Social Decision Making

Social Dilemmas, Social Values, and Ethical Judgments

Roderick M. Kramer, Ann E. Tenbrunsel, Max H. Bazerman, Roderick M. Kramer, Ann E. Tenbrunsel, Max H. Bazerman

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415654227
• eBook ISBN: 9781135419172
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

This book, in honor of David Messick, is about social decisions and the role cooperation plays in social life. Noted contributors who worked with Dave over the years will discuss their work in social judgment, decision making and ethics which was so important to Dave.

The book offers a unique and valuable contribution to the fields of social psychology and organizational behavior. Ethical decision making, a central focus of this volume, is highly relevant to current scholarship and research in both disciplines. The volume will be suitable for graduate level courses in organizational behavior, social psychology, business ethics, and sociology.

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Social Dilemmas, Social Values, and Ethical Judgments: Touchpoints and Touchdowns in a Distinguished Scholarly Career

Roderick M. Kramer

Stanford Business School

Ann E. Tenbrunsel

University of Notre Dame

Max H. Bazerman

Harvard University

This festschrift honors David M. Messick’s distinguished career as a social scientist. More precisely, we honor Dave’s two scholarly careers — the first as a preeminent experimental social psychologist and the second as a distinguished organizational behavior theorist. Given Dave’s dual personality (professionally speaking), we faced something of a daunting challenge in putting together this volume. Dave’s theoretical papers and empirical research have engaged so many important questions, cross so many disciplinary boundaries, and reflect such wide-ranging collaborations that a neat, tidy, or comprehensive compendium was difficult to compose.

In our role as editors, we were acutely aware that sins of omission would be inevitable when trying to do justice to Dave’s notable and varied scholarly career. We are biased by our associations with Dave. Rod has known Dave the longest, meeting him in 1980 when Rod joined the doctoral program at UC–Santa Barbara. Dave introduced Rod to the study of social dilemmas, resulting in a fruitful and enduring collaboration and friendship. Max got to know Dave in the 1990s as he joined the faculty at Northwestern and shifted his research agenda toward the psychology of ethics. Ann’s research interest in ethics began when Dave joined the faculty in her first year of her doctoral program and the first study of her dissertation was drafted in Dave’s experimental methods class. All of us have written multiple papers with Dave, see ourselves as students of Dave’s, are friends with him, and have consumed too many bottles of wine with him (he has a habit of ordering one more bottle than others might in similar situations). And all of us have experienced moving in a new research direction, only to find that Dave was covering similar turf a decade or more earlier.

Ultimately, in organizing this volume, we settled on trying to touch primarily on three streams of research in social psychology and organizational theory to which Dave made major and enduring contributions, and that engaged the bulk of his time and attention: social dilemmas, social values, and ethics. We also endeavored, however, to capture the broad social impact of that research on multiple generations of social scientists. In that spirit, we have assembled original contributions from many of Dave’s former students and collaborators. The contributors come from many parts of the world, which is not surprising given the expansive reach of Dave’s research.

By way of preface, we should note that Dave began his academic career as an experimental psychologist, earning his B.A. in psychology from the University of Delaware in 1961. He then went on to earn his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of North Carolina 4 years later. Dave has always had a strong love of — and facility with — mathematics and its application to psychological problems. Not surprisingly, therefore, many of his earliest academic contributions, such as those that examined multiple-choice decision behavior, reflect his strong mathematical bent and insights (e.g., Messick & Rapoport, 1965).

After earning his doctorate, Dave accepted a position as an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He, Judy, and his sons made the long trek across the country in an overloaded Nash Rambler. He was one of the first social psychologists to recognize the importance of game theory to social psychology and to explore game theoretic behavior within experimental settings (e.g., Messick & McClintock, 1968; Messick & Rapoport, 1965). Further, and no less importantly, Dave helped pioneer the use of computer-controlled experimentation so that he and his collaborators could rigorously and systematically study the psychological determinants and consequences of judgment and decision-making within laboratory settings (e.g., Messick & Rapoport, 1964; Messick & McClintock, 1967).

