Jeffrey L. Seglin's Blog, page 2

Are you responsible for checking your AI work?

If you use artificial intelligence (AI) to assist you in your professional work, how much responsibility do you have to check to make sure that whatever AI provides is accurate?

I am not an AI basher. There are moments when AI can be useful. In my line of work, some find it useful to correct grammar and usage, help with generating broad ideas, assist with a translation of a foreign phrase, or any number of other items. But by itself, AI – whether it is ChatGPT, X’s Grok or any number of other generative AI tools – is yet to be trusted to replace an actual human being without that human being double-checking all the work.

AI-generated documents are notorious for “hallucinating” or making stuff up. AI output is often rife with errors that might include made-up facts or references to sources that simply don’t exist. Sometimes it even includes links to those nonexistent sources, which go to nonexistent pages.

As an exercise, I asked ChatGPT to write my biography. Because I’ve been writing this column for the past 27 years, have written for other publications, made some television appearances, written books, appear in the directories or on the websites of the schools where I have taught, and have a short Wikipedia profile, there is plenty of information about me available on the internet. Most of what I’ve seen has correct information. There is plenty of data from which ChatGPT can draw.

Most of what ChatGPT came up with was correct, but some was not. Only someone who knows everything about me -- my work and my family -- would be able to discern what’s correct.

It listed my wife’s name as Lynne, which was a surprise to both me and my wife, Nancy. It mentioned my two daughters-in-law, Megan and Monica, who to the best of my knowledge don’t exist. While I do have four grandchildren, their names are not, as ChatGPT insists, David, Rose, Jonah and Mae. My first great-grandchild is not Eleanor Mae, although that is a lovely name. I also did not live with Lynne, whomever she may be, in New York City for a couple of years in the early 1980s. ChatGPT also provided me with a nephew named Joshua, also nonexistent.

ChatGPT also pegged me as the former managing editor of the Harvard Business Review, a publication I admire but have never written for, let alone edited. It listed many of the books I’ve written correctly but included others I didn’t, such as "Writing to Be Understood," a fact that would come as a surprise to Anne Janzer, who actually wrote that book. It also had me listed as the inaugural fellow in residence at the Center for the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley University. I’ve visited Utah, but never Orem where that university is located and never held that fellowship, if it exists (although if Utah Valley makes an offer, I’ll consider it). ChatGPT also thinks I’m a Fulbright Specialist. I’m not.

The right thing when using AI is to remember that it is a tool that is not foolproof without a human check. Sometimes it gets things right. Often it doesn’t. Assuming that you can use it to do your work for you – whether you’re a teacher, student, researcher, bureaucrat, job seeker or anybody else – is wrong if you expect your work to accurately reflect you and your abilities. I’m confident even Lynne would agree, if she existed.

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.

When friends don’t listen, should we dump them?

Should you dump friends who don’t seem to care as much about you as you care about them?

A reader we’re calling Amity indicates that she has many close friends, some of whom she’s had for years. Even when friends move away, Amity makes a point to stay in touch with about a half dozen of her friends once a week with at least a text and often with a longer phone conversation. Amity writes that she regularly asks about her friends’ lives.

Recently, however, Amity has noticed that few of her friends ask about her, or even when they do, the conversation almost always turns back to talk of whatever the friend happens to be going through at that moment. Amity admits that she isn’t typically as forthcoming about her personal life as her friends are, but she does like to feel as if her friends care as much about her as she does about them.

The perception that the balance of concern might be off hit Amity particular after she confided in a few friends about a health scare she had experienced. While she is fine now, she was taken aback that whenever she brought up her illness with friends, the focus of the conversation generally shifted from her to whatever her friends happened to be going through at the moment. Some friends did and continue to ask her how she is at the beginning of a conversation, but here too she feels like they don’t focus as much on her as she would have on them.

