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.
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.
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?
Robert Cialdini is a speaker who focuses on influence and persuasion. His content is ethically appropriate. The approaches he advocates are used in entirely non manipulative ways that never deceive or coerce others into assent. Persuasion is a key capability of police. Persuasion seeks to influence others by changing their attitude or behaviour. In this short video, Robert Cialdini explains the science of influence and persuasion based on research evidence.

How we can use these insights ethically?
It is encouraging to see an increased focus on mental health in the workplace. It is also important to remember that leaders' concern for people needs to be authentic and based on respect for the dignity of each person:

"If your concern is purely utilitarian—and you feign concern to help ensure performance levels don’t slip, people will see right through it. Your regard for the mental health of your team must be born from a genuine concern for them as human beings, and the delight they experience in contributing to your organization. Treat performance results as an outcome of that kind of leadership. Treating people as only a means to an end is a sure fire way to damage their mental health and your team’s performance."
To build on the gains made in recent years, ethics training will have to accomplish several goals. First, ethics training needs to focus on unleashing participants’ intrinsic motivation to be ethical, rather than rely on solely on a compliance mentality that justifies ethical behavior through rewards and punishment. When people are intrinsically motivated they persevere through difficult times and are less likely to take short cuts. By making ethics something that leaders want to do and need to do in order to succeed, we can increase commitment to ethics in organizations and reduce the likelihood of ethical lapses which can be more likely to occur if our field of vision is narrowed by external incentives.


To make their behavior contagious, ethical leaders need to harness the power of "elevation."
Moral rules and codes are important but moral inspiration comes from people's ethical behaviour. When we see or hear about acts of kindness, we feel elevation - an emotion that has the power to spread leading to upward ethical spirals. Let’s share positive stories that exemplify our values because they are more likely to motivate us all to do better.
Can people really miss a gorilla right in front of their eyes? You bet your sweet bananas they can! This video provides a tongue-in-cheek exploration of inattentional blindness with Professor Dan Simons and the often ignored Invisible Gorilla himself.

Simons is a faculty member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois and the Human Perception and Performance group of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

For the slopes are slippery... Getting away with minor infractions makes it easier for people to justify bigger, more serious ethical violations. Addressing even the smallest ethical transgression is important. So is checking our own behaviour and rationalisations. A new study finds that getting away with minor infractions ends up making it easier for people to justify bigger, more serious ethical violations. Over time, small ethical transgressions–like stealing pens from work–can put employees on the “slippery slope” of increasingly bad behavior.
A frequent issue around ethics is whether it is grey, black and white or somewhere in between. Is it all relative - when in Rome do we do as the Romans do? Or do we have universal ethical values?  An interesting perspective on the objectivity of morality focuses on harm, arguing that  "it is objectively clear that where there is intentional harm there is immorality".  What do you think?