What Is Behavioral Ethics?

Behavioral ethics is a field of research in sociology that focuses on how people behave when presented with ethical dilemmas, or choices that do or do not conform to accepted standards of human behavior within specific environments. As a field of social scientific research, the objective is less concerned with what the actual ethical standards are in a given situation as it is with what motivates people to comply with or violate such standards. The psychology of motivation for actions in behavioral ethics is a complex undertaking, as it has been shown as of 2011 that actual responses during ethical dilemmas are often inconsistent and hypocritical. People can deeply ascribe to certain moral principles, but often find justification for acting contrary to them.

This conflict of action versus belief that seems to violate behavioral integrity is often attributed to personal bias. That is, individuals see their own behavior in a more favorable light than the same types of ethics violations carried out by others. This condition is commonly known as the double standard, and reveals a core understanding of behavioral ethics. Individuals consistently have an inaccurate awareness of their own behavior, whether it is fairly compared to the same behavior in others or not. The purpose of behavioral ethics, therefore, is to gain a systematic understanding of how the human mind establishes boundaries for following or violating its own accepted moral principles.

While there are several different subdivisions of behavioral ethics based on motivations for behavior, such as cognitive ethics, humanistic ethics, and biological ethics, the overall focus for the outcome of the research is in the arena of business activity. This is because the primary way in which human beings have an increased power to benefit or harm each other either financially or physically is through the work in which they choose to engage and the subjective decisions that must be made in that work day-to-day. Recent large-scale scandals in the western business and investment community as of 2007 to 2008, which led to a global financial downturn, have put increasing pressure on the field of behavioral ethics. Governments and social scientists are being tasked with coming up with predictable causes for irresponsible behavior and ways to control and prevent it in the future.

One of the core discoveries of behavioral philosophy is the erroneous belief and trust that has been placed in the rational actor model. The rational actor model states that human beings are rational, reasonable creatures who make important decisions after extended introspection and logical contemplation of potential outcomes. While this is true in some instances, it fails to account for how beliefs or ascribed allegiance to certain ethics principles often supersedes rationality.

This dichotomy of rational versus belief-based decision-making has led behavioral ethics to question some previously-held views about motivations behind human behavior. One of the foundations guiding choice in human behavior has been the assumption that, when people make decisions, it is almost always through an active, conscious cognitive process. In reality, individuals have a sense of innate moral relativity in any social environment, and act accordingly. That is, important decisions are often made unconsciously based on how much it will “cost” to follow the moral path versus to violate it.