Designing Ethics Programs for How Minds Work
Organizations are very interested in the ethical behaviors of leaders, employees, customers, suppliers and everyone in the value chain. Significant time and money is spent on ethics training and programs designed to enhance compliance – often without achieving the desired results.
Clients and students ask, how can we use cognitive design to enhance the effectiveness of ethics training and programs?
The key is to approach it as a behavior change challenge and understand the underlying moral cognition that drives it.
For example, consider the research just published in Social Psychological and Personality Science by the University of Toronto on the Cognition of Moral Behavior.
They found that:
“People are more likely to cheat and make immoral decisions when their transgressions don’t involve an explicit action,”
Two studies illustrated this effect. In one study students taking a math test were told that the software they were using had a flaw. Group A was told that if they hit the space bar the answer to the question would appear. Group B was told that if they did not hit the space bar in 5 seconds the answer to the question would appear. Members of group B were far more likely to cheat. In the second study students were asked to volunteer to help a disabled student complete a test. Group A was prompted by the software to see if they would volunteer and forced to selected between Yes or No. Group B had to scroll to the bottom of the page and click on a link to volunteer and could just press continue to move to the next screen. Participants in Group A were 5 times more likely to volunteer.
Here is the insight:
“When people are confronted with actively doing the right thing or the wrong thing, there are a lot of emotions involved – such as guilt and shame – that guide them to make the moral choice. When the transgression is more passive, however, we saw more people doing the wrong thing, and we believe this is because the moral emotions in such situations are probably less intense,” Teper says.”
Although certainly not the whole story when it comes to moral cognition, it does illustrate that understanding cognitive needs (intellectual, affective, motivational, volitional) is critical to designing effective programs for encouraging ethical behavior.
Interested to hear from readers that have other science-based insights into moral cognition that have clear implications for designers.
