The Relationship of Ethics to Decision Making

Communicators have known for thousands of years that different things motivate people. Some people are moved by logic, some people are moved by emotion, and some people are moved by reputation or prestige. Thus, humans all make sense of the world in slightly different ways. When making decisions, then, people act on an assortment of heuristics, biases, preferences, dominant incentives, issue frames, personal goals, etc.

Ultimately, what underlies all of that are the beliefs and values that people hold, and their assessments of what is right and wrong, good and bad, favorable and unfavorable, in other words, ethics. As one of my professors in college used to say, “we think the way we think, because we are the way we are.” As discussed earlier in the module, human beings already have ethical predispositions, some toward dialogue and discussion, some toward solving the problem and moving on (satisficing), some toward a sense of duty to an individual, organization, or cause, etc.

Additionally, as the research on decision theory tells us, people are also motivated my intrinsic and extrinsic factors: biases, cognitive laziness, loyalty to a group or cause, etc. The quicker that an interlocutor can identify the preferences of his/her colleagues, the quicker s/he can influence the decision-making outcome.