Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(279)
- Faculty Publications (177)
- December 2017
- Supplement
Piracy in Somalia (B)
By: Sophus A. Reinert and Alissa Davies
Supplements the (A) case. View Details
- September 2017
- Case
Harvard Men's Soccer
By: Alison Wood Brooks and Katherine Coffman
In the fall of 2016, the Crimson, Harvard’s undergraduate newspaper, broke a story revealing that the 2012 Harvard Men’s Soccer team had produced a sexually explicit “scouting report” about the Women’s Soccer team. The story generated national headlines and... View Details
- September 2017 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
FJ Management Inc.
By: Lynda M. Applegate and Matthew G. Preble
In late 2015, Crystal Call Maggelet, president and CEO of FJ Management, is working with her investment committee to help set the company’s strategic direction. Maggelet, daughter of the company’s founder, has led FJ Management since 2009 when she stepped in as CEO... View Details
Keywords: Turnaround; Company History; Family Business; Transformation; Volatility; Change Management; Entrepreneurship; Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Cash Flow; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Financial Liquidity; Financial Management; Governance; Corporate Governance; Governance Controls; Leadership; Leading Change; Crisis Management; Negotiation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Family Ownership; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Business Strategy; Energy Industry; Travel Industry; Retail Industry; Service Industry; Utah
- Article
Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Jason Nemirow, Maxim Massenkoff and Steven Pinker
What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments?
We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental
model of people’s actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants... View Details
- July 2017
- Article
Business Responsibilities for Human Rights: A Commentary on Arnold
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
Human rights have come to play a prominent role in debates about the responsibilities of business. In the business ethics literature, there are two approaches to the question of whether businesses have human rights obligations. The “moral” approach conceives of human... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
Corporate Moral Agency, Positive Duties, and Purpose
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
A long-standing question in business ethics is whether business enterprises are themselves moral agents with distinct moral responsibilities. To date, the debate about corporate moral agency has focused on responsibility for past wrongdoing that involves violating... View Details
- Article
Is Saving Lives Your Task or God's?: Religiosity, Belief in God, and Moral Judgment
By: Netta Barak-Corren and Max Bazerman
Should a Catholic hospital abort a life-threatening pregnancy or let a pregnant woman die? Should a religious employer allow his employees access to contraceptives or break with healthcare legislation? People and organizations of faith often face moral decisions that... View Details
- Article
Moral Traps: When Self-serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior
By: Stephanie C. Lin, Julian Zlatev and Dale T. Miller
Two assumptions guide the current research. First, people's desire to see themselves as moral disposes them to make attributions that enhance or protect their moral self-image: When approached with a prosocial request, people are inclined to attribute their own... View Details
Keywords: Morality; Attributions; Decision Making; Prosocial Behavior; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Perception
- April 2017
- Supplement
Imprimis (C)
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Karen Elterman and Marc Appel
This case is a supplement to Imprimis (A & B). Set in 2015, it first describes Imprimis’s decision to introduce its own line of compounded eye drop medication called LessDrops. The case then examines the moral dilemma faced by CEO Mark Baum, who was struck by the... View Details
- Article
Normative Judgments and Individual Essence
By: Julian De Freitas, Kevin P. Tobia, George E. Newman and Joshua Knobe
A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over
time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the
next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types... View Details
Keywords: Concepts; Essentialism; Normative Factors; Persistence; True Self; Morality; Identity; Moral Sensibility; Perception
- April 2017
- Article
The Responsibilities and Role of Business in Relation to Society: Back to Basics?
