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Reducing bounded ethicality
... Were the accounting profession to reject this, society would have much less reason to grant it the privileges that come with being a recognized profession (e.g. monopoly over the service offered and the right to self-regulate) (de Bruin 2015, 186). of performing the audit objectively, even if they have the best intentions of not letting their own self-interest interfere with their performance (Zhang et al. 2015). ...
... recommend that increasing subjects' vigilance at critical moments can make an important difference (Zhang et al. 2015); and Soll et al. present a whole battery of strategies for debiasing our decision making (Soll et al. 2015). ...
This paper responds to the Radical Behavioral Challenge (RBC) to normative business ethics. According to RBC, recent research on bounded ethicality shows that it is psychologically impossible for people to follow the prescriptions of normative business ethics. Thus, said prescriptions run afoul of the principle that nobody has an obligation to do something that they cannot do. I show that the only explicit response to this challenge in the business ethics literature (due to Kim et al.) is flawed because it limits normative business ethics to condemning practitioners’ behavior without providing usable suggestions for how to do better. I argue that a more satisfying response is to, first, recognize that most obligations in business are wide-scope which, second, implies that there are multiple ways of fulfilling them. This provides a solid theoretical grounding for the increasingly popular view that we have obligations to erect institutional safeguards when bounded ethicality is likely to interfere with our ability to do what is right. I conclude with examples of such safeguards and some advice on how to use the research findings on bounded ethicality in designing ethical business organizations.
... Most study participants, including MBA students and executives, opt for Fortitude (Zhang, Fletcher, Gino, & Bazerman, 2015). Yet, when people are asked, instead, whether they see a problem with any of the funds, most participants identify that Fortitude's return is impossible. ...
... Going back to the Madoff decision that introduced this article, we note that Zhang et al. (2015) observed that people are quick to invest in Fortitude (Madoff), but that the simple prompt ''do you see any problem with any of the funds" quickly leads to the System 2 observation that Fortitude's returns are not possible. We believe that we need research to discover the conditions that prompt System 2 thinking so that individuals will notice unethical behavior more often. ...
In many of the business scandals of the new millennium, the perpetrators were surrounded by people who could have recognized the misbehavior, yet failed to notice it. To explain such inaction, management scholars have been developing the area of behavioral ethics and the more specific topic of bounded ethicality—the systematic and predictable ways in which even good people engage in unethical conduct without their own awareness. In this paper, we review research on both bounded ethicality and bounded awareness, and connect the two areas to highlight the challenges of encouraging managers and leaders to notice and act to stop unethical conduct. We close with directions for future research and suggest that noticing unethical behavior should be considered a critical leadership skill.
... Opportunity for fraudulent behavior is often created by nonexistent or ineffective controls over that behavior, or when there is the possibility and ability to override controls (Abdullahi & Mansor, 2015;Brown et al., 2016;Ernest-Jones et al., 2011). Research on fund investment, for example, suggests that when individuals were primed for a mindset of vigilance, this form of control increased their ability to notice and regulate their own fraudulent behavior (Zhang et al., 2015). Moreover, the opportunity does not necessarily need to be real; that is, the individual's perception or belief that the opportunity exists is a sufficient condition (Abdullahi & Mansor, 2015). ...
Plain language summary
Understanding students’ academic cheating using the fraud diamond theory
Purpose: To examine whether the Fraud Diamond theory explains fraudulent academic behavior (e.g., cheating on exams, plagiarizing essays). More specifically, to determine the relationship between the prevalence of academic fraud and students’ perceptions of the severity and whether the ability to justify fraudulent academic behavior is related to the students’ perception of its severity. Methods: A survey was administered to 1,032 university students who agreed to participate in the study. Hypotheses were tested using correlational and predictive statistical techniques. Conclusions: The Fraud Diamond theory can be used to explain the prevalence of students’ fraudulent academic behavior. The severity of such behavior is explained by the students’ ability to justify their fraudulent actions. The more the students cheat, the less severe they find this behavior to be, suggesting that students feel that cheating occasionally is not a big deal. Implications: Promoting a culture of integrity is more than just the implementation of control mechanisms of face-to-face and virtual invigilation. Programs of academic integrity including institutional, group, and individual level approaches are needed to create a sense of moral identity and self-control mechanisms which will reduce the propensity to cheat. Limitations: The data for this study is drawn from the students subjective self-reported experiences of their fraudulent behavior and may not accurately reflect objective prevalence of fraudulent behavior.
