Are Students Blind to Their Ethical Blind Spots? An Exploration of Why Ethics Education Should Focus on Self-Perception Biases

Ethics blind spots, which have become a keystone of the emerging behavioral ethics literature, are essentially biases, heuristics, and psychological traps. Though students typically recognize that ethical challenges exist in the world at large, they often fail to see when they are personally prone to ethics blind spots. This creates an obstacle for ethics education—inducing students to act in an ethical manner when faced with real challenges. Grounded in the social psychology literature, we suggest that a meta-bias, the bias blind spot, should be addressed to facilitate student recognition of real-world ethical dilemmas and their own susceptibility to biases. We present a roadmap for an ethics education training module, developed to incorporate both ethics blind spots and self-perception biases. After completing the module, students identified potential ethical challenges in their real-world team projects and reflected on their susceptibility to ethical transgressions. Qualitative student feedback supports the value of this training module beyond traditional ethics education approaches. Lessons for management and ethics educators include (a) the value of timely, in-context ethics interventions and (b) the need for student self-reflection (more so than emphasis on broad ethical principles). Future directions are discussed.