Professors' Moral Attitudes about Responding to Student Emails Are Almost Completely Unrelated to Their Actual Responsiveness to Student Emails
... or so say Josh Rust and I in an article were are busily writing up. (We reported some of the data in an earlier blog post here.)
Below is my favorite figure from the current draft. On the x-axis is professors' expressed normative view about the morality or immorality of "not consistently responding to student emails", in answer to a survey question, with answers ranging from 1 ("very morally bad") through 5 ("morally neutral") to 9 ("very morally good"). (In fact, only 1% of respondents answered on the morally good side of the scale, showing that we aren't entirely bonkers.) On the y-axis is responsiveness to three emails Josh and I sent to those same survey respondents -- emails designed to look as through they were from undergraduates, asking questions about such things as office hours and future courses.
(I can't seem to get my graphs to display quite right in Blogger. If the graph is cut off, please click to view the whole thing. The triplets of bars represent ethicists, non-ethicist philosophers, and professors in departments other than philosophy, respectively.)