Letting go of being a "good" person and become a better person

【听力文段】mp3

And here's another example: conflicts of interest. So we tend to underestimate how much a small gift -- imagine a ballpoint pen or dinner --

how much that small gift can affect our decision making. We don't realize that our mind is unconsciously lining up evidence to support the point of view of the gift-giver, no matter how hard we're consciously trying to be objective and professional. We also see bounded ethicality -- despite our attachment to being good people, we still make mistakes, and we make mistakes that sometimes hurt other people, that sometimes promote injustice, despite our best attempts, and we explain away our mistakes rather than learning from them. Like, for example, when I got an email from a female student in my class saying that a reading I had assigned, a reading I had been assigning for years, was sexist. Or when I confused two students in my class of the same race -- look nothing alike --

when I confused them for each other more than once, in front of everybody.

These kinds of mistakes send us, send me, into red-zone defensiveness. They leave us fighting for that good person identity. But the latest work that I've been doing on bounded ethicality with Mary Kern says that we're not only prone to mistakes --

that tendency towards mistakes depends on how close we are to that red zone. So most of the time, nobody's challenging our good person identity, and so we're not thinking too much about the ethical implications of our decisions, and our model shows that we're then spiraling towards less and less ethical behavior most of the time.

On the other hand, somebody might challenge our identity, or, upon reflection, we may be challenging it ourselves. So the ethical implications of our decisions become really salient, and in those cases, we spiral towards more and more good person behavior, or, to be more precise, towards more and more behavior that makes us feel like a good person, which isn't always the same, of course. The idea with bounded ethicality is that we are perhaps overestimating the importance our inner compass is playing in our ethical decisions. We perhaps are overestimating how much our self-interest is driving our decisions, and perhaps we don't realize how much our self-view as a good person is affecting our behavior, that in fact, we're working so hard to protect that good person identity, to keep out of that red zone, that we're not actually giving ourselves space to learn from our mistakes and actually be better people.

It's perhaps because we expect it to be easy. We have this definition of good person that's either- or. Either you are a good person or you're not. Either you have integrity or you don't. Either you are a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or you're not. And in this either-or definition, there's no room to grow. And by the way, this is not what we do in most parts of our lives. Life, if you needed to learn accounting, you would take an accounting class, or if you become a parent, we pick up a book and we read about it. We talk to experts, we learn from our mistakes, we update our knowledge, we just keep getting better. But when it comes to being a good person, we think it's something we're just supposed to know, we're just supposed to do, without the benefit of effort or growth.

So what I've been thinking about is what if we were to just forget about being good people, just let it go, and instead, set a higher standard, a higher standard of being a good-ish person? A good-ish person absolutely still makes mistakes. As a good-ish person, I'm making them all the time. But as a good-ish person, I'm trying to learn from them, own them. I expect them and I go after them. I understand there are costs to these mistakes. When it comes to issues like ethics and bias and diversity and inclusion, there are real costs to real people, and I accept that. As a good-ish person, in fact, I become better at noticing my own mistakes. I don't wait for people to point them out. I practice finding them, and as a result ... Sure, sometimes it can be embarrassing, it can be uncomfortable. We put ourselves in a vulnerable place, sometimes. But through all that vulnerability, just like in everything else we've tried to ever get better at, we see progress. We see growth. We allow ourselves to get better.

Why wouldn't we give ourselves that? In every other part of our lives, we give ourselves room to grow -- except in this one, where it matters most.

Thank you.

【地道美语，长句精练】

1. Explain away our mistakes rather than learning from them.

2. On the other hand, somebody might challenge our identity.

3. When it comes to being a good person, we think it's something we're supposed to know.

【课堂纠音，上节连读】

1. I can tell you are a really good person.

2. We go into red-zone defensiveness a lot of the time.

3. But what if I told you this?