Lesson Three: People may do bad things as part of a group, even though they may never consider doing so when acting alone.

There are many examples in which mob violence, mass riots and massacres are linked to group pressure, crowd psychology or herd morality (Handwerk, 2005, June 20; Welner, 2011, August 11; see also Sims, 1992). According to psychologists, the psychology of a crowd differs from that of an individual (Reicher, 2001). The reason is that people can get swept up in the collective movement and therefore do things they may never have considered when acting alone, such as committing acts of violence against other people. If events within the group move too fast, people may act without thinking until it is too late. The problem with such groupthink is that it is easy to lose ones identity that is, to become anonymous. It is also easy for individuals to feel a loss of individual responsibility, because responsibility can become diffused within groups. Generally, the larger the group, the easier it is not to be noticed and the less responsible a single group member may feel about the actions of the group. For example, if I cause the death of a person, I might (and probably should) feel fully responsible for that terrible act. However, if I am one of 300 individuals in a group that causes the death of someone, should I say that I am fully or only partly responsible? If partly responsible, then is my responsibility one part of 300 or something different? This example shows why it can be difficult for group members to feel responsible for actions taken by the group. A classic experiment documenting the role of group pressure on individual behavior was conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s (Asch, 2004). In this study, subjects were shown two cards. One card had one vertical line and the other card had three vertical lines of different lengths. Subjects were asked to select, from the card with three vertical lines, the one that was the same length as the single line on the first card. When making this choice alone, subjects almost always selected the right line. However, when asked to make their decision within a group, people erred when others in the group incorrectly selected the wrong line. What subjects did not know was that members of the group were confederates to the experimenter; the confederates knowingly selected the line of wrong length in order to determine whether the subject would be able to choose independent of the groups collective incorrect decision. Asch was able to document that an individuals resistance to group pressure in these experiments depends to a considerable degree on how wrong the majority is (p. 25). In other words, the greater the number of group members choosing incorrectly, the more likely it is that a single person will also make an incorrect choice. Aschs experiments and similar studies of conformity have been replicated numerous times in a variety of countries (Sunstein, 2003). Responsibility that people feel in groups can also be diffused as group tasks or activities are divided among members of the group. For example, consider the extreme case of a firm that makes a product that causes the death of a consumer, as illustrated by the Jack-in-the-Box restaurant case in the U.S. in 1993 in which three children died and hundreds sickened by eating beef tainted with the E. Coli bacteria (Porterfield & Berliant, 1995, June 16) or by the Remedia case in Israel in 2003 in which three babies died and nearly two dozen more injured when fed vitamin-deficient baby formula (Tsoref, 2008, September 15; Bob, 2013, February 13). Who is responsible for such deaths? The individual who designed the product? The person who built a component of the product? The person who oversaw its assembly? The person who marketed it? The person at the store who sold it to the consumer? The company president? In this case, it is 9 not clear who could be held responsible, or if any particular person had a responsibility to raise a warning about a potential harm. We could say that everyone had a shared responsibility, but is this valid? Is the secretary to the human resources vice president as responsible as the person who designed the product? If they have differently levels of responsibility, then how are we to apportion that responsibility? The lesson here is that business managers must recognize that individuals working as a group within a firm may feel differently about their decisions than when making decisions alone. Therefore, in order to reduce the likelihood that groups make ethical mistakes or intentionally engage in opportunistic acts, business managers should take responsibility for the actions of workers collectively in their firms. They should also teach their workers the importance of being responsible and hold individuals within their organizations responsible who are caught behaving unethically.

A summary and description of the lesson that we can learn from about the situational contexts and circumstances that affect the ethical and unethical behavior of people.