Use Your Ambivalence to Make More Ethical Decisions

Decision makers often want to escape the psychological discomfort of ambivalence by making choices as quickly as possible. This is true even for choices that have an ethical component, including those that can involve potential harm or violations of social norms. Decisions that have moral consequences are often dense and require reconciliation of the conflicting interests of multiple stakeholders, as well as more sustained and systematic consideration.

Studies have shown that individuals experiencing ambivalence don’t always correctly identify what is causing that conflicting feeling of positive and negative emotions. This is a missed opportunity. Being conscious of this state, called identified ambivalence, can lead to more effective decision-making, because recognizing uncomfortable mixed reactions allows decision makers to suspend initial judgments and try to understand what is truly causing their cognitive discomfort. In searching for the source, decision makers often find relevant information they overlooked and are able to more thoroughly integrate pertinent and conflicting messages. This targeted searching process is especially critical when making complex ethical decisions.

In two recent studies, we found that when people understand what’s making them feel ambivalent, they’re spurred to consciously assess the moral aspects of their choices. We found that they subsequently are better able to resist distracting biases and make more ethical decisions.

The Value of Sitting With Ambivalence

Hurried decisions are largely based on automatic, unconscious processing. The brain uses rules of thumb and readily available information to produce a selection that — in a trick of the mind — seems to the decision maker to be conscious and rational. Relying on unconscious processing can interfere with making thorny decisions effectively, which requires weighing pros and cons carefully and with minimal bias.

Identified ambivalence is a good tool because it keeps the unconscious mind from getting trapped by its biases. One type of bias is anchoring, which places undue importance on one piece of information over all others. For example, the initial price of a used car sets the basis for the negotiation; the same happens when negotiating salaries.

Another bias is loss aversion, when the negative emotions of losing something are felt more strongly than the pleasure derived from gaining the same thing. Retailers often use “Flash sale! Today only!” promotions to trigger a consumer’s fear of missing out. This kind of implicit loss message is more persuasive than an implicit pleasure message. It distracts us.

When the source of ambivalence is identified as a moral quandary, the goal for decision makers ought to be to suspend their gut reactions. Decision makers should be considering ethically relevant content and how the interests of others can be included in the decision-making process.

Integrating identified ambivalence into the decision-making process is a way to achieve this deeper moral awareness.

Testing Our Theory

We hypothesized that identified ambivalence would benefit people with low moral attentiveness more strongly than it would people with high moral attentiveness by making moral information more accessible and better understood.

Our first study had 292 online participants, all U.S.-based employees at a variety of companies. Participants were to engage in a decision-making exercise. We randomly assigned each participant to one of four attitudinal conditions: ambivalence, indifference, positivity, or negativity. We primed participants to adopt their assigned attitude by asking them to think carefully about their own experiences of the attitude and then write about it. Those in the ambivalence group were given a clear definition: “Ambivalence is different from indifference. Ambivalent individuals have strong and opposite (for example, positive and negative, or good and bad) opinions at the same time about an experience.”

For the decision-making task, participants were asked to choose between two hypothetical programs that had been developed to treat a deadly disease that would kill 600 people in the absence of treatment. When considered empirically, both Program A and Program B had the same chance of saving lives, 1 in 3.

We randomly assigned participants to one of two conditions meant to bias their choice through framing: Half of the participants read a paragraph framed in terms of how many lives would be saved by each program (the “gain” condition), and half read a scenario framed in terms of how many lives would be lost (the “loss” condition). They were asked to choose Program A, Program B, or “either program.” We then followed up and asked, “How conflicted do you feel?”; “How much indecisiveness do you feel?”; and “Do you have mixed reactions?”

Because both programs provided the same chance of saving lives, only those decision makers who consciously overcame the effects of framing and chose “either program” would be counted as having made an effective decision.

We found support for our initial hypothesis: Those in the ambivalence group — that is, primed to think about their own ambivalence — were almost 10 times more likely to come to the most logical decision compared with those in the other three groups. Identified ambivalence did have a significant positive effect on ethical decision-making effectiveness and mitigation of unconscious bias.

