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
Lies and the Lying Entrepreneurs Who Tell Them As we prepared a recent blog post about the fintech start-up Robin Hood, we noticed that a worrisome number of articles have been published in recent years about lying by entrepreneurs. Many of them recount stories of entrepreneurs’ telling brazen lies to save their companies. Gary Hirshberg (Stonyfield Farm) told the SBA that he had […] Ver
Deliberate Ignorance and Moral Wiggle Room You would think that rational human beings would gather all easily-acquired information that is relevant to a decision before they make that decision. Not so. Rather, people often prefer deliberate ignorance, defined by scholars Brown and Walasek as “the conscious individual or collective choice not to seek or use information in a situation where the […] Ver
Robinhood: A Case Study in Entrepreneurial Ethics Over the years, ethicists have paid particular attention to entrepreneurs, partly because there is some evidence that entrepreneurs may be special folks with unusual appetites for risk, significant overconfidence, and optimism untethered to reality. And partly because the competitive pressures faced by entrepreneurs often create special incentives to commit unethical actions. One of the more […] Ver
Being True to your “True Self” Whether it’s Donald Trump believing that he is a “stable genius” or Charles Barkley saying “I believe I’m the best-looking guy in the world and I might be right,” people (especially men) tend toward overconfidence. This overconfidence often manifests itself in the moral realm. As Bazerman and Tenbrunsel note: “It’s likely that most of us […] Ver
You Should Look at “Made You Look” “Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art” is an engaging crime documentary directed, co-written and co-produced by filmmaker Barry Avrich. It is the story of an $80 million art fraud in New York City. In rough outline, around 1995 a woman named Glafira Rosales appeared out of the blue and told Ann Freedman, […] Ver