Guidelines for Behavioral Business Ethics Project (300 pts)
Instructions (from the syllabus): Drawing on the behavioral ethics resources at Ethics Unwrapped as well as your own thinking and outside research, you and your assigned partner will make a case for applying some behavioral ethics techniques to what you perceive to be a common ethical issue in the workplace. Your work together will culminate in an in-class presentation; your presentation content (ppt, visual aides, etc.) will be submitted at Canvas. Specific guidelines will embedded in the Canvas assignment and discussed in class.
Behavioral Ethics Defined (from Ethics Unwrapped): “Behavioral ethics is the study of why people make the ethical and unethical decisions that they do. Its teachings arise from research in fields such as behavioral psychology, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology…. Instead of focusing on how people ought to behave, behavioral ethics studies why people act as they do…. Research in behavioral ethics finds that people are far from completely rational. Most ethical choices are made intuitively, by feeling, not after carefully analyzing a situation. Usually, people who make unethical decisions are unconsciously influenced by internal biases, like the self-serving bias, by outside pressures, like the pressure to conform, and by situational factors that they do not even notice. So, behavioral ethics seeks to understand why even people with the best intentions can make poor ethical choices.”
Project Description: If behavioral ethics can help us understand why people make unethical choices, it is in theory also capable of helping us intervene in decision-making to improve ethical outcomes in the workplace. For this project, you and your partner/s will do research to identify a problem area in business decision-making where behavioral ethics might help. Your ethical focus should be specific: the issue you discuss may be identified through personal experience or from our textbook or another source, but must be documented and analyzed with the help of at least three outside research sources (e.g., news or magazine articles providing data on the issue, real-life examples, and/or analyses of the costs of such ethical lapses could be helpful; however, at least one source should be from a scholarly book or journal). In addition, you must draw from at least two different video sources at Ethics Unwrapped to explain how those concepts/videos could be used as educational resources to avoid the issue(s) you’ve identified. Those videos should not be the only “intervention” you and your partner imagine, but they should be included in your presentation in some way.
Your presentation should include some visuals, a ppt, etc. All sources need to be properly documented in the presentation. As preparation for the assignment, you are required to submit a project idea at the Canvas discussion “Behavioral Business Ethics Project Ideas” on Friday, 3/4, by midnight.
**See the rubric below for a synopsis of expectations for the assignment.
Rubric for Behavioral Business Ethics Project
Excellent = (+Average to Good= (Poor = (-No evidence = 0
_____ Identified a common workplace ethical issue or issues to be addressed.
_____ Explained why these issues are important using the vocabulary of our course.
_____ Utilized at least three relevant outside sources, including at least one scholarly source.
_____ Drew from at least two concepts/videos in the Ethics Unwrapped behavioral ethics series to recommend an intervention.
_____ Met minimum presentation length expectations (10 mins).
_____ Properly cited all sources (videos, textbook, outside sources, etc.).
Overall: Was your presentation well-informed by the course and your sources? Was it attentive to the assignment guidelines? Did it make a persuasive case that the interventions you’ve proposed are relevant to the issue(s) you identified?
Additional Comments:
