BazermanMoore

48 Chapter 3: Bounded Awareness
she was asked if he or she had noticed anything unexpected or a change. Most of the
pedestrians did not report noticing the removal of the basketball.
In a parallel study, Angelone, Levin, and Simons (2003) showed people a videotape
of an interaction in which clearly visible clothing or objects were changed during a cut
in the camera position. 1 But it is not simply the case that people failed to perceive these
changes. In a series of studies, Mitroff, Simons, and Franconeri (2002) confirmed this
pattern of failing to explicitly notice a change, while having some implicit representation
in one’s mind of the information pre- and post-change. This suggests that at some
level they perceived the change but that somehow it was screened out of conscious
awareness. Evidence suggests people are even more prone to missing changes that occur
gradually (Simons & Rensink, 2005).
Are people any better at detecting changes in realms outside of visual perception?
Probably not. Imagine that you are an accountant who is in charge of the audit of a
large, well-respected corporation. After you have seen and approved of high-quality,
highly ethical financial statements for one year, the corporation begins stretching the
law in a few places, but commits no clearly unethical behaviors. The third year, the firm
stretches the ethicality of its returns a bit further; some of the company’s accounting
decisions may in fact violate federal accounting standards. By the fourth year, the corporation
is stretching the law in many areas and occasionally breaking laws. In this situation,
do you ever notice the unethical aspects of the reporting? And if so, at what
point, if any, do you refuse to sign a statement affirming that the financial records are
acceptable according to government regulations?
We predict that you are much more likely to notice and refuse to sign the statements
if the ethical lapse occurs abruptly from one year to the next. This prediction is
based on the notion of a ‘‘slippery slope’’ of unethical behavior (Cain, Loewenstein, &
Moore, 2005; Gino & Bazerman, 2006). According to the slippery slope theory, one tiny
step away from high ethical standards puts a corporation on a slippery slope downward
into larger ethical lapses. But such lapses are more likely to occur through tiny slips than
in one fell swoop. When our behavior becomes unethical one step at a time, we are less
likely to notice what we are getting ourselves into and more likely to be able to justify the
behavior than if we abruptly drop our ethical standards (Tenbrunsel & Messick, 2004).
In this sense, ethical degradation is like boiling frogs: Folk wisdom says that if you
throw a frog in boiling water, it will jump out. But if you put a frog in nice warm water
and slowly raise the temperature, by the time the frog realizes the water has become
too hot, it will already be cooked. Studies of ethical decision making confirm that people
are more willing to accept ethical lapses when they occur in several small steps than
when they occur in one large step (Gino & Bazerman, 2006).
FOCALISM AND THE FOCUSING ILLUSION
Gilbert, Wilson, and their colleagues (2000; Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, &
Axsom, 2000) coined the term focalism to describe the common tendency to focus too
much on a particular event (the ‘‘focal event’’) and too little on other events that are
1 For an example, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE.