Do Ethics Matter? Yes!

Our job as PR practitioners is to build connections and trust, so ethics ought to be top-of-mind for us at all times, whether we work for corporations or public relations/investor relations firms.

We’ve already experienced the consequences of ethical lapses on the corporate side. And once the U.S. Presidential Election really gets underway, I have every confidence that we will be subjected to the inevitable array of charges and countercharges that range from dubious to patently untrue.

Even small sins can lead to big evils, according to Stanford Professor of Psychology Philip Zimbardo, the author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. (Zimbardo is famous for creating the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which normal college students randomly selected to serve as “guards” in a simulated prison, became so brutal so quickly that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days.)

A speaker at this year’s TED conference in Monterey, CA, Zimbardo presented the “Seven Social Processes that Grease the Slippery Slope of Evil”. They include “blind obedience to authority,” “uncritical conformity to group norms” and “passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference.” Zimbardo concludes that we need to foster a culture of heroism as the antidote to evil.

In its list of professional values for our profession, PRSA lists “honesty” as the #2 value, after “advocacy.” I think “honesty” warrants a promotion to the #1 spot.