Page 109 - The Power to Change Anything

98 INFLUENCER

And yet we don’t think of the issue in those terms. Like Gioia,
who thought of claims, not lives, we think of costs, not health.
As Bandura suggested, we’re able to justify our behavior by
focusing on other moral outcomes—e.g., we’re making the
product affordable to the masses. In so doing, we dehumanize
those who may be affected by our choices. Then we attempt
to minimize and justify our actions. “It’s only 100 lives.
Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of people who will
benefit from this vehicle.” Finally, we displace responsibility:
“I didn’t set the rules for cost-benefit analysis. This is just the
way it’s done.”
The only way out of the nasty practice of disconnecting our-
selves from our moral grounding is to reconnect. This means
that we must take our eyes off the demands of the moment
and cast our view on the larger moral issues by reframing real-
ity in moral terms. And we have to do it in a way that is both
vibrant and compelling. Simple lectures, homilies, and guilt
trips—verbal persuasion at its worst—won’t work. If we don’t
reconnect possible behavior to the larger moral issues, we’ll
continue to allow the emotional demands of the moment to
drive our actions, and, in so doing, we’ll make short-term,
myopic choices.

Connect Behavior to Moral Values

When we inspect our actions from a moral perspective, we’re
able to see consequences and connections that otherwise
remain blocked from our view. Renowned psychologist Dr.
Stanton Peele reports that taking a broader moral perspective
enables humans to face and overcome some of their toughest
life challenges. In fact, Peele has been able to systematically
demonstrate that this ability to connect to broader values pre-
dicts better than any other variable who will be able to give up
addictive and long-lasting habits and who won’t. Peele has
found that individuals who learn how to reconnect their dis-