a 700- to 1,050-word summary of your findings from the Ethics Awareness Inventory which includes the following: • Summarize your personal findings from the Ethics Awareness Inventory. • Discuss the importance of ethics in the field of psychology. Include examples of ethical guidelines from both research and clinical work. • Discuss how ethics can affect how you will apply psychological principles to personal, spiritual, social, and organizational issues. • Include at least two references. • Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines. • An introduction and conclusion should be included which each highlight the key elements the paper covers.
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 Leadership," n.d.). 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 these to hire and fire personnel at will. Ethics remain important in the field of psychology, which is concerned ultimately with human behavior. As most of human behavior has an ethical component, it is helpful to understand the motives and diversity of ethics.
I can apply psychological principles to personal, spiritual, social, and organizational issues. For example, if I am disinterested in class material, I have the choice to maximize my own happiness and subscribe to utilitarian values by outsourcing my work. Doing this could be perceived as unethical by people with a different ethical orientation such as those who operate with obligation or character values, but for someone who is results-oriented, outsourcing my work has no ethical conundrum associated with it. The goal is to achieve the best possible results, which can often be achieved by outsourcing. Applying ethics to personal and organizational issues is a critical component of personal and professional development. Teamwork and organizational participation require personal awareness, as well as a judgmental awareness of others in my group. When I come across people who are different from myself, I need to make sure I know why I do not like them.
When it comes to personal and spiritual issues, I may take a different approach. How I treat my mother is far different from how I treat my friends or business partners. Whereas I tend to be ruthless in business, I will bend over backwards for my mother. This suggests that I do have a sense of obligation to those I love, but not to those I do not love because there has yet to be developed a deep trust in the relationship. Still, my ethical values remain utilitarian in scope.
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