Amity is concerned that her friends don’t care about her or that perhaps she has the wrong friends. Isn’t it wrong, she wonders, for them not to spend as much time talking about me as I do talking about them?

Since I don’t know Amity’s friends, I can’t speak to their appropriateness as friends. But I suspect that many of them are just as good a friend to Amity as they ever were. What’s likely changed, however, are Amity’s needs and her desire to break from the pattern of behavior she established with her friends long ago.

While true friends should indeed care about one another, there is no spreadsheet on which to tally who spends the most time caring about the other. Talking about someone in a conversation is just one way to indicate concern.

By Amity’s own admission, she hasn’t been as forthcoming about her personal life as her friends have been. While she may want to be more forthcoming now, her friends may not know this and instead default to the pattern they’ve established over the years.

It may feel a bit uncomfortable and out of character, but if Amity needs more listening time from her friends, the right thing is for her to tell them that. Granted, some friends are so in sync with one another that they know when a friend needs something, but many are not gifted at reading minds, particularly if the conversation is via spare and relatively emotionless text messages.

If some of her friends don’t respond to her request, then Amity may indeed want to address whether it’s time to let a friendship wane. But perhaps giving them a chance to step up and listen is something a true friend might do.

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.

When shouldn’t a friend honor a request for confidence?

Is it wrong to ignore a friend’s request to keep a confidence if you believe doing so might result in that friend being in danger?

For the past several years, a reader we’re calling Tom has noticed that an elderly friend who lives several states away has been having trouble remembering things. The friend will often call several times a day, forgetting that he had called earlier and often not remembering why he called.

Tom has been concerned but he has rested a bit easier knowing that his friend has family living nearby, a couple of whom seem to check in with him regularly. Occasionally, one family member in particular will give Tom a call to let him know how his friend is doing.

Recently, however, Tom got several calls within a couple of hours from his friend who seemed to be in a more agitated state than usual. The friend told Tom that he was having trouble logging into his email and that he was unable to reach anyone in his family who lived nearby. When Tom pressed his friend on how long it had been since he spoke with family members, his friend was unsure. The friend was convinced, however, that the family members had stopped talking to him or taking his calls and he suspected that they cut off his email as well.

Tom was unsure what to do. This was not the first time his friend seemed confused and forgetful. But this time the friend specifically asked Tom not to call his family since he was convinced they were cutting him off.

While Tom was pretty sure his friend’s family was not cutting him off and that there was a logical explanation, he wrestled with whether he should honor his friend’s request to not call his family or if he should go ahead and do so to ask them if all was OK.

If Tom planned to call the friend’s family in spite of his requests not to, the right thing would be to tell his friend that he was planning to do so. He could explain that he was concerned and was not willing to risk something going truly wrong at his friend’s house without his family knowing. Or if Tom did not believe his friend was at risk, he could do what he typically did in such cases and wait a few hours and then check back in with his friend.

Tom ultimately chose to do the latter and within an hour his friend called him back to tell him that the family member who usually checked in on him had just called to let him know that she’d been tied up tending to a friend who had a medical emergency. All was fine, Tom’s friend told him, and then he began to regale him with old stories from their youth as if nothing was wrong.

Tom honored his friend’s request not to get in touch with his family and all turned out OK-ish, but in cases such as this, Tom would do well to enlist the help of those in closer proximity to his friend if he believes his friend is in danger. Even if the friend is unlikely to remember Tom telling him he planned to call his family, Tom would still be doing the right thing by letting his friend know his intentions.

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.

Before spreading stories, check the source

Is it OK to repeat someone else’s story if you’re not sure it’s true?

There’s an old story about Ernest Hemingway accepting a bet that he couldn’t write a short story in six words. The story goes that Hemingway responded by writing: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” It had all that was necessary for a moving tale suggesting loss and grief. It’s been held up as an example of Hemingway’s writing prowess even with a paucity of words.