One early and influential stream of research, begun in the 1970s, examined judgment and choice behavior in mixed-motive games such as the two-person and n-person Prisoner’s Dilemma. A particularly fruitful line of inquiry — much of it done with his Santa Barbara colleague Charles (“Chuck”) McClintock — explored the nature of social values and how they affect judgment and choice (e.g., Messick & McClintock, 1968). Social values reflect individuals’ preferences for various self-outcome distribution patterns. As Dave and Chuck demonstrated, individuals differ in the extent to which they prefer, for instance, outcomes that maximize their own individual gain, their joint gain, or their relative gain over other social actors with whom they are interdependent. In a series of influential papers, Dave not only elaborated the theoretical underpinnings of such preferences (McCrimmon & Messick, 1976; Messick & McClintock, 1968), he developed a rigorous method for measuring them and tracing their consequences (Kramer, McClintock, & Messick, 1986; McClintock, Messick, Campos, & Kuhlman, 1973).

It was also in the 1970s that Dave’s interest in group decision-making began to take shape. His initial papers on individual judgment and collective behavior were anchored around the basic question of whether one should or should not join a union (Messick, 1973), a deceptively simple-seeming decision that is prototypic of many more complex, real-world mixed-motive conflicts. In such situations, individuals have incentives to cooperate in order to create public goods from which all, including self, benefit. However, they also realize they can free ride on the productive efforts of others, thereby avoiding the costs of contribution. Hence, the dilemma. Dave’s interest in the social psychology of fairness also developed rapidly during this period, leading to a body of highly regarded work on equity and fairness (e.g., Messick & Cook, 1983; Messick & Sentis, 1979, 1983).

The 1980s ushered in yet another productive research period, as Dave turned to a problem that was just beginning to capture scholarly attention — viz., the problem of cooperation and competition among groups of individuals sharing scarce resource pools. At the time, interest in this topic was anything but academic. Resource scarcities were front-page news at the time — including even a serious local water shortage in the Santa Barbara area, followed also by national fuel shortages and other environmental scarcities. Dave approached this important problem with his characteristic creative energy and intelligence. He and his collaborators at Santa Barbara developed a new laboratory paradigm for systematically studying resource consumption behavior in such situations (Parker et al., 1983). They demonstrated the usefulness of the paradigm in a series of empirical studies investigating psychological and structural determinants of choice behavior (e.g., Messick et al., 1983; Samuelson, Messick, Rutte, & Wilke, 1984). Their computer-based model of a replenishing resource pool became a widely used experimental analogue for studying social dilemma behavior throughout the 1980s and is still in use today by social psychologists and behavioral economists studying social dilemmas.

During this same period, in a fruitful collaboration with his Santa Barbara colleague Marilynn Brewer, Dave produced a conceptual overview of social dilemmas theory and research that became one of the most cited pieces in this rapidly growing literature (Messick & Brewer, 1983). Their paper helped orient not only their own students but a long line of empirical investigators around the world as to how to productively think about and study social dilemma behavior. This was followed by subsequent reviews that updated researchers on “state-of-the-art” theory and research in this area (e.g., Liebrand, Messick, & Wilke, 1992; Messick, 1991).

Dave’s own work in this area, conducted with a number of his students, contributed the useful notion that decisions in mixed-motive situations often reflect the operation of various social decision heuristics — judgmental rules of thumb (Allison & Messick, 1990). These heuristics could help decision-makers navigate even the thorniest of dilemmas. Dave’s work on the use of the equality heuristic constitutes just one example of such a heuristic (Messick & Schell, 1992). As Dave wisely notes, 50/50 is typically not fair but is a useful and expedient social heuristic to avoid discussing what is fair (think of the last time you split a bill in a restaurant when the other couple consumed more than twice as much wine and food as you did).

As perusal of his vita reveals, Dave’s contributions to these major streams of contemporary social psychological theory are truly impressive. Equally revealing and impressive, however, are his numerous contributions to small but rich research tributaries. These contributions reflect Dave’s broad curiosity about the world, as well as his willingness to be pulled in interesting directions by his students and collaborators. In this vein, his papers have examined, for instance, heuristics for determining the optimal interval between medical checkups (Klatzky, Messick, & Loftus, 1992); the role of the “Will Rogers illusion” in social judgments (Messick & Asuncion, 1993); the social facilitation of running (Worringham & Messick, 1983); the reverse outcome bias (Boles & Messick, 1995); the uniqueness bias (Goethals, Messick, & Allison, 1991); ethical fading (Tenbrunsel & Messick, 2004); and the Muhammad Ali Effect (Allison, Messick & Goethals, 1989) — to name just a few. Long before it was fashionable, Dave manifested an enthusiasm for cross-cultural research (e.g., Messick, 1988).