... Humans are inclined to overlook inconvenient truths [52][53][54][55][56]. Studies have shown that animal sector stakeholders tend to prioritise the tangible aspects of welfare and the resources that are provided to animals, and may disregard the animal's affective experience [47,48,57]. ...
Simple Summary
This article introduces an animal welfare monitoring app based on the 2020 Five Domains Model that considers how an animal’s nutrition, environment, health, and behavioural interactions, influence their mental state. Adapted for smartphone use, the Mellorater app allows animal guardians (carers, keepers, and owners) to record structured observations of an animal’s life-world with a free research-backed tool. The aim is to help them monitor and improve their animal’s daily lived experiences, make better management decisions, and achieve a good life for their animals. Completing the checklist does not require specialist training and a user-guide with step-by-step instructions on using the app is provided. Users respond to 18 statements by noting their level of agreement with each statement, using a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The authors acknowledge that this form of self-reporting has some limitations but propose that these may be outweighed by the benefits of structured monitoring being repeated over time. This approach helps to identify ongoing shortfalls in an animal’s life-world and trends in their observed quality of life indicators. Both of these outcomes may stimulate contact with sources of further advice, including veterinarians and other animal health and welfare professionals.
Abstract
When monitoring an animal’s welfare, it helps to have comprehensive and day-to-day information about the animal’s life. The goal is to ensure that animal guardians (carers, keepers, and owners) use such information to act in the animals’ best interests. This article introduces the Mellorater, an animal welfare monitoring app based on the 2020 Five Domains Model. This framework provides a means of capturing comprehensive information about the world in which individual animals exist. The Mellorater asks animal guardians to rate their agreement with 18 statements covering any focal animal’s nutrition, environment, health, and behavioural interactions using a five-point Likert scale. No specialist training is required other than following straightforward instructions on using the app, which are provided. The Mellorater is not proposed as a validated welfare auditing tool because it relies on reflective self-reporting and, thus, is vulnerable to the user’s subjectivity. If users’ subjectivity is stable over time, then the longitudinal data may be considered useful proxies for trends in quality of life. That said, it has the potential to be used by trained auditors if scientifically validated, species-specific indicators are applied. The Mellorater collects anonymous data and has been approved for a study to explore how the use of such scales may differ among guardians of different species and in different contexts. In this paper, we conduct the following: (1) summarise the app’s purposes; (2) clarify its capabilities and limitations; and (3) invite animal welfare scholars, veterinarians, health and welfare professionals, and animal guardians to use it.
... Providing structure is an important component of decision analysis because it requires people to evaluate multiple attributes (27,28). Structured reflection thus leads people to construe their intentions and behaviors relative to their personal criteria (29,30). ...
People believe they should consider how their behavior might negatively impact other people, yet their behavior often increases others’ health risks. This creates challenges for managing public health crises like the Covid-19 pandemic. We examined a procedure wherein people reflect on their personal criteria regarding how their behavior impacts others’ health risks. We expected structured reflection to increase people's intentions and decisions to reduce others’ health risks. Structured reflection increases attention to others’ health risks and the correspondence between people's personal criteria and behavioral intentions. In four experiments during Covid-19, people (N = 12,995) reported their personal criteria about how much specific attributes, including the impact on others’ health risks, should influence their behavior. Compared with control conditions, people who engaged in structured reflection reported greater intentions to reduce business capacity (Experiment 1) and avoid large social gatherings (Experiments 2 and 3). They also donated more to provide vaccines to refugees (Experiment 4). These effects emerged across seven countries that varied in collectivism and Covid-19 case rates (Experiments 1 and 2). Structured reflection was distinct from instructions to carefully deliberate (Experiment 3). Structured reflection increased the correlation between personal criteria and behavioral intentions (Experiments 1 and 3). And structured reflection increased donations more among people who scored relatively low in cognitive reflection compared with those who scored higher in cognitive reflection (Experiment 4). These findings suggest that structured reflection can effectively increase behaviors to reduce public health risks.
... Making the potential for poor judgement more salient has been shown to improve decision-making in many domains, but this insight has seldom been applied to issues of diversity and inclusion [41][42][43] . Drawing timely attention to the risk of exhibiting prejudice may have an important and underappreciated impact on decision-making that is worthy of further theorizing and study. ...
