Out of Sight, Out of Mind: How High-Level Construals Can Decrease the Ethical Framing of Risk-Mitigating Behavior

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Affinito, Salvatore J.; Hofmann, David A.; Keeney, Jonathan E.
• 署名单位: New York University; University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina School of Medicine
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0021-9010
• DOI: 10.1037/apl0001219
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 177-196
• 关键词: construal; safety; harm; ethical framing; psychological distance

摘要

Organizational failures often cause significant harm to employees, the organization itself, and the environment. Investigations of failures consistently highlight how key employees behaved in (perhaps unintentionally) unethical ways that de-prioritized safety, such as investing fewer resources in safety (vs. other priorities) over time. Drawing on these investigations, we suggest a previously underexplored theme could explain why organizational failures persist and why employees did not see the potential for their behaviors to cause harm to others: Employees were distanced from where the harm eventually occurred, either in terms of space (e.g., being located miles away from the job site) or time (e.g., making decisions that would not have impacts for months or years). We use construal level theory to investigate how the way employees construe where work occurs-defined as work context construal-influences perceptions of harm and the ethical framing of risk-mitigating behaviors. We hypothesize that high-level (abstract) work context construals (vs. low-level, concrete ones) reduce perceptions of potential harm which, in turn, leads to framing risk-mitigating behaviors as less of an ethical obligation. Six studies-a correlational survey of aviation employees (Study 1), field experiments with offshore drilling employees (Study 2A) and health care workers (Study 2B), a preregistered experiment with nurses (Study 3), and two supplemental studies (Studies 4A/B)-support our hypotheses. We discuss implications of this research for understanding organizational failures, particularly in a world where technology increasingly enables employees to monitor complex and high-risk work occurring many miles away, or on the other side of the world.