Was Blind But Now I See: Understanding Ethical Blindness in Terms of Function Rather than Content

Ethical blindness entails a lack of awareness of ethically relevant information and hence the motivation to act on it, and arises despite the importance of humans' moral sense to our survival. Existing research suggests that individuals rely on rigid frames in their information processing to guide behavior when they feel threatened, and that the use of rigid frames often underlies ethical blindness. Specifically, research from other psychological subdisciplines (e.g., attachment theory, political psychology) links rigid framing with excluding certain pieces of information as a response to perceived threat, in order to facilitate or avoid triggering certain behaviors (e.g., compliance versus questioning the decisions of those in power or of the majority, even when it entails acting unethically). These psychological processes are in turn associated with increasing versus decreasing one’s level of physiological arousal – upregulation versus downregulation, respectively. In marked contrast to the extant literature, which focuses on the behaviors in which ethical blindness is manifest (e.g., euphemistic labeling), the authors focus on understanding the psychological function it is serving. They accordingly suggest how different interventions to reduce ethical blindness may be more effective depending on whether it is serving an upregulating or downregulating function.