In this lesson, you are going to learn of some of the most common ways that ethical lapses trickle into our judgment. We see and hear of these types of situations almost every day. And rarely do we consider the impact they have on our moral reasoning. Let's get started. Storytelling is an extremely powerful way that information is conveyed and retained going all the way back to the caveman. We use stories to express our moral emotions like gratitude, contempt, and anger.

And in sharing these we create a shared sense of right and wrong that allows us to live together. Remember in the earlier course when I talked about the story of Odessa, for example. However, storytelling is as powerful a positive tool as it can be a negative tool leading to ethical lapses. Gossip works through reciprocity. In other words, I'll tell you my secret, if you tell me yours, our brains love this stuff. It's like a form of social insurance and a sure way to build intimacy with someone.

We had a participant at one of our seminars talk about the issues of gossiping at their office, a group of employees in the same department gossip continuously through the interoffice instant message program. This created many problems, including hurt feelings, in efficiencies, and a lack of respect for others. It also created a significant amount of work for the manager to deal with this issue. Recalling our ethical intelligence principles from the previous course, when we are gossiping, there is a potential to cause harm to disrespect others and to be unloving. On this basis, it fails on multiple principles and can unwittingly come back to haunt you when you least expect it. Here's another fallacy that humans fall victim to repeatedly through history, obeying a consensus reality without questioning.

This happens when we believe what we're told. Rather than Stand back and consider the bigger picture. All sorts of atrocities through history have arisen from this sort of brainwashing. Consider lynchings sacrificing, and the Holocaust. My daughter and I were visiting the London Bridge experience. It's a bit of a scary house with some history involved.

The guide points to my 10 year old daughter of proclaims her a witch. 500 years ago, when you were proclaimed a witch, there was only one way to determine whether or not it was true. So he tells my daughter, this is how we're going to proceed. He'll bind her hands and feet together and throw her into the Thames River. If she sinks to the bottom, she's innocent, but she's also dead. If she floats to the top, then she's guilty, and they will fish her out and burn her at the stake.

This was an accepted practice at the time for those accused of being a witch and no one questioned it. This one is interesting and exemplifies the power of the internet. vironment we live in and how it has a huge impact on our ethical judgment. The Stanford prison experiment was conducted by Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in 1971. And this was back in the day before they had a lot of ethical principles around doing experiments at universities. This experiment was designed to explore the psychological impact of the prison environment on prisoners and prison guards.

Zimbardo decided to simulate a prison environment where half the subjects were randomly chosen to become prison guards and have to become prisoners. The idea was to see what happened after two weeks. Keep in mind that everyone was innocent, and there were no crimes involved. The experiment failed after just six days, and there were strong signs that it was going to fail after only two days with the physical, mental and emotional The use of the prisoners began getting out of hand. We are where we live, eat, work and make love. The experiment highlighted just how unstable and malleable our moral judgment is in different situations.

We adjust our definition of right and wrong from one situation to the next. Next we're going to look at compartmentalization. And these are the rationalizations. we tell ourselves that it's okay to do something unethical. If we can change our beliefs from one situation to the next, how do we rationalize that in our brains? Don't we naturally feel guilt and remorse?

The answer is sometimes we do. But our brains can also disengage morally from destructive or evil things that we do when our brains are able to reframe our bad behaviors as virtuous in circumstances, we can distance ourselves from the harm that we inflict and this almost minimizes our personal responsibility considered Only attacks as an example, when you're not physically there, you're not responsible. We can also change the way we think about the harm itself. For example, theft from a large company, they won't notice. They don't need it. Everyone else is doing it.

I deserve it, or revenge someone gossips about you. So you do the same thing to get them back. And we can also blame the victims or deem them unworthy of respect. Think about sexual assault victims who get blamed for the crime that was committed against them. Anytime that we're telling ourselves these sorts of stories. We are compartmentalizing.

Compartmentalization is especially dangerous when our identities remain hidden as these to reduce our sense of personal responsibility, care and decorum. Think about when we post comments on the internet anonymously. Or if we wear a mask, compartmentalization allows for an oxymoron. to exist and how people live their lives, good husbands who cheat compassionate priests who are also pedophiles, kind farmers who happen to own slaves. Those are all ideas of compartmentalization. Consider this all too common behavior of normal people who attend Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

If you're going to flash wear a mask, or in Las Vegas, you know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Since when are those behaviors acceptable? Is it ethical? They react like completely different people just because we are in Vegas or New Orleans or wherever we happen to be. And what happens there stays there. consider for a moment.

What is it about these environments that cause people to act the way they do? Consider the reward system. In New Orleans. You get beads for showing your breasts in Vegas, the crazier you add, the more you get free drinks and attention deprived of ethical reference points in these circumstances, you don't know what to do. So instead, you do what everyone else is doing. So many of us don't go to Vegas or New Orleans, but a lot of us whether we realize it or not bend the rules.

We believe that as long as we're not totally outrageous, it's okay. And we still think of ourselves as ethical. Small dishonesties bypass our internal ethical radar. Consider the question in the quiz regarding the restaurant, or how many of you speed or jaywalk, where's the line between doing the right thing and not doing it? We tend to be more honest when the stakes are higher when our reputation is at risk if we get caught. In one study, even when participants were told there was no chance of being caught, most people would still not contemplate grand larceny.

Few people go around shouting to the world. I'm the greatest However, it's an entirely Doesn't matter when we're talking about groups. Canada is a greatest hockey nation in the world. America is the greatest country in the world. Somehow this comes across as acceptable in those particular societies. The impact of groupthink and peer pressure is enormous in the world of ethical decision making.

In one study measuring the effect of group pressure, it found that subjects challenged to agree with incorrect information caved into the majority, agreeing with the wrong answers, and astounding 41% of the time, history is shown over and over again, that people will go along with a bad decision because of the authority figure that's in charge and believing that that person is very strong, and therefore they must be making the right decision. Great example of this is john F. Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs invasion. All of the people around him thought it was a bad idea and in the end, it was a very Bad idea, but no one spoke up because of his authority. Think about the groups and what you affiliate yourself, your social groups, your companies, your political allegiances, ask yourself, do you personally censor yourself on account of fidelity to some exclusive group?

Do you participate in activities you don't believe in? What parts of yourself? Do you hold back in order not to be called a trader? Do you oppress others when you're feeling oppressed, or use group narcissism to pull yourself up and blind yourself to personal failings? We found these findings particularly interesting because they really provide some insight into how our moral compass can erode in different situations.