Receiving help can make or break a career, but women and racial/ethnic minorities do not always receive the support they seek. Across two audit experiments—one with politicians and another with students—as well as an online experiment (total n = 5,145), we test whether women and racial/ethnic minorities benefit from explicitly mentioning their demographic identity in requests for help, for example, by including statements like “As a Black woman…” in their communications. We propose that when a help seeker highlights their marginalized identity, it may activate prospective helpers’ motivations to avoid prejudiced reactions and increase their willingness to provide support. Here we show that when women and racial/ethnic minorities explicitly mentioned their demographic identity in help-seeking emails, politicians and students responded 24.4% (7.42 percentage points) and 79.6% (2.73 percentage points) more often, respectively. These findings suggest that deliberately mentioning identity in requests for help can improve outcomes for women and racial/ethnic minorities.
... The prospect of being drawn into a potentially draining investigation may avert already a busy director from looking into the matter further. Indeed, experimental research provided evidence that people who had insufficient bandwidth were ineffective overseers of fraudulent behaviors (Zhang et al. 2015) but having sufficient bandwidth enhanced moral decision-making (Shalvi et al., 2012). Field research also found that independent directors' bandwidth (typically labeled as its inverse, busyness) was valuable in strengthening corporate governance practices (Fich and Shivdasani, 2006) and reducing dishonest financial reporting (Beasley, 1996). ...
Financial corruption has an extensive adverse impact on corporate stakeholders. Over the last two decades, numerous prescriptions have been offered to improve the governance of US public firms, yet financial corruption is still prevalent. Board of directors' audit committees are typically charged with the responsibility of assuring that the corporation's financial reports satisfy the criterion of accuracy. We propose that a quad-qualified audit committee director can serve as an exemplar corporate overseer of financial reporting and minimize the likelihood of corruption. We predict that by having the qualifications of independence, directorship experience and financial expertise, bandwidth, and stock ownership, the effectiveness of monitoring financial reporting by such a director will be considerably enhanced, thus complementing the benefits of the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) enacted in 2002. To test our predictions, we employed a time-lagged, matched-pairs sample of 328 large US corporations (164 financially corrupt firms plus a comparison group of 164 compliant firms). Controlling for covariates, we found that the presence of a quad-qualified audit committee director reduced the likelihood of financial corruption in a public firm by 72%. Combined with the benefits from SOX, having at least one quad-qualified audit committee director decreased the probability of financial corruption by 92%. Our results also show that having just one quad-qualified audit committee director is more effective than the combination of the individual qualifications dispersed among the committee members.
... There is consensus that promoting moral sensitivity(MS) can help to alleviate moral blindness (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011b;Palazzo et al., 2012;Reynolds, 2006;Zhang et al., 2015). Generally, MS is defined as the ability to identify and to ascribe importance to moral issues when they arise in the workplace (Jordan, 2009;Karcher, 1996;Pedersen, 2009;Shaub, 1989;Sparks & Hunt, 1998). ...
Unlabelled:
In order to manage ethical challenges in organizations and the workplace, moral sensitivity (MS)-the ability to identify and ascribe importance to moral issues when they arise in the workplace-is seen as the key prerequisite by researchers and professionals. However, despite the importance of MS, satisfactory reliable and valid measures to assess this competence are to date lacking. The present research tests the psychometric qualities of a revised MS measure for the business domain (R-MSB) that is designed to assess individual differences in moral and business-related value sensitivity. We present three different analyses with two heterogeneous samples of Swiss and German employees (total N = 1168). The first two studies provide good evidence of the measures' factorial structure, its construct, and criteria-related validity. The third study examines how affective and empathic responses are associated with MS and business sensitivity (BS). The results support the view that empathic responsiveness enhances MS. The instrument's theoretical and practical strengths, limitations, and avenues for future research are discussed.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-021-01926-x.
... They do so even though the return is too good to be true, a fact they fail to notice. However, when asked instead to identify which option may be problematic, most participants correctly identify the option with the highest returns [14]. Such ethical blind spots can be more common when trust is fostered. ...
