Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty

2012/07/19 by Max H. Bazerman, Francesca Gino · 2 citations
Decision Sciences · Neuroscience · Health Professions · #Ethics in Business and Education #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Ethics in medical practice

paper · doi:10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-102811-173815

openalex publication_date 2012/07/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11

Abstract

Early research and teaching on ethics focused either on a moral development perspective or on philosophical approaches and used a normative approach by focusing on the question of how people should act when resolving ethical dilemmas. In this article, we briefly describe the traditional approach to ethics and then present a (biased) review of the behavioral approach to ethics. We define behavioral ethics as the study of systematic and predictable ways in which individuals make ethical decisions and judge the ethical decisions of others when these decisions are at odds with intuition and the benefits of the broader society. By focusing on a descriptive rather than a normative approach to ethics, behavioral ethics is better suited than traditional approaches to addressing the increasing demand from society for a deeper understanding of what causes even good people to cross ethical boundaries.

Citations

• Explaining Bargaining Impasse: The Role of Self-Serving Biases
• The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.
• Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice.
• When misconduct goes unnoticed: The acceptability of gradual erosion in others’ unethical behavior
• Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate?

Cited by

• Nobody is as Blind as Those Who Cannot Bear to See: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Management of Emotions and Moral Blindness
• Moral blindness [wikipedia]