Why you may not be as ethical as you think | Michael Hood | TEDxUniversityofMississippi

[Music] thank you all right how about we start this session with a test no no worries here this test is not going to be hard but what I want you to do is I want you to rate yourself ethically on a scale of one to ten one you are not ethical at all 10 you're absolutely ethical five you're in the middle so go ahead give yourself a number how many of you gave yourself a number higher than seven let's hear you clap if you gave yourself a number higher than seven that's it we got a lot of sevens out there you know I've asked about 3 000 people this question and 95 to 98 of them say I'm a seven or above but when I was with the FBI I specialized in financial crime white collar crime embezzlement fraud and what I found is that a lot of the people who I investigated were ordinary people just like you just like me your neighbor your colleague your co-worker and so now I'm going to say something's probably going to surprise you looking at this scale right here I am a five in reality I'm probably a four and I think by the end of this session by the end of our time together I think you're going to find out that you are closer to a five than what you care to admit so are you ready for the next part of the test let's do it right so in this one I'm going to give you a behavior and what I want you to do with these behaviors right here is Judge them on how bad they are one not bad at all who cares 10 whoa that is bad hold on now five in the middle so here comes your first Behavior how bad is it to share your Netflix password with someone outside your family oh I hear the laughing I see the faces right now remember FBI taught me non-verbal there may be a few guilty people out there right when I ask this question to people I usually get a run of answers between one and ten but predominantly I get people that say it's a one it's a two three at most and then they give me the excuses they're like everybody does it so who cares and then it's like I paid for my Netflix subscription it says I can do whatever I want with it because I paid for it and then finally I usually get it's Netflix they're not even real who cares so keep that in mind because I'm going to ask you a second question I want you to use the same scale that we're using right now how bad is it to go into a local restaurant order food eat it and leave without pay even though you have the means to pay the food was fine the service was fine it's a classic dine and dash what number would you give that how many Clapper allowed if you're going to give it above an eight there we go so you're telling me that's really really bad isn't it why if we look at both those behaviors together aren't they both stealing but yet one is accepted you'll say one oh Netflix one two or three but a dine and dash oh that that's a ten that's that's bad you don't do that and so as I started working my cases in the FBI one of the things that just fascinated me was how did people do this how could they come into work and just say hey how you doing and in the meantime they're stealing the company blind and I became fascinated I wanted to know how and so I started looking into these things and what you just experienced is something called psychological distance and it's a mental construct it's our ability in our brains to create a distance between our decisions and the consequences of those decisions and so when you think of Netflix like that's not even a real person but when you see that waiter that waitress all of a sudden that becomes very real so now I want you to imagine this for me imagine that you are in an amusement park and you see a family up ahead of you about 50 feet ahead of you husband wife whoever it is they got their wallet out they get something out of their wallet they put it in their pocket their purse their backpack whatever they have and as they place it back there it falls on the ground you yell at them but they don't hear you so you finally get up to that spot where the wallet fell you bend down you pick it up and as you pick it up you see it is loaded with cash hundred dollar bills how many of you are going to return that wallet with all the cash intact all of you right all of you I have no doubt but let's contrast that with this you're going to the amusement park with your family but you hate crowds so you go an hour late because you don't want to deal with the rush of people coming in and so you have to park a little bit farther back and it's a windy day but as you come up to them you come through the cars you look in between two cars and you see something moving something blowing in the wind and it catches your eye because it's green and you bend down you pick it up it's three fresh 100 bills you look around nobody's there how many of you are going to be like me and in the investigation right there and puts that money right in my pocket right that's what we're talking about with psychological distance we create this mental distance in our head that makes it seem there is no victim when you think of Netflix that they don't matter they're not real so what you're doing is you're denying a victim what I want you to do right now think about the organization you work for think about the organization you want to work for what is the first image that pops in your head because if it's a logo a slogan a product then you may have already created the psychological distance you need to rationalize your behavior whereas if you thought of a colleague you thought of a client you thought of a person that makes a little bit different that's like the waiter or the waitress when they're right in front of you so now if you're ready I've got one more behavior for you how bad is it to exceed the posted speed limit how many of you going to say negative numbers on this one right right but since again if we go back to the workplace our workplace is full of rules policies and procedures are we allowed to choose which ones we want to follow and which ones we don't and what this is called is denial of injury yeah I'm breaking the speed limit but I'm not hurting anybody but aren't speed limits put in place to protect people from accidents and even death and so I started thinking like how do these people how do they go home at night and not feel bad what goes on in their brains that make them say it's okay that I'm doing this and so I ran across an author by the name of Daniel Kahneman he wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow actually won a Nobel prize in economics for the book and he describes the brain in two different ways the first one is he calls it system one okay and so imagine this imagine you're on a country road it's late at night Sun's going down but you still have light you're going about 30 40 miles an hour you come around the corner and you see a deer in the middle of the road what are you going to do are you going to honk are you going to stop you're going to break you're going to Swerve or if you're like me I'm gonna speed up and hit it then I'm going to take it home and eat it right so in that moment did you just react to the stimulus in front of you Kahneman calls that system one your reactionary brain then he has this thing called system two and how many of you have ever had the wonderful experience of buying a car and negotiating with