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 not know who will be impacted by a contemplated act.   As described in this paper by Deborah A. Small and George Loewenstein,  in one study “subjects were more willing to compensate others who lost money when the losers had already been determined than when they were about to be” and in another “people contributed more to a charity when their contributions would benefit a family that had already been selected from a list than when told that the family would be selected from the same list.”   Beyond their direct application to the area of charitable giving, these findings may be relevant to a broader range of ethics issues, and, for instance, could help explain the relative ease with which so many individuals engage in offenses where the victims are not identifiable.  

One example of this is insider trading – a crime which, although widely known to be wrong, seems utterly pervasive (based, among other things, on the extent of trading in securities right before public disclosure of market moving events).  A behavioral ethics perspective suggests that (at least part of) the reason for this “inner controls” failure is that the victims of insider trading are essentially anonymous market participants. 

Another offense of this sort is government contracting fraud (where the victims tend to be everyone),  and indeed Ben Franklin famously described the risks of an ethics shortfall here as well as anyone could: “There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and more frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.”   Understanding why “otherwise good people” do bad things is much of what behavioral ethics is about.

But what about COIs? The picture there is mixed, as some COIs do involve identifiable victims – such as the job applicant who does not get hired because the position was filled by the boss’s son. Similarly, an organization might suffer identifiable harm when its procurement process is corrupted by a COI – e.g., paying too much or getting too little.

However, with other sorts of COIs the harm is less apparent. It is the damage to trust in key relationships.

For this reason, organizations might consider including the following question in their COI resolution protocols: “How likely would it be at that the COI would diminish the trust that stakeholders (shareholders, employees, customers, business partners, suppliers or regulators) would have in the Company or otherwise adversely impact the Company’s reputation?”

Of course, this thought experiment works only if you truly try to put yourself in the shoes of one of these parties. Or, to use the memorable words (albeit from  another setting) of philosopher Martin Buber: “Imagine the real.”