Episode 32: Max Bazerman

PsychologyDecision Making

Jul 24

Written By Michael LaBlanc

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Becoming Better: How to Achieve Maximum, Sustainable Goodness

In a world of hundreds of decisions every day, how do you reconcile your ethics and biases? Max Bazerman, award-winning author, distinguished educator, and Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, discusses his book, Better, Not Perfect. He shares how to become aware, honest, efficient, and smart about the decisions we make while not seeking the unrealistic standard of perfection. The framework he made outlines how to reach sustainability and maximum goodness.

During this conversation, he and host Greg La Blanc discuss Bazerman’s take on ethical and moral decision-making and corruption. He also talked about how rationality obstructs us from having a utilitarian point of view.

Do not miss his discussion on loyalty and how it prevents us from doing good. Finally, take notes as he discusses how universities create value in shaping these decision-making skills.

Episode Quotes:

Thoughts on whether you can guide and change a person's decision-making process

“We've done an amazing job of identifying when people make mistakes, the systematic and predictable ways we'll make mistakes. But we've made very little in terms of fixing human intuition… The core idea is that we make most of our decisions intuitively, deliberately, meaning thinking more systematically.
It means asking smart friends. It means crowdsourcing. It means using artificial intelligence. So, we have lots of ways of endangering our more deliberate thought processes. And when we do, we are less f****d. So, we both have people out of system one to system two, to an individual level and at a more systemic level as ways to improve our decision-making —even if we can't improve our underlying intuition.”

In what ways do you make emphatic decisions at the same time have a larger impact?

“What I want to do is provide a very, very different model. So, how do you create the balance? I don't know, I think there’s no one simple answer to that. But, here are just my simple predictions. My guess is, if you could audit your lines and identify various weights —where you sacrificed both your time and your money. You could create more good. That seems like a really good start.”

Thoughts on corruption on university admissions and people being willfully blind

“I think that most of us, we're not going to perpetuate the next newspaper-worthy scandal, but we may well be around and see. And too often, we do too little to stop it. So, view it as my obligation and my moral obligation as a professor to speak up against the policy of legacy admissions in giving favorites — the children of alumni, of donors, of faculty. I think giving special consideration to people who are already part of our fairly small moral tribe means that we ended up discriminating against lots of other people who aren't in that circle.”

Why do people choose not to act for the greater good? Are they lacking empathy or understanding of their utility?

"There was a movement that argues that once you want to give your available dollars locally, or once you want to give it to your group —your own religious group ﹘ probably limited how effective you can be in terms of your charitable dollars. Since in many cases, your charitable dollars can have a much greater impact in some organization that's more distant from you. So, as soon as we had a trial we're putting up barriers, How much good can we do as soon as we're selfish? We're putting up a barrier to doing as much good as we can do as soon we're limiting how much good we can do."

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Michael LaBlanc