Max Bazerman

Most of us believe that we should make certain choices—save more money or reduce gas consumption, for example—but we do not want to carry out these choices. In psychology this tension has been referred to as a" want/should" conflict. Rogers and Bazerman show through four experiments that people are more likely to choose what they believe they should choose when the choice will be implemented in the future rather than in the present, a tendency they call" future lock-in." They also discuss directions for future research and applications for public policy, an arena in which citizens are often asked to consider binding policies that trade short-term interests for long-term benefits. Key concepts include:

A fresh, research-driven playbook for how successful leaders can maximize the potential of others When we think of leaders, we often imagine lone, inspirational figures lauded for their behaviors, attributes, and personal decisions--a perception that is reinforced by many leadership books. However, this approach ignores the expectations of modern work cultures centered on equity and inclusion, where a leader's true mission is to empower others. Applying decades of behavioral science research, Don A. Moore and Max H. Bazerman offer a passionate corrective to this view, casting today's organizations as decision factories in which effective leaders are decision architects, enabling those around them to make wise, ethical choices consistent with their own interests and the organization's highest values. As a result, a leader's impact grows because it ripples out instead of relying on one individual to play the part of heroic figure. Filled with real-life stories and examples of the structures, incentives, and systems that successful leaders have used, this playbook equips each of us to facilitate wise decisions.

It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about the many people who supported their unethical or criminal behavior. In each case there was a supporting cast of complicitors: business partners, employees, investors, news organizations, and others. And, whether we’re aware of it or not, almost all of us have been complicit in the unethical behavior of others. In Complicit, Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman confronts our complicity head-on and offers strategies for recognizing and avoiding the psychological and other traps that lead us to ignore, condone, or actively support wrongdoing in our businesses, organizations, communities, politics, and more.Complicit tells compelling stories of those who enabled the Theranos and WeWork scandals, the opioid crisis, the sexual abuse that led to the …

Expressions of confidence can give leaders credibility. In the political realm, they can earn votes and public approval for decisions made in office. Such support is justified when the confidence displayed is truly a sign that a leader (whether a candidate or an incumbent) is competent. However, when politicians are overconfident, the result can be the election of incompetent leaders and the adoption of misguided policies. In this article, we discuss processes that can lead to a confidence “arms race” that encourages politicians to display more confidence than their rivals do. We also illustrate how overconfidence and hyperbole have impaired responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in many nations and offer guidance for distinguishing politicians who display levels of confidence that reflect their true assessment of a situation from those who fake their self-assurance. We then suggest ways that leaders in all spheres can …

At the heart of John Rawls’s masterwork, A Theory of Justice, is a thought experiment. Rawls asks: What kind of a society would we choose if we didn’t know who in that society we would be? The question is hypothetical, but the aim is to inform our thinking about the real world. A just society, Rawls argues, is one that we would choose if we were unbiased. It is, more specifically, one we’d choose if we lacked the information necessary to tilt the scales of justice toward our individual interests. The decision-makers in this thought experiment are said to be in the ‘Original Position’, and their choice is made from behind a ‘Veil of Ignorance’(VOI). As Rawls (1971: 12) explains:Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities.

Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy. Here, to address this limitation and accelerate the pace of discovery, we introduce the megastudy—a massive field experiment in which the effects of many different interventions are compared in the same population on the same objectively measured outcome for the same duration. In a megastudy targeting physical exercise among 61,293 members of an American fitness chain, 30 scientists from 15 different US universities worked in small independent teams to design a total of 54 different four-week digital programmes (or interventions) encouraging exercise …

Book review The power of experiments: Decision making in a data-driven world By Michael Luca, Max H. Bazerman, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: The MIT Press, 2021, 232 pp, $19.95, paperback

