Teaching Behavioral Ethics

• Date: 01 June 2014
• Author: Robert Prentice
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jlse.12018
• Published date: 01 June 2014

Journal of Legal Studies Education

Volume 31, Issue 2, 325–365, Summer 2014

Teaching Behavioral Ethics

Robert Prentice∗

I. Introduction: Approaches to Teaching Ethics

There are many ways to make unethical choices and probably just as many

ways (or even more) to try to teach people how not to make unethical choices.

Many ethics courses are philosophy based, others focus on building character,

and many are a combination of the two. Sharpening one’s moral reasoning

and reinforcing one’s character are certainly beneficial courses of action for

those who wish to be better people and those who wish to teach others how

to act more ethically. They are likely essential for people to reach their full

potential as ethical beings.

Because the empirical evidence indicates that the potential of these two

traditional approaches to transform human behavior is generally limited,1

however, many people interested in researching and teaching ethics have

recently focused on a new field called behavioral ethics.Thisisthebodyof

research that focuses on how and why people make the decisions that they

do in the ethical realm. The findings of this research demonstrate, among

other things, that context matters—that people of good character, even if

they are skilled at moral reasoning, may do bad things because they are

subject to psychological shortcomings or overwhelmed by social pressures,

organizational stresses, and other situational factors. Behavioral ethics is

∗Professor and Department Chair, Business, Government and Society, McCombs School of

Business, University of Texas.

1There is little evidence, for example, that moral reasoning ability translates into moral action.

See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics

and Religion 89 (2012). And good character has often proven insufficient to guarantee ethical

behavior, because situational factors often overwhelm people’s intention to act properly. See

John M. Doris, Lack of Character 2 (2002) (“situational factors are often better predictors

of behavior than personal factors”); Cordelia Fine, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain

Distorts and Deceives 73 (2006) (“When we ignore the power of circumstances to overwhelm

personality, we wind up misguidedly looking at a person’s character to explain their failure to

uphold an ideally high standard of conduct.”).

C2014 The Author

Journal of Legal Studies Education C2014 Academy of Legal Studies in Business

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326 Vol. 31 / The Journal of Legal Studies Education

primarily descriptive rather than normative. It describes why psychologi-

cal heuristics and situational pressures can cause good people to do bad

things.2

Behavioral ethics is arguably the “next big thing” in ethics teaching

and research.3It has become the hot new item because its research agenda

has produced much knowledge about how people choose and why people

act when facing ethical issues that were previously unknown.4The work of

Dan Ariely, Max Bazerman, Daylian Cain, David De Cremer, David DeSteno,

Francesca Gino, George Loewenstein, David Messick, Lamar Pierce, Ann

Tenbrunsel, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and many, many others has put ethics teach-

ers in a position to describe more accurately than ever before the ethical

decision-making processes that people tend to use—and the flaws in those

processes.

2See Joshua Margolis & Andrew Molinsky, Three Practical Challenges of Moral Leadership, in Moral

Leadership 77, 92 (2006) (“Social science has illuminated just how vulnerable we human beings

are to act in unethical ways. Breathtaking findings sober us to just how much human behavior

can be influenced by organizational features, social pressures, and cognitive tendencies.”).

3Although it is not quite that new, see Robert A. Prentice, TeachingEthics, Heuristics, and Biases, 1

J. Bus. Ethics Educ. 57 (2004), it is still the most promising approach to improving ethical be-

havior. After writing his four-hundred–page moral history of the twentieth century, philosopher

Jonathan Glover wrote that if we wish to avoid future atrocities of the types inflicted by Hitler,

Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Charlie Company at My Lai and the like, “[i]t is to the psychology that

we should now turn.” Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth

Century 414 (2d ed. 2012). See also John Walsh, The Convergence of Ethics and Compliance, Corp.

Counsel, July 9, 2013 (noting that “[t]he ultimate promise of behavioral ethics is that it provides

pragmatic tools that have been demonstrated to work”).

4See generally Dan Ariely, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty (2012); Max H.

Bazerman & Ann E. Tenbrunsel, Blind Spots (2011); Psychological Perspectives on

Ethical Behavior and Decision Making (David De Cremer ed., 2009); Behavioral Busi-

ness Ethics: Shaping an Emerging Field (David De Cremer & Ann E. Tenbrunsel eds., 2012);

David DeSteno & Piercarlo Valdesolo, Out of Character: Surprising Truths About

the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us 8 (2011); The Next Phase of

Business Ethics: Integrating Psychology and Ethics (John Dienhart et al. eds., 2001);

Francesca Gino, Sidetracked: How Our Decisions Get Derailed and How we Can Stick

to the Plan (2013); Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvi-

ous at Our Peril (2011); Codes of Conduct: Behavioral Research Into Business Ethics

(David M. Messick & Ann E. Tenbrunsel eds., 1996); Moral Leadership: The Theory and

Practice of Power, Judgment, and Policy (Deborah L. Rhode ed., 2006); Patricia Wer-

hane et al., Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making: Mental Models, Milgram and the

Problem of Obedience (2013).

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II. Paving the Way

Behavioral ethics can be taught in a multitude of ways; in this article I describe

my approach. It is a moving target. I have taught behavioral ethics for well

over a decade and tinker with my approach every new semester. But this

is how I do it currently. What I describe is a portion of the combination

business law and business ethics class that I teach, and it could play a role in

any pure ethics course. A behavioral ethics unit could contain only part of

what I describe in this article, or it could contain much more.

I teach behavioral ethics in a three-hour course that is one-third business

ethics and two-thirds business law. It is, therefore, the equivalent of a single

one-hour ethics course. I have experimented with different approaches—

teaching behavioral ethics in a block at the beginning, in a block at the end,

and also just scattered throughout the semester. My experience is that the

behavioral ethics material has been best received when I taught it in a block

at the end of the course. By the time we get to the ethics material, I have

in several ways attempted to pave the way for a smooth transition into the

material, including by giving the students several surveys early in the semester

that I will ultimately use to demonstrate that their own reactions correspond

to the psychological studies I will discuss later in the semester.

For example, one of the most important points I hope to get through to

students is that they probably are not as ethical as they think they are. Humility

should be the word of the day in ethics classes. So, in written surveys, I ask

half of the class to answer “true” or “false” to this statement: “I am satisfied

with my moral character.” And I ask the other half to answer similarly to this

statement: “I am more ethical than my fellow students.”

Surveys show that 92 percent of Americans are satisfied with their own

moral character5and that 75–80 percent of Americans think themselves

(against all statistical odds) more ethical than their peers.6Semester after

semester, I receive similar results in my surveys. It is one thing for me to

report to the students later in the semester that the average American is

overly optimistic about his or her ethicality. It is a more persuasive thing to

demonstrate to a classroom full of students that they have shown themselves

to be similarly ill calibrated.

5Marianne M. Jennings, Ethics and Investment Management: True Reform, Fin. Analysts J., May/

June 2005, at 45.

6Jeffrey R. Cohen et al., An Exploratory Examination of International Differences in Auditors’ Ethical

Perceptions,7J. Acct. Res. 37 (1996).