BazermanMoore

124 Chapter 7: Fairness and Ethics in Decision Making
decisiveness that System 1 thinking (discussed in Chapter 1) provides. System 1 thinking
allows the biases created by bounded ethicality to develop, which in turn leads to
decisions that deviate from one’s personal standards.
Like the other biases reviewed in this book, the biases emanating from bounded
ethicality apply to all of us, even the best and the brightest. In March 2004, for example,
Justice Antonin Scalia denied a motion from the Sierra Club to recuse himself from an
upcoming Supreme Court case, Cheney v. U.S. District Court for D.C. Scalia had
hunted ducks in Louisiana with Vice President Dick Cheney in January 2004, just three
weeks after the Supreme Court had agreed to consider whether Cheney should be
forced to provide information about the energy task force he had led as the Bush administration
formulated its environmental policy. The Sierra Club argued that Scalia and
Cheney’s friendship compromised Scalia’s objectivity. ‘‘If it is reasonable to think that a
Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I
had imagined,’’ Scalia wrote in defense of his decision (Janofsky, 2004). His friendship
with the vice president would not intentionally distort his judgment, Scalia argued, and
did not violate the Supreme Court’s rules on conflicts of interest.
But the rules governing the Supreme Court, like most guidelines, rules, and laws
that protect against conflict of interest, were generated to guard only against intentional
corruption (Banaji, 2004). Scalia’s comments indicate that he either chose to ignore or
was unaware of the strong evidence of the psychological aspects of conflict of interest.
In this section, we will provide evidence that many of the strictest of conflict-of-interest
guidelines are not sufficient to address those conflicts of interest that escape the awareness
of the professional being affected. For instance, psychologists have shown that a
friendship between two people makes it impossible for one friend to objectively assess
issues involving the other.
This chapter looks at seven examples of bounded ethicality: overclaiming credit
without realizing that you are doing so, in-group favoritism, discounting the future, implicit
attitudes, the psychology of conflicts of interest, indirectly unethical behavior, and
pseudo-sacred values. In each case, we present research showing that such behaviors
occur beyond an actor’s conscious awareness.
Overclaiming Credit
Ross and Sicoly (1979) asked married couples to estimate the percentage of household
chores, such as washing the dishes or taking out the trash, they each personally performed.
When the percentages offered by husbands and wives were added, the percouple
average was close to 140 percent. Since this original demonstration by Ross and
Sicoly, overclaiming of credit for work performed has been demonstrated in academia
(Caruso, Epley, & Bazerman, 2006), athletics (Brawley, 1984; Forsyth & Schlenker,
1977), and fundraising (Zander, 1971), just to name a few fields (see Caruso, Epley, &
Bazerman, 2005 for a review). The roots of overclaiming are the self-serving biases reviewed
in detail in Chapter 5. Even honest people believe they contribute more to an
enterprise than they actually do.
Overclaiming can also be a factor at the organizational level. Researchers have
puzzled over the question of why joint ventures so often result in disappointment