[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’s 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 the people who are committing suicide in these factories
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 affect
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 it about the stranger because I wouldn’t understand
the impact to that person as intimately.
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 don’t know how to answer that question as long as I’m not one of those twenty people,
as long as those people can't be identified, as long as they’re not specific people,
it’s okay to put the chemical in the water.
Isn't that strange?"
[Shelby] The decision was handed down to shut down the headquarters office, and so I and
all of my coworkers who were there in the office the day 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’ve
also liked and enjoyed and spent many years with them, they didn't seem to care less.
As long as their office of five was okay, they didn’t seem to think much of it.
Psychologist Max Bazerman and Anne Tenbrunsel tell the 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’s how you look at it.
You don’t look at it with a face."
But when her own sister asked for investing advice for her 401K, 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 401K.
At that point I felt the need to try and make the regulators look into these abuses.”
[Andrew] I also was reading another paper recently where the author, who’s 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 circumstance did happen in America that shook, you know, the whole nation.
I mean, everyone became aware of 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] When the shooting in Connecticut just happened, yeah that was something that,
you know, a few years ago may not have impacted 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's 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're not responsible for the impact of their decisions.
But just because we can't vividly perceive the impact of our decisions on those around
us, it doesn't mean that there isn't one.
To be ethical, we must look to the horizon and beyond when making business decisions.
I think it’s 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’t see.
Making it personal for people that if they take an action, what that impact will be.
Planting that seed and having them understand that their actions do affect people, whether
they see it or not.
I think that it’s important for us to draw relationships with each other besides just nationality,
race, and things like that.
I think it’s important for us to express the relationship that we have just being all
humans.