The sharing economy is fueled by trust, which allows strangers to cooperate. To share responsibly, one needs to be aware of the various consequences sharing has on interacting and third parties. When transparency about such consequences is lacking, mutual trust among interacting parties may encourage people to cooperate and share, in turn creating unintended negative impact. Psychologists have long studied trust and cooperation, yet few insights from psychological science have been used to understand the sharing economy. Here, we propose that evoking trust may paradoxically increase motivated information processing leading people to share irresponsibly by ignoring the negative consequences sharing has on others. We review three conditions under which evoking trust may lead to irresponsible sharing: ethical blind spots, willful ignorance, and misinformation. We propose that transparent information is key to enable and encourage responsible sharing. More psychological research is needed to better understand how this flourishing, trust-based industry can be shaped to encourage safe, cooperative, and responsible sharing.
... At a personal level, it may be simple things like The appearance of these signals speaks to the importance of structural and contextual changes that make the morality of decisions salient (Zhang et al., 2014). It may be that efforts such as these to install a condition of "vigilance" (Zhang et al., 2015) help actors understand that issues are morally charged and are more effective in getting them to address these socially important ends. Importantly, it may be that organizations need to make reminders (1) persistentassuring that actors become contextually aware of the morality of their actions in different contexts-as well as (2) let them evolve-helping to assure that morality reminders can change with consumer sentiment or the arrival of new goals that evolve to become socially or contextually important. ...
Sustainability problems often seem intractable. One reason for this is due to difficulties coordinating actors’ efforts to address socially responsible outcomes. Drawing on theories of bounded ethicality and incorporating work on communicating shared values in coordinating action this paper outlines the lack coordination as a matching issue, one complicated by underlying heterogeneity in actors’ moral values and thus motivation to address socially responsible outcomes. Three factors contribute to this matching problem. First, we argue it is not actors’ simple cognitive awareness, but their moral awareness of social issues that explains why certain actors move to address problems while others do not. In other words, actors may recognize sustainability problems, but are not motivated to solve them as they are not understood as moral problems. Second, we posit that progress requires alignment in issues that some actors find worth addressing whereas others do not, thus explaining how heterogeneity in moral perceptions interrupt coordination towards socially important goals. Finally, we propose that progress is undermined if actors myopically focus on level-specific outcomes in ways that elucidates why institutional responses often fail to address individual outcomes and vice versa. We use the existing literature on the socially important issue of food waste to examine our theoretical contribution and develop a typology that explains conditions that inhibit (or promote) coordination. Thus, our work proposes a psycho-structural view on matching and coordination toward sustainable outcomes, highlighting how psychological and structural constraints prevent effective coordination in addressing sustainability goals.
... Dual process theory frames the human mind in terms of two distinctive processes: System 1 and System 2. In contrast to System 1 thinking, System 2 thinking is slow, transparent, analytical, logical, reasonsresponsive and computational. Research shows that unethical and biased decisions are correlated with System 1 thinking, and that shifting the mode to System 2 thinking is often an effective way to avoid unethical behaviors (Bazerman and Gino, 2012;Bazerman and Sezer, 2016;Zhang et al., 2015;Sezer et al., 2015). This is despite the fact that System 1 thinking can be useful in other domains where intuitive associations are useful, such as in making heuristic decisions. ...
An important step in the development of value alignment (VA) systems in AI is understanding how VA can reflect valid ethical principles. We propose that designers of VA systems incorporate ethics by utilizing a hybrid approach in which both ethical reasoning and empirical observation play a role. This, we argue, avoids committing the "naturalistic fallacy," which is an attempt to derive "ought" from "is," and it provides a more adequate form of ethical reasoning when the fallacy is not committed. Using quantified model logic, we precisely formulate principles derived from deontological ethics and show how they imply particular "test propositions" for any given action plan in an AI rule base. The action plan is ethical only if the test proposition is empirically true, a judgment that is made on the basis of empirical VA. This permits empirical VA to integrate seamlessly with independently justified ethical principles.
... In addition, Beck and Schmidt (2012) showed that for people with a high levels of self-efficacy, momentary experiences of doubt (such as what should be brought about by perspective taking) relate to increased information search. In a similar vein, research suggests that people can overcome bounded awareness and other positive self-biases by deliberately considering issues, questions, or ideas from alterative points of view, similar to the cognitive processes involved in perspective taking (Zhang, Fletcher, Gino, & Bazerman, 2015). Such acts disrupt default thinking and enable more complex cognitive processes. ...