Such a steady accumulation of contributions to his chosen discipline of social psychology would seem to be more than enough for one career. And Dave could have been forgiven had he decided to simply kick up his heels and sit back on the veranda of his villa in the hills overlooking Santa Barbara. Yet, in 1992, he did just the opposite and took on the challenge of a second career. It came by way of the opportunity to join the organizational behavior faculty at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Dave accepted and equally happily accepted the prestigious Morris and Alice Kaplan Professorship of Ethics and Decision in Management. Max played a role in hiring Dave (proving wrong the social psychologists around the country who asserted that “Messick will never leave Santa Barbara”) and sees this hire as one of the few most important things he did in his 15 years at Northwestern.

For Kellogg, some saw hiring Dave as a stretch for distinguished professorship in ethics, but Dave made the transition from lab-coated experimenter to real-world organizational ethics scholar with his amazing grace, flair, enthusiasm, and success. He proved an adept and original thinker when it came to the application of social psychological research to problems of fairness and ethics in organizational settings (Darley, Messick, & Tyler, 2001; Messick & Tenbrunsel, 1996; Tenbrunsel & Messick, 1996), and in his discussion of the logic of appropriateness framework (Messick, 1999), he set the stage for the importance of understanding the construal of an ethical dilemma and its contribution to ethical fading (Tenbrunsel & Messick, 1999). He also ventured into new areas, such as leadership (Messick & Bazerman, 1996; Messick & Kramer, 2004; Wilke, Rutte, Wit, Messick, & Samuelson, 1986) and the emerging area of environmental organizational psychology (e.g., Bazerman, Messick, Tenbrunsel, & Wade-Benzoni, 1997).

It is characteristic of Dave that he not only became a major researcher but an effective thought leader. In consensus with all those who know him or his work, we see Dave as the key intellectual figure in bringing psychology to the topic of ethics and permanently transforming how professional schools think about ethics. Dave made it clear that the decisions of organizational actors are at the core of organizational ethics and encouraged all of us to think about the malleability of the mind as a key component for improving ethics in organizations. He also created models and mechanisms that have profoundly influenced thousands of his own MBA students and executives and tens of thousands of the students of other scholars through his mentoring and writing. As business schools realized the need to transform their educational processes in the field of ethics, Dave has become the most influential intellectual on the topic. He also mentored a series of excellent doctoral students, including Terry Boles, Don Moore, Ann Tenbrunsel, Kim Wade-Benzoni, and Mark Weber, who are continuing to develop Dave’s perspective on ethics.

As one might infer from the number of successful collaborations he has had, Dave has always been a true social psychologist — and we emphasize the word social here. He not only crosses intellectual borders easily, he travels easily across geographic and cultural ones as well. One of the most enduring and significant impacts has been his sustained collaboration with his University of Groningen colleagues. Some of the early — and best — studies on social dilemmas and fairness came out of that fruitful collaboration (e.g., Messick, Wilke, & Liebrand, 1992). And, he builds institutions along the way. The Kellogg School now has an endowed Ethics Center (The Ford Center), in large part due to Dave’s efforts. Though one could say that this book is a tribute to the end of a career, it is evident from the chapters in this book that his contribution is only just beginning.

OVERVIEW OF THE PRESENT VOLUME

As noted earlier, it is probably impossible (and certainly not easy) to give a full and faithful reflection of Dave’s exceptionally productive and creative scholarly career in a conventionally sized edited volume. Nonetheless, we have tried to bring together in this one book leading social psychologists and organizational theorists whose work provides a representative sample — if not always adequately capturing the full flower a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Editors
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Dilemmas, Values, and Ethical Judgments: Touchpoints and Touchdowns in a Distinguished Scholarly Career
• SECTION I Dilemmas
• SECTION II Values, Control, and Cooperation
• SECTION III ethical Judgments, Fairness, and equality
• SECTION IV Commentary and Reflections
• Scholarly Bibliography for David M. Messick
• Subject Index
• Author Index