What’s more, participants who were able to identify the source of their ambivalence were also more likely to be aware of the moral content in the decision-making task. This supported our hypothesis that moral awareness is the mechanism through which ethical decision-making is achieved.

In our second study, with a similar number of participants, we looked more closely at how being aware of ambivalence could help people deflect biases. We randomly assigned participants to one of two attitudinal conditions, ambivalence or indifference. We told them that the scenario they’d be considering could make them feel conflicted and indecisive.

We used a scenario adopted by other researchers to test the effect of the availability bias on ethical decisions. Availability bias affects how individuals estimate the probability of events. It often means that decision makers overestimate the likelihood of events that are memorable and have vivid consequences — especially if they were recently top of mind. Participants read this passage: “It is said that up to 50% of businesses fail within five years of inception. Most of these businesses start and end in obscurity. A few of them, however, start up with the verve of a cannonball, only to crash in a similarly dramatic fashion. Companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and Livestrong Foundation exemplify this disastrous trajectory.”

We then asked whether ethical wrongdoing or weak sales were more likely to cause bankruptcy in the U.S. The correct answer is weak sales, and participants who chose that as the answer had resisted the availability bias. But because contemporary society gives disproportionate attention to ethical scandals, participants affected by the availability bias erroneously focused on the second half of the passage and attributed most bankruptcies to corporations’ ethical wrongdoings.

Participants in the identified ambivalence condition were more likely to understand weak sales to be the correct answer than participants in the indifference category, who we expect were misdirected by hearing names such as Enron and WorldCom before answering. As with our first study, this confirmed our hypothesis that identified ambivalence helps prevent bias.

In this second study, we also looked at whether identified ambivalence was especially helpful for decision makers with low moral attentiveness, as measured on a self-report scale. We found that decisions made by people with low moral attentiveness are improved by identified ambivalence. Compared with people who normally think about ethics, people who don’t normally think about ethics benefit more by understanding that their decisions are being affected by an ethical quandary.

Implications for the Workplace

Based on our research, we expect that leaders who learn to incorporate identified ambivalence into their decision-making will make better and more ethical decisions. Here are three ways to leverage our findings in the workplace:

Practice identified ambivalence. In addition to being mindful of their own sources of ambivalence, leaders can engage stakeholders by questioning the role of the established processes and systems. They can offer opportunities for idea incubation in a psychologically safe environment where employees are free to present ideas against and in favor of initiatives.

Use identified ambivalence in collective decision-making. To produce balanced consideration of options and mitigate cognitive biases, leaders can ask employees to privately write the pros and cons of key strategic decisions. This step enables employees to suspend judgment and consider different perspectives: They are less likely to fall prey to group- and individual-level biases, such as confirmation bias, which is the tendency to give weight to information that confirms one’s existing beliefs. Leaders can then promote group debate and encourage employees to fully engage with opposing perspectives before allowing them to vote privately on the decision.

Use counterfactual thinking to share ideas between different levels of an organization. Managers can ask subordinates to think about past decisions and consider what-if questions, such as, “What if we had not discontinued the product?” or “What if we had increased the investment in the product?” They can also check in with their employees during regular meetings by asking, “What could we have done differently this month?” After-the-fact discussions pave the way for better future decisions by making it safe to discuss relevant information and ideas that might have been overlooked earlier.

Most past studies into how managers can help their employees increase moral awareness have considered the traits of employees or company culture. Although we acknowledge the importance of these two things, we encourage managers to provide opportunities for workers to balance conflicting information and suspend their initial snap judgments before moving forward.

Our results offer consistent and robust evidence that individuals who are aware of their ambivalence are more likely than others to attend to the moral aspects of dilemmas and make effective ethical decisions: Fewer gut reactions result in fewer ethical errors. New cognitive strategies can help create new decision-making competencies, even when traits of employees and company culture are unchanged.