Noga – Shaw - Pant Using Causal Loop Thinking to Examine Professional Accounting Ethics Issues in the Curriculum

This paper offers causal loop thinking as a basic framework for helping students analyze professional ethical questions facing the accountants. After the Arthur Anderson meltdown, several challenging ethical policy issues surfaced for critical debate in the accounting curriculum. We suggest that a standard protocol can serve as a starting point for faculty and students engaged in this analysis. A similar framework has served in the more traditional material on individual behavior ethics. To organize discussions on personal ethical belief and behavior, many case presenters draw on the simple, generic, but useful basic decision model. This model provides an easily adopted methodology for instructors to identify a problem and consider alternative courses of action. Causal loop thinking adds context to student’s choices by specifying likely long term and distant consequences of such decisions are likely to be. As students grapple with understanding conflicts of interest facing several constituencies within the accounting profession, causal loop thinking about group structure and behavior can serve as a method of organizing thinking about the context of choices and actions.