A central idea in the feedback seeking literature is that there should be a positive relationship between self-efficacy and the likelihood of seeking feedback. Yet empirical findings have not always matched this theoretical claim. Departing from current theorizing, we argue that high self-efficacy may sometimes decrease feedback seeking by making people undervalue feedback and that perspective taking is an important factor in determining whether or not this occurs. Results from 5 studies, utilizing diverse methodologies and samples, support our hypothesis that the relationship between self-efficacy and feedback seeking depends on the extent to which one engages in perspective taking. In the absence of perspective taking, self-efficacy tends to be more negatively related to feedback seeking. However, when perspective taking occurs, this relationship tends to be more positive. We also provide evidence that this interaction effect is mediated by perceptions of the value of feedback. We discuss the implications of our theory and findings for the feedback seeking literature and more broadly. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
... [31] Studies on "framing effects" further suggest that how a question or issue is framed may generate automated versus thoughtful ethical responses. [32] Finally from a behavioral science perspective on "nudge-theory" ethics, the second contextual form arguably functioned as a more potent moral symbol of ethical conduct, which effectively nudged professionals towards higher ethical vigilance, accountability [33] and enhanced disclosures once peers were assembled. ...
Background
Authors of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) disclose financial conflicts of interest (FCOIs) to promote transparency ethics. Typically, they do so on standard declaration forms containing generic open-ended questions on FCOIs. Yet, the literature is scant on the format and effect of alternative disclosure forms. Does supplementing a standard form with subsequent detailed disclosure forms tailored to the context of the CPG improve the yield or accuracy of FCOIs declarations?
Methods
For an international CPG in gastroenterology on the endoscopic surveillance for colorectal neoplasia in inflammatory bowel disease, we compared the use of a standard FCOIs disclosure form with a contextual FCOIs disclosure form that detailed commercial relations related to the CPG topic. This included manufacturers of endoscopes, endoscopy equipment and accessories. Participants completed the generic form early, and the supplementary contextual form six months later. We then compared the FCOI disclosures obtained.
Findings
26 participants provided FCOIs disclosures using both disclosure forms. We found discrepancies regarding (1) the disclosure of FCOIs (presence/absence), and (2) the listing of financial entities. While the number of participants who disclosed a FCOI remained the same (30.8%) using the two forms, disclosures were not from the same individuals: two additional participants disclosed a FCOI, whereas two participants withdrew previous disclosures. Among those who reported a FCOI in either form, we noted inconsistencies in disclosures for 70% of the participants. This included changes in FCOIs disclosure status or modifications of "their commercial relations".
Discussion
Accurate reporting of FCOIs advances the transparency and ethical integrity of CPGs. Our experience suggests that a contextual FCOIs disclosure form tailored to content of the CPG with narrow, detailed questions provides supplementary, more complete FCOIs declarations than generic forms alone. The finding raises challenges on how forms are best written and formatted, optimally timed, and more effectively processed with sensitivity to professional behaviour, so as to heighten transparency.
... Thanks to this tool, a third person may recognize -through his own System 2 -the unconscious distortions of participants' System 1 that have affected the decision-making process. The rationale behind this tool and other developed instruments to reduce biases (Klein, 2007), lies in the adoption of a "vigilant mindset" (Zhang et al., 2015), considered as a main step towards bias-free organizations (Gardiner, 2016). Although the adoption of a behavioural approach to organizations and strategy was previously claimed by Ansoff (1987), but, onlyPowell et al. (2011 offered it as a first formal conceptualization of a behavioural strategy paradigm and of its field. ...
This work investigates the historical advancements attained on the bounded rationality concept in management research, considering the key influencing discoveries in related fields. Understanding the cross-fertilization that has occurred is the first step to go beyond the current knowledge on bounded rationality and to face its challenges.
The adopted method is historical. This research approach helps to explain the evolution of a widespread concept in a scientific field and, particularly, to identify the parallel influencing advancements made in related domains.
Investigation of the irrational forces of human reasoning is at the centre of today’s research agenda on rationality in organizations, claiming to be an extension of the original bounded rationality concept. In this regard, scholars should commit themselves to build a more holistic approach to the investigation of human rationality, conjointly applying sociobiological and behavioural perspectives to explain the real behaviour of people in organizations and society. This reconnection will also help to overcome the inner limits of some ‘fashion of the month’ streams that have yet to demonstrate their contribution.
This is the first work that offers an overall historical evolution of the bounded rationality concept which considers both management research and developments in related fields. The historically educed lessons learned are at the basis of the concluding recommendations for future research.
