Behavioral compliance: back to school edition

In the waning days of summer, here is a roundup of some recent  notable writings about using behavioral ethics to enhance corporate compliance efforts.

First is a post on the Compliance and Enforcement web site by Timothy Lindon, the Chief Compliance Officer of Philip Morris International. In it, he suggests that companies should start down this path by establishing “an in-house compliance curriculum to educate the compliance function and others about relevant research and learnings. At a minimum, the curriculum should include discussion of research in behavioral ethics, behavioral economics, and psychology. Other relevant topics include organizational theory and case studies of notable disasters such as the NASA Space Shuttle explosion and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, which demonstrate the role of power and hierarchy. Another useful topic,” he suggests,“is corporate lingo given the use of euphemisms such as ‘creative accounting’ and ‘technical violation’ in companies to hide and rationalize misconduct.”

Lindon further recommends: “Once the company’s compliance professionals are trained on academic research,” seek to determine if “they routinely use these learnings in all aspects of the company’s compliance program? This can include revising a Code of Conduct to harness the power of peer influence; anticipating the problem of ethical fading though just-in-time training or training which places employees in real life ethical dilemmas while under business pressure; and developing a communications toolbox to drive employee behavior and minimize employees’ rationalizations of misconduct.” Finally, he suggests that companies use data analytics “to check on and enhance the behavioral approach…” These are all good ideas from my perspective.

Second, writing in Compliance Week in last Spring, Jose Tabuena argues that compliance program auditors should act as behavioral scientists: “In the field of behavioral economics, priming has proven to be an effective tool to subtly encourage honest behavior. Priming occurs when an individual is exposed to a specific stimulus that influences his or her ensuing actions. In studies by behavioral economist, Dan Ariely, experiments were designed to influence honest behavior when researchers ‘primed’ people with a stimulus that involved morality and then observed how often cheating occurred when solving small math problems. When the participants were asked to recall the Ten Commandments, cheating significantly decreased compared with those who were instead asked to recall the names of Shakespeare’s sonnets.” Tabuena also notes: “Similar studies provide additional behavioral insights. It is easier to be just a little dishonest. Experiments show that we are more likely to cheat over a small amount of money than a large amount. People also tend to find it harder to be dishonest when interacting with another person than with an impersonal mechanism. The belief that we make rational decisions is a myth that belies the complexity of human behavior.”

Auditors play an important (but not always appreciated) role in forensic auditing and C&E programs. Hopefully, Tabuena’s article will help “recruit” more of them to the behavioral perspective, particularly given that he is one of the true experts in the field of C&E auditing.

Finally, in an interview in the August issue of Compliance & Ethics Professional (available to SCCE members on that organization’s web site), Joel Rogers of Compliance Wave speaks about a behavioral approach to C&E marketing, particularly  the role that conditioned responses play in spawning unethical conduct, and how C&E marketing campaigns can provide “pattern interrupts” to such forces. Among other things, such a campaign can help mitigate the phenomenon, noted by Ariely and others, that people do “tend to forget moral and ethical reminders really quickly.”

This interview was conducted by the SCCE’s Adam Turtletaub, who – like Rogers – is a long-time champion of the behavioral approach to C&E. I recommend the interview to you, not only for its behavioral-related insights but also for the ideas and information it has about the C&E field generally.