Situational ethics

About: Situational ethics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4023 publications have been published within this topic receiving 145379 citations.

The Forms of Social Awareness

Abstract: The theme of this chapter can be expressed in two simple observations. The first is that a person can think about different things. The second is that even in thinking about one thing, the person may do so from different perspectives. Because these observations can be made with remarkable frequency in daily life, their importance is often cloaked in what Heider (1958) called the “veil of obviousness.” We hope to open the veil a bit for these deceptively commonplace ideas by introducing a systematic way of understanding their profound influence on social behavior. This analysis begins with an exploration of what it means to think about different things from different perspectives in the course of social encounters. We then define several forms of social awareness-states of mind in which the person is consciously aware of a specific range of social experience from a specific point of view. After identifying some personal and situational antecedents of these forms, we turn finally to an outline of the crucial behavioral effects that can be traced to their variations.

Myopic Biases in Strategic Social Prediction: Why Deadlines Put Everyone Under More Pressure Than Everyone Else

Abstract: Five experiments document biases in the way people predict the outcomes of interdependent social situations. Participants predicted that situational constraints would restrain their own behavior more than it would the behavior of others, even in situations where everyone faced identical constraints. When anticipating the effects of deadlines on outcomes of negotiations, participants predicted that deadlines would hinder their performance more than it would hinder the performance of others. The results shed light on the psychological processes by which people predict the outcomes of and select strategies in strategic social interaction. They extend prior findings, such as people believing themselves to be below average on difficult tasks, to highly interdependent situations. Furthermore, the article shows both how focusing can account for these effects and also how perspective taking can reduce their biasing influence.

A Descriptive Study of Situational and Individual Influences upon Individuals' Responses to Sexual Harassment:

Abstract: Recently, Thacker and Ferris (1991) proposed a theoretical model in which they suggested that targets' responses to sexual harassment would be influenced by the nature of the working relationship between the target and the harasser, the type of harassment, and gender. The purpose of this study is to investigate these potential influences, as well as duration, another situational influence, upon two types of target response: complaint/refusal and avoidance/going along. Respondents are employees of the Federal government. Findings suggest that both situational and individual influences have differential effects upon target response. Implications for the design of user-friendly sexual harassment prevention policies are discussed.

Automatic normative behavior in environments: The moderating role of conformity in activating situational norms

Abstract: Previous research (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2003) has shown that mental representations of situational norms (e.g., behaving quietly in libraries) and corresponding overt behaviors are capable of being automatically activated. Two experiments extended this line of research by investigating the conditional role of the tendency to conform to social norms in these effects. Participants explored a picture of a library and were given the goal to visit this library or not. Accessibility of representations of normative behavior was assessed in a lexical decision task. In the first experiment, individual differences in conformity to social norms were measured, whereas in the second experiment conformity was primed. Results indicated that the goal to visit the environment caused participants to automatically access representations of normative behavior. Importantly, in both experiments conformity was shown to moderate these accessibility effects: Automatic access to representations of normative behavior emerged when conformity tendencies were active.

How Managers Talk about their Consumption of Popular Management Concepts: Identity, Rules and Situations

Abstract: This paper analyses how top managers account for their consumption of popular management concepts. By ‘consumption’ we refer to managers acting as active users of popular management concepts within their organizations. After reviewing the relevant literature, we argue that the logic of appropriateness is a better theoretical perspective to view, understand and analyse managers' accounts of concept consumption than is the logic of consequence. We apply this perspective to extensive interviews we conducted with top managers in Germany. Based on the managers' own accounts of how they understand and apply popular management concepts, we identified four discourse categories: (1) learning from others' experiences, (2) controlling organizational change, (3) gaining external legitimacy and (4) collective sensemaking. We argue that these discourse categories all draw on the social norm of rationality central to managerial identity, while differing in socially defined rules about how rationality is realized in typical management situations. Our findings strongly encourage researchers, when investigating popular management concepts in the future, to take into account the situational nature of rationality that circumstantiates the consumption of concepts.