June 2014

ON ETHICS
How to Curb Unethical Behavior

Is there a fix for dishonest and unethical behavior? A group of Harvard Business School professors explored this question and recently shared their findings on how to mitigate unethical behavior based on moral psychology and behavioral ethics research.

In their white paper Morality Rebooted: Exploring Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs, the researchers point out three primary reasons why individuals resort to dishonest and unethical behavior:

• They engage in unethical behavior without being aware of what they are doing;

• When they realize they are acting unethically, they fail to recognize that social and situational forces are pushing them to cross ethical boundaries; and

• Unethical behaviors can be difficult to detect, particularly when observers of the behavior operate under motivated biases. For example, the observers may fear being harmed if they detect others cheating.

The researchers examined two approaches to mitigating unethical behavior: values-oriented approaches and structure-oriented approaches. Values-oriented methods target a person’s internal desire to be ethical. If you remind the person of his or her personal moral fiber or raise the prominence of the ethical values and norms of an organization, connections between values and unethical behaviors increase the psychological costs of wrongdoing. These types of approaches target a wide variety of unethical behaviors, which includes cheating, stealing, and lying.

Structure-oriented strategies involve structuring incentives, tasks, or set of choices to reduce or eliminate the temptation to behave unethically. Structure-oriented approaches are designed to impose external costs of acting unethically in order to make dishonesty more inconvenient to implement or remove unethical options altogether.

For example, to prevent students from cheating on a test, a values-oriented method influences students to be more ethical by reminding them of their ethical identity or of ethical standards through the signing an ethics code or placing a mission statement of the school on the classroom wall. A structure-oriented method to preventing students from cheating would involve changing the design of the exam so that they are less tempted to cheat by forcing students to sit further apart, making the exam questions random in order, or increasing the penalty of being caught.