Seek simplicity, then distrust it.
--Alfred North Whitehead
As a result of the financial and ethical meltdown, both HR organizations and colleges are rethinking relevant corporate ethics and what to do about them. As all of us in business recognize, since the collapse of Enron, the fraud at Worldcom and the ethical meltdown of the finance industry, the media blasted away at the perpetrators and started searching for underlying causes. But the causes are not nearly as obvious as most think, and the solutions border on the impossible.
The search for causes led to answers of varied sort: regulatory failure, bad apples and business incentives. Of course what the media and the public wanted were corporate and governmental changes to keep employees from acting unethically. The passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley in 2002, for example, targeted changes to reduce corrupt behavior. But as all of us know, though the Sarbanes-Oxley functioned to reduce intentionally-corrupt behavior, it has become a gatekeeper for only certain kinds of ethical misbehavior.
In a thoughtful and intriguing survey in Social Justice Research, Harvard’s Max Bazerman and Mahzarin Banaji (see #1) update us on ethical research. What’s helpful is that the authors and colleagues put the ordinary unethical behavior front and center, and then argue for a different understanding and process for managing ethical misbehavior. I find it especially helpful because I’ve long been aware that the materials and classes on social ethics in my seminaries were an utter waste of time. And it took very few years after graduation from school to realize that now well-researched fact. Indeed, the research clearly finds that my typical background knowledge of ethics from both philosophy and theology plainly doesn’t work. There are far, far better insights and recommended practices from the field of social psychology.
What do we know about ordinary ethical failure?
Although the Sarbanes-Oxley is useful for intentional ethical failure, it bypasses the vast majority of unethical behaviors that occur without a person’s conscious awareness of engaging in them. Extensive research surfaces a number of reasons for ordinary ethical failure.
- Ordinary unethical behaviors are based in the mechanics of the mind’s abilities and constraints. If you’ve worked through Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, you know that the idea that our minds are susceptible to systematic errors is generally accepted. M R Banaji’s studies of prejudice reveal that these (un)ethical characteristics are not characteristic of an unethical group of people—but of all of us. Indeed, we’re masters at self-deception.
- A great deal of evidence points to the limits of our conscious thinking. It reveals that many of our actions are impacted pervasively by our unconscious mind. Significantly, the research finds that much of our so-called “conscious decision-making” is an illusion. Indeed, we have little to no control over many intended actions.
- The power of the unconscious has been revealed especially in studied of prejudice and bias. You can test yourself with the Implicit Association Test which gauges prejudicial attitudes or beliefs about certain groups of people. Candidly, in spite of my history of tolerance, I found the IAT immensely challenging, almost a shock to the system.
- Further research reveals that we clearly overstate our potential for conscious feeling and thought determining our behaviors. You can see that when we assume that an act (of another) is motivated by feelings and thoughts that are “objective, fair and judicious,” but are obviously wrongheaded to the observer. (As I noted in #3, the unconscious surfaces strongly in issues of prejudice and bias.)
What resolutions are successful?
Historically, ethical behavior has been taught by an emphasis upon ethical theory, some discussion and application of ethical principles and the use of relevant cases. If you read the typical newspaper column written by your local ethics or philosophy teacher, you know what I mean. This approach assumes that by highlighting the moral implications of decision, business folk will be better able to “choose the moral path.” Research, however, points only to limited success using these methodologies.
In more fruitful research, Bazerman and Banaji argue that the problem with ethics training is that it focuses nearly solely on unethical practice. And if our unethical strategies are out of our awareness, that typical focus of the past centuries won’t work. Furthermore, in an aside, the authors point out that the most ethically challenged will give a deaf ear to such approaches.
Instead, the authors suggest that the best approach to ethical development is better aimed at understanding our psychological tendencies. To as significant degree this is the same approach that’s been applied to managerial decision making for the past 25 years, and the results have been fairly successful.
Fortunately, the process for becoming a skilled decision-maker (see #2) is no more complex than becoming a skilled athlete. It can be taught—and it can be learned. That means, for example, that if you understand that decision making is inevitably flawed and characterized by unconscious, feelings-oriented processes, that we’re inevitably overly confident, and that where we’re least capable we tend to be more certain, then we’d better be sure to go slowly in making important decisions. And most of all, that means we become systematic about our decisions and be sure to work at disconfirming them before we get very far down the path.
Flickr photo: Center for Study of Ethics at UVU
1. Bazerman, Max and Mahzarin Banaji, The Social Psychology of Ordinary Ethical Failures. Social Justice Research, V 17, No. 2, June 2004.
2. Russo, J Edward and Paul JH Schoemaker, Winning Decisions. (New York: Currency Doubleday),
2002.