[Professor Robert Prentice] People tend to believe that they have good moral character,
and therefore they're confident that when they face issues with moral dimensions
they'll make good choices.
However, Cynthia Cooper, who was the whistleblower in the infamous WorldCom fraud, wrote that,
"People don't wake up one day and say, 'Today is the day I think I will start my life of crime.'
Instead, it's often a slippery slope. We slowly lose our ethical footing one step at a time."
This process is what behavioral ethicists call "incrementalism."
[Megan] It’s like "Oh I just had one."
Like having one more wouldn’t be that much different!
And all of a sudden you’ve eaten like a whole bag of Hershey's Kisses!
And what did I just do there?
As an example, think about the Abu Ghraib prison site, and the mistreatment of some
of the inmates there.
A female soldier wrote: "In the beginning, you see someone naked and you see underwear
on their head and you're like, ‘Oh, that's pretty bad -- I can't believe I just saw that.'
And then you go to bed and you come back the next day and you see something worse.
‘Well, it seems like the day before wasn't so bad.’"
This is the slippery slope at work.
And if we're not careful, we can easily go from minor transgressions in our workplace,
such as taking a few office supplies home for personal use or lightly padding our expense
account, to more serious transgressions.
[Charity] I'm a building monitor, so what I’m supposed to do is walk around the building
every two hours, every floor of the building, inspect all of the doors and stuff...
which I did... for the first like two or three months that I worked there.
Now, I guess the regular security checks that we do are sort of, like, inferred.
And, I hope this can’t get me fired, but I don’t do them.
Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman, who are psychologists at the Harvard Business School,
refer to it as the "boiling frog syndrome."
It's said that if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, he'll jump out.
But if you place him in a pot of cool water and gradually turn up the heat,
he'll slowly boil to death.
I don't think Gino and Bazerman actually experimented on frogs, but they observed humans
and found that we unconsciously lower the bar over time through small changes in ethicality.
[Kushboo] When I have had it pointed out to me, I felt bad.
But, when I was doing it, I wasn’t thinking, "Oh this is wrong."
[Michael] The tough part is you don’t even really think about it, you don’t even really
realize it, and when you compare it to… you’re not comparing. It's just...
It's become the norm for you.
So the trick is to sort of stop before every action you take and think about it.
Think about it: most multi-million dollar securities frauds start with executives fudging
fairly small numbers but over time those numbers grow through incrementalism.
An officer who was caught up in the Enron scandal later said, "You did it once, it smelled bad.
You did it again, it didn't smell bad."
That's incrementalism at work.
The slippery slope really comes into play especially in the workplace because you can
always sort of blame somebody else.
It means that people make excuses...
Like I’m doing right now.
[Robert] And that’s a dangerous path to be on because it can keep going downhill and
downhill and it’s really hard to reverse that trend, I think.
The slippery slope is always there in society.
I mean, no matter what kind of society you’re in.
And so sort of incubating yourself and not letting anything slip and upholding the values
of integrity, I think are really important.