The Right Thing: 2026

Sunday, January 25, 2026

Should you read something before you "like" it?

Should you like something online if you haven’t read it?

A reader we’re calling Frank has a close friend who has spent years advising businesses and organizations on how to use social media effectively. Frank’s friend had built a strong reputation and was in strong demand. Recently, he wrote, his friend decided to start an online newsletter in which she would share her experiences and expertise with social media with the world. Her intentions with the newsletter, as Frank understood it, was both to build more awareness to her business, but also to test the waters for writing a possible book on the topic.

Since Frank’s friend had a decent following on various social media platforms, she figured she could hit the ground running with readers by promoting her online newsletter with existing followers from other platforms. Her gambit seemed to work since she told Frank.

Frank went to his friend’s first entry shortly after she posted it and noticed that she already had five “likes” on her the post. “Not bad,” he figured, but then he read the post. In it, he noticed that there were several typos and that one paragraph contained incomplete and repeated sentences. The errors were substantial enough that anyone reading the first entry would have found it impossible to make any sense out of what his friend was trying to convey in that paragraph. Nevertheless, those five people had already posted a like to it, presumably out of loyalty or because they regularly liked things they hadn’t bothered to read.

Frank had two questions for me. “Is it wrong to like something you haven’t actually read?” And: “Should I tell my friend about the errors in her post?”

The answer to the second question is simple: Yes, tell her. Even if she wasn’t a close friend, pointing out the error should be appreciated. If Frank cares about her and her work, then pointing out the errors is the right thing to do.

The answer to the first question should be simple as well. No, it’s not OK to like something you haven’t bothered to read. If you’re doing it out of loyalty, it would be kinder to actually read the piece rather than pretending you’d taken the time to do so. The same holds true for forwarding links to pieces online you haven’t read. By sharing pieces you haven’t read simply because someone you know posted them, you send a false message that you’ve actually taken the time to read what you share. That’s not only disingenuous, but it also risks sharing stuff that if you’re read it in full, you’d realize you’d be aghast at sharing it. The right thing is to take the time to read the stuff we like or share.

Frank’s friend also should have taken the time to re-read her own post before posting it. We all make mistakes and introduce the occasional typo into a piece by mistake. But if we take the time to proofread what we’re about to post, we’ll generally catch the big mistakes. Taking that time is the right thing to do, especially if we expect our prospective readers to take the time to read what we post.

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.

Sunday, January 18, 2026

The problem with "repurposing"

How much honesty do I owe my readers?

I have a wicked head cold. Mostly, the symptoms are a persistent hacking cough, running nose and tiredness. The last of these likely results from waking myself up every hour or so with that hacking cough. I’ve been to the doctor, I am taking medication, drinking lots of fluids and taking a copious amount of naps.

It is a bit difficult to concentrate, but truth be told, I had the head cold when I wrote last week’s column and no one, near as I can tell, found it any worse for the wear. But I’m more exhausted this week and still have a bit of prep work to do for a couple of courses I agreed to start teaching a week ago.

My best friend called and suggested I “repurpose” an old column. Since I’ve been writing The Right Thing column since 1998, he’s convinced no one will be the wiser. He uses words like “repurpose,” he says because he’s a former Hollywood writer and regularly repurposed stuff.

The only other time someone suggested I use an old column rather than write a new one was after my father died during COVID. My editor at the time was sympathetic to how challenging a time it was and offered me the chance to re-run an old column.

In neither case, did I seize the opportunity. Given that I’m now writing the 1,200th Right Thing column, there’s certainly enough material to draw upon. It’s also quite likely that there’s been some overlap in the types of topics I’ve written about over the years, although those have been inadvertent. I will admit, however, that there are times I sit down to write a column and have to search through the old columns to make sure I haven’t written the same column before. Forty-seven years is a long time and, particularly when I have a head cold, it’s highly likely I don’t remember everything I’ve written.

But I look at it this way: It would be misleading to present an old column as a new one to my readers. Some readers might not care, but I do. So I soldier on and write about the importance of being honest with my readers.

There might be a time when I decide to consider repurposing an old column. I don’t anticipate doing so, but if I do, the right thing would be to let readers know that the column is one that ran before. That would be the honest approach. If I do give it a try, I may find out that an occasional greatest hit from the archives is something readers would appreciate. Few of you, after all, have been with me since 1998 when I started, something about which I was made painfully aware when four graduate students told me that weren’t yet born then.

My promise to you is to be honest and as transparent as possible.

But now I have an appointment with a bowl of homemade chicken soup made by my wife. Unlike those grad students, she has read every column I’ve written since 1998. Those are only two of the many reasons that she remains the woman I’d eat bees for.

