Making the case. One of your readings for the week, “27 Psychological Reasons Go

Question

Making the case.

One of your readings for the week, “27 Psychological Reasons Good People Do Bad Things”, looks at a number of examples where arguably good people are faced with challenging ethical situations and take perhaps a less than ethical stance in reaction thereto. For this activity you are to select 3 of the examples and discuss whether you agree or disagree with the outcome or conclusion. In your discussion I want you to make the most compelling arguments you can to convince and persuade me that your point of view is the correct one. Is there anything in your value system that leads you to your point of view?

Explanation / Answer

Escalating commitment, induction mechanism, and problematic punishments can be seen as some of the typical examples. While dealing with the issues of escalating commitment, most of the small thieves convert into big robbers in the future. Their smaller mischievousness leads them into a greater misconduct and they are not able to find any way out of this situation. This is quite commonly seen in the example of a gambler who enjoys earning small wins initially and then this induces him to take greater risks but when it becomes big games, his fortunes take a flip and he starts losing but despite that greater risks will be taken by them so that they can recover their losses.

In case of induction mechanism, the individuals start having greater misconduct when they evaluate their existing behaviour with their past behaviour and thus they do not treat their behaviour as bad. But when it becomes their habit to misconduct, they start showing extremely unethical behaviours. For example, most of us may think that using social media while in office is unethical. But when the staff keep on using social media in office, it becomes routine and thus unethicality becomes a possibility.

There are a number of issues involved in economic punishment on unethical behaviours due to their adverse impact. The moral connotation will be lost when a certain behaviour is termed as unethical and thus an economic perspective will be connected to it. For example, when fines are given for traffic violations, people view the behaviour in an economic perspective about the probability of getting arrested or fined.

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