Written by Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel
How would you rate your ethics in comparison to your peers? Rate yourself relative to the other readers on a scale of 0 to 100. If you believe you are the most ethical reader out there, give yourself a score of 100. If you are the least ethical, give yourself a score of 0. If you are average, give yourself a 50. Now, also rate your organization: On a scale of 0 to 100, how ethical is your orga-nization compared to other organizations?
If you are like most professionals, each of your scores is higher than 50. We strongly predict that if we averaged the scores of all of your peers, the average would be well above 50%, likely in the 70s. If we are right, many of you must be overestimating your ethicality. In fact, research suggests that most of us overestimate our ethicality at one point or another. We live in a bubble, unaware of the blind spots that keep us from recognizing how we engage in unethical actions outside of our own awareness.
Blind Spots and the Failure to Save Lives
Consider the case of organ donation, adapted from a problem that Max wrote with his colleagues:2
Which option do you prefer?
A. If you die in an accident, your heart and other organs will be used to save other lives. In addition, if you ever need an or-gan transplant, there will be a 90 percent chance that you will get the organ.
B. If you die in an accident, you will be buried with your heart and other organs in your body. In addition, if you ever need an organ transplant, there will be a 45 percent chance that you will get the organ.
Presented this way, most of us have a clear preference for Option A. We agree. A change in the U.S. organ donation system to one resembling Option A could save up to 6,000 lives per year in the United States alone – roughly twice as many people as were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Yet, the United States’ organ donation policy looks more like Option B. If you are a U.S. citi-zen and die in an accident and have made no explicit decision about your organs, you will be buried (or cremated) with your organs intact. If you want to donate your organs, you need to opt in to the donation system (e.g., when you renew your driver’s license). In the U.S., we have an effective donation rate of about 44 percent. While that beats most other countries that use the same system that we do, we could do much better – easily.
In many European nations, if you make no explicit decision about your organs, your organs are, by law, available for harvesting. If you do not want to have your organs harvested, you need to proactively opt out of the system. In either regime, you have a choice, assuming you stop to think about it, and can fill out the right form accordingly. But, the default differs, and defaults matter a great deal. The opt-in system creates Option B, while the opt-out system creates Option A. In contrast to the United States’ 44%, opt-out nations have effective rates between 85-99%. We fully accept that there are insightful, honest people who are opposed to organ donation for religious or moral reasons. Our focus in Blind Spots is on the plethora of citizens and leaders who would prefer Option A upon reflection, yet who stand by while our nation continues to resort to Option B. And, we believe that allowing 6,000 additional people to die due to our inaction is an ethical issue.
Our core argument is that our ethical blind spots lead many of us to act in unethical ways in which we would not with great-er reflection. This “bounded ethicality” leads us to systematically act in unethical ways without our own awareness. These behaviors include: in-group favoritism; discrimination without intention to do harm; overclaiming credit; and discounting the future.
A Common Blind Spot:
Not Fully Recognizing the Ideas of Others
Many of us think that we are immune. So, let’s take a closer look at one example of our blind spots – overclaiming credit.
What percent of the household work do you do? What percent of the best ideas in your working group come from you? What percentage of the profitability of your orga-nization comes from the efforts of your di-vision? In your current joint venture, what percentage of the alliance’s success is due to your organization’s contributions?
We do not know that you have overclaimed credit for your or your group’s contributions. But research documents very clearly that most people view their own input to a group, their division’s input to the overall organization, and their firm’s contributions to a strategic alliance to be more important and substantial than reality can sustain. Even when people consciously try to be accurate, they still overclaim. As a result, overclaimers are perceived to be unfair and often unethical, even though they desire to be the opposite.
Researchers are not immune. Frederick Banting was the co-winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin. When he spoke publicly about the work, he argued that his partner, John Macleod, who was the head of their laboratory, was more of a hindrance than a help. And, Macleod forgot to mention that he had a partner. Max and his colleagues Eugene Caruso and Nick Epley surveyed authors of four-author papers in the field of organiza-tional behavior to distribute credit for work done on the paper. On average, the sum of the credit claimed added up to 140%. This study does not prove that each member of the group overclaimed credit, only that the four people collectively claimed 40% more credit than they deserved. Such honest overclaiming (honest because each person believes his or her estimate is accurate) makes it impossible for all or even most of the authors involved to feel that they were given appropriate credit by the group for the work they performed. And, conflict can erupt when each mem-ber seeks the credit (e.g., order of author-ship) she believes she deserves.
In the midst of disputes, we often fail to see eye to eye. Why? Both sides are paying attention to different data. Our tendency to focus on our contributions to a joint effort and not on those of other group members reflects egocentrism. We make self-serving judgments regarding allocations of credit and blame, a phenomenon that in turn leads each of us to different conclusions regard-ing what a fair solution to a problem would be. Consider what happened when Linda Babcock and George Loewenstein had stu-dents simulate a dispute between a plaintiff and a defendant, providing identical infor-mation to both. Both parties processed the information in a way that supported their own perspective. Defendants remembered more details that supported their case and didn’t remember details that supported the plaintiff’s case. The reverse occurred for plaintiffs. This egocentrism affects par-ties’ perceptions of what constitutes a fair settlement, and, for instance, the level of disagreement about what is fair can predict the length of a strike.
In ethical dilemmas, the same phenomenon occurs. We see the parts of the decision that benefit us but we don’t “code” into our memory those aspects of the situation that hurt others. So, we often make unethical decisions that are beneficial to us, without realizing the costs that they impose on others. The critical issue is that all of this bias happens even without the intent to act unethically. We naturally absorb the information that is advantageous to us and ignore information that isn’t. Our blind spots unknowingly lead to un-ethical behavior.
This is the first part in a three-part series on our ethical blind spots. The next two issues of Ethisphere will contain articles on the psychological barriers across time that allow our blind spots to exist and why we too frequently do not notice the unethical actions of others around us.
***This is the first in a three-part series on ethical behavior, adapted from the author’s forthcoming book Blind Spots, Princeton University Press, 2011.
Max Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Adminis-tration at Harvard Business School and Ann Tenbrunsel is the Rex and Alice A. Martin Professor of Business Ethics at the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame.
