Integrity
Integrity
Doing the right thing at all times and in all circumstances, whether or not anyone is watching.
- How would you handle a lapse of integrity in a friend, teammate, or squadron member?
- How do you handle your own failure of integrity?
Videos for Tonight’s Meeting
VIDEO 1: The Stray Path
VIDEO 2: US Military Academy Cheating Scandal
VIDEO 3: USAF Nuclear Officers Cheating
VIDEO 4: Scooter Braun: How To Live with Integrity
Cadet Small Group Questions
- In our Learn to Lead textbooks, we learned that integrity is “doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” What else does integrity mean to you?
- In a recent survey of 3000 college students, 86% of those surveyed admitted to cheating in high school. What makes cheating seem like a good idea?
- Can a person have integrity in some areas but not in others?
- Does integrity mean that I must follow CAP rules outside of CAP activities?
- Anonymity allows people to say and do things without revealing their identities. How can anonymity encourage integrity? Put differently, is it ever easier to do the right thing when no one will know you did it?
- Anonymity is common on the internet, where many people use handles, screen-names, and nicknames. How would people act differently if they had to be responsible for everything they said on the internet?
- We also read in Learn to Lead that attitudes are contagious. Do you think integrity is contagious? Why or why not?
Cadet Small Group Activity
Setup of the Exercise:
Each participant should have a blank piece of paper and a pencil/pen.
Instructions:
Each participant should write down three statements about themselves. Two of these statements should be true and the other one false. For example:
I am a cadet in Civil Air Patrol. (true)
I go to Cleveland High School. (not true)
I got to the meeting tonight driving my own car. (true)
The facts can be as tricky as you wish, but they should all be realistic and “possibly” true. Read your three facts to the group. As the group listens, they need to decide which of your statements is false. They can talk about it but must vote. The reader then tells the other participants whether they identified the lie.
Discussion questions after the activity:
- How easy was it for you to identify the untrue statement?
- What questions did you ask yourself to identify the untrue statement?
- Is it more difficult to deceive the other players when playing in a virtual meeting space?
- What would make it more difficult to deceive the group?
- If it is so easy to deceive, how you can establish trust in your groups?
- Do games like this one, which encourage us to tell lies and sniff them out, do more harm than good?