Inaction and Decision Making in Moral Conflicts

Netta  Barak-Corren; Max   Bazerman

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Article | Organizational Dynamics | January–March 2020

Inaction and Decision Making in Moral Conflicts

by Netta Barak-Corren and Max Bazerman

Abstract

People regularly face conflicts in which obeying one moral requirement means transgressing another. Moral conflicts require difficult decisions: a person believes she should take both actions, but doing both is impossible. In this paper, we examine a common form of decision-making for those facing moral conflicts: inaction. Instead of taking any action, people too often respond with procrastination, indecision, avoidance, and evasion.

Keywords: moral conflicts; Moral Sensibility; Decision Making; Behavior;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Barak-Corren, Netta, and Max Bazerman. "Inaction and Decision Making in Moral Conflicts." Art. 100703. Special Issue on 21st Century Decision Making. Organizational Dynamics 49, no. 1 (January–March 2020).

About the Author

Max H. Bazerman

Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets

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Article | MIT Sloan Management Review | Summer 2020

Want to Make Better Decisions? Start Experimenting

Michael Luca and Max Bazerman

Four lessons for using randomized controlled experiments to create value for your company and customers

Keywords: randomized controlled experiments; Value Creation; Decision Making;

Citation:
Luca, Michael, and Max Bazerman. "Want to Make Better Decisions? Start Experimenting." MIT Sloan Management Review 61, no. 4 (Summer 2020). View Details

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Article | Harvard Business Review Digital Articles | April 29, 2020

How Should We Allocate Scarce Medical Resources?

Max Bazerman, Regan Bernhard, Joshua D. Greene, Karen Huang and Netta Barak-Corren

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.

Keywords: COVID-19; Health Pandemics; Resource Allocation; Decision Making; Policy; Fairness; Ethics;

Citation:
Bazerman, Max, Regan Bernhard, Joshua D. Greene, Karen Huang, and Netta Barak-Corren. "How Should We Allocate Scarce Medical Resources?" Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (April 29, 2020). View Details

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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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Inaction and Decision Making in Moral Conflicts

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