Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Anna] They get so caught up in doing
the wrong things just for their own gain
that it is very important for them to step back and look at
what their consequences are. Even though does not affect them maybe directly
it is causing hurt to the world and to other people and they need to think about that.
[Professor Robert Prentice] Psychological studies show
that human decision-making is naturally impacted more by
vivid, tangible, contemporaneous factors
than by factors that are removed in time and space.
For example, people are more moved by relatively minor injuries to their family,
friends, neighbors, and even pets than they are by the starvation
of millions of people abroad.
This tendency we have to give greater value to the tangible over the abstract
can cause problems that have real ethical dimensions.
[Dorine] It is more impactful to see
something right in front of you
it physically affects you. If you see a cat get hit, a dog get hit.
[Taylor] With an animal, or a dog, or something they come home to them and they see them
and they interact with them on a daily basis and that causes them
to feel things for, you know, that dog but not for the children of these people
who are committing suicide in these factors under terrible working conditions.
Consider a corporate CFO
who realizes that if he does not sign false financial statements,
the company's stock price will immediately plummet.
Not only will his firm's reputation be seriously damaged today,
but employees whom he knows and likes may well lose their jobs tomorrow.
Those losses are vivid and immediate.
On the other hand, to fudge the numbers will visit a loss, if at all,
mostly upon a mass of nameless, faceless investors
some time off in the future. Perhaps unconsciously,
the CFO Will feel substantial pressure to go ahead and fudge the numbers
to protect against immediate and tangible losses
If I had to
tell a small lie, I would think about it
far more if it were going to effect a friend of mine because that was going to...
I would see the effects of that rather than see the effects
on somebody else.
[Carolyn] I would be more apt to do in about the stranger because
I would not understand the impact to that person as intimately.
[Fernanda] yeah I would more likely affect a stranger than a friend, for sure.
Sociologist Robert Jackall studied in detail
the inner workings of a corporation in his book Moral Mazes.
Jackall interviewed a manager of a chemical company
when the manager was faced with a choice between putting a chemical in the water
that would kill twenty people out of a million
versus spending $25 million of the company's money to spare those lives
he said, "is it worth it to spend that much money?
I do not know how to answer that question as long as I am not one of those twenty people,
as long as those people can't be identified
as long as they are not specific people it it okay to put the chemical in the water.
Is that not strange?"
[Shelby] The decision was handed down to shut down the headquarters office
when they made the announcement were extremely upset
people had built their lives, their careers here. When I would talk to some of my friends who were out
in these satellite offices, who I also liked and enjoyed and spent many years with them,
they didn't seem to care less
To them it was out of sight out of mind.
So to them, even though there were three hundred people affected in this office
as long as their office of five was okay
they did not seem to think much of it.
Psychologist Max Bazerman and Anne Tenbrunsel tell a story of a Goldman Sachs employee
who blew the whistle on a late trading-scandal
that allowed certain favored clients to trade to the detriment
of most of Goldman's average clients.
The Goldman Sachs employee had originally viewed victims of the practice
as part of a nameless faceless business.
She said "in this business that is how you looked at it.
You do not look at it with a face." But when her own sister
asked for investing advice for her 401 K,
suddenly the whistleblower saw things differently.
I saw one face - my sister's face -
and then I saw the faces of everyone whose only asset was a 401 K.
At that point I felt the need to try and make the regulators
look into these abuses.
[Andrew] Maybe this is tangentle but, I also read another paper recently where
the author, whose a very prominent legal scholar, wrote a paper describing the differing
attitudes and reactions the United States government has taken towards
the threat of climate change and the threat of terrorism.
In short his
reasoning was that the US has taken more robust action on
combating terrorism because, you know, a circumstances did
happen in America
that shook, you know, the whole nation. Everyone became aware that.
Climate change still exists as an abstract
threat and only occasionally do we have some event
which we might be able to attribute to it.
[Kirk] growing up when you hear about certain tragedies
even if they are in the US they may not resonate as much with you
by for instance now that I have kids
when the shooting in Connecticut just happened yeah that was something that
you know a few years ago may not have impact me as much.
Just the mere fact that I know I have kids and I want them to be safe and
I want to see them when I come home again,
it makes you think about things like that a little bit more.
These are just a couple of examples of the tangible and the abstract at work.
And often it is not a pretty picture.
Working inside big corporate bureaucracies often causes people
to feel largely separated from the consequences of their decisions.
Likewise working in global or multinational corporations
with offices all around the world can also cause people to feel that they are not responsible
for the impact of their decisions. But just because we can not vividly perceive
the impact of our decisions on those around us
it does not mean that there is not one.
To be ethical we must look to the horizon and beyond
when making business decisions.
I think it is a matter of being... or having empathy.
Trying to develop that in yourself
so you have to remember what you
value and then also remember all the things that you can not see.
Making it personal for people that if they take an action what that impact will be.
Planting that seed and and having them understand that
their actions do affect people whether they see it or not.
Teasing out and explaining how that
decision actually does come back to affect you in these are the reasons why.
So I think it is important for us to draw relationships with each other
besides just nationality, race, and things like that. I think it is important to express the relationship that we have
just being all humans.