Becoming a First-Class Noticer

Max   Bazerman

Article | Harvard Business Review | July–August 2014

Becoming a First-Class Noticer: How to Spot and Prevent Ethical Failures in Your Organization

Abstract

We'd like to think that no smart, upstanding manager would ever overlook or turn a blind eye to threats or wrongdoing that ultimately imperil his or her business. Yet it happens all the time. We fall prey to obstacles that obscure or drown out important signals that things are amiss. Becoming a "first-class noticer," says Max Bazerman, requires conscious effort to fight ambiguity, motivated blindness, conflicts of interest, the slippery slope, and efforts of others to mislead us. As a manager, you can develop your noticing skills by acknowledging responsibility when things go wrong rather than blaming external forces beyond your control. Bazerman also advises taking an outsider's view to challenge the status quo. Given the string of ethical failures of corporations around the world in recent years—from BP to GM to JPMorgan Chase—it's clear that leaders not only need to act more responsibly themselves, but also must develop keen noticing skills in their employees and across their organizations.

Keywords: accountability; Business ethics; Cognitive psychology; Human behavior; Personal ethics in business; Business or Company Management; Ethics;

Format: Print

4 pages

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Citation:

Bazerman, Max. "Becoming a First-Class Noticer: How to Spot and Prevent Ethical Failures in Your Organization." Harvard Business Review 92, nos. 7/8 (July–August 2014): 116–119.

Who should get a ventilator if there aren’t enough to go around? Research on decision making leads to three concrete guidelines that policy-makers and physicians can use to make fair choices when allocating scarce, life-saving resources. The key to making fair and ethical choices is to assure that decisions are made through an impartial process.

Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Signing at the Beginning vs at the End Does Not Decrease Dishonesty

Ariella Kristal, A.V. Whillans, Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely

Honest reporting is essential for society to function well. However, people frequently lie when asked to provide information, such as misrepresenting their income to save money on taxes. A landmark finding published in PNAS (Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, and Bazerman, 2012, “Signing at the Beginning Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-reports in Comparison to Signing at the End”) provided evidence for a simple way of encouraging honest reporting: asking people to sign a veracity statement at the beginning instead of at the end of a self-report form. Since this finding was published, various government agencies have adopted this practice. However, in this project, we failed to replicate this result. Across five conceptual replications (N = 4,559) and one highly powered, pre-registered, direct replication (N = 1,235) conducted with the authors of the original paper, we observed no effect of signing first on honest reporting. Given the policy applications of this result, it is important to update the scientific record regarding the veracity of these results.

Keywords: Morality; nudge; policy-making; replication; honesty; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Policy;

Citation:

Kristal, Ariella, A.V. Whillans, Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar, and Dan Ariely. "Signing at the Beginning vs at the End Does Not Decrease Dishonesty." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117, no. 13 (March 31, 2020). View Details

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Becoming a First-Class Noticer: How to Spot and Prevent Ethical Failures in Your Organization

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