The problem is that it’s highly unlikely Hemingway ever accepted such a bet or originated the words, a version of which appeared in 1906, when Hemingway was 7 years old. Nevertheless, it makes for a good story and still gets wrongly attributed.

I was reminded of the baby shoes story when I was contemplating writing a column about a story that I recollect my best friend telling me in the early 1990s, when he was furniture shopping for his studio apartment in Manhattan. As I recalled it, Jim told me that he purchased a small cabinet that he carried several blocks from the store to his apartment. When he got the cabinet into place and opened one of the drawers, he told me that it was full of stuffed animals. What I couldn’t remember was what Jim decided to do with the animals that were erroneously included with his purchase.

I can’t double-check with Hemingway to see if he made up the story about writing about baby shoes since he died in 1961. But I could check in with Jim, who is alive and well and now living outside Los Angeles.

I called Jim to ask him two questions. The first was whether the story actually happened or if it was a yarn he spun as he was settling into life in Manhattan. If it did indeed happen, I wanted to know what he did with the stuffed animals. That second answer could lead to a column about what to do when you find yourself being given more than you paid for.

Jim couldn’t recollect telling me the story. He did, however, remember all of the furniture he bought and carried home to his studio apartment, assuring me that the apartment wasn’t big enough to hold much. “I’m pretty sure that never happened,” he told me of the stuffed animals. We then figured it made for a good story about his adventure and he made it up.

That the story stuck with me is anecdotal proof that an incidental comment we make to someone might have more sticking power than we intend. Both Jim and I had experienced such yarn-spinning with old high school friends. We were both present when a mutual friend recalled something that happened to them in high school that actually had happened to one of us. This mutual friend presumably forgot that we were all there and knew the truth.

I could have written a column based on Jim’s anecdote. But checking with those who tell us stuff before we spread that stuff to others is the right thing to do. So too is returning stuff we didn’t pay for.

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.

It’s OK to say, 'I don’t know'

Is it wrong to pretend to understand something when you clearly don’t?

Many of the graduate students I’ve worked with over the past several years have arrived with significant professional experience in areas where often I have next to none. They signed up for the courses I taught because I happened to teach something in which they had no or limited experience.

Somewhere in the early days of the course, I typically remind the students of the fact that they know more than I do about what they’ve done prior to coming to school. But I go on to tell them that I am sort of like Liam Neeson’s character, Bryan Mills, in the movie "Taken," in that like him I have “a very particular sets of skills” that I have “acquired over a very long career.” The students sometimes will laugh (humor can be hard in any classroom), but they seem to get the point that I am trying to make: I know what I know, and I will not pretend to know things I don’t know.

When I am working with students who want to write articles for a general audience, I remind them that their audiences will often not know as much as they do about what they are writing. They must be able to write in a way to make things understandable enough to make their message clear.

Here, I remind them of a colleague I once hired to work as a content editor at a software startup. She once told me that she had no problem getting information from the software engineers by reminding me (and often them) that if the engineers couldn’t explain something to her, it was likely they didn’t understand it themselves.

Most of us find ourselves in situations from time to time where we simply don’t know something or understand something that someone is trying to tell us. If we don’t know the person well, the temptation might be to feign comprehension rather than to admit we haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. There are any number of reasons for having such a reaction. We might fear being judged as ignorant for not knowing something. Or our insecurities might kick in, making us want to appear more knowledgeable than we are.

There is, however, little upside to pretending to know something we don’t. By failing to acknowledge our ignorance, we risk never understanding whatever it was we pretended to know. We also risk sending a message that we’re capable of doing something when we have yet to understand what that something is. While an instructive YouTube video might help us in some cases to cover should we ever be asked to actually do that something, that’s not a reliable method toward understanding something.

The more honest and useful response is to acknowledge our ignorance. That doesn’t make us lesser or stupid or a failure. It simply acknowledges that we have the integrity to acknowledge when we don’t know stuff and the desire to want to learn more.

