Publications

2015
Article

Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment

By: George E. Newman, Julian De Freitas and Joshua Knobe

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about (a) what a person values, (b) whether a person is happy, (c) whether a person has shown weakness of will, and (d) whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend... View Details

Keywords: Concepts; Social Cognition; Moral Reasoning; True Self; Values; Weakness Of Will; Blame; Values and Beliefs; Identity; Moral Sensibility; Happiness

2018
Chapter

In Search of Moral Equilibrium: Person, Situation, and Their Interplay in Behavioral Ethics

By: Julia J. Lee and F. Gino

Book Abstract: This comprehensive and cutting-edge volume maps out the terrain of moral psychology, a dynamic and evolving area of research. In 57 concise chapters, leading authorities and up-and-coming scholars explore fundamental issues and current controversies. The... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Ethics; Situation or Environment

Research Summary

Moral Reasoning & Experimental Political Philosophy

In this work, we demonstrate a new and morally significant effect on judgment and decision-making. This research is inspired by the work of John Rawls, widely regarded as the most important political philosopher of the 20th Century. Here we apply the central... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Fairness; Distributive Justice

1995
Chapter

The Role of Fairness Considerations and Relationships in a Judgment Perspective of Negotiation

By: M. H. Bazerman and M. A. Neale

Keywords: Fairness; Relationships; Negotiation; Conflict and Resolution

April 2018
Article

Compromised Ethics in Hiring Processes? How Referrers' Power Affects Employees' Reactions to Referral Practices

By: Rellie Derfler-Rozin, Bradford Baker and F. Gino

In this paper, we explore referral-based hiring practices and show how a referrer’s power (relative to the hiring manager) influences other organizational members’ support (or lack thereof) for who is hired through perceptions of the hiring manager’s motives and... View Details

Keywords: Selection and Staffing; Ethics; Perception

Article

Doubting Driverless Dilemmas

By: Julian De Freitas, Sam E. Anthony, Andrea Censi and George A. Alvarez

The alarm has been raised on so-called driverless dilemmas, in which autonomous vehicles will need to make high-stakes ethical decisions on the road. We argue that these arguments are too contrived to be of practical use, are an inappropriate method for making... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Autonomous Vehicles; Driverless Policy; Transportation; Ethics; Judgments; Policy

2013
Book

Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed and How We Can Stick to the Plan

By: Francesca Gino

You may not realize it but simple, irrelevant factors can have profound consequences on your decisions and behavior, often diverting you from your original plans and desires. Sidetracked will help you identify and avoid these influences so the decisions you make do... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Decision-making; Judgment; Decisions; Strategy; Behavior; Ethics; Attitudes

March 2021
Article

Deliberately Prejudiced Self-driving Vehicles Elicit the Most Outrage

By: Julian De Freitas and Mina Cikara

Should self-driving vehicles be prejudiced, e.g., deliberately harm the elderly over young children? When people make such forced-choices on the vehicle’s behalf, they exhibit systematic preferences (e.g., favor young children), yet when their options are unconstrained... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Autonomous Vehicles; Driverless Policy; Moral Outrage; Moral Sensibility; Judgments; Transportation; Policy

January 2017 (Revised January 2019)
Case

The Rise and Fall of Lehman Brothers

By: Stuart C. Gilson, Kristin Mugford and Sarah L. Abbott

With nearly $700 billion in assets, Lehman was the largest U.S. bankruptcy in history. In 2007, Lehman achieved record earnings of over $4 billion on revenues of $60 billion. By September 2008 the fourth largest investment bank in the world was bankrupt. How had a... View Details

Educators

October 15, 2021
Article

Virtuous Victims

By: Jillian J. Jordan and Maryam Kouchaki

How do people perceive the moral character of victims? We find, across a range of transgressions, that people frequently see victims of wrongdoing as more moral than non-victims who have behaved identically. Across 15 experiments (total n = 9,355), we document this... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Restorative Justice; Punishment; Compensation; Person Perception; Moral Sensibility; Judgments; Perception

September 2017
Article

The Belief in a Favorable Future

By: Todd Rogers, Don A. Moore and Michael I. Norton

People believe that future others’ preferences and beliefs will change to align with their own. People holding a particular view (e.g., support of President Trump) are more likely to believe that future others will share their view than to believe that future others... View Details

Keywords: Social Cognition; Judgment; Prediction; Forecasting; False Consensus; Donation; Open Data; Open Materials; Preregistered; Forecasting and Prediction; Perception; Values and Beliefs; Behavior

February 2021
Case

The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations

By: Mihir Desai, Ruth Page, Suzanne Antoniou and Leanne Fan

How should historic social injustices be addressed? Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and their descendants, including Representative Regina Goodwin of Tulsa, believe they should be addressed through reparations and have consequently continued to push the government... View Details

Educators

May 2024
Article

Moral Thin-Slicing: Forming Moral Impressions from a Brief Glance

By: Julian De Freitas and Alon Hafri

Despite the modern rarity with which people are visual witness to moral transgressions involving physical harm, such transgressions are more accessible than ever thanks to their availability on social media and in the news. On one hand, the literature suggests that... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgement; Thin Slices; Social Media; Fake News; Misinformation; Moral Sensibility; News; Behavior

Article

If You're Going to Do Wrong, at Least Do It Right: Considering Two Moral Dilemmas at the Same Time Promotes Moral Consistency

By: Netta Barak-Corren, Chia-Jung Tsay, Fiery Cushman and Max Bazerman

We study how people reconcile conflicting moral intuitions by juxtaposing two versions of classic moral problems: the trolley problem and the footbridge problem. When viewed separately, most people favor action in the former and disapprove of action in the latter,... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Judgments; Problems and Challenges; Conflict and Resolution

07 Jul 2008
Research & Ideas

Innovation Corrupted: How Managers Can Avoid Another Enron

"In the end, Enron was at the center of a truly delinquent society. Once Enron's ethical drift took hold, its collapse was only a matter of time," says HBS professor emeritus Malcolm S. Salter. As he explains in this Q&A and... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Energy; Utilities

Article

Is the Moral Domain Unique?: A Social Influence Perspective for the Study of Moral Cognition

By: J. Lees and F. Gino

The nature of the cognitive processes that give rise to moral judgment and behavior has been a central question of psychology for decades. In this paper, we suggest that an often ignored yet fruitful stream of research for informing current debates on the nature of... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Social Psychology

September 2012
Article

Vicarious Dishonesty: When Psychological Closeness Creates Distance from One's Moral Compass

By: F. Gino and A. Galinsky

In four studies employing multiple manipulations of psychological closeness, we found that feeling connected to another individual who engages in selfish or dishonest behavior leads people to vicariously justify the actions of this individual and to behave more... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Relationships; Ethics; Research

2017
Working Paper

A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy

By: Matthew Weinzierl

I propose and formalize an argument for why economists working in the welfarist normative tradition should include nonwelfarist principles in how they judge economic policy. The key idea behind this argument is that the world is too complex, and our ability to model it... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Policy; Economics

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