Removing the Blinders: Increasing Students’ Awareness of Self-Perception Biases and Real-World Ethical Challenges Through an Educational Intervention

Kathleen A. Tomlin (), Matthew L. Metzger () and Jill Bradley-Geist ()
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Kathleen A. Tomlin: Fairfield University
Matthew L. Metzger: University of Colorado Colorado Springs
Jill Bradley-Geist: University of Colorado Colorado Springs

Journal of Business Ethics, 2021, vol. 169, issue 4, No 8, 746 pages

Abstract: Abstract Business ethics educators strive to produce graduates who not only grasp the principles of ethical decision-making, but who can apply that business ethics education when faced with real-world challenges. However, this has proven especially difficult, as good intentions do not always translate into ethical awareness and action. Complementing a behavioral ethics approach with insights from social psychology, we developed an interventional class module with both online and in-class elements aimed at increasing students’ awareness of their own susceptibility to unconscious biases and, consequently, unethical behaviors. We deployed this intervention within a problem-based learning course (137 undergraduate students), in which students completed real-world projects for actual business clients. Our results suggest that although students appeared universally aware of the importance of ethical issues in business and generally espoused intentions to act ethically, those who received the intervention were significantly more likely to recognize their own susceptibility to perpetuating unethical business behavior and to identify ethical issues specific to their real-world projects. These results have important implications for behavioral ethics pedagogy and provide a de-biasing interventional approach for bridging classroom knowledge with real-world skills.

Keywords: Behavioral ethics; Social psychology; Psychological traps; Bias blind spot; Knowing-doing gap; Ethics education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-019-04294-6

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