that salesperson back and forth and you consider does this fit in my budget is this a fair price and you use that brain you have to think Kahneman calls that system two that is your rational thinking brain and so now what I want you to consider which do you spend more time in each and every day system one your reactionary brain or system two your thinking brain and let's do another test I'm going to ask you a simple question Kahneman and other researchers have used this question to kind of illustrate the difference between system one and system two so as you know the answer and most of you will know the answer go ahead and say it out loud okay here we go how many of each animal did Moses take on the ark zero I hear some zeros there I hear some twos whoever said zero is correct because Moses didn't take anybody on the ark it was no uh system one makes 95 of your decisions every single day and it does it on an unconscious level where you're not even aware it's happening those of you chose two what happened system one shot that answer to the front of your brain and before you even thought about it you said two that's the power of system one and it leads to something called bounded ethicality it's described as the psychological pressures the social pressures and the normal processes of your brain that cause us to act in certain ways that sometimes are unethical without our knowledge two professors Dr Max bazem and Dr Anne Tim Brunson have done a lot of work on this and what they found is that bounded ethicality when we have an interest in an outcome it causes us sometimes to deviate from our ethical baselines in other words it causes us to do things that we ordinarily wouldn't do Dr Tim buncele also worked with an individual named Dr David Messick and they came up with a concept called ethical fading and you see the definition right there ethical fading is when you system one specifically makes a decision and somehow your brain has taken the ethical Dimensions out of the decision completely and what we may be doing today in the business schools at this University at universities all around the United States all around the world we may be inadvertently teaching our students how to make decisions with ethical fading taking the ethical Dimensions right out of it and it's called a cost benefit analysis yep a cost benefit analysis I'm an accountant and I know there's value in a cost benefit analysis but as you look at the calculation you look at the cost you look at the benefit you make your decision you don't always take the ethical implications of the decision and so I take you to this case that has been researched over and over again it involves a car called the Ford Pinto and for those of you younger than me the Ford Pinto with this strange looking car that if you hit it from behind at 30 miles per hour or more it exploded and the people inside would suffer severe burns or even death here's the thing Ford Executives knew prior to creating the first Pinto that there was a design flaw and that this was going to happen and they okayed the production of the pinto anyway and so as they looked into it they said how did this happen they came down to that cost benefit analysis and they figured out that to fix the design flaw in the Ford Pinto it would cost are you ready eleven dollars per car eleven dollars now move that to today's dollars it's a little bit more but not too much but when they did the cost benefit calculation the cost to fix the pinto was way more than the anticipated lawsuits the anticipated brand damage and so what did they choose they choose to manufacture the pinto and people died and suffered because of it but if you look at the basis of the decision that cost benefit analysis there was no ethical implications but if I could have asked the Ford Executives one question one question that would have brought the ethical Dimensions right back in front of their face I would have asked them he says imagine that your 16 year old son or daughter comes up to you and says Mom Dad I'd like to get a pinto for my 16th birthday if you were the Ford Executives who have this information what would you have said to your kid that ain't happening but you see right there how the ethical Dimensions all of a sudden can come into play if we think about them so how what can we do as people to make sure that we don't go down that unethical path we don't succumb to ethical fading and one of those ways is to generate multiple perspectives how many of you have ever made a decision or you're talking to somebody and you made a comment says wow you know what I hadn't thought about that one of the things that you can do as a person is when you come to a decision ask yourself what would happen if I made the exact opposite decision or what would happen if the decision I'm about to make would affect me how would I feel if I had to suffer the consequences because that would change your perspective another method that you can do to create these multiple perspectives is have somebody a colleague a friend someone you trust be your Devil's Advocate President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs invasion a massive failure realized that they had not generated enough perspectives and so they made a bad decision he went to his brother Robert the Attorney General of the United States and he gave him this instruction he said Robert your job from this point forward is to find out how I'm going to decide on any topic and then argue the exact opposite even if you don't agree with it and what he was doing he's trying to generate perspectives that he hadn't thought of looking at the problem from multiple formats trying to see different ways to handle it and if you do that research shows that you're more likely to make ethical decisions two other professors Dr Miriam kuchaki Dr Street Hari Desai did some interesting work in organizations and what they did is imagine your workplace they put up pictures of morally moral leaders people that as you look at their picture you just you accept them as moral leaders people like Gandhi people like Mandela and they study the ethical profiles of the organization after they put up these pictures and guess what happened unethical Behavior dropped because you see when we're reminded of our morality we act more ethically so if you can find a way to remind yourself that you are a moral person you may stay true to your ethical baselines and isn't that what you want I spent 25 years of my life as an FBI special agent putting people in jail I want to spend the next 25. trying to keep people out and so if you Empower people around you to give you the opinion that you may not want to hear you empower the people around you to generate these different perspectives and you remind yourself that you are a moral person then maybe we can overcome psychological distance and ethical fading and maybe we can make better decisions and if we make better decisions can we make this a better world now I've got one last question for you before we go how ethical are you again thank you everybody [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 37,248

Keywords: Business, English, Ethics, Mindfulness, Perception, Psychology, Self improvement, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:51868]

Id: B5VmcL6RQW0

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023