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Chapter 8

Narrowing the Gap Interventions for Improving Ethical Behavior

You might be surprised to learn that Ann and Max (the authors) do not agree on a number of ethical issues. In fact, we disagree on lots of policy issues with ethical implications. We do not share identical philosophical perspectives. Nor do we have religious perspectives in common; one of us is a churchgoing Catholic, the other a nonreligious Jew. As a result, we’ve had to negotiate about some of the stories that made it into the earlier chapters, and some that did not. Our differences may help to explain why we haven’t tried to impose either of our ethical

standards on you. At the same time, we recognize that our own perspectives and values probably influenced the examples we used. We have no interest in encouraging you to act according to our or anyone else’s ethical values. Rather, our goal is to help you, others, and organizations make the ethical decisions you would make upon thoughtful, reasoned reflection. We have offered up seven chapters’ worth of evidence from behavioral ethics that people do

not act as ethically as they would upon deeper reflection. In this chapter, we turn our attention to the concept of change: that is, how you can use the knowledge acquired in earlier chapters to bring your own decisions in closer alignment with your ethical views, and how you can help the organizations to which you belong—and society in general—do the same.

Changing Yourself

Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change. —Confucius

Given that few people number among the wisest and the stupidest of society, virtually all of us are ripe for change, according to Confucius’s standards. Yet change can be difficult, and changing our ethical behavior can be particularly tough. As we have tried to document, we believe much of this difficulty rests in a lack of awareness of the negative ethical implications of our actions. So, when it comes to improving your ethical behavior, what’s an individual to do? The

answer lies in part in aligning the gap between your “want” and “should” selves. As argued in Chapter 4, we tend to predict that we will behave as we think we should behave, but at the time of the decision, we behave how we want to behave. To make matters worse, when we reflect back on the decision, we tend to believe that we acted as we thought we should behave. Most of us understand that to make an effective decision, we need to engage in thorough

Bazerman, Max H., and Ann E. Tenbrunsel. Blind Spots : Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It, Princeton University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gguu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=664630. Created from gguu-ebooks on 2023-07-23 17:33:24.

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deliberation prior to the decision and, after making the decision, accurately reflect on it.1 However, because our predictions of how we will behave aren’t accurate, we have trouble making the ethical decisions we planned to make. Moreover, because we distort our recall of decisions to help us feel better about any unethical behavior we may have committed, our reflections aren’t accurate, either. As Max and his colleague Mahzarin Banaji have argued, to make ethical decisions, you need to recognize your vulnerability to your own unconscious biases.2 If you don’t, you won’t be aware of your blind spots. One of the first steps toward removing your blind spots is to make sure you are planning

appropriately and reflecting realistically on your behavior. As we described in Chapter 4, System 1 refers to our fast, automatic, effortless, implicit, and emotional decision processes, while System 2 refers to slower, conscious, effortful, explicit, logical, and more reasoned decision processes. Our intuitive System 1 responses are more likely to be immoral than our more reflective System 2 thoughts.3 This would suggest that learning to think before acting, in more reflective and analytical ways, would help us move toward the ideal image we hold of ourselves. Doing so entails being prepared for the hidden psychological forces that crop up before, during, and after we confront ethical dilemmas.

Preparing to Decide: Anticipating the “Want” Self

The “want” self—that part of us which behaves according to self-interest and, often, without regard for moral principles—is silent during the planning stage of a decision but typically emerges and dominates at the time of the decision. Not only will your self-interested motives be more prevalent than you think, but they likely will override whatever “moral” thoughts you have. If you find yourself thinking, “I’d never do that” and “Of course I’ll choose the right path,” it’s likely your planning efforts will fail, and you’ll be unprepared for the influence of self-interest at the time of the decision. One useful way to prepare for the onslaught of the “want” self is to think about the

motivations that are likely to influence you at the time you make a decision, as Ann and her colleagues have demonstrated in their research.4 Drawing on the sexual harassment study discussed in Chapter 4, participants were asked to predict how they would react if a job interviewer asked questions that qualified as sexual harassment. Participants who were induced to think about the motivation they likely would experience at the time of the decision— the desire to get the job—were significantly less likely to predict that they would confront the harasser and more likely to predict that they would stay silent (just as those in the actual situation did) than were those who were not asked to think about the motivation they would experience at the time of the decision. As this study suggests, thinking about your motivations at the time of a decision can help bring the “want” self out of hiding during the planning stage and thus promote more accurate predictions. To help our negotiation students anticipate the influence of the “want” self on decisions that

have an ethical dimension, we ask them to prepare for the very question they hope won’t be