By: Nien-he Hsieh
In this address, I outline a back-to-basics approach to specifying the responsibilities and role of business in relation to society. Three “basics” comprise the approach. The first is arguing that basic principles of ordinary morality, such as a duty not to harm,... View Details
- March 2017 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
CEO Activism (A)
By: Michael W. Toffel, Aaron K. Chatterji and Julia Kelley
This case introduces CEO activism, a phenomenon in which business leaders engage in political or social issues that do not relate directly to their companies. The case uses several examples to describe why business leaders are engaging in CEO activism and the potential... View Details
Keywords: Leadership & Corporate Accountability; Environmental And Social Sustainability; Environment; Climate Change; Gender Equality; Communication Strategy; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Leadership; Law; Rights; Risk Management; Media; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Religion; Expansion; Strategy; Social Issues; Consumer Products Industry; Electronics Industry; Technology Industry; United States; Indiana; North Carolina
- March 2017
- Article
Why Do We Hate Hypocrites? Evidence for a Theory of False Signaling
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Roseanna Sommers, Paul Bloom and David G. Rand
Why do people judge hypocrites, who condemn immoral behaviors that they in fact engage in, so negatively? We propose that hypocrites are disliked because their condemnation sends a false signal about their personal conduct, deceptively suggesting that they behave... View Details
- Article
Origins of the Belief in Good True Selves
By: Julian De Freitas, Mina Cikara, Igor Grossman and Rebecca Schlegel
Despite differences in beliefs about the self across cultures and relevant individual differences, recent evidence suggests that people universally believe in a ‘true self’ that is morally good. We propose that this belief arises from a general tendency: psychological... View Details
- 2017
- Article
True Happiness: The Role of Morality in the Concept of Happiness
By: Jonathan Phillips, Julian De Freitas, Christian Mott, June Gruber and Joshua Knobe
Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents' psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Vicarious Contagion Decreases Differentiation—and Comes with Costs
By: Ovul Sezer and Michael I. Norton
Baumeister et al. propose that individual differentiation is a crucial determinant of group success. We apply their model to processes lying in between the individual and the group—vicarious processes. We review literature in four domains—attitudes, emotions, moral... View Details
- 2016
- Case
Advanced Leadership Pathways: Alberto Mora and the Costs and Consequences of Torture
By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Benjamin Summers
Alberto Mora's time as General Counsel of the Navy from 2001–2006 greatly influenced his mission to illuminate the policy consequences of torture. Mora's drive to restore the nation's awareness and conscience against torture was gaining traction. Prominent... View Details
Keywords: Leadership Skills; Torture; Costs And Consequences; Humane; Restraint; Human Dignity; Treatment Of Prisoners; Prison; Repression; Opposition; Revolution; Democracy; Communism; International Affairs; Public Service; September 11; War On Terror; Operation Enduring Freedom; Guantanamo; Cuba; Coalition; Working Group; Cruelty; Interrogation; Memorandum; American Law; Authority; Authoritative; Quadrennial Defense Review; National Defense Authorization Act; Public Engagement; Advocacy; Law; Accountability; Center For The Victims Of Torture; Human Rights; Public Policy; Legality; Morality; Legal System; Tactical Military Operations; West Point; NGO; Human Rights First; American Civil Liberties Union; Human Rights Watch; Amnesty International; Constitution Project; Center For Constitutional Rights; Strategic Military Effect; National Security; Weapon; Terrorism; Prisoners Of War; Abu Ghraib; Pentagon; Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Leadership; Rights; Policy; Public Opinion; United States
- 2016
- Teaching Note
Advanced Leadership Pathways: Shelly London and Ethics Education
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Tessa Natanay Hamilton and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone
Teaching Note for Case 313-028. Following a successful career as a Senior Vice President, Vice President, and Chief Communications Officer at two large corporate companies, Shelly London became a Harvard Advanced Leadership Fellow. During her fellowship she set out to... View Details
- 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
- November 2014
- Case
Napalm: From Soldiers Field to Trang Bang
By: Tom Nicholas and Jonas Peter Akins
Napalm is one of the most destructive weapons ever to be invented. Yet, at its original inception it was nothing more than a technical challenge, and it was never intended to be used in indiscriminate antipersonnel warfare. The pathway of its development by a Harvard... View Details