Ethical

Business people face ethical issues every day which can be very difficult to assess. Some types arise infrequently, others occur regularly, and we are not even aware of it. So, now the question is how this could happen? Researchers and psychologists have been working hard on this issue, and eventually found the answer on this question. According to the Yale psychologist David Armor, “we are deluded by the illusion of objectivity; the notion that we are free of the very biases, we are so quick to recognize in others”. Although, we may believe that a job’s candidate race is not a determined factor on our decision making, or that we are immune on conflict of interest, we may find out that we could be very wrong. The psychological research exposes counter intentional, unconscious biases, which even the most well- meaning person is not resistant off. Unconscious/unintended bias is something we do not have control over. The article “How (UN) ethical are you?” describe four sources that are related to the unintentional unethical decision making: implicit forms of prejudice, bias that favors one’s own group, conflict of interest, and a tendency to over claim credit.

The bias that emerges from unconscious beliefs or the implicit prejudice is deeply embedded in the fundamental mechanics of the thought. In order to organize our world, and make our life easier, we tend to automatically connect one thing to another, for example: rain and thunder, bread and butter, poor and lazy etc. According to the social scientists, children begin to acquire prejudices and stereotypes as toddlers. Many studies have shown that as early as age three, children pick up terms of racial prejudice without even understanding their significance. That means, that we grow to trust them, and they can “blind” us to the point where the associations are not accurate.

In the mid-1990s, a professor at the University of Washington, Tony Greenwald, developed an experimental tool called the Implicit