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asked. When preparing for a job negotiation, for example, we encourage them to be ready to field questions about other offers they may have. Otherwise, when a potential employer asks “What’s your other salary offer?” an applicant’s “want” self might answer “$90,000,” when the truthful answer is $70,000. If an applicant has prepared for this type of question, her “should” self will be more assertive during the actual interview, leading her to answer in a way that’s in harmony with her ethical principles, yet still strategic: “I’m afraid I’m not comfortable revealing that information.” Similarly, rehearsing or practicing for an upcoming event, such as a work presentation or

exams, may help you focus on concrete details of the future situation that you might otherwise overlook.5 In her book Giving Voice to Values, Mary Gentile offers a framework to help managers prepare for difficult ethical decisions by practicing their responses to ethical situations.6 When you are able to project yourself into a future situation, almost as if you were actually in it, you can better anticipate which motivations will be most powerful and prepare to manage them. The point of increasing your accuracy in the planning stage of decision making isn’t to

recognize that you will be influenced by self-interested motives and admit defeat to the “want” self. Rather, it’s to arm you with accurate information about your most likely response so that you can engage in proactive strategies to reduce that probability. Knowing that your “want” self will exert undue pressure at the time of the decision and increase the odds that self-interest will dominate can help you use self-control strategies to curb that influence.7 One such strategy involves putting in place precommitment devices that seal you to a desired

course of action.8 In one example, Philippine farmers who saved their money by putting it in a “lockbox” that they could not access were able to save more money than those who did not, even factoring in the small cost of the lockbox.9 By eliminating the farmers’ ability to spend their money immediately, the lockbox effectively constrained the “want” self. Ann’s teaching assistant used a similar pre-commitment strategy to constrain her “want” self during finals week. Knowing she should study but would be tempted to procrastinate by spending time on Facebook, she had her roommate change her password so that she could not access the social networking site. By doing so, the student constrained her “want” self from acting and allowed her “should” self to flourish. Such precommitment devices explain the popularity of personal trainers at health clubs. By making appointments with a trainer (who might charge up to $100 an hour) with the threat of a cancellation fee, clients precommit to their “should” self, ensuring that they will work out rather than giving into the strong pull of the “want” self and watching TV instead. When faced with an ethical dilemma, we can use similar strategies to keep our “want” self

from dominating more reasoned decision making. Research on the widespread phenomenon of escalation of commitment— our reluctance to walk away from a chosen course of action— shows that those who publicly commit to a decision in advance are more likely to follow through with the decision than are those who do not make such a commitment.10 You might also precommit to your intended ethical choice by sharing it with an unbiased individual whose opinion you respect and whom you believe to be highly ethical. In doing so, you can induce

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escalation of commitment and increase the likelihood that you will make the decision you planned and hoped to make.

Making the Decision: Giving Voice to Your “Should” Self

In addition to preparing for the power of the “want” self at the time of decision, there are other ways to give more power to the “should” self. For instance, given that abstract thinking dominates our thinking when we are predicting how we will behave, it’s useful to bring this abstract thinking to light when we are actually making a decision as well. Focusing on the high- level aspects of the situation at the time of the decision may be one way to do this.11 For example, a group of researchers was able to reduce the immediate temptation of eating a tasty pretzel by refocusing participants’ attention away from the concrete aspects of the temptation— how good the pretzel would taste—and toward the abstract dimensions; they did so by asking participants to imagine that they were looking at a picture of a pretzel rather than an actual pretzel.12 Similarly, in the famous “marshmallow experiments,” a child was placed alone in a room with a single marshmallow on her plate.13 An adult told the child that she had only two choices: (1) eat the marshmallow before the adult came back to the room, in which case she would only get that one marshmallow, or (2) wait to eat the marshmallow until after the adult returned and be rewarded with a second marshmallow for her patience. (For a demonstration of this experiment, visit www.blindspots-ethics.com/temptation.) The success of the “temptation resistors” seemed to rest at least partly on the level of thinking in which the children engaged. Those who were encouraged to think about vivid and highly arousing pictures of the marshmallow quickly succumbed to temptation and ate it, while children who were encouraged to think about the marshmallows as abstract images (for example, as a puffy cloud) were more likely to resist temptation and wait for the reward.14 In a similar manner, when we are faced with an ethical dilemma, we may be able to give the

