Groupthink is a phenomenon that police need to be aware of. It occurs within a group of people who desire harmony or conformity and results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs. This causes the group to minimise conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation. It is more likely to happen in a group that overestimates its power and morality and contains pressures towards uniformity.
https://www.prsb.vic.gov.au/groupthink
Leaders who develop stories with craft and humility can encourage ethically robust decisions. Stories’ descriptiveness can lead to appreciation of complexity that is missing from many current communication methods.
https://www.prsb.vic.gov.au/storytelling-and-ethics
Professor Michael Macauley discusses the use of storytelling and how that connects – both positively and negatively – with ethical decision making. This conversation explores the psychological links between developing narratives and sensemaking and provides an example of positive storytelling practice from New Zealand police. The session also warns against the dangers of storytelling as a form of manipulation on an individual and cultural level.
https://www.prsb.vic.gov.au/the-moral-of-the-story-storytelling-and-ethical-decision-making-1
Why are humans so slow to react to looming crises, like a forewarned pandemic or a warming planet? From a near-disastrous hike on Panama's highest mountain to courageously joining his high school's diving team, Adam Grant borrows examples from his own life to illustrate how tunnel vision around our goals, habits and identities can find us stuck on a narrow path. He shares counterintuitive insights on how to broaden your focus and remain open to opportunities for rethinking. (If you think you know something about frogs, watch until the end and get ready to think again.)
https://www.prsb.vic.gov.au/think-again
Most of us are comfortable saying that "leadership is an art." But what about ethical leadership? Is it an art, too?
When we think of someone who is "moral," "ethical," or "virtuous," we tend to think of an unimaginative rule-follower. Mention "artist," on the other hand, and we conjure up an image of someone who "colors outside the lines" both in their work and in their life—someone like Jackson Pollock, for example. Pollock lived and painted "volcanically." He broke with all of the artistic conventions of his time by flinging or pouring paint directly onto his canvases. And in his relationships he was similarly erratic and explosive.
Recent research has found, however, that morality and the imagination are not as separate as these images would suggest. It reveals that there is something of an artist in the ethical person after all.
https://www.prsb.vic.gov.au/is-ethical-leadership-an-art
How can we ensure that training has the greatest impact and the highest return-on-investment? Answering this question begins with looking at learner engagement and truly understanding how your people learn best.
Adult learning theory is a set of guiding principles and best practices for teaching adult learners. The effectiveness of ethics training can be improved when we focus on how adults learn. Significance and relevance, ability to direct own learning, problem centeredness, and cooperation and collaboration are some of the key principles of adult learning. Adults prefer to learn by doing than by being taught.
https://www.prsb.vic.gov.au/adult-learning-theory-10-key-principles-and-best-practices
We all like to think we are impartial when weighing up factors to make decisions. Unfortunately, the evidence is that in most situations, people have already made up their minds and then work backwards to justify their decisions. This is called motivated reasoning, and it can influence many decisions. What can we do to avoid this kind of thinking?
https://www.prsb.vic.gov.au/motivated-reasoning-the-use-of-reasoning-to-justify-self-serving-decisions
Bias is a particularly important topic for police officers, as biases, both positive and negative, can affect how well police interact with the community and how effective they are. We’ve discussed ingroup bias. This interesting short video discusses the opposite bias - outgroup bias.
https://www.prsb.vic.gov.au/outgroup-bias
Ethical fading occurs when the ethical aspects of a decision disappear from view. This happens when people focus heavily on some other aspect of a decision, such as solving a case or managing a high workload. People tend to see what they are looking for, and if they are not looking for an ethical issue, they may miss it altogether. We can try to counteract it by learning to recognise when we put ethical concerns behind other factors in making decisions.
https://www.prsb.vic.gov.au/ethical-fading
Can people be persuaded to act in ways that serve the longer-term collective interest? What strategies can we use to encourage people to make strong long-term decisions in situations defined by a conflict between short-term self-interests and longer-term collective interests?
https://www.prsb.vic.gov.au/how-to-short-circuit-short-term-thinking