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Learning & Development

Published November 2007

Training the Ethical Workforce

Brian Summerfield

Most companies have some sort of ethical foundation in place, but if those values aren't part of the lifeblood of those organizations, then they're just words. Principles must be clearly communicated to employees. If done correctly, training can breathe life into ethics.

In his controversial and now well-known Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, Professor Philip Zimbardo enlisted the help of several college students to create a mock jail setting in the basement of Stanford University's psychology school. Twenty-four undergraduate male students were arbitrarily divided into "inmate" and "guard" roles in the scenario. The situation was even more realistic because the prisoners were arrested at their homes by actual police officers in Palo Alto, Calif.

Only a couple of days after the experiment, the prisoners rioted in response to the poor treatment they received. To put a stop to this revolt, the guards attacked them with fire extinguishers. Also, many of them subsequently became more sadistic in their handling of the inmates, meting out punishments such as denying them use of the bathroom and forcing exercise sessions. Conditions got so bad that the program was shut down after six days, less than half the time planned for it.

Why did this happen? What led to the collapse of decency and humanity between two groups of people whose members were essentially interchangeable? The answer has a lot to do with ethics.

In the guards' "orientation," Zimbardo told them the following:

"Their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy … we're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general, what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation, we'll have all the power, and they'll have none."

Additionally, upon their arrival, the guards stripped, deloused and issued uniforms to the inmates, who were then supplied with the ID numbers that served as their "names" during the exercise. The detainees weren't referred to by their real names at any point in the experiment.

Additionally, the guards wore mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact with the prisoners. These acts were obviously intended to dehumanize members of each group and make them antagonistic toward each other.

With this ethical framework, it's no surprise the experiment went so badly. Ethical lapses are frequently the product of institutional values or a lack thereof. The highly publicized corporate scandals from the earlier part of this decade were examples of this.

"Some of the case studies I've read on companies like WorldCom, Enron and Arthur Andersen have to do with driving this culture of expectations of high performance in such a way that the message is, 'Anything goes,'" said James Murphy, International Business Ethics Institute executive director. "If you're thinking about whether the right ethical decision or your stock price at the end of the quarter is more important, that's a very tough choice to make on a day-to-day basis. In some of these cases, companies found those external pressures were too intense."