“should” self a stronger voice by focusing on the abstract principles that guide the decision. Rather than thinking about the immediate payoff of an unethical choice, thinking about the values and principles that you believe should guide the decision may give the “should” self a fighting chance. A useful strategy for encouraging abstract thinking is to imagine the eulogy you would like written about you and your actions. What principles will people say guided your life? What would you like them to say? Still find yourself thinking of the trees and not the forest? If so, the “mom litmus test” may be

useful. When faced with a tempting but possibly unethical choice, ask yourself whether you would feel comfortable sharing that decision with your mom (or your dad or someone else you really respect). Could you comfortably approach your mother and say, “Guess what, Mom? I lied about having another salary offer in order to get the job.” Imagining your mom’s reaction in that exchange is likely to bring abstract principles to mind (“What would Mom do?”) and thus give the “should” voice more power. Yet another efficient strategy for drawing attention to the “should” self involves changing the

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http://www.blindspots-ethics.com/temptation

decision set from that of a single option— “Should I behave unethically or not?”—to a choice between options. Based on their research, Max, Ann, and their colleagues have argued that the “should” self tends to dominate if decision makers have the chance to evaluate more than one option at a time.15 For example, individuals who evaluated two options at a time—an improvement in air quality (the “should” choice) and a commodity such as a printer (the “want” choice)— were more likely to choose the option that maximized the public good (improvement in air quality); by contrast, when participants evaluated these options independently of one another, they more often chose the printer.16 Similarly, in a choice between two political candidates, one of higher integrity and one who would provide more jobs, individuals who evaluated the two candidates side by side voted for the higher-integrity candidate; when participants evaluated the candidates independently, the one who provided more jobs was more popular. This evidence suggests the value of joint decision making when assessing ethicality or

making ethical judgments, consistent with long-standing advice in the decision literature to consider all available alternatives when making decisions. Reformulating an ethical dilemma into a choice between two options—the ethical choice and the unethical choice—should be helpful in bringing the “should” choice to the forefront, highlighting the fact that by choosing the unethical action, you are not choosing the ethical act. One might argue that the recommendations presented—think abstractly, apply the “mom

test,” and construe the decision as one involving more than one option—require an awareness that a decision has an ethical component. Of course, if that were the case, these recommendations wouldn’t be needed in the first place! Rather, ethical decision making requires that we apply these recommendations to all of our important decisions.

Evaluating Your Unethical Choice—Accurately

The desire to be an ethical person is a noble aspiration, yet ironically, it can actually impede your ability to accurately assess your unethical behavior and behave more ethically in the future. As discussed in Chapter 4, because we want to see ourselves as ethical (and have others see us that way as well), our recollections of our behavior are biased in that direction— that is, we’re predisposed to reinterpret our unethical behavior as ethical. Unfortunately, “debiasing” ourselves of this tendency is quite hard.17 Because it can be so difficult, people tend to need training to help them identify and correct

the distorted feedback they give themselves. Rather than focusing on how they should behave, such training should emphasize the psychological mechanisms that lead to unethical behavior and inaccurate recollections of such behavior.18 In addition, it needs to incorporate techniques to help people to accurately recall their behavior. Training individuals on the biases and distortions that impede accurate evaluation of their actions and asking them to examine reasons their initial recollection might be wrong can help mitigate the effects of these biases.19

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Decision feedback is another effective means of improving your ability to accurately assess your actions. Feedback needs to be immediate, and it should warn about the likelihood of distortions and describe how bias might affect your recollection of the decision.20 Debriefing your decisions on a regular basis, perhaps with the help of a trusted friend or colleague playing the part of “devil’s advocate,” may also help improve the accuracy of your recollections. Perhaps because they have built-in feedback mechanisms, group decision making and systems that hold people accountable for their decisions are other effective methods of debiasing judgment.21