Sunday, January 11, 2026

Looking back at another year of doing the right thing

A year ago, at the end of 2024, after looking at the analytics for the website where The Right Thing weekly column gets posted after it has run in publications that carry it, it was clear that readers were most drawn to columns that focused on being an engaged citizen, companies that prop up bad behavior in advertisements, learning to lose gracefully, not allowing pretension to get in the way of our message, and whether companies are obligated to honor commitments even if they were made in jest.

In 2025, the five columns viewed the most touched on the reliability of artificial intelligence, Googling prospective acquaintances, full disclosure by product reviewers, letting online friends know you were cutting ties and trusting columnists without checking their facts.

The fifth-most viewed column, “If a columnist tells you something, check it out,” ran in late August. In it, I recounted how a news program once misidentified my profession and how I’d recently misspoke on a podcast interview. In each instance, I felt the importance of acknowledging the error and urged readers to double-check facts before they spread them as gospel.

A July column, “Should I tell a social media friend that I’m cutting them?” reassured a reader there was nothing unethical about pruning the list of people she connects with online without feeling compelled to alert them they were being dumped or added.

The answer to “Should reviewers disclose receiving compensation?” which also ran in July was an emphatic “yes.” Being transparent about when you’re receiving compensation to review any product lets readers know about potential biases in the reviews they read.

In early August, I asked: “Is it OK to Google someone you’re about to meet?” While there’s no replacement to getting to know someone in person, it’s also perfectly fine and often wise to gather as much information about a person as you can before meeting them.

Finally, by far the most viewed Right Thing column of the year was June’s “Are you responsible for checking your AI work?” I mentioned that I’d asked several chatbots to write my biography and while most of the information about me was accurate, they also named a wife, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who didn’t exist in my life, had me living with my imaginary wife in Manhattan for a couple of years, and bestowed a fellowship from a Utah university I’d never received. Even without those hallucinations, the right thing is to double-check whatever AI tells you is true.

As 2025 drew to a close, I was reminded of the opening of a Lucille Clifton poem:

i am running into a new year

and the old years blow black

like a wind

that I catch in my hair

Thank you for continuing to email your questions, stories and reactions to The Right Thing column. May your years continue to be full of doing the right thing while surrounded by those who choose to do the same and may you face whatever the coming year’s winds bring you.

Sunday, January 04, 2026

How likely are you to return a found wallet?

How honest are people likely to be?

In research results published six years ago in the journal Science, researchers wanted to examine the “trade-off between honesty and self-interest” so they “visited 355 cities in 40 countries and turned in a total of 17,303 wallets.”

The wallets contained varying amounts of cash or no cash at all, all in denominations specific to the country where they were "lost." The rate of return was different depending on the country with 76% of people in Switzerland returning a wallet while only 14% did so in China.

But in 38 of the 40 countries, one surprising result was that the more money a wallet contained, the more likely it was returned. If little or no money was in the wallet – the equivalent of $13.45 -- their research found, the rate of return averaged between 40% and 51%. In three countries when they increased the amount in the wallets to the equivalent of $94.14, the rate of return increased to 72%. (Only Mexico and Peru did not experience such a jump, according to the researchers.) That far more people returned wallets when more money was involved surprised the researchers.

I’m reminded of the study whenever I find a wallet on the street, something that seems to happen more than I might have anticipated. Then again, I am old and walk around a lot. Most recently, it happened when I saw a wallet on the stoop of a building in Porto, Portugal, not far from the University of Porto, the university upon which J.K. Rowling allegedly based the gowns worn by the students at Hogwarts.

My Portuguese is nonexistent, so I asked the desk clerk at my hotel for help in figuring out if an owner could be identified. There were 10 euros and a college identification card in the wallet. “Ten euros would mean a lot to the student,” the desk clerk said and he assured me he would turn it in to the police.

While there was no phone number in the wallet, perhaps I should have tried to hunt the student down myself to make sure his cash and cards were returned. Instead, I counted on the fact that Portugal was in the top half of the countries when it came to returning lost wallets with little or no money inside. I also counted on the honesty of the desk clerk.

The lost-wallet study reminded me that generally people try to do the right thing when it comes to being honest about such things as lost wallets, at least the 17,303 that these researchers put into the world.

But I’m curious about what readers have done when in such situations. Nothing? Make every effort to find the owner? Has it depended on how much was in the wallet? If so, what amount triggers action?

Send me your stories to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. I’ll share some in an upcoming column. If you’re worried about others learning of your honest response, I will do my best to disguise your real name.