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Removing the Blinders: Increasing Students’ Awareness of Self-Perception Biases and Real-World Ethical Challenges Through an Educational Intervention

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Abstract

Business ethics educators strive to produce graduates who not only grasp the principles of ethical decision-making, but who can apply that business ethics education when faced with real-world challenges. However, this has proven especially difficult, as good intentions do not always translate into ethical awareness and action. Complementing a behavioral ethics approach with insights from social psychology, we developed an interventional class module with both online and in-class elements aimed at increasing students’ awareness of their own susceptibility to unconscious biases and, consequently, unethical behaviors. We deployed this intervention within a problem-based learning course (137 undergraduate students), in which students completed real-world projects for actual business clients. Our results suggest that although students appeared universally aware of the importance of ethical issues in business and generally espoused intentions to act ethically, those who received the intervention were significantly more likely to recognize their own susceptibility to perpetuating unethical business behavior and to identify ethical issues specific to their real-world projects. These results have important implications for behavioral ethics pedagogy and provide a de-biasing interventional approach for bridging classroom knowledge with real-world skills.

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Notes

  1. For an additional discussion of these issues, see Tomlin et al. (2017).

  2. See Tomlin et al. (2017) for an extensive description of the ethics intervention (video and discussion content), which can be used as a guide for those interested in incorporating these pedagogical approaches into their classrooms.

  3. Excluding these data makes our analyses more conservative, as the extreme responses were in the hypothesized direction.

  4. The free-responses from these same students are featured in Tomlin et al. (2017) as suggestive evidence that the ethics intervention is effective, but are analyzed for the first time in comparison to the control group in this paper.

  5. It is important to note that we have no data to assess the extent to which students experienced ethics education in other courses. It is possible that students in both conditions may have covered ethics in another class, which might account for the generally high level of awareness of ethical issues.

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Correspondence to Kathleen A. Tomlin.

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Appendix: Survey Administered to Students in Week 15 of the Course (11 Weeks After the Ethics Intervention)

Appendix: Survey Administered to Students in Week 15 of the Course (11 Weeks After the Ethics Intervention)

  1. 1a.

    We uncovered potential ethical issues on our team’s innovation project.

  2. 1b.

    If you answered yes to the previous question, do you agree that the ethical issues uncovered will affect your client’s ability to innovate?

  3. 2.

    Ethical issues exist at individual levels that may affect innovative processes. These might include personality issues and/or “traps” that anybody can fall into (e.g., conflicts of interest, peer pressures, etc.) that cause people to behave unethically.

  4. 3.

    Ethical issues exist at organizational levels that may affect innovative processes. These might include poorly defined standards and expectations, a lack of ethical leadership, or an emphasis on market performance at the expense of stakeholder value.

  5. 4.

    Ethical issues exist at industrial levels that may affect innovative processes. These include industry-wide issues that affect one or more stakeholders of the industry.

  6. 5.

    Ethics are influential for processes of innovation.

  7. 6.

    I am personally susceptible to ethical transgressions.

  8. 7.

    I will work to avoid ethical transgressions.

Note: Question 1a was a dichotomous choice between “Yes” or “No”. The remaining questions were a Likert-type scale from 0 = Strongly disagree to 7 = Strongly agree. In the second semester of data collection, all items were followed by a prompt to write a brief explanation of their selection.

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Tomlin, K.A., Metzger, M.L. & Bradley-Geist, J. Removing the Blinders: Increasing Students’ Awareness of Self-Perception Biases and Real-World Ethical Challenges Through an Educational Intervention. J Bus Ethics 169, 731–746 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04294-6

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