Changing Organizations

When it was discovered the gas tank was unsafe, did anyone go to Iacocca and tell him? “Hell no,” replied an engineer who worked on the Pinto, a high company official for many years, who, unlike several others at Ford, maintains a necessarily clandestine concern for safety. “That person would have been fired. Safety wasn’t a popular subject around Ford in those days. With Lee it was taboo. Whenever a problem was raised that meant a delay on the Pinto, Lee would chomp on his cigar, look out the window and say ‘Read the product objectives and get back to work.’” . . . Iacocca was fond of saying, “Safety doesn’t sell.”22

—Douglas Birsch and John H. Fielder, The Ford Pinto Case

As this quotation suggests, closing the ethical gap in an organization requires a thorough audit of top leaders’ decisions and behavior. Lacking a leader who believes in ethical decision making, an organization won’t behave ethically. But while having an ethical leader is a necessary quality of an ethical organization, it is by no means sufficient. Findings from behavioral ethics suggest that less obvious, hidden aspects of unethical behavior also need to be addressed, including the organization’s informal values and ethical “sinkholes,” which are characterized by decision uncertainty, employee stress, and the isolation of decision makers.

Identifying Hidden—but Powerful—Informal Values

An organization may espouse ethical values, require ethical training, and even have an ethics “hotline,” yet such symbolic moves may have relatively little impact on ethical behavior.23 As we argued in Chapter 6, the informal values imparted at work play a much more critical role in employee behavior. If they want to see real ethical improvement in their organizations, managers need to understand these informal values. Doing so requires an understanding of the processes that motivate individual employees’ decisions. What pressures do employees feel and why? What ethical challenges do they face? What types of decisions does the organization actually reward? What qualities characterize those who make it to the top? One way to get to the heart of these questions is to try to identify who really “runs the

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company”—which may not necessarily mean the CEO. In the later days of Arthur Andersen, it was the consultants who had the most power. At Ford during the Pinto era, it was the salesmen: “This company is run by salesmen, not engineers; so the priority is styling, not safety,” said one Ford engineer.24 Identifying these pockets of power can reveal a great deal about the true values of the organization. If winning consulting business is an accounting firm’s penultimate goal, what considerations are pushed aside to achieve it? If salesmen are running an auto manufacturer, whose voices are silenced? While the question of who’s in charge depends upon the organization, chances are that a

consensus will exist within each organization. In universities, it’s generally known which colleges “have the president’s ear.” In companies, employees tend to know which departments are “the place to be seen and heard”—that is, where you need to land if you want to make it to the top. On the flip side, employees are also aware of the “dead zone”—the departments where no one wants to land—which also reveals the company’s true priorities. Paying attention to “organizational talk” can also shed light on the informal values at work.

Noticing what’s talked about—and what isn’t— can shed light on the values that employees believe are actually rewarded, as well as those that aren’t. What slogans and stories do employees repeat over and over? What values do those stories emphasize? As an internal company slogan, “Safety doesn’t sell” sends an incredibly powerful message about what is and isn’t important to the organization. In doing so, it blocks certain criteria from employees’ decision-making process—specifically, in this case, eliminating customer safety as a consideration. In this manner, the ethics of considering the potential effects of one’s decisions on others’ well-being fades from the decision process. Stories are a particularly powerful mechanism for alerting employees to the informal values

of their organizations. Is there company lore about someone who stood up to leadership on an ethical issue—for example, an engineer “taking on Iacocca” over the Pinto? Or is the story one of being rebuffed by a leader for mentioning ethical concerns? Both types of stories would powerfully reveal an organization’s true values and cause employees to hold very different beliefs about expected behavior and decision criteria. One well-known client of ours, a Fortune 50 corporation, produced a video of four stories

told by four employees who went above their bosses’ heads to keep the corporation from acting unethically. Each tells his or her story in vivid detail and stresses that he or she was simply doing what was needed to behave ethically. The video is widely shown within the organization. At the end of the video, we learn that all four whistleblowers now hold very senior positions in the corporation. While it’s true that a formal decision was made to create the video, it has had a lasting, powerful effect because the stories are repeated through informal channels. Paying attention to what isn’t talked within an organization also provides valuable

information about its informal values, as exemplified in this quote from Barbara Toffler, a former Arthur Andersen employee:25 “We were supposedly still the guardians of the public trust, but no one ever mentioned that. Everyone did, however, talk about making money all the time.” Similarly, an anonymous Ford engineer’s story concerning gastank safety at the auto

