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Cognitive, Ideological, And Goal-Pursuit Barriers To Ethical Decision Making, Jeffrey J. Bailey

Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Technology

This paper brings together diverse research findings to suggest that there are several cognitive, ideological, and goal-pursuit barriers that often get in the way of ethical decision-making. The barriers lead managers to give little or no conscious attention to the ethical implications of their actions. The barriers that I categorize and describe are overconfidence, cognitively “filling-in” of missing information, social norm beliefs, ethical fixed mindsets, metaphors in-use, fairness and justice ideology, behavioral scripts, goal-fever (teleopathy), and goal framing. I describe the processes and mechanisms that underlie these barriers to increase awareness of them so that the willing manager may be …