The December 8, 2010, seminar was presented by Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow Sreedhari Desai. Sreedhari's research examines the ways that moral cues in our environment may discourage unethical behavior. Her presentation provided an overview of the empirical evidence demonstrating automaticity in ethical decision making, and the possible role that specific moral cues may play in affecting our behavior. She is particularly interested in the ways that Western associations of children and moral purity may affect our ethical decision making when exposed to cues that are suggestive of childhood.
Following the presentation, seminar participants debated whether an association of moral purity with children moves people to behave more ethically, or whether other factors might be at play. (Do children make us behave better because we perceive them as being morally pure, or because we automatically feel a responsibility to be a role model of ethical behavior in the presence of a child?) Participants then moved on to a discussion of how time horizons and temporal discounting may affect our behavior within institutions. The conversation then returned to the question of how to create a market for independence and the most effective psychological strategies to bring that about.
Some participants pointed out that one role that institutional corruption may play is the institutionalizing of processes, so that individual decisions rarely have to be made. In such a case, exposure to moral cues may not matter or have much of an effect, because the framework of the institution has been constructed in such a way that the individual may not be incentivized to even consider the ethical dimension of a question.
One example of this would be the financial industry, where the structure was such that people were incentivized to consider nothing more than immediate, short-term payoff.
Another participant suggested the need to create an environment in which consistent contributors (those whose behavior is not swayed by short-term time horizons) can survive long enough so that they improve the situation for everyone. This led to a discussion of how to create immediate short-term benefits for independence in the system. It was suggested that attempts to change the social meaning of certain actions may be more effective than attempts to change the norms themselves.
In summary, participants considered the ways that psychological cues may influence our ethical behavior. They discussed how the structures of institutions can be such that individuals may be almost entirely removed from having to consider the ethical implications of their behavior. Also, they considered how to create a market for independence in the way most likely to elicit real changes in behavior