One can scarcely open the newspaper without finding examples of smart, well-educated people who have behaved in ethically challenged ways: for example, Bernard Madoff and the numerous investment advisers who have come to be called mini-Madoffs because their Ponzi schemes were similar to Madoff’s. President Obama called the bonuses awarded to some of the same Wall Street executives who helped to create the current economic mess “shameful.” Even some of the president’s own proposed political appointees had to withdraw for ethically questionable behavior. And then, of course, there are people like Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, and Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit’s former mayor, who seem to have few ethical standards at all.
What is frightening about ethical lapses is not that they happen to the ethically outrageous but that they can sneak up on just about all of us. An informal classroom “experiment” I performed recently illustrates that slippery slope.
“I am very proud of myself,” I told the 17 undergraduates in my seminar, called “The Nature of Leadership.” I had just returned from a trip, I told them, and felt that the honorarium I was paid for my consulting on ethical leadership was less than I deserved. I felt badly that I had decided to accept an engagement for so little compensation. I then told the class that I had been about to fill out the reimbursement forms when I discovered that I could actually get reimbursed twice. The first reimbursement would come from the organization that had invited me, which required me merely to fill out a form listing my expenses. The second reimbursement would come from my university, which required me to submit the receipts from the trip. I explained to the class that by getting reimbursed twice, I could justify to myself the amount of work I had put into the engagement. (Full disclosure: I did not really seek double reimbursement.)
I waited for the firestorm. Would the class — which had already studied leadership for several months — rise up in a mass protest against what I proposed to do? Or would only a few brave souls raise their hands and roundly criticize me for what was patently unethical behavior? I waited, and waited, and waited. Nothing happened. I then decided to move on to the main topic of the day, which, I recall, was ... ethical leadership. The whole time I was speaking about that main topic, I expected some of the students to raise their hands and demand to return to the issue of my double reimbursement. It didn’t happen.
Finally, I stopped talking and flat-out asked the class whether any of them thought anything was wrong with my desire for double reimbursement. If so, I asked them, why had no one challenged me? I figured that all of them would be embarrassed for not having challenged me. Indeed, many of them were. Others thought I must have been kidding. Still others thought that, since I was the professor and a dean to boot, I must have had a good reason for doing whatever I wanted to do. What I did not expect, though, was that some of the students would commend me for my clever idea and argue that, if I could get away with it, I was entitled to receive the money — more power to me!
That experience reminded me how hard it is to translate theories of ethics, and even case studies, into practice. The students had read about ethics in leadership, heard about ethics in leadership from a variety of real-world leaders, discussed ethics in leadership, and then apparently totally failed to recognize or at least speak out against unethical behavior when it stared them in the face. Moreover, these were students who by conventional definitions would be classified as gifted. Why is it so hard to translate theory into practice, even after one has studied ethical leadership for several months?
In 1970, Bibb Latané and John Darley opened up a new field of research on bystander intervention. They showed that, contrary to expectations, bystanders intervene when someone is in trouble only in very limited circumstances. For example, if they think that someone else might intervene, bystanders tend to stay out of the situation. Latané and Darley even showed that divinity students who were about to lecture on the parable of the good Samaritan were no more likely than other bystanders to help a person in distress.
Drawing in part on Latané and Darley’s model of bystander intervention, I’ve constructed a model of ethical behavior that applies to a variety of ethical problems. The model’s basic premise is that ethical behavior is far harder to display than one would expect simply on the basis of what we learn from parents, school, and religious training. To intervene, to do good, individuals must go through a series of steps, and unless all of the steps are completed, people are not likely to behave ethically, regardless of the ethics training or moral education they have received and the level of other types of relevant skills they might possess, such as critical or creative thinking.
Consider these eight steps of behaving ethically and how my students responded, or didn’t respond, to the ethical challenge I presented:
1. Recognize that there is an event to react to. The students were sitting in a class on leadership, expecting to be educated about leadership by an expert on leadership. In this case, I did not present the problem as one to which I expected them to react. I was simply telling them about something I was planning to do. They had no a priori reason to expect that something an authority figure did, or was thinking of doing, would require any particular reaction, except perhaps taking notes. So for some students, the whole narrative may have been a nonevent.
That is a problem that extends beyond this mere college-classroom situation. When people hear their political, educational, or especially religious leaders talk, they may not believe there is any reason to question what they hear. After all, they are listening to authority figures. In this way, cynical and corrupt leaders can lead their followers to accept and even commit unethical acts such as suicide bombings and murder of those with divergent beliefs.
2. Define the event as having an ethical dimension. Not all students in the class defined the problem as an ethical one. It became clear in our discussion that some students saw the problem as utilitarian: I had worked hard, had been underpaid, and was trying to figure out a way to attain adequate compensation for my hard work. In that definition of the problem, I had come up with a clever way to make the compensation better fit the work I had done.
Thus cynical leaders may flaunt their unethical behavior simply by defining it in other, plausible-sounding ways. For example, when Robert Mugabe and his henchmen seized the land of white farmers in Zimbabwe, the seizure was presented as a way of compensating alleged war heroes for their accomplishments. What could be unethical about compensating war heroes?
3. Decide that the ethical dimension is significant. In the case of my plan to seek double reimbursement, some of the students may have felt it was sketchy or dubious but not sufficiently so to make an issue of it. Perhaps they themselves had “double-dipped.” Or perhaps they had sometimes taken what was not theirs — say, something small like a newspaper or even money they found on the ground — and saw what I was doing as no more serious than what they had done. So they may recognize an ethical dimension, but not see it as sufficiently significant to create a fuss.
