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Summary Bazerman and Tenbrunsel - Blind spots
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This is a summary of the book of Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel - Blind spots: Why we fail to do what's right and what to do about it.
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Summary Blind Spots by Bazerman and TerbrunselChapter 1 – The gap between intended and actual ethical behaviour
It is likely that most of us overestimate our ethicality at one point or another. We are unaware
of the gap between how ethical we think we are and how ethical we truly are (who you want
to be and who you are).
Under pressure to become more ethical, organizations and financial institutions have
undertaken efforts aimed at improving and enforcing ethical behaviour within their walls
(codes of conduct, value-based mission statements, ethical ombudsmen, ethical training,
SOX, government of NYSE, changes in the way of communication and punishments).
Despite these expensive interventions, new ethical scandals continue to emerge.
The failure of ethics interventions is based on a false assumption: that individuals recognize
an ethical dilemma when it is presented to them.
Behavioural ethics: a field that seeks to understand how people actually behave when
confronted with ethical dilemmas.
Our ethical behaviour is often inconsistent, at times even hypocritical.
Moral hypocrisy: when individuals’ evaluations of their own moral transgressions
differ substantially from their evaluations of the same transgressions committed by
others (one rule for ourselves, a different one for others which is consistent with the
gap).
Traditional approaches to ethics and the traditional training methods lack an understanding
of the unintentional yet predictable cognitive patterns that result in unethical behaviour.
Bounded ethicality: psychological processes that lead even good people to engage in
ethically questionable behaviour that contradicts their own preferred ethics.
In this book, we will explore the implicit psychological processes that contribute to the gap
between goals and behaviour, as well as the role that organizations and political
environments play in widening this divide and we offer tools to help with weighting important
ethical dilemmas (blind spots on the individual, organizational and societal level).
Our preferences and biases affect how we assess ethical dilemmas, but we fail to realize that
this is the case.
The notion that we experience gaps between who we believe ourselves to be and who we
actually are is related to the problem of bounded awareness: the common tendency to
exclude important and relevant information from our decisions by placing arbitrary and
dysfunctional bounds around our definition of a problem. Bounded awareness results in the
systematic failure to see information that is relevant to our personal lives and professional
obligations.
We are boundedly aware: our perceptions and decision making are constrained in ways we
do not realize.
Systematic constraints: favour our own self-interest at the expense of the interest of others.
Three important experiments/activities show tha tour ethical behaviour is distinctly different
from our expectations of our own behaviour (ethical blinders) (Milgram (teacher giving
shocks to learner when making mistakes); Bernard Maddoff’s ponzi schemes; Singer). In
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,Milgram’s experiment: overly focused on following the experimenter’s instructions, failure to
analyse the situation as an ethical dilemma.
Ethical gaps at the individual level are compounded when considered at the organizational
level: Challenger space shuttle case (p.14) common form of bounded ethicality: moving
forward too quickly with readily available information, rather than first asking what data would
be relevant to answer the question on the table and how the decision would affect other
aspects of the situation or other people.
An organization’s ethical gap is more than just the sum of the individual ethical gaps of its
employees: group work creates additional ethical gaps.
Groupthink: the tendency for cohesive groups to avoid a realistic appraisal of alternative
courses of action in favour of unanimity.
Functional boundaries prevent individuals from viewing a problem as an ethical one:
organizations often segment decisions within particular gups or disperse different aspects of
a decision to different parts of the organizations. Such fading prevents employees who make
seemingly innocuous decision from recognizing the ethical implications of their decision for
others (informal values/sinkholes within the organization).
Policy decisions may be the most important set of decisions we make as a society: blind
spots can play an active, dysfunctional role without our conscious awareness (think about
organ donations, p.17/18). As concerned members of society, all of us want the individuals
and organizations that represent us to behave ethically. Yet those making decisions that
affect society tend to be unaware of the blind spots that prevent them from doing just that:
conflicts of interest have unambiguous evidence on the psychological aspects of conflicts
of interest. The laws on intentional corruption are of relatively little use in protecting society,
since most unethical behaviour is unintentional.
The implication of failing to consider our ethical gaps I compounded when we consider all
three levels simultaneously:
- Individual level fall prey to psychological processes that bias our decisions and we
don’t know they are biased.
- Organizational level leaders typically fail to appreciate the role of bounded
ethicality in their employees’ decisions and that their employees’ integrity will protect
them and the organization from ethical infractions (think about how the environment
prompts unethical action without conscious awareness of the decision maker).
- Societal level federal government should solve the bounded ethicality, make
changes to societal defaults that highlight the value trade-offs we are making and
draw attention to future concerns.
Case searching right doctor for treatment: doctors fail to realize that their training, incentives
and preferences prevent them from offering objective advice conflicts of interest: not in
the best interest of the patient, but themselves: when people have a vested interest in seeing
a problem in a certain manner, they are no longer capable of objectivity.
Chapter 2 – Why traditional approaches to ethics won’t save you
Footbridge dilemma: Would it be ethical to save the five people by pushing this strange to his
death? Two different approaches to ethical decision making:
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, - Consequentialist approach: determines the morality of an action by its ensuing
consequences utilitarianism: doing the greatest good for the greatest number of
people (cost-benefit analysis).
- Deontological approach: judge the morality of an action based on the action’s
adherence to rules or duties. From this view, the act of pushing someone off of a
bridge would violate his rights and is therefore immoral (the ends don’t justify the
means).
Trolley problem: hit the switch or not in order to save 5 people and kill 1 or vice versa (p.26).
These two theories illustrate we sometimes use the implied philosophical principles
discussed earlier to make judgments. However, we tend to apply these rules inconsistently
and we sometimes violate what we would od if we gave the question more thought.
As society demands more ethical behaviour from organizations, it is useful to examine
whether traditional ethical analysis offers a promising solution.
Ethics are historically studied from a normative perspective: an approach that seeks to
determine the morally correct course of action (how should people behave?).
Ethicists themselves provide the perfect sample to test whether traditional, normative training
in ethics lead to more ethical behaviour. Schwitzgebel’s research concludes that the
research undercuts the widespread assumption that enrolment in ethics courses will improve
students’ future ethical behaviour. It can be explained by little empirical attention has been
devoted to examining how people actually do behave and how their ethical behaviour can be
improved – knowledge that is needed to understand and improve not just how philosophers
behave, but also how the ethical and economic crises of the past decade emerged. How we
think we should behave is very different from how we want to behave.
Another barrier that has kept scholars of ethics from fully dealing with ethical issues concerns
the central role they give to the decision makers’ ethical intentions.
Ethical decision making: moral awareness moral judgment moral intention moral
action.
This model presumes that awareness is needed for a decision to have moral
implications, an individual’s reasoning determines judgment and moral intention is
required for her to understand her moral action. As a result, the model directs our
attention away from critical elements of decision making and judgment that lead to
unethical behaviour.
When we lack moral awareness: training in business ethics tends to be largely based on the
approaches to ethics emphasizing the moral components of decisions with the goal of
encouraging executives to choose the moral path, but it ignores that decision makers often
fail to see the ethics in a given ethical dilemma. Our minds are subject to bounded ethicality
or cognitive limitations that can me us unaware of the moral implications of our decisions.
The outside world also limits our ability to see the ethical dimensions of particular decisions.
Ethical fading: process by which ethical dimensions are eliminated from a decision
common features of organizations (goals, rewards, compliance systems and
informal pressures) can blind us to the ethical implications of a decision (business
decision instead of an ethical decision) which increases the likelihood that we will
behave unethically. The organizational practices that contribute to ethical fading may
be as subtle as difference in the language used to describe the decision
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