Blaming The Unlucky
A recent working paper finds that we call the same decision immoral when it leads to a bad outcome, but moral when it leads to a good outcome:
Two studies investigated the influence of outcome information on ethical judgment. Participants read a series of vignettes describing ethically-questionable behaviors. We manipulated whether those behaviors were followed by a negative or positive consequence. As hypothesized, participants judged behavior as less ethical when it was followed by a negative consequence. In addition, they judged the behavior as more blameworthy and to be punished more harshly. Participants’ ethical judgments mediated their judgments of both blame and punishment. The results of the second experiment showed again that participants rated behavior as less ethical when it led to undesirable consequences, even if they saw that behavior as acceptable before they knew its consequences. Implications for both research and practice are discussed. …
We show that outcomes of decisions lead people to see the decisions themselves in a different light, and that this effect does not depend on misremembering their prior state of mind. In other words, people will see it as entirely appropriate to allow a decision’s outcome to determine their assessment of the decision’s quality. … The tendency demonstrated in our studies might lead people to blame others too harshly for making sensible decisions that have unlucky outcomes. … Too often, we let ethically-questionable decisions slide for a long time until they result in negative outcomes, even in cases in which such outcomes are easily predictable.
This makes morality look more like a social convention for who we can blame for what, rather than a direct guide to decision making.
The most amazing part of this blog is finding out what amazing things otherwise intelligent people can find to be surprised by. That makes this place a gem beyond price.
Can you think of a single Kerviel or Leeson who was caught, fired and hung out to dry after the bank noticed he was making far too much profit for them?
Having worked in the futures and options trade (not, happily, as a trader), I actually have seen someone fired for following unhedged trading strategies that turned out to temporarily profitable. He was extremely surprised, particularly since he simultaneously received a sizeable bonus from his activities, but some of the old gray heads in the office understood. Bias evaporates like first frost when you have to make a hundred bets per day, every day.
Participants in the study may believe that they themselves are fallible judges of ethics. If that is the case, then it may be rational for them to update their judgment in the light of new evidence relevant to an ethical judgment. Specifically, one thing that is relevant to an ethical judgment is what it is reasonable to expect as the outcome of an action. The more reasonable it is to expect a bad outcome from the action, the more likely it is that the action is ethically suspect. And our judgment about what it is reasonable to expect is in turn informed by our experiences of what actually happens. The more often we observe that A leads to B, the more reasonable we judge it to expect A to lead to B. And in this study, the participants did in fact observe (or think they observed) one case in which the action led to a bad outcome.