Advancing Best Practices in Behavioral Interventions to Improve Moral Decision Making

Abstract: Within organizational contexts, people regularly face moral decisions. Organizations rely on a set of best practices to guide such moral decision making among their employees and their clients. Each of the papers in this symposium investigates one best-practice for behavior change intervention in the moral domain. We focus on societally impactful outcomes, including the positive outcomes of donating to charity and promoting women, and also the negative outcomes of spreading misinformation, selfish behavior in negotiations, and dishonesty. Popular interventions designed to affect each of these behaviors are based on assumptions derived from lay intuition and prior scholarship. In this symposium, we show that these assumptions are often tenuous. We first show that interventions aimed at decreasing deception and increasing charitable gifting are more limited than prior work has previously suggested. We then show that interventions to promote civility in negotiations can instead promote self-interested behavior. Finally, we present evidence for novel interventions that effectively curb the spread of misinformation and decrease the gender-wage gap, and that depart from common practice. Taken together, we demonstrate the limitations of popular interventions to change morally charged behaviors, and advance new best practices to promote welfare.

Keywords: Behavior Change Interventions, Morality, Ethics, Decision-Making