Page 108 - The Power to Change Anything

Make the Undesirable Desirable 97

Albert Bandura. Bandura has repeatedly looked at the question,
How can we stimulate people to connect their actions to their
values or beliefs? and has turned it on its head by asking, How
is it that people are able to maintain moral disengagement? That
is, how do people find ways to enact behaviors that appear so
clearly at odds with their espoused values?
Bandura’s research has uncovered four processes that allow
individuals to act in ways that are clearly disconnected from
their moral compass. These strategies that transform us into
amoral agents include moral justification, dehumanization,
minimizing, and displacing responsibility.
Let’s turn to a real-life case to see how these four processes
work in combination to keep people morally disengaged. When
Dennis Gioia, Ford recall director, looked at “graphic, detailed
photos of the remains of a burned out Ford Pinto in which sev-
eral people had died,” you would think he would have imme-
diately issued a recall of the car. And yet he didn’t. Data
showed that a 30-mile-per-hour rear-end collision would cause
the fuel tank to rupture, causing unspeakable injury or death
to the passengers. And now Gioia was staring at the devastat-
ing result. The good news was that a fix would cost a mere $11
per vehicle.
But Gioia didn’t issue a recall because he had been trained
to use cost-benefit analysis when reviewing equipment, and
that’s what he did. The Ford Motor Company set the value of
a human life at $200,000, so a simple calculation of the cost
of the recall revealed that the greatest dollar benefit would
come from keeping the vehicle cheap and settling inevitable
claims. Perhaps there would be a hundred or so such claims.
Gioia’s training established a moral framework that justified
what others would call manslaughter. And lest we judge him
too harshly, take note that we all do something similar every
day. When we accept lower prices rather than demand stiffer
pollution standards, we are, in essence, making life harder for
some number of individuals who have weak respiratory systems.