Calculation, principle or bias? Information preference and ethical decision-making

Abstract

This study proposes a novel information preference perspective to integrate ethics, managerial decision-making and risk. It argues that individuals confronting complex decisions, which involve risk, tend to process the available information through filters that reflect different ethical frames. We used an experiment where participants were asked to play the role of the co-owner of a car racing company who had to decide whether to run a crucial race, under various kinds of potential risk. The results revealed three key findings. First, participants had indeed filtered the information they received, with significant differences not only in what they considered most important, but also what they saw as least important. Moreover, factor analysis revealed that such individual filtering had configured three distinct patterns of preferences and that there was an internal logic to these patterns, characterizing what we called “Patterns in Information Preference (PIPs): “Expected Value”, “Responsibility” and “Autopilot.” Second, the PIPs that emerged from participants’ filtering processes reflected different ethical approaches to decision-making under conditions of risk (utilitarian, deontological and psychological), as the filtering favored information that supported an ethical approach over the others and discounted information not aligned with that particular approach. Third, participants’ PIPs influenced the decisions they made (and thus their respective potential ethical implications): we found that the “Responsibility” PIP had a significant association with the decision to forfeit the car race, whereas the “Autopilot” PIP was significantly associated with the decision to run. We discuss these findings from the perspective of descriptive and normative ethics, examine the limitations of the study, and explore implications and directions for future research.