Telling someone we don’t know is not only the right thing to do, it gives that person the chance to share knowledge. If they can’t, then it’s likely they too don’t know.

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.

Should we tell friends when we see old social media posts?

If you stumble upon an old social media post made by someone you know and it might prove embarrassing or harmful, should you alert them to your discovery?

Frequently over the past 20 years, when I’ve come across a Facebook post made by someone I know that might wreak havoc on their job search as they are about to enter the market, I’ve let them know.

Perhaps it was a relative who was a rising college senior who once thought it amusing to post a photo of herself chugging back alcohol at a party, but forgot the photo was there or didn’t give it much thought. My email might remind them that potential employers can scour the internet for anything about a prospective employee that might give them pause. Did they really want the chugging photo to be among the first things potential employers found when they did a search?

On other occasions, a friend might have thought it cool to post a profile photo of them pointing a handgun at the camera after having just taken a shooting lesson. When that same person was quite vocal about gun control on their social media feed, I might email to ask if they thought some viewers might not find the humor in their pose.

In such cases, the recipient of my emails could decide to keep the photos up. My goal wasn’t to police anyone’s activity on social media. They were just meant as a heads up in case they had forgotten they made the post.

When we post something on social media, we often post and forget about it. But what we post stays there, often for years and remains available for anyone who wants to find it.

I raise this issue now because over the past several months, I’ve had more queries from readers, former associates, family members or former students about how concerned they are about past posts somehow coming back to haunt them. There appears to be a warranted anxiety given some high-profile cases of graduate students in the United States on an international visa being targeted because of posts in their social media feeds or an op-ed they might have co-written for their campus newspaper. International students may be most vulnerable to repercussions. Nevertheless, the breadth of heightened anxiety seems wide.

The responsibility for what gets posted lies with the person who posted it. But if we come across something posted by someone we know that seems particularly incendiary, I believe the right thing is to alert that person.

When we see something, it’s not meddling to alert a friend. If someone reminds us what’s out there, the appropriate response is to thank them and to decide whether the post accomplishes what we intended or whether it’s time to take it down.

As long as we are not trying to harm someone, each of us should be free to post comments or to write pieces on issues about which we are passionate. But too many of us have been cavalier about what we post without being thoughtful or remembering that the Internet has a long memory.

effrey 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.

When emails are sent erroneously, should sender come clean?

If you send an email by mistake, should you admit your error?

Many of us have had the experience of sending an email or a text and inadvertently including someone we ought not to have included as a recipient. Perhaps a glib comment was made about a colleague or a boss who ends up receiving the message. Or a job application ends up in your manager’s inbox by mistake.

Few of us have likely sent an email threatening action against a person or an organization before we meant to send it. Nevertheless, such things happen.

When discovered, what should an errant emailer do?

Coming clean on the mistake and owning the error is the most honest response. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be repercussions.

If it’s an email about a colleague or a friend, some serious repair of the relationship might be in order. If it’s a particularly derogatory comment about a boss, the lift might be a bit heavier and, as a friend who is an expert in crisis management tells me, that email sender would be wise to start looking for a new job.

In politics, my crisis friend tells me, the tendency is often not to come clean, but to try to find ways to use a creative vocabulary to lessen the blow. That might include asking the recipient why they didn’t check with you to see if you were serious in the words you used. Or if the email included something that suggested you were so agitated you were likely to embark on a rule-breaking spree, to respond to queries with something as ambiguous as: “I try never to break the law.”

In 1923, humorist Will Rogers is reported to have said: “If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.”

My crisis friend tells me that few in politics want to admit errors because they don’t want to end up relegated to political Siberia because it’s so cold, although he used more colorful language.

It might be viewed as naïve to believe that owning your mistakes and admitting to errors after you’ve made them is the right thing to do. Some errors get corrected before any harm can be done. There’s no reason to go around alerting people to every mistake you’ve ever made on the way to a successful outcome, particularly if those errors hurt no one and were not done with harmful intent. We all make mistakes.