Etik körlük, karar verme sorumluluğunu üstlenen kişilerin farkında olmadan etik dışı davranışlarda bulunmaları anlamına gelmektedir. Ulusal alan yazında geçerli ve güvenilir ölçüm aracı ihtiyacından dolayı etik alanındaki çalışmaların yetersiz kaldığı düşünülmüştür. Bu çalışmada Aleksić (2017) tarafından geliştirilen İş Yerinde Etik Körlük (Ethical Blindness at Work) ölçeğinin Türkçe alan yazınına kazandırılması amaçlanmaktadır. İlgili ölçek, uyarlama çalışmalarında tavsiye edilen kapsam, yapı ve ölçüt geçerliliği açısından analiz edilmiştir. Öncelikle ölçek maddeleri Türkçeye uygun duruma getirilmiştir. Ardından pilot çalışma yardımıyla iç tutarlılık oranı (α<;0,70) ve madde toplam korelasyon değerleri (r>0,30) incelenerek ölçeğe son şekli verilmiştir. Ölçeğin son şekliyle hazırlanan anket formu, farklı sektörlerde çalışanlara uygulanmıştır. 550 katılımcıdan elde edilen veriler analiz edilmiştir. Ulaşılan sonuçlar, ölçeğin orijinal yapısına uygun şekilde “rasyonelleştirme”, “rutin” ve “bilgisizlik” olmak üzere üç faktörlü bir yapıya sahip olduğunu göstermektedir. Ayrıca ölçüt geçerliliği kapsamında, işle bütünleşme ölçeği ve duygusal bağlılık ölçeği kullanılarak İş Yerinde Etik Körlük ölçeğinin diğer yapılarla ilişkisi incelenmiştir. Ulaşılan tüm sonuçlar dikkate alındığında, İş Yerinde Etik Körlük Ölçeğinin Türkçe alan yazınında kullanılabilecek geçerli ve güvenilir bir ölçüm aracı olduğu söylenebilir.
Schools of choice need to provide equitable access and opportunities to all students, including students with disabilities and emergent bilinguals. In the context of Early College High Schools, principals and school districts should be partners in ensuring admissions processes are non-discriminatory. In this fictional case, a new principal in a high-performing early college high school becomes concerned that the school has been denying or not actively recruiting students with disabilities and emergent bilingual students. However, when she raises her concern with her supervisors and predecessor, she gets no support. The teaching notes of this case review the literature on ethical leadership, school administration dilemmas, and bounded ethicality.
Therapeutic working has long been considered a fundamental part of the educational psychologist’s (EPs) role. Yet, little attention has been given to the ethical ambiguity which exists between the terms therapeutic practice and therapy, and the implications this has for practice. This paper starts with a definition of therapeutic practice, identifying three different approaches and exploring the practical and ethical differences between them. It is proposed that these approaches sit within a therapeutic continuum, which presents a range of nuanced, ethical complexities for consideration. Those issues are explored further, with a focus on ethical blind spots (EBS). The paper concludes with illustrative examples of EBS, bringing together dilemmas in initial decision-making along the therapeutic continuum and the practice-based issue of contracting with children and young people (CYP) and how these might be overcome.
This is a book review article.
The paper reports two studies exploring the relationship between scholars’ self-reported publication pressure and their self-reported scientific misconduct in research. In Study 1 the participants ( N = 423) were scholars representing various disciplines from one big university in Poland. In Study 2 the participants ( N = 31) were exclusively members of the management, such as dean, director, etc. from the same university. In Study 1 the most common reported form of scientific misconduct was honorary authorship. The majority of researchers (71%) reported that they had not violated ethical standards in the past; 3% admitted to scientific misconduct; 51% reported being were aware of colleagues’ scientific misconduct. A small positive correlation between perceived publication pressure and intention to engage in scientific misconduct in the future was found. In Study 2 more than half of the management (52%) reported being aware of researchers’ dishonest practices, the most frequent one of these being honorary authorship. As many as 71% of the participants report observing publication pressure in their subordinates. The primary conclusions are: (1) most scholars are convinced of their morality and predict that they will behave morally in the future; (2) scientific misconduct, particularly minor offenses such as honorary authorship, is frequently observed both by researchers (particularly in their colleagues) and by their managers; (3) researchers experiencing publication pressure report a willingness to engage in scientific misconduct in the future.
