Search Results for “bias”

Compliance & ethics officers in the realm of bias

Bias and conflicts of interest are, of course, related to each other;  but they also differ, in that the former can be based purely on thoughts (or feelings or beliefs) whereas the latter generally requires something truly tangible, such as an economic or familial relationship. Prior postings on bias – […]

Specialty bias

A recurring theme in Doonesbury during the presidency of George W. Bush was that whatever the challenge he was faced with the President would respond by cutting taxes for the wealthy. The reason was not nefarious, according to the comic strip. Cutting taxes was simply what he knew best how […]

How does your compliance and ethics program deal with “conformity bias”?

In his blog on the Ethics Unwrapped website published by the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business,  Prof. Robert Prentice reviews some important recent research on the behavioralist phenomenon of “conformity bias” – “the tendency of people to take their cues as to the proper way to think and […]

Cognitive Bias and the Need for “Behavioral Ethics and Compliance”

The Conflict of Interest Blog is focused not only on traditional COIs but also on what can be called “Conflicts’ Cousins” – other phenomena that, like COIs, can subvert sound ethical (and sometimes legal) decision making.  One of these – “moral hazard” – has been the subject of several posts to […]

Being a parent as a source of ethics risk

In 1973, in speaking to colleagues on the  Cook County Democratic Committee, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago defended his having directed a million dollars of insurance business to an agency on behalf of his son John with the immortal words: “If I can’t help my sons, then [my critics] can kiss […]

Behavioral ethics and compliance assessments

New from the Compliance Program Assessment Blog. Rebecca Walker and I hope you find it interesting.

Behavioral ethics and compliance index 2019

While in the more than seven years of its existence the COI Blog  has been devoted primarily to examining conflicts of interest it has also run quite a few posts on what behavioral ethics might mean for corporate compliance and ethics programs. Below is an updated version of a topical  index […]

Inherent anti-conflicts of interest

A post some years back explored the idea of “inherent conflicts of interest,”  COIs so embedded in a situation that they are essentially impossible to resist. In an important column this week in Wired UK , the eminent behavioral ethicist Dan Ariely describes an approach he has developed which might […]

Hire the guilt prone

In a recent edition of Knowledge at Wharton, Maurice Schweitzer of that school discusses a paper, “Who is Trustworthy? Predicting Trustworthy Intentions and Behavior,” he co-authored with T. Bradford Bitterly, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Taya R. Cohen, a professor at Carnegie […]

Imagine the real

  An early post on this blog noted that among the more interesting phenomena of behavioral ethics was the impact that knowing or not knowing a party could have on how one treated that party. A set of circumstances that is relatively likely to lead to an ethical shortfall is where we do […]