Behavioral ethics in practice: why we sometimes make the wrong decisions

"This book is an accessible, research-based introduction to behavioral ethics. Often ethics education is incomplete because it ignores how and why people make moral decisions. But using exciting new research from fields such as behavioral psychology, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology, the study of behavioral ethics uncovers the common reasons why good people often screw up. Chapters coordinate with free online teaching resources from The University of Texas at Austin. Scientists have long studied the ways human beings make decisions, but only recently have researchers begun to focus specifically on ethical decision making. Unlike philosophy and religion, which aim to tell people how to think and act about various moral issues, behavioral ethics research reveals the factors that influence how people really make moral decisions. Most people get into ethical trouble for doing obviously wrong things. Aristotle cannot help, but learning about behavioral ethics can. By supplementing traditional approaches to teaching ethics with a clear, accessible, detailed, and research-based introduction to behavioral ethics, beginners can quickly become familiar with the important elements of this new field. This book includes the bonus of being coordinated with Ethics Unwrapped-a free, online, educational resource featuring award-winning videos and teaching materials on a variety of behavioral ethics (and general ethics) topics. This book is a useful supplement for virtually every ethics course, and important in any course where incorporating practical ethics in an engaging manner is paramount. The content applies to every discipline-journalism, business ethics, medicine, legal ethics, and others-because its chief subject is the nature of moral decision making. Because the book is research-based yet accessibly written with interesting studies, it could be used in high schools, colleges, graduate schools, and industry"--

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Title Page -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I Why it's hard to be the kind of person your dog thinks you are -- 1 Making moral judgments -- 2 How emotions influence ethics -- 3 Moral action decisions and moral reasoning flaws -- 4 Obedience to authority -- 5 Conformity bias -- 6 Overconfidence bias -- 7 Self-serving bias -- 8 Framing -- 9 Incrementalism -- 10 Loss aversion -- 11 Role morality -- 12 Moral equilibrium -- 13 Tangible and abstract -- 14 In-group bias -- 15 Implicit bias -- 16 Cognitive dissonance

17 General situational factors -- 18 Temporal factors -- 19 Fundamental attribution error -- Part II How to improve your chances of living a life you can be proud of -- 20 Being your best self -- 21 Rationalizations and other mechanisms of moral disengagement -- 22 Giving voice to your values -- 23 Creating a culture that makes it easier to do the right thing -- Notes -- Index