Cheating and unethical behavior in the context of high-stakes accountability has been well documented. Recently, the US Department of Education found Texas schools failing to comply with the nation’s special education law as a result of a state accountability policy. This article examines how a group of principals recognized for their effectiveness in special education (a) understood the state policy and (b) the social and psychological forces that influenced their leadership. Bounded ethicality and behavioral ethics research are used as a theoretical model to examine principal perceptions and actions. Conclusions inform next generation research and new approaches to leadership development.
Using interpersonal theory as a framework and drawing upon sociometer theory and emotions as social information (EASI) model, we examine the implications of advice rejection in repeated advising exchanges. In five experiments (n = 1788), we identified an advisor's reduced social worth as an intermediary mechanism explaining how an advisee's rejection (vs. acceptance) of previous advice could reduce the advisor's prosocial motivation toward the advisee and lead to dishonest (vs. honest) advice giving in a subsequent advising exchange. The advisee's gratitude expression, compared to neutral/no expression and ingratitude expression, served as a buffer, which elevated an advisor's social worth in the condition of advice rejection. The findings were robust, whether the second advising exchange involved conflict of interest or not.
The business scandals of the past several decades have led to the rising importance of ethics as a topic central to management scholarship. Behavioral scientists in particular have been attracted to the topic in far greater numbers, and the study of ethical decision making has emerged as a core subfield (Messick & Tenbrunsel, 1996). This paper draws on that framework and applies it to negotiations, arguing that not all unethical behavior is intentional; rather, negotiators fall prey to bounded ethicality, engaging in behavior that is contradictory to their values without realizing that they are doing so. We further argue that ethical fading—when individuals do not see the ethical implications of the situation or their action—is central to explaining why this occurs. Relying on past empirical research, we identify negotiation cues that have been linked to unethical behavior, and explore how they make a negotiator particularly vulnerable to ethical fading, resulting in subsequent unethical behavior. We discuss several opportunities for future research in the negotiation discipline and other disciplines that draw on motivated social exchange or assume intentionality, and conclude with a call for scholars to define normative standards as they pertain to negotiator ethics.
The data includes measures collected for the two experiments reported in “False-Positive Psychology” [1] where listening to a randomly assigned song made people feel younger (Study 1) or actually be younger (Study 2). These data are useful because they illustrate inflations of false positive rates due to flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting of results. Data are useful for educational purposes.
Over 40 years of research on the effects of goal setting has demonstrated that high goals can increase performance by motivating people, directing their attention to a target, and increasing their persistence (Locke & Latham, 2002). However, recent research has introduced a dark side of goal setting by linking high performance goals to unethical behavior (e.g., Schweitzer, Ordóñez, & Douma, 2004). In this paper, we integrate self-regulatory resource theories with behavioral ethics research exploring the dark side of goal setting to suggest that the very mechanisms through which goals are theorized to increase performance can lead to unethical behavior by depleting self-regulatory resources across consecutive goal periods. Results of a laboratory experiment utilizing high, low, increasing, decreasing, and “do your best” goal structures across multiple rounds provide evidence that depletion mediates the relationship between goal structures and unethical behavior, and that this effect is moderated by the number of consecutive goals assigned.
Examined the influence of situational variables and religiosity, as measured by several personality scales (e.g., the Religious Life Inventory), on the helping behavior of 40 theology students in an emergency situation suggested by the parable of the Good Samaritan. Ss going between 2 buildings encountered a shabbily dressed person slumped by the side of the road. Ss in a hurry to reach their destination were more likely to pass by without stopping. Some Ss were going to give a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan, others on a nonhelping relevant topic; this made no significant difference in the likelihood of their giving the victim help. Religious personality variables did not predict whether S would help the victim or not. However, if S did stop to offer help, the character of the helping response was related to his type of religiosity. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Many written forms required by businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of, e.g., tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their financial self-interests-at great costs to society. We test an easy-to-implement method to discourage dishonesty: signing at the beginning rather than at the end of a self-report, thereby reversing the order of the current practice. Using laboratory and field experiments, we find that signing beforerather than afterthe opportunity to cheat makes ethics salient when they are needed most and significantly reduces dishonesty.