But when you do discover an error or someone else does, I believe the right thing is to have the integrity to acknowledge the error. Granted, this might result in a blow to a career or a friendship, but lying to cover your actions – while a time-tested maneuver – shows little moral courage. On a practical level, it’s the lies we tell to cover up that often result in the most self-damage.

A year after he made the comment above, Will Rogers said: “They ought to pass a rule in this country in any investigations if a man can’t tell the truth the first time he shouldn’t be allowed to try again.”

That’s a law unlikely to be considered. What we can control, however, are our own actions and whether we choose to do the right thing when things go awry.

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.

How much should we read into emails we receive?

Is it disrespectful to dismiss someone else’s political views?

A reader we’re calling Edwin has more conservative political views than his older sister. They voted differently in the 2024 presidential election and they view the efforts of the current administration differently as well.

Nevertheless, they maintain a good relationship and are capable of exchanging opposite views without it resulting in an all-out battle. Edwin has long found it possible for each of them to be respectful of one another and their respective views while still holding true to their strong beliefs.

Recently, however, Edwin received an email from his sister that he found “very disappointing.”

In an email to his sister, Edwin had encouraged her to watch a Fox News interview with Elon Musk and members of his Department of Government Efficiency team. He mentioned to her that he found the group to be earnest in their stated objectives and hoped that his sister might give them the benefit of the doubt or at least not assume the worst about them.

His sister responded by telling Edwin she had seen the interview and ended her email with “Sick!” Given Edwin’s and his sister’s ages, it’s unlikely she was using “sick” as a slang some younger readers might use to connote something positive.

Edwin found that response to be dismissive of his efforts to help his sister see that reasonable people can disagree, but that everyone would do well to try to see what “makes the opposition tick.”

Did Edwin’s sister step over the line with her response to his email? Should he take her response as being dismissive of him and his efforts to enlighten her?

Clearly, if Edwin was taken aback by his sister’s response, he has every right to be, particularly if it wasn’t in keeping with the typical way they respond to one another.

But email can be a funny thing and intentions are not always as clear in email messages as they might be in a conversation in-person, by phone or via a video conference. What Edwin took as dismissive of him might have been more of a reaction to Elon Musk and the DOGE team or of the many efforts they have undertaken since being deployed to find ways to cut government spending.

For all Edwin knows, his sister may have found his attempt to portray Musk and team as earnest in their efforts as disrespectful of what he knew to be her views.

Again, Edwin has every right to be taken aback by his sister’s response. But particularly if Edwin wants to continue their relationship, which he indicates he does, the right thing would be for him to tell her he was taken aback by it and why. Doing so would give both the chance to flesh out how each of them responded to the interview they saw.

Very likely, they would not agree on the earnestness of the DOGE team or the value of its efforts, but they would have a chance to understand more of how one another ticks when it comes to such things. And that, after all, is someone Edwin embraces as something we should all try to do.

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.

Calling out kindness doesn’t erase bad behavior, but it can help

When bad behavior seems to run amok and all appears bleak, do rare moments of grace make a difference?

Hannah Selinger is an accomplished food and travel writer. Her work has appeared in Travel & Leisure, The New York Times Magazine, Eater, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit and a number of other well-respected publications. She’s been nominated for a James Beard award for her writing and her work has appeared in “The Best American Food Writing 2022” collection.

Prior to writing, Hannah worked as a certified sommelier for several well-known restaurants in New York. Now, Hannah has written a memoir about her life in the restaurant business. It’s called “Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly.” In her review in the San Francisco Chronicle, Hannah Bae calls the book a “passionate, insightful and deservedly critical book on the culture of restaurant work.”

Hannah’s book is indeed critical and specific about the indignities and abuse she experienced while working in the restaurant industry. She provides examples of several restaurant people (high-profile and not-so-much) guilty of bad behavior.

