Ethics experiment surprises some and worries others

Most EMU students think Enron executives should be put in jail for stealing millions of dollars from investors, but their take on stealing "little things" is a bit different.

The EMU Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE) team decided it would be interesting to get a perspective of how students at EMU involve ethics in their decisions and actions for Business Ethics Month in October.

They showed a movie, The Insider, which depicts a top executive of a tobacco company who becomes a "whistle blower" because he feels that letting the public know what products are being used in cigarettes is the ethical thing to do. Because he makes this ethics-based decision, his life is changed. His family is threatened, his marriage fails, he loses his home and cars, and he finally ends up teaching high school chemistry.

SIFE’s interest lay in studying whether watching this movie had an effect on students of EMU and the way they view ethics in decision-making.

On Oct. 26, SIFE distributed a pre-survey to 25 people that included five questions. One-hundred percent of the participants responded that ethics in America needed to be improved. However, 100 percent also answered that they would not report other students to the professor if he or she had plagiarized a paper, and 95 percent said they considered taking an ink pen from work to be ethical.

After viewing the movie the exact same survey was distributed to see if the movie had had any effect. "We thought that people’s thoughts might be changed or their idea of ethics might be changed, but it really didn’t seem that way at all," said SIFE president Caleb Stitely.

While the responses to the ink pen question dropped to from 95 to 85 percent saying it was ethical, 100 percent still said they would not report the incident of plagiarism to the teacher.

Does this information reflect the ethics of EMU? One observer said, “Probably people think ethics are important, but they think it’s personal, too. They’d feel good if an authority like a teacher caught a cheater, but they don’t think it’s their business to ‘tattle.’”

SIFE members, however, found it disappointing that in an institution where academic integrity is a crucial part of life, 100 percent of respondents would not report acts against this integrity, and a very high percentage of respondents thought stealing a pen was ethical. "While some may think of it as just an ink pen, items as small as pens have an effect on company budgets and may lead to other unethical actions and decisions," said Stitely.

While he pointed out that the 25 people surveyed weren’t necessarily representative of the whole campus, he said, "The whole thing is kind of disturbing."