We Remember Our Coworkers’ Misdeeds, but What about Our Own?

Every office has them: colleagues behaving badly. Whether they always pad their expense reports, call in sick then go to the beach, or just avoid refilling the printer paper, their shenanigans seldom stop. It’s a phenomenon that we see over and over in organizations, in everyday life—people repeatedly engaging in unethical behavior,” says Kouchaki, an assistant professor of management and organizations. “This paper is our attempt to answer why.” None of us like thinking poorly about ourselves, she explains, so as a defense mechanism we tend to have murky memories of when we acted poorly in the past. This faulty recollection, her research shows, can lead to unethical behavior in the future, since we don’t have our own experiences at hand to act as a deterrent. She calls the phenomenon “unethical amnesia.”