It can make for a harrowing read to be brought along on Hannah’s journey. But then I am a biased observer. Hannah was a graduate student I taught at Emerson College 20 years ago. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, particularly as she made the shift from wine to writing.

Most of the reviews of Hannah’s book focus on those who seemed to go out of their way to demean others, including her. But there are moments in her book that suggest not everyone was a creep. Friends and supporters abound but are rarely mentioned. And then there is one episode Hannah recalls in which a high-profile celebrity chef seems to go out of his way to show some kindness.

Shortly after starting to work at Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain, he made a visit to the restaurant. He noticed Hannah standing by the oyster bar staring at her notepad. After asking her her name and a few questions he quickly surmised that she didn’t know much about oysters. He then tapped the metal bar and was served various oysters, which he proceeded to taste with Hannah and walk her through the differences and how to describe them to customers. “Now you know the difference,” she recalls him saying and with that he walked on and she went back to her station.

Certainly, it was in Flay’s best interest to have a staff well-versed on what they were serving customers. But he didn’t scold her or dismiss her for not knowing as much as he did about mollusks.

The incident is only a brief moment among pages where such patience is nowhere in sight. But that moment taken by a celebrity restaurateur who did not need to take it stood out to me. When someone takes the time to show grace, it’s good to call it out. Especially in an industry that is notorious for treating employees poorly, taking a moment to point out examples of those who don’t and who still have managed to achieve great success seems the right thing to do.

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.

How critical is it to keep a confidence?

How obligated are we if we agree to keeping a confidence?

A reader we’re calling Willa recently traveled out of town to spend a few days minding her teenaged grandchildren while their parents were away. While there, Willa’s teenage granddaughter whom we’re calling Addie told her that she had recently solved a trigonometry program in her high school math class that her teacher had never seen before.

The teacher told Addie that he would try to help her publish her solution in an academic journal but gave Addie just a few days to decide if she wanted to do it. Addie told her teacher that she’d think about it, but feared that if he parents knew, there would be even more pressure on her to succeed in school, including possibly summer school. Willa writes that Addie is already an excellent and conscientious student, but she believes that “enough is enough” when it comes to doing extra work in school.

Addie asked her grandmother not to tell Addie’s parents or anybody else about her dilemma. Willa agreed, but when she returned home she told her husband and asked his opinion of how she might advise Addie. Willa writes that her husband thought Addie deserved their support and suggested language for her to use in a text to her that urged her to consider trying to publish her solution.

Addie thanked her grandmother, but now Willa thinks Addie is upset with her because she violated her confidence. Willa’s husband isn’t convinced a teenager should be allowed to let her short-term concerns, however legitimate, determine an action that could potentially impact her life positively in the long run. But what Willa really wants to know is if she was wrong to tell her husband about the situation.

While Willa’s husband may be correct that publishing a solution to a math problem might be a boon to Addie’s high school record, so too might trying out for a sport or activity at which an adviser believes she would excel. Not seizing every opportunity, even the rare ones, might seem myopic, but ultimately, if they trust that Addie knows it would be too much pressure, it seems wise to trust her as she considers her choice.

When asked to keep a confidence, before agreeing to do so, the right thing is to get clear with the requester what they are asking and if you agree to be as clear as possible what you’re agreeing to.

It would have been wrong for Willa to agree not to tell her husband and then to do so. Willa could have told Addie she wouldn’t say anything to Addie’s parents but that she doesn’t keep any secrets from Addie’s grandfather. That way, Addie would have been prepared for the text from her grandmother when it arrived. All bets would have been off if Addie has confided something that was likely to put her in a dangerous situation, but that’s not the case here.

Willa clearly cares about Addie and wanted to give her the best advice possible while still providing her room to make her own decision. Addie might be upset with her grandmother for violating a confidence, but she also might be upset because her grandmother is giving her advice to consider doing something she might not want to do. That Willa offered that advice should send Addie the message of just how much she cares about her.

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.

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