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 […]

2021 behavioral ethics and compliance index

While in the more than nine 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 to these […]

Have you checked your behavioral externalities?

In The Case for Adding Darwin to Behavioral Economics posted on the Ethical Systems web site,  Robert H. Frank  of Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management writes: I use the term “behavioral externalities” to describe choices that affect social environments… Because social environments influence us so profoundly, both for good […]

Are you a member of the “compliance elite”?

In “Compliance Elites ”Professor Miriam Baer of Brooklyn  Law School writes: “As corporate compliance has expanded its influence, so too has the status of those who implement and oversee the firm’s compliance function. Chief compliance officers (CCOs), who are often (but not exclusively) lawyers by training, increasingly boast the types of […]

Moral hazard and the revised DOJ compliance standards

One of the great afflictions of our age is moral hazard. As noted in an earlier post: “The concept of moral hazard was used originally to refer to the phenomenon that providing insurance tended to promote risky behavior by insured parties.  Subsequently, the idea has been applied more generally to mean […]

Mapping the field of “”behavioral business ethics”

In “Toward a Better Understanding of Behavioral Ethics in the Workplace,”  David De Cremer of the Business School, National University of Singapore, and Celia Moore of the Cambridge Judge Business School, review literature that is part of the growing area that they call “behavioral business ethics.” They use this formulation […]

The gut as accomplice

A review of core behavioral ethics concepts (“Rule-breaking without Crime: Insights from Behavioral Ethics for the Study of  Everyday Deviancy” by Yuval Feldman, Benjamin van Rooij and  Melissa Rorie) noted: “Behavioral Ethics has shown that … people relying on System 1 cognition (characterized by intuitive and emotional decision making, more […]