The Social Psychology of Ordinary Ethical Failures

After the collapse of Enron, the fraud at Worldcom, and a host of other corporate scandals at the start of the new millennium, the media immediately began a search for the underlying cause of the failure of ethics that caused these scandals. These searches led to answers such as regulatory failure, a few bad apples, and the poorly created incentives of the gatekeepers. The scandals led to decline in the perception of business leaders in society, and business schools were challenged to rethink their training of future leaders. Implicit in the calls for action was the assumption that changes were needed to keep corporate actors from explicitly engaging in unethical behavior. The passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 made a variety of changes targeted to reduce intentionally corrupt behavior, including the regulation of public accounting firms. Although we applaud such changes in the incentive structure to make organizational actors act more ethically, we believe that such measures simply bypass the vast majority of unethical behaviors that occur without the conscious awareness of the actors who engage in them. The papers in this special issue provide insight into the types, magnitude, and causes of unethical behavior that can occur without the conscious awareness in the actor performing the unethical action and the consequences for those affected by their actions. These ordinary unethical behaviors are conceived to be ordinary because they are assumed to be rooted in the basic mechanics of the mind’s abilities and constraints (Banaji, 2001). They are also ordinary in that such unethical behaviors are not characteristic of a special group of unethical people, the bad apples that Enron had to cast away, but rather of all of us. If this is true, then the pervasiveness of what is termed “unethical” must be rethought, and as such the solutions to contemporary ethical scandals may need special attention. To engage in a satisfactory discussion of these issues, we