Behavioral Ethics in Practice

Why We Sometimes Make the Wrong Decisions

Cara Biasucci, Robert Prentice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367341633
• eBook ISBN: 9781000207934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Education
• Index: Business

This book is an accessible, research-based introduction to behavioral ethics. Often ethics education is incomplete because it ignores how and why people make moral decisions. But using exciting new research from fields such as behavioural psychology, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology, the study of behavioural ethics uncovers the common reasons why good people often screw up.

Scientists have long studied the ways human beings make decisions, but only recently have researchers begun to focus specifically on ethical decision making. Unlike philosophy and religion, which aim to tell people how to think and act about various moral issues, behavioral ethics research reveals the factors that influence how people really make moral decisions. Most people get into ethical trouble for doing obviously wrong things. Aristotle cannot help, but learning about behavioral ethics can. By supplementing traditional approaches to teaching ethics with a clear, detailed, research-based introduction to behavioral ethics, beginners can quickly become familiar with the important elements of this new field. This book includes the bonus of being coordinated with Ethics Unwrapped – a free, online, educational resource featuring award-winning videos and teaching materials on a variety of behavioral ethics (and general ethics) topics.

This book is a useful supplement for virtually every ethics course, and important in any course where incorporating practical ethics in an engaging manner is paramount. The content applies to every discipline –business ethics, journalism, medicine, legal ethics, and others – because its chief subject is the nature of moral decision making. The book is also highly relevant to practitioners across all sectors.

PART I
Why it’s hard to be the kind of person your dog thinks you are

Introduction

Your moral self is, in many ways, your essence. If your brain falters and your memory fades, your friends will say that you just can’t remember things as you used to. If you suffer a brain injury and begin to have fits of anger, your friends will say that your moods have changed. But if you suffer a brain injury that affects your moral self, your friends will tend to say that you are just not you anymore.¹⁰

Studies demonstrate that your moral character is what forms others’ impressions of you.¹¹ When people judge their closest peers, morality is the most important factor. It’s more influential than being competent or friendly.¹² In other words, morality counts! And learning to improve your moral life will be worth any effort you put into it.

Behavioral ethics

Behavioral ethics is the study of how and why people make ethical and unethical decisions. Its roots lie deep in related research fields, including behavioral psychology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and primatology. It demonstrates that humans are simultaneously complex, somewhat irrational, and yet generally well-intentioned beings. Indeed, if you’re a typical human being, you want to be a good person. But, like all typical human beings, you’ve probably done things you wouldn’t want your mother to know about, or to see splashed across the headlines of the newspaper (even though most people don’t read newspapers anymore).

The general point of Behavioral Ethics in Practice is to introduce and explain various factors and forces that can make it difficult for you to be a good person – an honest, reliable, fair, open-minded, trustworthy type of person. It’s not our goal to tell you what you should believe about the most controversial moral issues of the day – abortion, the death penalty, climate change, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and so forth. Rather, we’d like to help you live up to your own moral standards. To do that, you must avoid three types of influences that can create a gap between who you want to be and how you actually act. These influences are:

• Social and Organizational Pressures (External Pressures)
• Psychological Biases and Mental Shortcuts (Internal Biases)
• Situational Factors (Circumstances)

These mostly unconscious influences limit human beings’ ethicality – our ability to act with integrity, honesty, and transparency. As much as we might think we act logically and with integrity – and are therefore ethical – the truth is that we all lie a little and cheat a little every day,¹³ sometimes in response to one or more of these influences. And, even though it may be illogical to act unethically (given the consequences), none of us are perfectly rational thinkers.

In fact, economists and other academics used to assume in their models (and sometimes still do) that people are perfectly rational – logical in their thinking, choices, and actions. But research by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrates that human rationality has definite limits. People are only boundedly rational. Kahneman and Tversky’s research, as well as the research of dozens of their academic followers, shows that these boundaries (or limits) apply to all peoples’ decision making about all things – including when they make ethical choices. In other words, as human beings, we are both boundedly rational and boundedly ethical.

Behavioral ethics in practice: why we sometimes make the wrong decisions

This book focuses on some (but not all!) of the many biases and influences described by behavioral ethics research that often serve as a trap for the unaware. We do this to educate you and make you wary, in the hopes that you’ll be less likely to fall into ethical traps. We also agree with psychologists Isaac Smith and Maryam Kouchaki, who argue that “recognizing one’s own moral fallibility is a key aspect of moral humility, and an important step toward closing any gaps between a person’s espoused values and their enacted behaviors.”¹⁴ In other words, if we succeed in showing you how easy it is to screw up in the ethical realm (and you take this message to heart), you’ll be a giant step closer to being the good person you want to be.

In Part I, we discuss the influences and forces that make it difficult for all of us to live up to our own moral standards. Each chapter examines a pressure, bias, or factor that can induce people to make ethical errors. In Part II, we discuss more generally the steps that people can take to prevent and correct ethical mistakes (so they may live a life of which they can be proud). We also give you tools to more successfully avoid ethical pitfalls and more reliably and effectively stand up for what you believe to be right. And we give you some tips to shape your organizations so that it’s easier to do the right thing.

Importantly, the material in this book is evidence-based. We reference research and cite scores of studies (empirical, experimental, and more) from many different academic disciplines. Our discussion of behavioral ethics provides real world examples, too, to supplement and bolster the points made in most of the academic studies referenced here.

However, keep in mind that behavioral ethics is a new field. What we think we know is ever-evolving, and it pays to be skeptical.¹⁵ This is especially true because some fields (such as psychology) have suffered a “replication crisis” where important findings from one experiment sometimes don’t show up in the next experiment in the same area.¹⁶ So, while your authors are confident in the big picture painted here regarding the field of behavioral ethics, we are equally confident that some concepts may be expanded and described quite differently at some later point (if this book has a second edition). Better-designed studies will debunk some of the finding we report. Science will march on!

ETHICS UNWRAPPED RESOURCES

Videos

Behavioral Ethics

Series: Ethics Defined

Intro to Behavioral Ethics

Series: Concepts Unwrapped

Bounded Ethicality

Series: Ethics Defined

Bounded Ethicality

Series: Concepts Unwrapped

Ethics

Series: Ethics Defined

Case Studies

The CIA Leak

Healthcare Obligations: Personal vs. Institutional

1
MAKING MORAL JUDGMENTS

“Across all demographic groups, levels of education, ethnicities and both genders, people judge moral dilemmas similarly.… However, across all demographic groups subjects were remarkably bad at justifying their reasoning… Even a majority of subjects who reported exposure to moral philosophy were unable to provide a sufficient justification of their actions.”¹⁷

– Neil Levy

Introduction

Immanuel Kant, one of history’s most brilliant philosophers, thought carefully about masturbation. Don’t ask your authors why. We’re not sure we want to know.

Everyone knows, Kant said, that masturbation is immoral: “That such an unnatural use (and so misuse) of one’s sexual attributes is a violation of one’s duty to himself and is certainly in the highest degree opposed to morality strikes everyone upon his thinking of it.” He acknowledged it was difficult to explain why masturbation is immoral, but ultimately argued that “[a] man gives up his personality (throws it away) when he uses himself merely as a means for the gratification of an animal drive.”¹⁸

Now it’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Why it’s hard to be the kind of person your dog thinks you are
• Part II How to improve your chances of living a life you can be proud of
• Notes
• Index