How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass

F.  Gino

Chapter | Cheating, Corruption, and Concealment | 2016

How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass

Abstract

Cheating, fraud, deception, uncooperative actions, and many other forms of unethical behavior are among the greatest personal and societal challenges of our time. While the media commonly focuses on the most sensational scams (e.g., Enron, Bernard Madoff), less attention is given to more prevalent "ordinary" unethical behavior—unethical actions committed by people who value morality but behave unethically when faced with an opportunity to cheat. Ordinary unethical behavior causes considerable societal damage, as demonstrated by increasing empirical evidence. Drawing on recent research in moral psychology and behavioral ethics, I examine "moral flexibility," or the common ability to justify one's immoral actions by generating multiple and diverse rationales for why these actions are ethically appropriate. The chapter discusses various antecedents to moral flexibility that are likely to prompt ordinary people to do wrong while feeling moral and suggests future research directions regarding how self-serving justifications result in ethical misconduct.

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Organizations; Attitudes;

Format: Print

Citation:

Gino, F. "How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass." In Cheating, Corruption, and Concealment: The Roots of Dishonesty, edited by Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Paul A.M. van Lange. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Article | Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | December 2019

It Helps to Ask: The Cumulative Benefits of Asking Follow-up Questions

Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Julia A. Minson and Francesca Gino

In a recent article published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP; Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson, & Gino, 2017), we reported the results of 2 experiments involving “getting acquainted” conversations among strangers and an observational field study of heterosexual speed daters. In all 3 studies, we found that asking more questions in conversation, especially follow-up questions (that indicate responsiveness to a partner), increases interpersonal liking of the question asker. Kluger and Malloy (2019) offer a critique of the analyses in Study 3 of our article. Though their response is a positive signal of engaged interest in our research, they made 3 core mistakes in their analyses that render their critique invalid. First, they tested the wrong variables, leading to conclusions that were erroneous. Second, even if they had analyzed the correct variables, some of their analytical choices were not valid for our speed-dating dataset, casting doubt on their conclusions. Third, they misrepresented our original findings, ignoring results in all 3 of our studies that disprove some of their central criticisms. In summary, the conclusions that Kluger and Malloy (2019) drew about Huang et al. (2017)’s findings are incorrect. The original results are reliable and robust: Asking more questions, especially follow-up questions, increases interpersonal liking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

Keywords: question-asking; communication; relationships; interpersonal communication; Conversation;

Citation:

Yeomans, Michael, Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Julia A. Minson, and Francesca Gino. "It Helps to Ask: The Cumulative Benefits of Asking Follow-up Questions." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 117, no. 6 (December 2019): 1139–1144. View Details

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When most organizations strive to increase collaboration, they approach it too narrowly: as a value to cultivate—not a skill to teach. So they create open offices, talk up collaboration as a corporate goal, and try to influence employees through other superficial means that don’t yield progress. Companies that excel at collaboration, in contrast, realize it involves instilling the right mindset: widespread respect for colleagues’ contributions, openness to experimenting with others’ ideas, and sensitivity to how one’s actions may affect teammates and outcomes. What’s more, these firms have established programs to help employees develop those attitudes.

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How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass

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