Milgram

1.

Our success as moral agents at work depends in part on being able to notice and respond to the features of organizational situations that are liable to lead our decision-making morally astray. As we learned in the section on ethical reasoning, it is often not easy or natural to reason in a morally sound way in business organizations. Rationalization, social influence, and misplaced incentives can each, or in combination, create difficulty.

We might be misled in thinking that these challenges tend to arise because of the malevolent intentions of organizational leaders or designers. “If only all the managers were better people who made better decisions,” we might wish. But these challenges often arise irrespective of the intentions and character of organizational members, and oftentimes the bad decisions of managers are themselves the result of challenging situations that the managers had no hand in creating. This means that, if we want to understand how to navigate moral problems in business, we need to take seriously, and better understand the detailed contours of, situational challenges in organizations.

Fortunately, we can benefit from research undertaken by social scientists focused on these issues since the middle of the twentieth century. In this section, we will focus on an influential, replicated study – the Milgram obedience study. Begin by watching this clip of original footage from the study.

Video 2.1. Milgram experiment 1963 by PsychHubUK

2.

The results of the Milgram study are sobering. They have been replicated many times. The vast majority of participants, though well-intentioned, decent people, repeatedly performed actions that they thought to be harmful (perhaps even deadly!) and morally wrongful. Imagine yourself as a participant in the Milgram study. You might hope to be in the small minority who refused to inflict the “shocks,” but we should be humble about the potency of our own moral agency.

The most immediate question that arises is a why-question: Why did so many of the participants go along with wrongful instructions, especially when they were entirely free to quit the experiment and leave whenever they chose? It is natural to focus on, as the video clip did, “the man in a white coat.” He is the one instructing the participants to administer the (unbeknownst to them, fake) electric shocks.

But it is worth reflecting further about why this figure held so much sway in their minds. He was not a formal authority figure, like a manager or law enforcement official. The participants were involved with the experiment entirely voluntarily. Again, they could leave or quit whenever they wanted. So why did his prodding, “The experiment requires you to continue,” function like an authoritative order in their minds? One factor to consider here is the operation of “social heuristics,” whereby in the presence of uncertainty, people tend to defer to or imitate the expressed judgments and behaviors of those who seem successful and confident in the environment. (Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier, 2011)

Closely related to this is what moral psychologists call the “displacement” of responsibility. Note that when the study participant in the video becomes very concerned and agitated about the harm he may be doing, he asks a crucial question, “Who’s going to take responsibility if something happens to that gentleman?” What follows (revisit this part of the video clip if you don’t recall it) involves the participant displacing their sense of moral responsibility. They come to view the experimenter as responsible instead of (or at least much more so than) themselves.

Finally, note that the participants were separated from the experimental confederates by a wall. They could hear the confederates’ protests and yells, but they could not see their faces. It turns out that seeing others’ faces plays an important cognitive role in our moral reasoning. (Werner and Vance, 2022) We are much more likely to take their perspective and interests seriously when we see their faces, and less so when not.

3.

The Milgram study presents a rather exotic set of circumstances, quite unlike those we tend to face in everyday organizational situations. How, if at all, do we see these factors arise in more mundane situations in business? To explore this, let’s return to the Wells Fargo case [New Tab].

If you were a banker or branch manager at Wells Fargo, how might you have encountered situational challenges analogous to those we find in the Milgram study? Try to move one by one through the relevant factors we discussed.

Answering these questions should begin to reveal how, even though the Milgram study is peculiar in the social situation it created, the moral challenges it imposed on study participants are quite common in mundane organizational situations. And notice that they can arise even if no one (or at least very few) members of an organization have bad or malevolent intentions. This means that to be ready and equipped to engage in effective moral reasoning, we need to keep our eyes out for situational factors that arise independently of any bad actors.

References

Gigerenzer, G. & Gaissmaier, W. (2011). Heuristic Decision Making. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 451–82. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120709-145346

Bandura, B. (2002). Selective moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Journal of Moral Education, 31(2), 101-119, https://doi.org/10.1080/0305724022014322

Werner, P. & Vance, J. (2022). Attentional moral perception. Journal of Moral Philosophy. https://www.doi.org/10.1163/17455243-20220001