Ethics Readings and Resources

New research suggests the link between doing the right thing and "sleeping well" is no mere metaphor. By causing distress and rumination, unethical behavior can lead to insomnia. The researchers found that when people engaged in unethical behaviors, they felt they had lowered their own moral standing. As a result, they experienced negative feelings about themselves, including guilt and shame. This meant that as evening came, they could not unplug from work. They began to ruminate, revisiting their own distressing behaviors. Unable to relax, they could not get to sleep quickly.
However, not everyone lost sleep to the same degree. It also mattered whether the individual engaging in the counterproductive behaviors saw himself or herself as a moral person. Those who saw themselves as caring, compassionate, fair, and honest were affected the most. But those participants who did not see these and similar traits as a core part of who they are did not experience the same outcome.

We have all heard the phrase "power corrupts", and research backs the idea that power does tend to corrupt. But is this the only possible outcome? Does power have to corrupt? Not always. In fact, recent research suggests that we can change the way power affects us in order to help others and ourselves. While researchers find that power comes with temptations, they also affirm that power only “tends to corrupt”.

Do you know how ethical you are? Most people overestimate their own ethical behaviour, and have large blind spots about things that can influence their own ethical decision making. How can we challenge our flawed self perception and make better ethical decisions?

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

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.