People rarely think about their implicit associations and the assumptions that result from them, in truth they represent the basic unit of understanding that produces our day-to-day behaviour
Philosophers have long theorized about the inner workings of moral decision-making. With a few important exceptions, rational thought has taken a dominant position in this literature. Recently however, scholars have drawn from findings on moral intuition and the burgeoning physiological and clinical research in the area to suggest that moral decision-making is also impacted -- if not dominated – by reflexive or automatic cognitive processes.
A host of research supports the proposition that individual behaviour is shaped by the interaction between individuals and their environments, and as a result, we fully expected to find that explicit contextual cues activate implicit beliefs; however, research indicates that behaviour is also influenced by subtle contextual cues. Thus, employees of an organization can be characterized as ‘reflexive interactionists’ -- moral
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]