Proceedings of Global Business Research Conference
7-8 November 2013, Hotel Himalaya, Kathmandu, Nepal, ISBN: 978-1-922069-35-1
Some (Non-) Effects of Ethics Education in Business and
Economic Contexts
James Konow
Recent years have witnessed a series of business scandals and economic upheavals, and
many people have pointed to poor morals as a cause. At the same time, there has been a
steady increase in emphasis on ethics education at institutions of higher learning, partly
motivated by these events. This paper reports the results of three studies designed to
examine different types of ethics education and their possible effects on the attitudes and
behavior of college students in business and economics contexts. Study 1 involves a survey
about attitudes towards fairness and compares the responses of students in a Philosophy
course, who have just completed a section on distributive justice, with those of students, who
have not, and finds almost no differences. Study 2 is an incentivized classroom experiment
with business and economics students involving a guest lecture followed by dictator and
prisoner dilemma decisions. There are three groups of subjects, who are exposed to
different lectures: one emphasizing moral duties, one stressing self-interested reasons for
cooperating, and a third a control about applying statistics to economics. Moral duty
increased generosity in the dictator game but not cooperation in the prisoner’s dilemma,
whereas the lecture stressing self-interest had the opposed effect: cooperation rose but not
generosity. Finally, Study 3 examines effects of volunteer work on subsequent generosity in
a dictator game and finds a significant positive effect for recent volunteering but not for more
distant activities. These studies suggest that ethics education might or might not have effects
in economic contexts, and the effects depend on the type of education employed and the
type of effect targeted.
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James Konow, Professor of Economics, Loyola Marymount University, USA, Email: jkonow@lmu.edu
and
Chair of Economics and Ethics, Kiel University, Germany.