Ethics Readings and Resources

Do you know how ethical you are? Most people overestimate their own ethical behaviour, and have large blind spots about things that can influence their own ethical decision making. How can we challenge our flawed self perception and make better ethical decisions?

Groupthink is a phenomenon that police need to be aware of. It occurs within a group of people who desire harmony or conformity and results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs. This causes the group to minimise conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation. It is more likely to happen in a group that overestimates its power and morality and contains pressures towards uniformity.

Leaders who develop stories with craft and humility can encourage ethically robust decisions. Stories’ descriptiveness can lead to appreciation of complexity that is missing from many current communication methods.

Most of us are comfortable saying that "leadership is an art." But what about ethical leadership? Is it an art, too?
When we think of someone who is "moral," "ethical," or "virtuous," we tend to think of an unimaginative rule-follower. Mention "artist," on the other hand, and we conjure up an image of someone who "colors outside the lines" both in their work and in their life—someone like Jackson Pollock, for example. Pollock lived and painted "volcanically." He broke with all of the artistic conventions of his time by flinging or pouring paint directly onto his canvases. And in his relationships he was similarly erratic and explosive.
Recent research has found, however, that morality and the imagination are not as separate as these images would suggest. It reveals that there is something of an artist in the ethical person after all.

How can we ensure that training has the greatest impact and the highest return-on-investment? Answering this question begins with looking at learner engagement and truly understanding how your people learn best.
Adult learning theory is a set of guiding principles and best practices for teaching adult learners. The effectiveness of ethics training can be improved when we focus on how adults learn. Significance and relevance, ability to direct own learning, problem centeredness, and cooperation and collaboration are some of the key principles of adult learning. Adults prefer to learn by doing than by being taught.

We all like to think we are impartial when weighing up factors to make decisions. Unfortunately, the evidence is that in most situations, people have already made up their minds and then work backwards to justify their decisions. This is called motivated reasoning, and it can influence many decisions. What can we do to avoid this kind of thinking?

Bias is a particularly important topic for police officers, as biases, both positive and negative, can affect how well police interact with the community and how effective they are. We’ve discussed ingroup bias. This interesting short video discusses the opposite bias - outgroup bias.

Ethical fading occurs when the ethical aspects of a decision disappear from view. This happens when people focus heavily on some other aspect of a decision, such as solving a case or managing a high workload. People tend to see what they are looking for, and if they are not looking for an ethical issue, they may miss it altogether. We can try to counteract it by learning to recognise when we put ethical concerns behind other factors in making decisions.

Can people be persuaded to act in ways that serve the longer-term collective interest? What strategies can we use to encourage people to make strong long-term decisions in situations defined by a conflict between short-term self-interests and longer-term collective interests?

Robert Cialdini is a speaker who focuses on influence and persuasion. His content is ethically appropriate. The approaches he advocates are used in entirely non manipulative ways that never deceive or coerce others into assent. Persuasion is a key capability of police. Persuasion seeks to influence others by changing their attitude or behaviour. In this short video, Robert Cialdini explains the science of influence and persuasion based on research evidence.

How we can use these insights ethically?