What Didn’t Work for ‘WeWork’ In earlier blog posts, we have repeatedly told tales of grandiloquent young entrepreneurs and their downfall — Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos (“Elizabeth Holmes: Scamming Silicon Valley), Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival infamy (“Under Fyre”), and Ross Ulbricht, creator of Silk Road (“Silk Road: Paved by Grandiosity”). Reeves Wiedeman’s book the Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic […] View
Sexual Harassment, Networks of Complicity, and Newsrooms We at Ethics Unwrapped are pleased to be associated with the Press Forward movement (www.thepressforward.org), which aims to change the culture in newsrooms in order to create safe, civil, and diverse workplaces for women. We are pleased to have made a minor contribution by creating our own Me Too video. After scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, […] View
Coding Honor into Virtual Classrooms It’s that time of year when here at UT (and at colleges all across the country), we are concerned about academic dishonesty in a time of online (or mostly online) education. All teachers fear that despite their own best efforts and the utilization of some technological surveillance devices, it is virtually impossible to prevent cheating […] View
The Overconfidence Bias Comes Home to Roost Columnist David Brooks reviewed the scientific literature and concluded that “the human mind is an overconfidence machine.” As our videos indicate, the overconfidence bias often disrupts ethical thinking. Not one of us is immune from the impact of this bias. Consider the fact that Ethics Unwrapped creator Cara Biasucci and Ethics Unwrapped faculty director Robert […] View
Cyberstalking, Cockroaches, and eBay Being a young employee, a new employee, a low-level employee in an organization that wants to do evil can be a terrible situation to be in. As the New York Times reports it, Ina and David Steiner, an innocuous couple living in Natick, Massachusetts, ran a sort of trade publication called EcommerceBytes read by those […] View
Confronting the Causes of Racial Discrimination Some claim that the United States is not a racist nation, and that may be true in an important, but very narrow sense. The presence of conscious, intentional racial prejudice has subsided. And only a small percentage of Americans view expressed racially biased views as acceptable in open society. This trend is a welcome development, […] View
The Silk Road: Paved by Grandiosity All of us are prone to overconfidence regarding all manner of skills and characteristics, including ethicality. (See our video: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/overconfidence-bias). When that overconfidence approaches grandiosity, danger lurks. We just read Nick Bilton’s engaging and moderately terrifying American Kingpin — the story of “Silk Road” founder Ross Ulbricht, who’s website became the Amazon for drugs, guns, […] View
Aunt Becky Goes to Jail: Revisiting the College Admissions Scandal Although we have blogged about the Varsity Blues admissions scandal before, actress Lori Loughlin (“Aunt Becky” of “Full House” fame) and her fashion designer husband Mossimo Giannulli just entered guilty pleas to charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and were sentenced to two months and five months in prison, respectively. It seems […] View
Stopping COVID-19: A Behavioral Ethics Guide We act immorally when we do unjustified harm to objects of moral worth, such as other people. In the midst of a pandemic, when we ignore the best scientific guidance and refuse to wear masks, physically distance, or avoid crowds, we act immorally unless the view “I’m going to do what I want to do […] View
Operation Warp Speed and the Psychology of Conflicts of Interest At this moment in time, it seems as though there is nothing more important than developing a vaccine for Covid-19, the coronavirus that has launched a worldwide pandemic. The world hungers for such a vaccine that might enable us to return to some semblance of normalcy. President Trump has named Dr. Moncef Slaoui to lead […] View