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company, as recounted by Douglas Birsch and John H. Fielder in their book The Ford Pinto Case, provides a compelling demonstration of the importance of considering the “popularity” of certain topics and their relationship to organizational values:

Lou Tubben is one of the most popular engineers at Ford. He’s a friendly, outgoing guy with a genuine concern for safety. By 1971 he had grown so concerned about gastank integrity that he asked his boss if he could prepare a presentation on safer tank design. Tubben and his boss had both worked on the Pinto and shared a concern for its safety. His boss gave him the go-ahead, scheduled a date for the presentation and invited all company engineers and key production planning personnel. When time came for the meeting, a grand total of two people showed up—Lou Tubben and his boss.26

The anonymous Ford engineer who related this story ironically commented, “So you see, there are a few of us here at Ford who are concerned about fire safety,” and added, “They are mostly engineers who have to study a lot of accident reports and look at pictures of burned people. But we don’t talk about it much. It isn’t a popular subject.”27 As this story suggests, “ethics talk”—or lack thereof—also reveals a great deal about an

organization. How are unethical behaviors described? More importantly, how are they disguised? For example, when someone is found to have lied to management or to a customer, is the word “lying” used, or is the behavior disguised as “misrepresenting the facts”? Is stealing described as an “inappropriate allocation of resources”?28 The importance of labeling is exemplified in a study in which participants had a sensible aversion to eating from a container labeled “cyanide.”29 Interestingly, participants had trouble overcoming this impulse even when they themselves were the ones to write “cyanide” on an otherwise clean container. There is similar power in calling unethical behavior by its name. If unethical behavior isn’t labeled as such, it is unlikely that an intervention will be attempted, let alone that one will succeed. Because informal values are organization-specific, ethics “fixes” will depend on those

values and be unique to each organization. As we have discussed, formal systems such as codes of conduct and ethics training don’t drive informal values; rather, informal values need to drive which formal systems are warranted and how they are designed. An organization cannot simply “borrow” another organization’s formal ethics plan, as so many do; nor can the government mandate particular programs and expect success. Identifying the informal values that drive an organization is difficult and may reveal unpleasant truths, yet organizations that truly desire meaningful change must undertake this hard work.

Identifying Ethical “Sinkholes” in the Organization

The difficult task of identifying how an organization’s informal values differ from its desired ethical values can be made easier by identifying characteristics that make misalignment more

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likely. More specifically, paying attention to areas in the organization that are characterized by uncertainty, time pressure, short-term horizons, and isolation serves as a good first start. Uncertainty is a catalyst for the ethical fading process, Max, Ann, and their colleague David

Messick have found.30 Namely, the more uncertainty there is the environment, the more likely unethical behavior is to occur. In addition, in her research, Ann found that individuals were more likely to lie about the amount of resources they had to allocate to another person when the recipient was uncertain about the actual amount available. In environments characterized by high uncertainty, individuals may be able to downplay the ethical implications of a decision and, in doing so, become more likely to code the decision as a business choice rather than an ethical one. Uncertainty also has been identified as a catalyst in the divergence between the “want” and “should” self. By introducing the idea that an outcome may not have ethical implications, the “want” self may be able to focus on its own desires, increasing the probability that the individual will make an unethical act choice.31 In the case of the Ford Pinto, focusing on the likelihood that the gas tank wouldn’t combust upon impact fades other possible outcomes—combustion and subsequent loss of life—from consideration, allowing the decision to be re-coded as a business rather than an ethical decision. Time pressure within an organization is another likely source of unethical behavior. The

