[Jack Abramoff] I had a very unfortunate mantra in those days
that if it's worth doing, it's worth over-doing.
Well, anyone with an approach like that, ultimately will wind up where I wound up,
which is in prison.
[Professor Robert Prentice] The notion of framing is that, psychologists find,
we have different ways of looking at different issues.
And if we look at them in different ways,
we make different decisions.
[Associate Professor Minette Drumwright] We can't really focus on everything at the same time,
so we choose our focus.
And any focus we choose leaves a lot of things out of the picture.
One way to deal with frames is to become aware of our own frames
and then try to adopt purposely other frames
to see what's being left in
and what's left out.
And to see how we might want to change our opinion
or revise or re-examine, based on a change of frames.
From the time I was a young child, I was hyper competitive
anything I participated in, I wanted to win.
Now, a part of that was my upbringing,
that was one of the values—for better or for worse—
my father instilled in me.
I remember vividly him saying, "There's no such thing as a good loser,
there's a polite loser,
but if you're a good loser, you're a loser."
And then, "There's first place and then last place,
there's no second place."
And these, whether they were said in the sports context
or they were said in life context,
as a young man, these had a deep impact on me.
I think that we are often blind to our own frames,
and that we typically adopt a frame without even realizing it.
I thought, "This is how this game is played.
I'm going to win this game.
Okay, these are the rules, I'll operate within these basic rules,
the margins and edges of the rules we can explain away,
and we can deal with that later."
Unfortunately, I did deal with it later by being incarcerated.
So, it really was Jack Abramoff's job,
and I think it's all of our jobs,
to keep ethical considerations in our frame of reference when we make decisions.
But he didn't do that.
I think Jack made the mistake many of us make,
and that is, he was really blind to the ethical issues.
He framed his situation so ethical issues were just not in the picture at all,
and it's easy to do that.
Clearly, he was in a toxic environment.
But all of us live in environments that have some degree of toxicity in them.
In a very famous example,
engineers from Morton-Thiokol,
when they were considering launching the Space Shuttle Challenger,
pretty much all voted that we shouldn't launch
because it's not safe enough.
But their supervisor came in and said,
"I'd like you to put on your business hats,
put on your managers hats."
When they put on their managers hats, all of a sudden they're thinking dollars and cents
and how much it would cost to scrub the launch
and they changed their mind.
And we all know what happened with the Space Shuttle Challenger.
As all of us go through life, I think we've got to frame our lives in ways that we can be proud of,
and we've got to measure our lives by metrics we can be proud of,
and if our only metric is:
"Am I going to win? Am I going to make more money?"
You're going to make different decisions than
if one of your metrics is:
"Am I going to act honorably?"
"Am I going to act consistently with my own ethical values?"