Week 6 Flashcards
Where does unethical behavior not come from?
Unethical behavior does not follow from a deliberate and careful decision in which we tradeoff the (moral) costs and benefits of actions.
What is a result of sacred values and emotions with regards to understanding others?
Emotions may stand in the way of appreciating the situation from the perspective of someone who does not share these values or principles.
What can you use Normative, descriptive, and prescriptive models
for?
When you know what people should do (normative) and what people actually do (descriptive) you can design processes to bring behavior closer to normative.
What are normative models of ethics about?
What should people do? What is the morally right thing to do?
What are descriptive models of ethics about?
What are people doing? What decisions do people make in situations and under which conditions do they act morally right?
What are the 2 schools of normative models of ethics?
Consequentialist and deontological
What is the consequentialist school of ethics?
Focus on the outcomes and focus is in maximizing total welfare.
What is the deontological school of ethics?
Focus on rights and duties. Actions can be right or wrong independent of consequences.
What are descriptive models of ethics split by?
Classic and contemporary approaches.
What is Lawrence Kholbergs’ piramid about?
Morals are not born but developed, you develop as you get older.
What is Kholberg’s Heinz dillema about?
Not the outcome, but the process of choice is important. People are graded based on the decision process.
What are the steps in Rest’s model of ethical decision making?
- Moral awareness
- Moral judgment
- Moral intention
- Moral action
What are 3 important assumptions of Rest’s model of ethical decision making?
- Awareness is needed for a decision to have moral implications;
- Behavioral intentions follow from reasoning/judgment;
- Moral action requires moral intention.
What is the implication for Rest’s model of ethical decision making?
If people want to make more ethical choices, let them become aware of the ethical assumptions.
What is the empirical evidence regarding Rest’s model?
The 3 assumptions are often violated, our behavior often does not come from an intention to handle a certain way.
What describes contemporary descriptive models?
Unethical behavior typically emerges from our system 1, not system 2. We are often unaware that we do things that we find unethical and find it easier to justify our unethical behavior.
What is bounded ethicality?
The systematic and predictable psychological processes that lead people to engage in self-serving but unethically questionable behaviors. “we lie, steal and deceive as long as we can retain our self image of an honest and decent person”.
What happens with system 1 and system 2 with ethicality?
System 1 often favors a self-serving action, and recognizing the moral consequences of our behavior requires careful, deliberate consideration of a decision.
What is overclaiming credit?
People genuinely believe that they (and groups they belong to) are better than others. We have self-servings notions of fairness.
What is the attribution bias?
My success is due to hard work and excellent skills, my failures are due to bad luck. Others’ successes are due to good luck, others’ failures are due to a lack of effort or ability.
What is in group favoritism?
“Us” versus “them” mentality. We have self-serving biases towards our group. We often discriminate against other groups by doing in-group favors which harm out-groups.
What are implicit attitudes?
Evaluations that occur without conscious awareness towards something.
Most people have implicit attitudes towards people with certain characteristics. People are often unaware of them and may even deny having them. Implicit association tests unmask them.
What is social pressure?
Pressure from a superior, peers, friends and family
What is framing and motivated reasoning?
This is about focusing on favorable comparisons.
There is always a good excuse.
Taking baby steps rather than a big leap.
Omission-commission bias.
What are sacred values?
sometimes system 1 tells us something is wrong, but upon reflection it is not entirely clear why.
Certain behaviors go against deeply felt values or principles. We may also misjudge others’ moral intentions.
What is motivated blindness?
Deliberately look the other way when another person takes immoral or painful actions that benefit you.
What is moral wiggle room?
Deliberately ignore information to avoid feeling bad about our own actions. When there is some uncertainty about the consequences, it’s easier to ignore our actions.
What is indirect unethical behavior?
Delegating a decision weakens perceived responsibility for outcomes. Blame falls (partly) on party to which decision has been delegated.
What is moral cleansing?
happens when we “compensate” bad behavior with good behavior to restore out self-image
What is moral licensing?
Is a similar phenomenon but in the opposite order: using your good behavior in the past to allow yourself some bad behavior now.
What are the 7 points how you can improve decision making?
- Decision-analysis tools
- Acquire expertise
- Debiasing
- Reason analogically
- Take an outsiders’ view
- Understand biases in others
- Nudge
