Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort that we feel when our minds entertain two contradictory concepts at the same time.
Ethics Unwrapped Blog
Moral Emotions
Moral emotions are the feelings and intuitions that play a major role in most of our ethical decision making and actions.
Implicit Bias
By Ethics Unwrapped
Implicit bias exists when people unconsciously hold attitudes toward others or associate stereotypes with them.
Ethical Leadership, Part 2: Best Practices
Psychological research provides guidance as to how leaders can create a workplace culture that encourages ethical behavior by employees.
Ethical Leadership, Part 1: Perilous at the Top
The moral example set by leaders has a major impact on the behavior of their subordinates, both good and bad. Despite career success, leaders are particularly vulnerable to ethical lapses.
Being Your Best Self, Part 4: Moral Action
Moral action involves taking the necessary steps to transform the intent to do the right thing into reality. This includes moral ownership, moral efficacy, and moral courage.
Being Your Best Self, Part 3: Moral Intent
Moral intent is the desire to act ethically when facing a decision and overcome the rationalization to not be ethical “this time.”
Being Your Best Self, Part 2: Moral Decision Making
Moral decision making is the ability to produce a reasonable and defensible answer to an ethical question.
Being Your Best Self, Part 1: Moral Awareness
Moral awareness is the ability to detect and appreciate the ethical aspects of a decision that one must make.
Moral Myopia
By Ethics Unwrapped
Moral myopia is a distortion of moral vision that keeps ethical issues from coming clearly into focus.
Moral Muteness
By Ethics Unwrapped
Moral muteness is when we communicate in ways that obscure our moral beliefs and commitments, or don’t voice moral sentiments at all.
Moral Imagination
By Ethics Unwrapped
Moral imagination is our ability to think outside the box and envision ways to be both ethical and successful.
Intro to Behavioral Ethics
Behavioral Ethics investigates why people make the ethical (and unethical) decisions that they do in order to gain insights into how people can improve their ethical decision-making and behavior.
Loss Aversion
We hate losses about twice as much as we enjoy gains, meaning we are more likely to act unethically to avoid a loss than to secure a gain. This phenomenon is known as loss aversion.
Obedience to Authority
Obedience to authority describes our tendency to please authority figures. We may place too much emphasis on that goal and, consciously or subconsciously, subordinate the goal of acting ethically.
Fundamental Attribution Error
Fundamental attribution error describes how, when judging others’ actions, we tend to give too much causal weight to their character and not enough to the circumstances in which they acted.
Tangible & Abstract
Tangible and abstract describes how we react more to vivid, immediate inputs than to ones removed in time and space, meaning we can pay insufficient attention to the adverse consequences our actions have on others.
Bounded Ethicality
By praxent
Bounded ethicality explains how predictable organizational pressures and psychological processes cause us to engage in ethically questionable behavior that is inconsistent with our own values and preferences.
Conflict of Interest
By praxent
Conflict of interest arises when we have incentives that conflict with our professional duties and responsibilities in ways that cause harm to others and to society.
Conformity Bias
By praxent
Conformity bias refers to our tendency to take cues for proper behavior in most contexts from the actions of others rather than exercise our own independent judgment.
Ethical Fading
By praxent
Ethical fading occurs when we are so focused on other aspects of a decision that its ethical dimensions fade from view.
Framing
By praxent
Framing describes how our responses to situations, including our ethical judgments, are impacted just by how those situations are posed or viewed.
Incentive Gaming
By praxent
Incentive gaming, or “gaming the system,” refers to when we figure out ways to increase our rewards for performance without actually improving our performance.
Incrementalism
By praxent
Referred to as the slippery slope, incrementalism describes how we unconsciously lower our ethical standards over time through small changes in behavior.
Moral Equilibrium
By praxent
When we do something good we get to thinking of ourselves as pretty good people, and can then give ourselves license to fail to live up to our own ethical standards. This phenomenon is known as moral equilibrium.
Self-serving Bias
By praxent
The self-serving bias causes us to see things in ways that support our best interests and our pre-existing points of view.
Overconfidence Bias
By praxent
The overconfidence bias is our tendency to be more confident in our ability to act ethically than is objectively justified by our abilities and moral character.
Role Morality
By praxent
Role morality is the tendency we have to use different moral standards for the different roles we play in society.