Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty

What makes even good people cross ethical boundaries? Society demands that business and professional schools address ethics, but the results have been disappointing. This paper argues that a behavioral approach to ethics is essential because it leads to understanding and explaining moral and immoral behavior in systematic ways. The authors first define business ethics and provide an admittedly biased history of the attempts of professional schools to address ethics as a subject of both teaching and research. They next briefly summarize the emergence of the field of behavioral ethics over the last two decades, and turn to recent research findings in behavioral ethics that could provide helpful directions for a social science perspective to ethics. These new findings on both intentional and unintentional unethical behavior can inform new courses on ethics as well as new research investigations. Such new directions can meet the demands of society more effectively than past attempts of professional schools. They can also produce a meaningful and significant change in the behavior of both business school students and professionals. Key concepts include:

• Shifting the modes of thought can lead to profound differences in how we make ethical decisions. This has implications at the individual and at the societal level.
• Until recently, little empirical attention was given to how people actually behave when they face ethical dilemmas and decisions or to how their behavior can be improved.
• A behavioral ethics approach does not teach students how they should behave when facing ethical dilemmas, nor inform them about what philosophers or ethicists would recommend. Instead it sees an opportunity in helping students and professionals better understand their own behavior in the ethics domain, and compare it to how they would ideally like to behave.
• Behavioral ethics identifies levers at both the individual and the institutional level to change ethically questionable behaviors when individuals are acting in unethical ways that they would not endorse with greater reflection.
• Prior to the 1990s, it was rare for professional schools to have a significant focus on the area of ethics (or business ethics more specifically) in the courses offered to students. Courses that were taught used philosophical approaches or suggested that morality is a rather stable personality trait that individuals develop by going through differences phases of development.