The COVID-19 crisis has forced healthcare professionals to make tragic decisions concerning which patients to save. Furthermore, The COVID-19 crisis has foregrounded the influence of self-serving bias in debates on how to allocate scarce resources. A utilitarian principle favors allocating scarce resources such as ventilators toward younger patients, as this is expected to save more years of life. Some view this as ageist, instead favoring age-neutral principles, such as “first come, first served”. Which approach is fairer? The “veil of ignorance” is a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial decision-making by reducing decision-makers’ use of potentially biasing information about who will benefit most or least from the available options. Veil-of-ignorance reasoning was originally applied by philosophers and economists to foundational questions concerning the overall organization of society. Here we …

Throughout our lives, we face many choices between activities we know we should do and those we want to do. Examples of such choices include whether or not to visit the gym, to smoke, to order a greasy pizza or a healthy salad for lunch, and to watch an action-packed blockbuster or a history documentary on Saturday night. Using data on consumption decisions over time from an Australian online DVD rental company, this paper investigates how and why individuals make systematically different decisions when their choices will take effect in the present versus the future. Key concepts include:

Experimental mindset has permeated much of the tech sector and is spreading beyond that. These days, most major tech companies, such as Amazon, Facebook, Uber, and Yelp, wouldn't make an important change to its platforms without running experiments to understand how it might influence user behavior. Some traditional businesses have been dipping their toes into experiments for decades. And many more are ramping up their efforts in experimentation as they undergo digital transformations. In a dramatic departure from its historic role as an esoteric tool for academic research, the randomized controlled experiment has gone mainstream. Startups, international conglomerates, and government agencies alike have a new tool to test ideas and understand the impact of the products and services they are providing. Here, Luca and Bazerman discuss how to effectively incorporate experimental results into …

People regularly face conflicts in which obeying one moral requirement means transgressing another. Moral conflicts require difficult decisions: a person believes she should take both actions, but doing both is impossible. In this paper, we examine a common form of decision-making for those facing moral conflicts: inaction. Instead of taking any action, people too often respond with procrastination, indecision, avoidance, and evasion. Consider the following examples:

Honest reporting is essential for society to function well. However, people frequently lie when asked to provide information, such as misrepresenting their income to save money on taxes. A landmark finding published in PNAS [L. L. Shu, N. Mazar, F. Gino, D. Ariely, M. H. Bazerman, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 15197–15200 (2012)] provided evidence for a simple way of encouraging honest reporting: asking people to sign a veracity statement at the beginning instead of at the end of a self-report form. Since this finding was published, various government agencies have adopted this practice. However, in this project, we failed to replicate this result. Across five conceptual replications (n = 4,559) and one highly powered, preregistered, direct replication (n = 1,235) conducted with the authors of the original paper, we observed no effect of signing first on honest reporting. Given the policy applications of this result, it …

Executive Overview Goal setting is one of the most replicated and influential paradigms in the management literature. Hundreds of studies conducted in numerous countries and contexts have consistently demonstrated that setting specific, challenging goals can powerfully drive behavior and boost performance. Advocates of goal setting have had a substantial impact on research, management education, and management practice. In this article, we argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects nongoal areas, distorted risk preferences, a rise in unethical behavior, inhibited learning, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter …

Negotiation and decision-making expert Max Bazerman discusses how we can make more ethical choices by reframing our intentions toward being better rather than being perfect.

In article “A New Model for Ethical Leadership” by Max Bazerman has discussed about what is ethical leadership and why ethical leadership is important in our society. There are main five principles of ethical leadership. First one is honesty means honest leader keep everyone in contact of what is going on within the group or organization and the key important of honesty is that it builds trust within the group and organization. Second one is integrity means having a strong moral principles and quality of being honest. Third one is respect means to treat group member in ways that confirm their beliefs, attitudes, and values. Fourth one is justice means that leaders have to make decisions with considering fairness in the center. Fifth and last one is community means by engaging in the activities like team building and mentoring this means ethical leadership helps to build a community. Ethical leadership is very important …