A dynamic and cyclical model of bounded ethicality

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Abstract

We introduce a new model of bounded ethicality which helps explain three persistent puzzles of ethical behavior: when moral awareness is or is not present, when ethical behavior is more or less consistent with past behavior, and when blind spots obscure our ethical failures. The original conception of bounded ethicality (Chugh, Banaji, & Bazerman, 2005) described the systematic psychological constraints on ethical behavior and has contributed to our field's understanding of the phenomena of everyday, “ordinary” unethical behavior. In this more detailed model, we delineate these systematic processes and mechanisms and show how concepts of automaticity, self-view, and self-threat play critical roles in our ethical decision-making. The model describes distinct, asymmetric patterns of (un)ethical behavior and pinpoints the contingency which determines which pattern is more likely to unfold, including when we will trend to more or less automaticity and more or less ethical behavior. Our model integrates and synthesizes many of the key models and findings in recent behavioral ethics research into a single, overarching model of ethical decision-making, offering an anchor for new questions and a new realm of study.

Section snippets

What is bounded ethicality?

The original model of bounded ethicality challenged the notion that people can be fully ethical all the time, proposing instead that we are all prone to ethical failure (Chugh, Banaji, & Bazerman, 2005). Further, these ethical failures are the outcome of systematic and ordinary psychological processes (Chugh et al., 2005), and these processes are neither rare nor unpredictable (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Scholars using this model of bounded ethicality (e.g. Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2012) have

The field of behavioral ethics

Behavioral ethics research is thriving, revealing pattern after pattern of surprising and counter-intuitive evidence that we are not perfectly or consistently ethical all of the time. In this section, we will highlight two conceptual themes in the literature and describe three puzzles which persist, or even emerge, as this research grows. These puzzles persist despite the robust set of empirical findings and the impressive array of other integrative models in the field (Haidt, 2008, Jones, 1991

The bounded ethicality model

With these puzzles in mind, we present our model. It is worth noting that much of the scholarly narrative on ethical failures, particularly prior to the most recent decade, is dominated by the role of self-interest and its rational underpinnings (Miller, 1999), though this premise is typically unspoken (Epley and Caruso, 2004, Moore and Loewenstein, 2004, Tenbrunsel and Smith-Crowe, 2008, Welsh and Ordóñez, 2014). We can infer this premise because this type of ethics research often describes

An agenda for future research

We offer an overarching model of ethical decision-making in which we specify the ways in which ethicality is systematically bounded, or “bounded ethicality”. Our model describes “the systematic and ordinary psychological processes of enhancing and protecting our ethical self-view which automatically, dynamically, and cyclically influence the ethicality of decision-making”. Our model does not explain all ethical decision-making, but brings important insights to everyday behaviors in which

Conclusion

In closing, our model of bounded ethicality integrates much of the recent research in the active and thriving study of behavioral ethics. Our hope is that it provides scholars and practitioners alike a cohesive platform for understanding ethical failures and designing ethical interventions. In particular, we seize the opportunity to leverage the insights about the self and automaticity in order to deepen our knowledge of bounded ethicality and look forward to the future research building on

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