Optimism Bias: The Dark Side of Looking at the Bright Side On January 20, 2022, CNN reported that a well-known Czech folk singer, who also happened to be a vocal anti-vaxxer, had died of COVID-19 after intentionally exposing herself to the virus so that she could be “done with COVID.” She was confident that COVID-19 posed no serious threat to her health. Hanna Horka’s tragic death […] Ver
Elizabeth Holmes’s Conviction: Theranos and Loss Aversion A few years ago, one of our blog posts focused on Elizabeth Holmes and the massive Theranos fraud. On January 3, 2022, Holmes became the first Silicon Valley CEO to be convicted of securities fraud and she now faces years in jail for inducing investors to entrust her with $900 million or so based on […] Ver
The Doctor Who Killed At this writing (December 2021), the headlines are filled with stories of bad behavior. Elizabeth Holmes’ fraud trial arising from the Theranos scandal is ongoing. As is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial. Jussie Smollett was just convicted of faking a homophobic attack upon himself, presumably to drum up sympathy and publicity. Josh Duggar was just […] Ver
A Whistleblower Faces Down Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen’s October 5, 2021 testimony before Congress regarding her former employer Facebook’s practices was simultaneously riveting and deeply unsettling. Her overarching point was that Facebook consistently prioritizes profits over users’ safety, refusing to make product reforms that would protect users from the company’s products’ biggest harms. Facebook has, of course, faced several scandals […] Ver
Dirty Work and Moral Inequality Eyal Press’s 2012 book, Beautiful Souls, contained a fair amount of behavioral ethics material of the type that we emphasize here at Ethics Unwrapped. His new book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, doesn’t emphasize behavioral ethics, but is very thought-provoking. Inequality of income and wealth in America is […] Ver
We Are Killing Ourselves with Cognitive Dissonance We just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new best-seller, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War. It’s a wild ride with surprising implications for one of today’s most significant problems. The “Bomber Mafia” was a group of U.S. airmen, led by General Haywood Hansell, who believed in […] Ver
Giving Voice to Values: Within Higher Education and Without Our blog posts are often prompted by books that we’ve read, but we seldom do book reviews. This post is an exception, because we wish to call your attention to the latest book in the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) series. Mary Gentile created the GVV program, the best platform on the planet for enabling […] Ver
The Astros Scandal Revisited We wish it weren’t so, but cheating and sports seem to go hand-in-hand. In a time (summer 2021) when Olympic hopefuls are being disqualified after failing drug tests and baseball is coping with a major scandal involving foreign substances and pitch spin rates, we return to a subject we have blogged about before—the Houston Astros […] Ver
Game Over for Activision Blizzard’s Toxic Culture The evidence is clear that the #MeToo movement has much work left to do. Although as we write this blog entry the headlines are filled with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment woes, with this post we focus on the video gaming firm Activision Blizzard, Inc. (ABI) (a group of companies responsible for “Call […] Ver
The Ethics of Falsehoods One of America’s foremost legal scholars, Harvard Law School’s Cass Sunstein, has written a small, provocative book titled Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception (2021). Because Sunstein is founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at the Harvard Law School, currently serves as Chair of the […] Ver