BazermanMoore

126 Chapter 7: Fairness and Ethics in Decision Making
former sorority sister for a job, or to talk to your banker cousin when a friend from
church gets turned down for a home loan? A favor is a favor no matter who you’re
helping, right?
Few people set out to exclude underrepresented minorities through such acts of
kindness. But when those in the majority tend to favor people who are similar to them
when allocating scarce resources (such as jobs, college admissions, and mortgages),
they effectively discriminate against those who are different from them. Consistent with
the work on implicit attitudes that we will discuss later in the chapter, Dasgupta (2004)
has reviewed almost 100 research studies that show that people have a greater tendency
to associate positive characteristics with their ‘‘in-groups’’ (groups they belong to) than
with ‘‘out-groups’’ (groups they do not belong to), and to more easily associate negative
characteristics with out-groups than with their in-groups. Moreover, Bernhard, Fischbacher,
and Fehr (2006) have shown that people’s willingness to engage in altruistic
norm enforcement by punishing those who treat others unfairly is much greater when
those treated unfairly are similar to themselves with respect to ethnic, racial, or language
group. These discriminatory patterns can result from both automatic, implicit
processes and thoughtful, explicit processes.
People often regard the favors they do for in-group members as virtuous, without
recognizing the harm that these favors may create for out-group members. Even as we
congratulate ourselves for doing something nice for a member of our ‘‘community,’’ we
overlook the ethical implications of the favoritism we perpetuate in the process. Ingroup
favoritism, or giving ‘‘extra credit’’ for shared demographic traits, is equivalent to
punishing people for being different from you. Yet helping people who are like us is
viewed by society as a nice thing to do, while discriminating against those who are different
is viewed as unethical.
Over the last decade, studies have repeatedly shown that banks are much more
likely to deny a mortgage to an African-American than to a Caucasian, even after controlling
for a variety of factors, including income, house location, and so on. The common
view is that banks are overtly hostile to the African-American community. For
some banks and some loan officers, this may very well be the case. But Messick and
Bazerman (1996) argue that a much more common—and insidious—cause of discriminatory
mortgage lending is likely to be in-group favoritism. Thus, white loan officers
may be making too many loans to unqualified whites. Given a limited pool of resources,
fewer funds remain available for nonwhite applicants.
Discounting the Future
People generally believe that we ought to leave the natural environment in as good a
state as we inherited it. People also generally believe that we should not treat the Earth
and its natural resources ‘‘as if it were a business in liquidation’’ (Herman Daly, as cited
in Gore, 1992, p. 191). These explicit values concern future generations. In contrast,
our bounded ethicality allows us to make ongoing decisions that are inconsistent with
our explicit views. Rather than making decisions aimed at sustainability, we choose to
consume environmental resources at an ever-increasing rate. Our explicitly stated concern
for the future collides with our implicit desire to consume, and, too often, our