Ethics Awareness
Ethics are at the core of human behavior and decision-making. This paper evaluates the results of the Ethics Awareness Inventory, a proprietary software designed to measure a person's ethical stance. The results of the Ethics Awareness Inventory can be applied to that person's psychology, and can help supervisors make human resources decisions related to the individual. Moreover, organizational psychologists especially benefit from ethical inventories. It is important to apply ethical awareness and psychological principles to personal, social, and organizational issues.
The Ethics Awareness Inventory is proprietary software designed to profit off of the need to evaluate and analyze every single human decision. Available for a select group of people, the Ethics Awareness Inventory "is a program that can evaluate one's ethical style," in the same way a quiz can evaluate what food, country, or sexual position is most appropriate (Collack, 2007). As with most quizzes, the Ethics Awareness Inventory has a gimmick, which is an acronym. The cliche acronym provides a mnemonic device for remembering the four CORE elements of ethical decision making: character, obligation, results, and equity. Theoretically, people will tend to favor one of these four ethical elements in their decision-making; and understanding one's ethical style could be important. Businesses may be especially interested in testing their employee's ethical styles. This is partly because "high profile ethical failures" are commonplace in the corporate world ("Ethical...
Although testing methodology is ironically ethically questionable, and of questionable value, software like the Ethics Awareness Inventory remain popular because of the way it supports, upholds, and maintains the narcissistic trend in American society.
My findings from the Ethics Awareness Inventory indicate that I am results-oriented. I have a consequentialist ethical point-of-view. I do not care how a person made their decision, because what matters most is the results. This suggests that I am utilitarian in my value system. The results reveal that I can particularly become frustrated when there are minority groups coming in the way of a majority consensus. It is difficult to value minority points-of-view, especially when they come in the way of a utilitarian outcome that emphasizes the greatest good for the greatest number of people. However, I believe that it is most productive to focus on outcomes and maximizing total happiness rather than worrying about every single person in the group. There will always be people who are disgruntled or unhappy.
Ethics is highly important in the field of psychology, especially in the fields of applied psychology and organizational psychology. Individuals can easily learn about ethics on their own by reading primary sources and simply observing their behavior, but managers need tools like the Ethics Awareness Inventory to quantify the results and add an artificially scientific element to their decision-making processes. Human resources teams can use ethics inventories like…
