Ever Make a Bad Choice? Make it Worse by Rationalizing It?

I knew it was probably a risky thing to do.  But I hadn't been paid, and kept getting the runaround, so when I went over my boss's head, and his boss told me he'd look into it the following week, what I'd been hearing all along, I kind of went a little nuts and said, "Please don't take this the wrong way but I feel like I'm getting the runaround again."

And, poof!  They fired me.

So how do we talk ourselves into rationalizing bad choices?

I had every right to get paid.  But most likely I should have known the guy had a thin skin and I should have been more careful.  Even my son, 16 at the time, told me I should have not done it.

"When a reward is tempting enough, people will break their own moral codes to gain the desired prize," says newswise.com. "Afterward, they’ll tell you exactly how they were justified: 'It wasn’t as if anyone was harmed,' “I was only borrowing …,” 'My boss told me too,' or 'It’s our customers’ responsibility to read the fine print.'”

The web site exlains that it’s a rationalizing process called “moral disengagement” and  Darden Professors Sean Martin and Jim Detert have studied it. "People are self-interested, but we don’t like to face that about ourselves because we also have a strong need to see ourselves as good people, they argue, so we unintentionally, and quite effortlessly, use a series of cognitive maneuvers to justify self-interested choices that don’t align with who we say we want to be or what we want others to think about us. 

What I did isn't exactly like this but I wanted something and felt okay about pressuring my superior.

Moral disengagement can accompany small transgressions — pocketing extra change given in error at a coffee bar (“It was the cashier’s fault”) — and major scandals, such as those that have happened when employees at major U.S., European and Japanese automakers rationalized away behaviors that led to false advertising about fuel efficiency or potential risks to consumer safety.

In a series of experiments, Detert, Martin and their colleagues found that the more tempting the potential personal gain is, the more likely people are to break their own internal standards (their conscience) by utilizing morally disengaged thinking to distort the ethical consequences of a behavior. 

Martin says companies should be aware of this universal human tendency and learn how to challenge moral disengagement before it leads to bad decisions or creates an unethical culture.

When people are about to do something wrong because they’re morally disengaging, their language often changes. Euphemisms replace plain-spoken language. "For example, Wells Fargo employees opening fake banking accounts called it 'gaming' rather than “fraud," newswise says, adding, "When people pirate music or break licenses on software they may call it 'file sharing' instead of 'stealing.' 

"When they’re about to distort some accounting or sales numbers, employees may say 'Everyone does it' (diffusion of responsibility) or 'It’s no big deal' (distortion of consequences). In a letter to employees, United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz reportedly victim-blamed passenger David Dao, who was dragged out of his paid-for seat on an overbooked United flight, by calling him 'disruptive and belligerent.' That’s an example of attribution of blame. 

So how we solve this in the workplace?  Experts say companies need to scrutinize the goals they set, the web site points out.  Also, being aware of what we sound like and when people are particularly susceptible to self-interest are areas to watch.

Her'es a better example.  I recently wanted my husband to pick up some fruit for our son because I didn't feel like going to the grocery store so I told him they were out of it and could he pick up some?  (Usually, I do all the grocery-shopping).  The store, of course, had them but I just didn't feel like going to pick them up myself.

He went and got the fruit at another store but had to run to the original store to get something else.  He saw the fruit.  Gotcha. I suppose it's not as serious as fraud or distortion of consequences but it sure doesn't help a marriage!