dinner around my father’s dining room table. Among the items we prepared was the stuffing I had made each Thanksgiving for our family and friends back in Boston.

As my sister was eating a fork full of stuffing, she commented how much she always liked this stuffing from my mother’s recipe. As playfully as I could, I told her it was my recipe and she had never eaten it before. She laughed and ate on.

Did I need to correct her? No. I gained little by having it known the recipe was mine. It didn’t strike me, however, that offering the correction would diminish my mother’s memory since it was after all my mother’s frozen turkey that had inspired the dinner.

Often, when someone is being given credit for something they didn’t do, it might feel awkward to set the record straight. If, for example, in a work setting a manager is heralding the efforts of a worker on a particular project when it was actually the work of someone else, it might feel petty for the person actually responsible for the work to speak up.

In such cases, the right thing for anyone receiving credit for something they didn’t do is to be the one to set the record straight. When a group of employees contribute equally to an accomplishment and only one gets singled out, that one person should name the other members of the team. Getting recognition feels great. But accepting it for something you didn’t do is dishonest.

Before my sister died in October 2020, it became something of a tradition for her to call me around Thanksgiving and ask for our mother’s stuffing recipe. I’d moan, remind her that it wasn’t mom’s recipe, and then send it on to her.

On that note, I should point out that my stuffing recipe borrows liberally from both the Joy of Cooking and from the recipe on the plastic packaging of unsliced white bread sold in grocery stores around Thanksgiving time. When the recipe appeared in a holiday cookbook compiled by my employer, I gave credit to each because that’s the right thing to do. If you’d like a copy of the recipe, email me and I’d be glad to send it to you.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Think twice before sending that group text

Are you obligated to let others know when you decide to leave a chain of group text messages?

I haven’t counted them personally, but various sources estimate that as many as 23 billion text messages are sent every day throughout the world. While many of these texts might be useful to managing our daily lives, some are simply dross.

In the mix of text messages are group texts. Sometimes the recipients are aware they are part of a group text chain, but often these group texts come in unexpectedly from someone who decides to include us. These texts might be from a work colleague about an ongoing project. Or they might be from a family member keeping us and others abreast of some milestone or other. On other occasions someone who has our number decides to include us on some joke or story or meme they found amusing. Depending on the size of the routing list, responses to the original post may multiply quickly, resulting in even more distractions from more useful incoming texts.

If a group text is part of a conversation that we need to be part of – an ongoing work project, for example – it’s unlikely we should leave the chain no matter how tempted we might be. But if the chain is some random bit of information we didn’t ask for and don’t particularly need and is copied to a bevy of recipients whose numbers we don’t recognize, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with removing yourself from the chain. If doing so helps unclutter your inbox and manage unwanted distractions, it’s a simple enough process to remove yourself from the conversation. No harm. No foul.

If you do so, however, do you owe it to the original sender to let them know you’re opting out? If it’s a work text focusing on something with which you’re only tangentially involved, you might want to let the colleagues you see regularly know that you are opting out as a courtesy. If it’s a group text you asked to be part of, even if in the distant past, it also would be gracious to let the sender know you are leaving the discussion.

But if it’s an unsolicited group text concerning something you don’t have a desire or a need to know about, there’s nothing wrong with just leaving. Doing otherwise and sending a text to the group to let them know you’re leaving risks triggering a slew of new unwanted texts in response. Who needs that? Surely not you nor the others on the text chain.

If a friend or acquaintance includes you when sending something you find off-color, factually wrong or otherwise offensive, it could be worth it to send them a direct text to let them know why you find the text offensive and to please not include you on other such messages in the future.

The right thing when receiving unsolicited group texts is to decide which you really want to be part of and to leave the rest. If you’re thinking about sending a group text, the right thing is to be thoughtful and consider whether what you’re about to send is really worth adding to the billions of texts sent every day, many of which none of us need to receive.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Are you obligated to support public media?

If you listen to publicly funded radio or watch publicly funded television, are you obligated to make donations to help support their operation?

Even before Congress voted in July to cut $1.1 billion in funds that were allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the question of whether listeners or viewers had an obligation to contribute if they regularly listened to broadcasts loomed. Now that their local public broadcasting affiliates find themselves having to find ways to continue operations without a regular source of funds, the question looms larger.