What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar-but objectively incorrect-questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand-in-hand with a failure to rate dodgers more negatively. We propose that dodges go undetected because listeners' attention is not usually directed toward a goal of dodge detection (i.e., Is this person answering the question?) but rather toward a goal of social evaluation (i.e., Do I like this person?). Listeners were not blind to all dodge attempts, however. Dodge detection increased when listeners' attention was diverted from social goals toward determining the relevance of the speaker's answers (Study 1), when speakers answered a question egregiously dissimilar to the one asked (Study 2), and when listeners' attention was directed to the question asked by keeping it visible during speakers' answers (Study 4). We also examined the interpersonal consequences of dodge attempts: When listeners were guided to detect dodges, they rated speakers more negatively (Study 2), and listeners rated speakers who answered a similar question in a fluent manner more positively than speakers who answered the actual question but disfluently (Study 3). These results add to the literatures on both Gricean conversational norms and goal-directed attention. We discuss the practical implications of our findings in the contexts of interpersonal communication and public debates.
By the time Merck withdrew its pain relief drug Vioxx from the market in 2004, more than 100 million prescriptions had been filled in the United States alone. Yet researchers now estimate that Vioxx may have been associated with as many as 25,000 heart attacks and strokes. Evidence of the drug's risks was available as early as 2000, so why did so many doctors keep prescribing it? The answer, say the authors, involves the phenomenon of bounded oworeness-when cognitive blinders prevent a person from seeing, seeking, using, or sharing highly relevant, easily accessible, and readily perceivable information during the decisionmaking process. Doctors prescribing Vioxx, for instance, more often than not received positive feed back from patients. So, despite having access to information about the risks, physicians may have been blinded to the actual extent of the risks. Bounded awareness can occur at three points in the decision-making process. First, executives may fail to see or seek out the important information needed to make a sound decision. Second, they may fail to use the information that they do see because they aren't aware of its relevance. Third, executives may fail to share information with others, thereby bounding the organization's awareness. Drawing on examples such as the Challenger disaster and Citibank's failures in Japan, this article examines what prevents executives from seeing what's right in front of them and offers advice on how to increase awareness. Of course, not every decision requires executives to consciously broaden their focus. Collecting too much information for every decision would waste time and other valuable resources.The key is being mindful. If executives think an error could generate almost irrecoverable damage, then they should insist on getting all the information they need to make a wise decision.
Cheating, deception, organizational misconduct, and many other forms of unethical behavior are among the greatest challenges in today's society. As regularly highlighted by the media, extreme cases and costly scams are common. Yet, even more frequent and pervasive are cases of ‘ordinary’ unethical behavior — unethical actions committed by people who value and care about morality but behave unethically when faced with an opportunity to cheat. In this article, I review the recent literature in behavioral ethics and moral psychology on ordinary unethical behavior.
Ethical decision making is vulnerable to the forces of automaticity. People behave differently in the face of a potential loss versus a potential gain, even when the two situations are transparently identical. Across three experiments, decision makers engaged in more unethical behavior if a decision was presented in a loss frame than if the decision was presented in a gain frame. In Experiment 1, participants in the loss-frame condition were more likely to favor gathering "insider information" than were participants in the gain-frame condition. In Experiment 2, negotiators in the loss-frame condition lied more than negotiators in the gain-frame condition. In Experiment 3, the tendency to be less ethical in the loss-frame condition occurred under time pressure and was eliminated through the removal of time pressure.
For an in-depth read on research related to noticing and bounded ethicality, see: M. H. Bazerman, The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders SeeDecisions Without Blinders The Invisible Gorilla
- M H Bazerman
- D Chugh
- —97 ; C F Chabris
- D J Simons
- J M Darley
BIBLIOGRAPHY
For more details about the experiment, please see the online
supplement. For an in-depth read on research related to
noticing and bounded ethicality, see: M. H. Bazerman, The
Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See (Simon &
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False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as SignificantDeciding Under the Influence of Specific Goals,'' unpublished manuscript, 2015. To learn about the situational and social forces that lead individuals to act unethically
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To learn about the situational and social forces that lead
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Exploring Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs Research in Organizational BehaviorSigning at the Beginning Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-Reports in Comparison to Signing at the End
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To learn about the situational and social forces that lead individuals to act unethically, read: F. Gino, Sidetracked
- P Fletcher
P. Fletcher, ''Deciding Under the Influence of Specific Goals,'' unpublished manuscript, 2015.
To learn about the situational and social forces that lead
individuals to act unethically, read: F. Gino, Sidetracked
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013);
The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See
- M H Bazerman
bounded ethicality, see: M. H. Bazerman, The
Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See (Simon &
Schuster, 2014);