BazermanMoore

130 Chapter 7: Fairness and Ethics in Decision Making
hunting trip with friends) and doing what is best for their clients, their patients, or society
at large. These same professionals, however, assume that they themselves are immune
from such conflicts of interest. Likewise, it would be natural for the authors of
this book to believe that the degree to which a job candidate’s research affirms our own
research never would affect our opinions in a faculty hiring decision. After all, we consider
ourselves to be honest and objective people. Not only do we believe that we ourselves
are immune from conflicts of interest, but we also believe that the professionals
giving us advice can overcome them as well.
This common belief in our own objectivity and the objectivity of our advisors belies
the clear evidence that conflicts of interest are less likely to lead to conscious corruption
than they are to distort our judgments in ways that we are not even aware are occurring.
When a real-estate agent advises you to raise your offer beyond what a rational assessment
would suggest, the point is not that she is corrupt, but simply that she is human,
and therefore implicitly motivated to maximize her own returns from the deal. Because
of this, she will focus on anecdotal evidence suggesting that buyers would prefer to
overpay a bit for a house rather than run the risk of losing it. When we are motivated to
interpret or alter data in a direction that will benefit us financially or otherwise, we are
not capable of providing others with an objective assessment (Moore, Cain, Loewenstein,
& Bazerman, 2005). This is true of doctors, lawyers, auditors, real-estate agents,
professors, and other professionals.
Many people believe that disclosure is the best solution to conflicts of interest.
In the words of former U.S. Senator Phillip Hart, ‘‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant.’’
Disclosure is attractive in part because it does little to disrupt the status quo: Parties
need only report what they are doing. Consequently, disclosure is one of the most common
responses to conflicts of interest. Disclosure of donations to politicians and political
parties is the centerpiece of most campaign-finance legislation, including the
McCain-Feingold Act of 1997. Most of Title IV of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2001,
which regulates auditing, is dedicated to issues of disclosure. Professional associations,
including the American Medical Association and the Society for Professional Journalists,
have codes of ethics that instruct their members to disclose potential conflicts of
interest, as does the New York Stock Exchange.
But disclosure is not a panacea. In fact, Cain, Loewenstein, and Moore (2005)
present evidence suggesting that disclosure can actually increase bias. In their study,
the researchers assigned one member of each pair of participants to the role of ‘‘estimator’’
and the other to the role of ‘‘advisor.’’ Both participants were asked to estimate
the amount of money held in each of six jars filled with coins. Each advisor was
able to inspect each jar closely and at length, while the estimators could only look at
the jars briefly and from a long distance. Each advisor was then asked to provide advice
to his or her estimator about the amount of money in the jars. Estimators always
were paid more when their estimates were more accurate. The advisors had a conflict
of interest, because they were paid more the more their estimators overestimated
how much money was in the jar; in other words, advisors had an incentive to mislead
the estimators into guessing high. In addition, Cain, Loewenstein, and Moore (2005)
told some of the estimators about the advisors’ pay arrangement but said nothing
about it to the rest of the estimators.