busier and more rushed people are, the more they have on their minds, and the more likely they are to rely on System 1 thinking. In particular, the frantic pace of managerial life suggests that executives often rely on System 1 thinking.32 Notably, time pressure characterized the production of the Ford Pinto. Described as “the shortest production planning period in modern automotive history,” the Pinto’s production schedule was set at under twenty-five months, an aggressive timeline given the average production schedule of forty-three months.33 Time pressure reduces the cognitive resources available to decision makers and decreases their odds of making “should” choices. In a study examining consumer choice, individuals who were asked to memorize a seven-digit number were more likely to choose chocolate cake over fruit salad (i.e., the “want” choice), whereas those who only had to memorize a two-digit number were more likely to choose the fruit (i.e., the “should” choice).34 We can increase our likelihood of making a “should” choice by analyzing ethical dilemmas in an environment free of distractions and time pressures. Isolation also tends to promote informal values that are at odds with an organization’s

desired values. Isolated individuals and groups tend to develop norms that diverge from the stated norms of the organization. From 1990 to 1994, for example, General Electric paid fines ranging from a $20,000 criminal fine to a $24.6 million civil fine for employees’ unethical behaviors that included misrepresentation, money laundering, defective pricing, cost mischarging, false claims, product substitution, conspiracy/conversion of classified documents, procurement fraud, and mail fraud.35 In one 1992 incident, GE pled guilty to defrauding the Pentagon and agreed to pay $69 million in fines. The company took responsibility for the behavior of a former marketing employee who, working with an Israeli Air Force general, helped divert Pentagon funds to their personal bank accounts and to Israeli military programs that were unauthorized by the United States. As a result of these and other incidents (and being

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shut out of government contracts for six months), General Electric now strives to prevent isolated groups from hatching unethical or fraudulent plots.36 Once an organization has identified its “ethics sinkholes,” it needs to promote ethical values

within these areas. These values need to be communicated to key individuals, particularly those with access and control over information and staff; administrative assistants, for example, are often described as being among the most powerful people in organizations.37 Communicating desired values to these employees and finding ways to make those values “stick” will provide the biggest payoff in terms of reforming the organization’s informal culture.

Changing Society

In this book, drawing on the emerging field of behavioral ethics, we have focused primarily on documenting the psychological reasons good people engage in bad behaviors. And up to this point in the chapter, we have suggested ways of improving human judgment and improving organizations, goals that are important components of the larger agenda of improving ethics across society. But structural changes at the societal level are also needed to create a more ethical society. As we documented in the previous chapter, special-interest groups are often strategically exploitative and have found ways to use our bounded ethicality against us. Rather than accepting the distortions of parties that oppose wise change, voters can and should educate themselves about the actual facts behind key issues and support politicians who are wise and brave enough to advocate ethical policies. In addition, we should support campaign finance reform legislation (and the politicians who pursue such measures) that would curb the undue influence of special-interest groups. Proposals that move toward the public financing of campaigns deserve our serious consideration, and politicians who support public financing deserve our backing. We can also use the ideas in this book to help well-intentioned politicians generate and

implement ideas that would push us toward becoming a more ethical and efficient society. Along these lines, psychologists and behavioral economists recently have begun to develop a novel strategy for coping with the imperfections of human judgment. Beginning with the knowledge that people act in predictably irrational ways, these theorists then structure choices to optimally account for biased decision making. The result: better, more ethical decisions. In their important book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have pushed scholars and organizational decision makers at all levels to develop ingenious ways of designing choice environments to avoid systematic pitfalls in decision making. This strategy can be used throughout society to promote more ethical, wiser decisions. Here, we suggest how some of the psychological concepts developed throughout this book could be used to lead citizens toward more ethical decisions.