Prior to Congress’ action, viewers or listeners might have believed that because some of their tax dollars were going to help fund the operations of public media outlets, they were already helping fund operations. They’d be correct. According to CPB, prior to the congressional cuts, $1.60 of every individual’s taxes was allocated to public media.

Still, that’s hardly been enough to keep things running. Instead, affiliates have had to rely on listener and viewer donations as well as support from not-for-profit and corporate underwriters. Without that congressional allocation, the need for other sources of money becomes even greater. Affiliates in less affluent rural areas are likely to be hit harder than those in larger markets, but all will be affected.

To be fully transparent, years ago, I worked on a local public television showed as a content consultant. My role was small, but it existed nonetheless. The show was called “On the Money,” and it focused on personal finance. My wife and kids were featured as extras in one episode sitting around the kitchen table discussing the family finances. My son may have been washing the same dishes over and over so the cameraman could get a good shot. The show lasted one season. Its only notable feature was that the co-host was Will Lyman, an actor who has been the narrator of PBS’s “Frontline” series since 1984.

My first editor on The Right Thing column when he was the Sunday business editor at The New York Times is now the president and CEO of New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR). He reported in a video posted to his LinkedIn page that the cuts will result in his station losing at least $400,000 a year of its operating budget. While I don’t live in New Hampshire, I do listen to NHPR on my drives from Boston to visit in-laws in Maine. NHPR’s "Civics 101" podcast has received Edward R. Murrow and Silver Gavel Awards.

While some people don’t care for public media and others claim a political bias, public media does often provide a source of local news in areas that otherwise would be underserved. I am biased and not just because of my past work for and friendship with those who currently work for public media. I believe they are doing good work and that public media newscasts are often best at providing straight reporting rather than devolving into a bevy of talking-head pundits populating cable news outlets.

There is, however, no ethical obligation to donate money to public media. Nevertheless, if you believe that public media provides a valuable service, then it certainly would be good to consider helping support it way beyond the $1.60 a year per person it is losing through congressional cuts.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Is it OK to Google someone you’re about to meet?

Is it wrong to Google someone before you meet them?

Variations of the question about whether it’s OK to Google someone you’re about to meet regularly arrive from readers. Some readers want to know if it’s OK to do a search for someone prior to a first date, or if that borders on creepy. Others ask if it’s kosher to do a Google search on a person who is about to interview you for a job or, conversely, if it’s OK for an employer to do a Google search on a prospective employee.

Some readers worry they could be violating someone’s privacy by doing a search. They worry if their searches might be misconstrued as stalking or trolling. Others express concern that if the person were to find out they had been searched they would take offense.

Let’s start with the prospective employees. If they know the name of the person who is to interview them, it’s not only OK to search for information about them, it seems wise. On some websites such as LinkedIn, people can see who has viewed their profile. So what? If I see that someone I’m about to interview for a job has looked me up on LinkedIn, my guess is that the person is likely desirous of being as prepared as possible for the interview.

I see no issue with people doing a Google search on someone with whom they’re about to go on a first date. For those who find one another from on online dating app, this seems a no-brainer, a chance to see if the dating profile matches up with what’s available publicly on the internet. For others, it’s an opportunity to learn a thing or two about the date, which could come in handy if the conversation lulls. (Caveat: I have not dated anyone other than the woman I’d eat bees for since the Carter administration, so I am no expert on current dating norms.)

As long as no ill intent is involved, using the internet to find out about someone can be helpful. In courses I teach, I regularly ask students to fill out a personal survey prior to the course’s start. If they mention something they’ve written, I often will look up their writing or other things from their survey. My goal is to get to know my students. If the internet can help me do this, I see that as a good thing.

I do, however, tell students that I am doing this and I encourage them to not freak out if I have been viewing their LinkedIn profile. I would expect that some students Google me prior to class as well since they regularly ask questions or point out a particularly embarrassing piece of writing from my past. I encourage them to be relentlessly curious, which their Googling skills often enable them to be.

If someone asks if you’ve Googled them, don’t lie. They shouldn’t lie to you either if you ask them.

The right thing is to use Google to gather information that might help you get to know something about someone, but never to rely solely on that to do so. There’s no replacement for getting to know someone in person.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.