DID YOU KNOW that my New Year’s Pledge is to become more ethical?

Earlier this year, I took  Dan Ariely’s online  course "Introduction to Irrational Behavior."    A couple of the findings that Mr. Ariely presented in his course included the following.   When people are asked to sign an Honor pledge at the top of the page before completing a test there was less unethical behavior then when they were asked to sign the same Honor pledge at the bottom of the page at the end of taking the test.  When conflicts of interest in a professional environment are disclosed they are actually factored in less correctly then when they aren’t disclosed.     To essentially quote him the reality is that most of us think of ourselves as honest; but, in fact, we all cheat. From government to corporations, the classroom to the workplace, unethical behavior is everywhere. None of us is immune, whether it's speeding down the highway when we know we shouldn’t to taking the paper and pencils from the office home.

Ariely’s course was so valuable because he not only identified the problem he also identified and shared what we can do to improve and become more ethical.   Simply reminding someone about ethics before an event changed the outcome of the event in the same manner that signing the honor pledge at the top of the page before taking the test instead of at the end changed the behavior during the test. 

This year I have signed up for the impressively titled "Practical Ethics and Unethical Decision making in Organizations."

The introduction to the course description explains:

“ Whenever we hear about ethical scandals, we tend to believe that unethical or illegal behavior in organizations is driven by character deficiencies of individual actors. Put differently, we simply assume that bad things are done by bad people (so-called bad apples). However, numerous corporate scandals, such as Enron, Ford, or Siemens, have demonstrated that even people with a high level of integrity can break the rules if they are put into a corrupt context. Good apples may become rotten in bad barrels. Regardless of their good intentions and strong values, individual actors might adapt to the unethical practices in their respective organizational context and, over time, lose the ability to see their wrongdoings. They become ethically blind.”  ( https://www.coursera.org/course/unethicaldecision )

So this year I ask all of you, and in particular our government elected officials and staff,  to join me in a New Year’s resolution to pause a second whether at the office or at home before you do something and ask: Is this ethical?