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Certitude
Word Count: 967
Read Time: 3.5 minutes
During orientation week at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University, a senior executive from one of the world’s leading telecom companies came and spoke with our class. He had prepared some video clips from the movie “The Intern” with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway. Hathaway’s character is the founder of a very successful technology start-up and DeNiro’s character is a retiree serving as an intern. In one of the clips, De Niro’s character sees Hathaway’s driver drinking from a bottle that is concealed in a brown paper bag. DeNiro immediately goes to the man and confronts him. He demands that the driver hand over the keys and go home. De Niro then safely drives Hathaway to her destination.
The executive then paused the video, turned to us in the class and asked, “how many of you would have done something similar in this situation?” Every hand went up, except mine. Some students discussed alternate possibilities that did not involve confronting the driver, but all were determined that they would have intervened in some capacity. He then asked, “Is there anyone here who would have done or said nothing?” I conspicuously raised my hand from the back row. He looked at me, seemingly shocked and bewildered, and every head in the audience whipped around to look at me. All I could say was, “I’m just being honest, I probably would have just ignored it.” He said, “fair enough” and moved on to the next clip among the low murmurs of confused students.
Would I really have done nothing in that situation? I don’t know, I’ve never been in that situation, and there is a great deal of uncertainty. My answer was intended to shock the people in the room and get them to ask themselves honestly, “would I actually have intervened?” A lot of my classmates, maybe even most, would have intervened, but not all of them would have. This highlights a major flaw in vignette-based ethics training: most people think that they are moral angels when dealing with a hypothetical moral dilemma. In vignettes where the need to act in a reasoned way is ethically and morally required, most think that they will act with unambiguous integrity. Even in vignettes where any action (or inaction) leads to a worse outcome, students can rationalize an answer from some sort of ethical basis. The classic “trolley problem” is an example of this. The danger of using only vignette-based training is that it can reinforce students’ pre-existing views that they will act ethically in a difficult situation.
I’ve long argued that the purpose of ethics training, in addition to teaching people to reason ethically, should be to teach people that when they are faced with a moral or ethical problem, there is at least a non-zero probability that they will make the wrong choice. A large contributing factor to unethical behavior is the stories people tell to themselves about themselves. People who think themselves incapable of immoral or unethical behavior may be the most susceptible to that kind of behavior. That is why I typically confront people who readily pass judgment on others who make poor ethical decisions.
When I was an instructor at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, I was having a conversation with some of my fellow instructors and the topic of marital infidelity came up. One of the instructors stated very emphatically, “I could never cheat on my wife, I just don’t have that in me.” The other instructors made similar declarations about their moral steadfastness. I said, “I bet most people who cheat on their spouse said the exact same thing. Given the wrong situation, each and every one of us would cheat on our spouses.” The other instructors were shocked at my impropriety.
I then walked my colleagues through the following thought experiment: Imagine you are on a business trip away from home. You are sitting in the hotel bar finishing your dinner when your attractive colleague sits down next to you and you both strike up a conversation, which is totally fine because you would never cheat on your spouse. And when you finish your drink, it’s harmless to order another one because you would never cheat on your spouse. You both decide that it’s best to move from the bar to a quiet corner of the lounge area where it’s easier to talk, and it’s perfectly innocent because you would never cheat on your spouse. While you are at it, it’s perfectly okay to flirt juuuuust a little bit, because you would never cheat on your spouse. When your colleague remembers that they forgot to show you the new project they have been working on, it’s perfectly okay to go to your colleague’s room to see it because you would never cheat on your spouse. And by the time that you realize that you’ve made a terrible mistake, you soothe your moralistic ego by reassuring yourself that it was a one-time thing, and it meant nothing. You are a good person because you would never really cheat on your spouse.
If instead the story you told yourself about yourself was “I don’t want to cheat on my spouse, but I might if given the wrong situation,” then as soon as your attractive colleague sits down next to you at the hotel bar, you will politely excuse yourself and retire to your room, alone.
Be careful about the stories that you tell yourself about yourself. If they are too flattering, those stories end up as post-hoc rationalizations for your bad behavior. And the next time you are about to pass judgment on someone for a poor ethical decision, you might want to remind yourself that, given the same circumstances, it’s at least possible that you would have done the same thing.
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