Politicians seem to specialize in trying to downplay the ethical dimension of their behavior. The shenanigans and subsequent lies of Bill Clinton regarding his behavior with Monica Lewinsky are an example. Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York, misbehaved for years until his misdeeds were exposed.
4. Take responsibility for generating an ethical solution to the problem. My students may have felt that they were, after all, merely students. Is it their responsibility, or even their right, to tell a professor of a course on leadership how to act, especially if the professor is a dean? Perhaps from their point of view, it was my responsibility to determine the ethical dimensions, if any, of the situation.
Similarly, people may allow leaders to commit wretched acts because they figure it is the leaders’ responsibility to determine the ethical dimensions of their actions. Or people may assume that the leaders, especially if they are religious leaders, are in the best position to determine what is ethical. If a religious leader encourages someone to become a suicide bomber, for example, that person might conclude that being a bomber must be ethical; why else would a religious leader suggest it?
5. Figure out what abstract ethical rule(s) might apply to the problem. Perhaps some of the students recognized the problem I created for them as an ethical one. But if they had never had to figure out reimbursements, it might not have been obvious to them what rule, or rules, apply. Or even if they had dealt with reimbursements, might there be some circumstances in which it is ethical to be reimbursed twice? Maybe the university supplements outside reimbursements, as they sometimes do with fellowships? Or maybe the university does not care who else pays, as long as they get original receipts. Or maybe I had misspoken; maybe what I meant to say was that I would get some expenses paid by the university and others by the sponsoring organization. Especially in unfamiliar situations, it may not be clear what constitutes ethical behavior.
6. Decide how abstract ethical rules actually apply to the problem, in order to suggest a concrete solution. Perhaps the students did know of relevant ethical rules but did not see how to apply them. Suppose they thought of the rule that one should expect from others only what one deserves. Well, what did I deserve? Maybe they saw me as deserving more than I did simply because I said I did. Or suppose they reflected on the maxim that one should not expect something for nothing. Well, I did something — I was only trying to get something back that adequately reflected my work. In the end, the students may have had trouble translating abstract principles into concrete behavior.
When U.S. forces kill suspected terrorists in other countries, some residents of the United States may be happy that the evildoers got what they deserved. But what if foreign forces entered the United States and started killing people a foreign government suspected of being terrorists? Does the ethical principle of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” mean, concretely, that if we do not want foreign forces in our country, we should not have our own forces elsewhere? Or does it mean that if we in the United States have forces elsewhere, those forces should not kill anyone, regardless of who that person is killing and what terrorist acts he or she may be planning?
In many instances, understanding exactly how to apply an ethical principle forces us to grapple with deeply held values.
7. Formulate an ethical solution, at the same time possibly preparing to counteract contextual forces that might lead you to act unethically. Suppose you sit in a classroom and hear your teacher brag about what you consider to be unethical behavior. You look around: No one else is saying anything. As far as you can tell, no one else is even fazed. Perhaps what you think is the right course of action isn’t. Maybe you’re the one who’s out of line, and speaking up will only embarrass you in front of your peers.
In Latané and Darley’s work, the more bystanders there were, the less likely it was for one to intervene. The investigators saw that people tend to think that if something is really wrong, someone else witnessing the event will take responsibility. You are actually better off having a breakdown on a somewhat lonely country road than on a busy highway because a driver passing by on the country road may feel that he or she is your only hope.
Sometimes the problem is not that other people seem oblivious to the ethical implications of a situation, but that they actively encourage you to behave in ways you define as unethical. In the Rwandan genocides, Hutus were encouraged to hate and kill Tutsis, even if they were family members. Those who were not willing to participate in the massacres risked becoming victims themselves. In Hitler’s Germany, those who tried to save Jews from concentration camps risked being sent to the camps themselves, or having family members sent.
Obviously an individual has to decide what he or she is willing to risk for the sake of doing what he or she believes is right.
8. Act. In the end, you could be a wonderful ethical thinker, figure out all you need to do, be prepared to do the right thing, and then do nothing. One has to make the leap from thought to action. For example, most people know they should have only safe sex, but not all of them do, even if they know they have an illness that they could spread through sexual contact. In Rwanda and most recently in West Darfur, there were countless discussions about what needed to be done to behave ethically.In the end, the most difficult thing was not getting people to talk about action, but to engage in it.
We would like to think that peer pressure to behave ethically leads people to resist internal temptations to misbehave. But often exactly the opposite is the case. In the Enron scandal, when Sherron Watkins blew the whistle on unethical behavior, she was punished and made to feel like an outcast. In general, whistle-blowers are treated poorly, despite the protections they are supposed to receive.
I have argued that ethical behavior typically requires eight steps, and that if you miss any one of them, you are not likely to behave fully ethically. College can produce students who are smart and knowledgeable but ethically challenged. By alerting students to the steps in ethical behavior and the potential difficulty of going through them all, students may come to understand why it is so easy to slip into unethical behavior and be more likely to think and behave ethically. Given the problems we face in today’s world, that seems like an urgent priority.
Robert J. Sternberg is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, a professor of psychology, and an adjunct professor of education at Tufts University. His books include Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 33, Page B14