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Changing Defaults

In Chapter 1, we referred to Johnson and Goldstein’s cross-European organ donation study, which revealed that policy defaults are a tremendous factor in people’s decisions. Specifically, countries that have opt-in organ donation policies, where the default is not to harvest people’s organs without their prior consent, sacrifice thousands of lives in comparison to opt-out policies, where the default is organ harvesting. As you will recall, countries with opt-in policies had donor consent rates of 4.3 to 27.5 percent, while countries with opt-out policies had donor consent rates of 85.9 to more than 99.9 percent. In the United States, where opt-in policies result in low organ donation rates and needless deaths, lack of awareness of the power of defaults produces results that most citizens likely would consider unethical. Knowledge of the influence of policy defaults could be used to dramatically increase donation rates without changing the options available to citizens. Indeed, Thaler and Sunstein have offered tremendous documentation of the power to nudge people toward wiser behavior by changing the default. It’s not just that defaults matter; it’s that they matter far more than most of us expect them to

matter. Default settings for home electronics such as air conditioners, refrigerators, and computer monitors could all be required by law to have lower presets while still giving the user the same range of power, and computer printers could be required to have a default of printing in draft mode—a lower cost, less ink-intensive mode.38 Such regulations could be enacted without limiting anyone’s options, lead to better and more ethical decisions, and in most cases, make consumers better off financially.

Structuring Information to Expose Value Trade-offs

When it comes to promoting ethical behavior, how governments communicate to their citizens also makes a difference. Most people would agree that it would be more ethical for us, as a society, to consume less fuel. However, though most of us appreciate fuel efficiency, we do not like higher gas taxes and gas prices. Making matters worse, fuel efficiency can be hard to measure and understand. In the 1970s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency started a program that required car manufacturers to place stickers on new cars that told potential buyers about the efficiency of the car in miles per gallon. This system seems to make a great deal of sense, and it’s certainly far better than providing no information about fuel efficiency to buyers. Unfortunately, the way in which this information is conveyed is not ideal. Researchers Rick

Larrick and Jack Soll figured out that measuring fuel efficiency as miles per gallon leads consumers to systematically misinterpret the available information.39 Larrick and Soll describe the “MPG illusion” as the common, false belief that the amount of gas a car consumes decreases linearly as a function of a car’s MPG, when the actual relationship is curvilinear. That is, most of us intuitively and falsely think that we’ll achieve the same or similar fuel

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savings by trading a 10 MPG car for a 15 MPG car as we would by trading a 20 MPG car for a 25 MPG car. In fact, if you do the arithmetic, the former will save much more fuel than the second, holding miles driven constant. Imagine, for example, that you own two cars, each of which you drive 10,000 miles per year. One gets 10 MPG, and the other gets 20 MPG. When you trade in the 10 MPG car for a 15 MPG car, you reduce your fuel usage from 1,000 gallons to 667 gallons, saving 333 gallons. In contrast, when you trade in the 20 MPG car for a 25 MPG car, you reduce your fuel usage from 500 gallons to 400 gallons, saving only 100 gallons. Clearly, getting the lowest-MPG cars, the old gas guzzlers, off the road should be a critical goal in our society, even if drivers don’t replace the guzzlers with small hybrids. Larrick and Soll suggest that we would be far better off as a society by requiring stickers on

new cars to convey information in the form of gallons per mile (GPM) instead of MPG. While the difference sounds semantic, GPM likely would lead consumers to pay far more attention to fuel economy information. Why? Because fuel consumption does decrease linearly with GPM, thereby correcting the MPG illusion. And in a study run by Larrick and Soll, participants more accurately chose fuel-efficient cars when consumption was expressed as GPM than as MPG. Europe, Canada, and Australia have already moved to volume-over-distance measures such as GPM, but the United States, Japan, India, and other countries have yet to correct the MPG illusion. Though interesting in its own right, the MPG story reveals that the salience and clarity of

information can affect the tendency of people to use the information at their disposal. To push people toward more ethical use of fuel, we need to change the format in which data is presented.

Increasing the Importance of Future Concerns

In Chapter 3, we described how the common tendency to discount the future can lead people to make decisions that harm the environment and leave burdens, such as the national debt, for future generations. Many policies that eliminate the imposition of unethical decisions on future generations require people to make a small current sacrifice in return for larger future benefits (or to avoid larger future harms). Often, these proposals fail because people overweight the immediate costs of implementation. For example, should we increase fuel taxes to reduce consumption of a product that contributes to global climate change? Most citizens agree that the United States needs to reduce its contribution to this problem, yet legislative efforts face stiff opposition; few voters are willing to seeing the price of gas jump by fifty cents a gallon or more. In this type of classic want/should conflict, we give too much weight to our dislike of current costs (higher gas prices) and underweight long-term implications (efficiency). Max’s work with Todd Rogers offers one lever policymakers can use to better calibrate

citizens’ weighing of costs and benefits: a concept we call “future lock-in.”40 We have found that people are more likely to choose according to the interests of their “should” selves when making decisions about the future than when making decisions that will be implemented

