How Implicit Assumptions Affect Ethical Behaviour
hilosophers have long theorized about the inner workings of moral decision-making. With a few important exceptions, rational thought has taken a dominant position in this literature. Recently however, scholars have drawn from findings on moral intuition and the burgeoning physiological and clinical research in the area to suggest that moral decision-making is also impacted -- if not dominated – by reflexive or automatic cognitive processes.
As work in this area progresses, a major hurdle has emerged: despite strong arguments for the relationship between automatic processes and moral behaviour, there is no direct evidence of this relationship. Furthermore, though many have acknowledged that organizations can play an important role in shaping automatically-driven behaviour, these discussions have been relatively abstract: to date, no research has shown how an organization can affect the relationship between an individual’s automatic cognitive processes and their behaviour.
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The literature on automatic cognition indicates that social judgments are rapidly constructed from past experience through a process that is truly automatic – i.e., without conscious deliberation. Individuals have been shown to approach even the most novel social situations informed by their underlying experience, which is stored in ‘knowledge structures’—schematic mental models that describe relationships between concepts. The term ‘implicit association’ refers to any association of this type. Scholars have distinguished between different kinds of implicit associations, including implicit attitudes, implicit stereotypes and implicit self concept.
Though people rarely think about their implicit associations and the assumptions that result from them, in truth they represent the basic unit of understanding that produces our day-to-day behaviour. It is important to note that implicit associations are distinct from explicit attitudes: explicit attitudes are beliefs and opinions developed through cognitive deliberation, which means that people are aware of holding such attitudes and beliefs. In contrast, implicit associations are what lead to automatic responses; they are activated without conscious effort by exposure to strongly associated stimuli. As a result, implicit associations are highly sensitive to context and often reflect culturally-pervasive themes.
Along with my colleagues Scott Reynolds of the University of Washington and Keith Leavitt of the United States Military Academy, I recently set out to study the implicit associations related to the term ‘business’. We chose this term because the concept is so common, and would be germane to anyone who has encountered moral issues at work. Though individual understandings of the term vary in minor details, at an abstract level everyone holds a general understanding of what the term represents. Furthermore, ‘business’ is generally linked to a particular set of norms and principles. Research shows that the term is associated with an economic paradigm that emphasizes competition, fiduciary responsibilities, maximizing shareholder returns and other traditional, economics-minded, capitalistic values and behaviours.
We made the following hypothesis: that an implicit assumption that business is moral will be positively associated with traditional, economics-minded, capitalistic values and beliefs. Beyond holding just a simple description of what ‘business’ represents, we believed that people also hold a normative (i.e. good or bad) valuation of the term, such that it is implicitly assumed to be either inherently moral or immoral. As Brown University’s Mark Suchman has argued, morality is an aspect of legitimacy, and thus, implicitly assuming that business is inherently moral would reflect a belief that the predominant economic paradigm with which business is associated is morally valid and legitimate.
A person who believes that ‘business is inherently moral’ would likely believe that business should be an exercise in intense competition emphasizing shareholder obligations, financial performance and other traditionally capitalistic practices. In contrast, an implicit belief that business is immoral would reflect a view that traditional business norms and practices are unwarrantedly aggressive and even harmful. Those who hold an implicit assumption that business is immoral would be more leery of the traditional, economics-minded, capitalistic business paradigm and would instead lean towards more collaborative and more people-oriented views, values and beliefs.
In addition to these associations with individual values and beliefs, my colleagues and I believed that this implicit assumption would also be associated with definitively moral behaviours. Empirical evidence of a link between elements of the traditional, economic paradigm and immoral behaviour can be found in research on deliberate moral decision-making. One analysis suggests that ‘Machiavellianism’ -- an individual trait that emphasizes competition and self-advancement -- is associated with immoral behaviour. In other research, the traditional economic paradigm is often represented as a more realistic and less idealistic view of the world, and research has demonstrated that realism is associated with immoral behaviour whereas idealism is associated with moral behaviour.
Though a link between an implicit belief about the moral nature of business and moral behaviour may exist, the evidence suggests that such a link requires a ‘contextual cue’ in order for the association to become salient. By definition, a contextual cue refers to ‘a message embedded in a discernable element of the environment’. Contextual cues can convey a great deal of information, and the relevance of any single piece of information to automatically-driven behaviour is a function of the extent to which the cue taps into existing associations. Thus, to the extent that a cue is salient to an existing implicit association, it can activate the association and initiate a behavioural response.
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