Confronting Your Ethical Blindspots: The New Age of Ethics
To err is human, but to understand the nature of our errors may be divine. This is the realm of behavioral ethics, with one website transforming how its taught to create a kinder, more humane world.
We are all prone to various biases and behaviors that we just can’t help. They’re in the blueprint of being human. We partake in group-think, avoid speaking up when it comes at a “social cost” and tend to make self-serving decisions. Although we can’t eradicate these instincts, we can cultivate an understanding of these tendencies in order to make better, more ethical decisions. At least, that’s the prime philosophy and objective of behavioral ethics.
Cara Biasucci believes that understanding behavioral ethics in ourselves and others gives us the power to create a better, kinder and more ethical world. That’s why she and her colleagues Robert Prentice and Lazaro Hernandez run Ethics Unwrapped, a free online platform that teaches the fundamental concepts of ethics to students across the world.
In this edition of The Scoop, we take a look at what it takes to create a platform like Ethics Unwrapped. Biasucci gives a glimpse into the remarkable impact that these lessons in behavioral ethics may have for our world, and the hardships she and her colleagues face in this unique endeavor.
“It’s so important to be able to hear each other out when we have differing values, and also to understand our commonality. If you’re a human being, you’re subject to these biases and pressures. There’s no way that you’re not.” - Cara Biasucci
A brief history of behavioral ethics
It wasn’t until relatively recently that beliefs regarding man’s superior rational and logical thinking was questioned. Up until the early 20th century, “we’ve been thinking that rationality is the thing that separates human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom…” Biasucci says. This changed when Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky discovered the notion of behavioral economics. They were pioneers in cognitive bias, realizing that humans don’t make rational choices. Instead, we function off a System 1 and System 2 paradigm, which are two distinct ways of making decisions. System 1 thinking results in automatic, unconscious decision making and supports most of the choices we make throughout the day. Only System 2 thinking demands slow, logical and conscious decision-making.
This realization flipped the traditional notion of humans as rational beings on its head. With the vast majority of our choices made by our reflexive, intuitive and emotionally-charged framework, we’re using rational and logical thinking only a fraction of the time.
This why behavioral ethics is so important, and the primary teaching objective of Ethics Unwrapped. Understanding our behaviors and how these connect to ethical decision making is our greatest leverage in creating a better world. This understanding is further heightened through the intersection of other related domains like biology, neuroscience and psychology, which have all in recent times contributed significantly to research in this area.
“It takes the conversation out of the realm of the theoretical. It’s not enough to know moral frameworks. We’re facing ethical issues all the time. We’re not recognizing them as ethical issues because we have blindspots. We are rationalizing our intuitive responses to these situations, and not actually using deliberate logical thinking to work our way through to the most ethical decision that we can.” - Biasucci
Behavioral ethics in the classroom
Traditionally, ethics was taught in the context of philosophy or religious studies. This bode well in a world where many students pursued liberal arts educations and had a broader exposure to philosophy. As education has increased its focus on specialization, often as the cost of liberal arts, this has meant less opportunities for students to learn ethics.
This widespread lack of education is part of the reason why Biasucci was driven to found Ethics Unwrapped almost 11 years ago. With over 2,000 universities and hundreds of thousands of site visitors a month, the platform has served a real need in educating students globally.
Teaching ethics, the new way
When Biasucci began her work with Ethics Unwrapped, she knew the most important first step: understanding what was already out there.
Rather than jumping in and making content straight away, she interviewed many educators across the United States in an attempt to understand how ethics was being taught. It was from these interviews she gained key insights, like how students wanted to “see people who looked like them talking to them. They didn’t want to see a bunch of people who look like their parents talking to them about ethics.”
Moreover, she purposefully sought out instructors from various disciplines. “If we’re gonna create publicly available content, I want it to be useful across disciplines,” Biasucci said. Today, that dream lives on clearly, with Ethics Unwrapped videos being watched by students across all disciplines, from law school to music appreciation to chemistry.
Choosing video as the primary medium was a natural choice. Biasucci already had a decade of filmmaking experience and anticipated that short form videos would be the perfect conduit for teaching ethical concepts. She wanted to make “the videos short, so that teachers could use them in a variety of different ways, either inside the classroom to introduce a topic, or outside the classroom as preparation for discussion.” Going to the site today, you’ll find some videos under a minute, and longer ones maxing out at around seven minutes.
Those domain experts continue to be a pivotal part of the platform today. Biasucci works with academics across the country to come up with new, research-based content. These collaborators are just as passionate as Biasucci when it comes to communicating these important topics. She believes, “We all do this because we believe in the same thing, which is elevating ethics education, with the effort to make our world a more humane, friendlier, kinder, more conscious world.“
Students response
Years later, the crucial choices Biasucci and her collaborators made early on bore fruit. In their survey of over 8,500 students across the University of Texas campuses and colleges, over 90% of students said that watching an Ethics Unwrapped video helped them understand and apply ethics. Even more salient was the huge portion of respondents that specifically commented about the value of the student interviews within videos. Many videos, like this one on sports, use student interviews as the primary medium for how ethical concepts are taught in the Ethics Unwrapped world. Seeing the lessons in real-world situations from relatable sources made the content concrete and engaging, according to the survey respondents.
When reflecting on the 800+ survey comments on the Ethics Unwrapped content, Biasucci finds that the responses are split roughly down the middle. Half of the students resonate deeply with their peers presenting information, while the other half are particularly drawn to the animations and narrations. This seven-minute introduction to moral emotions demonstrates how easily these videos communicate even relatively complex and multifaceted topics. Corresponding materials, like a case study of the Wells Fargo 2016 fiasco, provide real-world examples of the same concepts, giving students concrete examples of how these ethical concepts influence some of the biggest scandals.
A persistent challenge: staying free
The accessibility of Ethics Unwrapped is both its greatest asset and most challenging requirement to work around. The platform is entirely free, and Biasucci views this as critical to its mission. When they started, there wasn’t a comparable source providing the same content in such an accessible manner. Clearly, Ethics Unwrapped filled a much needed gap. In fact, this wasn’t just limited to universities. In addition to the thousands of students and individuals across the world watching their content, over 1,000 companies have also used the platform in order to help educate employees. The openness of the platform has also been a crucial factor in appealing to a wide range of viewers across the world.
However, keeping any platform strictly free isn’t easy. For as long as Ethics Unwrapped has been around, securing finances have been a struggle. In fact, the project began with a finite budget, designed to be spent over a 3-year period. Since then, additional sources of funding have been acquired through other grants and opportunities, keeping the project alive and well today.
In an increasingly polarized world, understanding behavioral ethics is a crucial first step to bridging gaps between dissenting groups. By acknowledging our innate biases and self-serving behaviors, we are then empowered to step beyond those limitations.
“If you’re a human being, you’re subject to these biases and pressures. There’s no way that you’re not. And to be able to give each other a little bit of mercy, a little bit of slack, and recognize we all operate under this umbrella of imperfection…” - Biasucci
That’s what inspires Biasucci, her colleagues and collaborators to continue working on Ethics Unwrapped. Through the common language of behavioral ethics, everyone, and especially the next generation of world leaders and decision-makers, can understand each other better and make better choices.
Did you learn or teach behavioral ethics throughout your academic career? How do you think it should be incorporated into education? Share your thoughts and join the discussion below.
We would like to warmly thank Cara Biasucci for her valuable insights for this edition of The Scoop.