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immediately. In exchange for a slight delay in implementation, otherwise unappealing policies may be able to achieve large increases in support. The time delay persuades people to look beyond their emotional dislike of incurring the immediate costs of implementation. In our study, we started by identifying five policies that people report feeling they should

support but do not actually want to support. One was a policy that would limit the number of fish that could be caught by the fishing industry to reduce ocean overharvesting. Participants were told the policy would increase the price of fish, create job loss in the fishing industry, protect the fish population in the oceans, and extend the survival of the fishing industry to a sustainable level. Half of the participants were told the policy would go into effect as soon as possible, while the other half were told the policy would be implemented four years from now. Creating the four-year delay dramatically increased the policy’s acceptability. This type of future lock-in could be immensely useful for policymakers who are trying to

bolster support for particular policies. Most citizens agree we need to do more to solve global environmental problems, yet most proposed initiatives face strong opposition due to the short- term costs. Slightly delaying implementation would allow people to listen to the part of themselves that should support a given policy rather than to the side of them that does not want to incur the costs. An additional benefit of delaying a policy’s implementation is that it gives people time to prepare for the legislation’s impact. For instance, passing gas taxes that go into effect in the future allows car owners to enjoy more years of value from the vehicles they currently own and gives auto manufacturers time to modify their plants to create the models that match the new legislation. By leveraging the benefits of the future lock-in effect, policymakers could increase the proportion of people who support wise reforms. In addition, because future lock-in can be achieved through minor differences in language, it

can be completely costless. Consider that many policies are intended to go into effect in the future, yet are communicated in language that evokes immediate, self-interested concerns. Our research shows that how the timing of a policy is framed can have a strong influence on its level of support. This time, we asked a national sample about how favorably they would view a new law that would increase the price of gas by fifty-three cents in two years, but which they would vote on in a few months. The same story was read by all:

If passed, this policy would reduce gas consumption by increasing the price of a gallon of gas by fifty-three cents. In doing this, the policy would reduce U.S. contribution of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, which is one of the leading causes of global climate change. This policy would also reduce U.S. dependence on oil from foreign countries, especially the Middle East. This fifty-three-cent price increase in a gallon of gas would also make gas more expensive for Americans, and increase the costs of all forms of travel, especially driving. It would also probably cost jobs in the short term as the gas price increase would slow economic growth. This policy would be voted on early in 2007 and go into effect in 2009.

Half of the participants were then asked, “How strongly would you oppose or support this policy, which would go into effect two years in the future?” The other half was asked, “How

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strongly would you oppose or support this policy, which would be voted on by Congress as soon as possible?” Participants who read the version with the question that mentioned the delay in implementation were significantly more likely to vote for the policy than were participants who read the version that mentioned the imminent congressional vote. This was true despite the fact that both groups were presented with the same policy, which would be voted on by Congress at the same time and with the same implementation date. Simply changing participants’ focus on the time period affected the acceptability of the policy. The examples in this section highlight the potential of defaults, saliency, and delayed

implementation to create wise policies that can be passed. While one might question whether these strategies should be needed, the fact is that they are. Not only do we need to envision wise legislation, but we need to create policies that have a real chance of passing and succeeding in the real world.

Final Thoughts

We do not know what ethical challenges you are facing in your personal and professional life, nor do we know what your ethical values are. What we do know is that many people fall far short of their own standards. Applying the lens of behavioral ethics, we have tried to identify ways in which you and the groups to which you belong can see the ethical implications of your actions more clearly and make choices that better align with your values. At the individual level, you are well positioned to reach the ethical standards you would rely on with greater self-awareness. At the organizational level, leaders now should better understand how the decisions they make will affect the ethicality of their colleagues. At the societal level, innovative tools exist to help governments profoundly influence their citizens’ ethical behavior for the better. In the end, we hope we have shown that each one of us, using the tools at our disposal, can contribute toward creating a more ethical world.

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