Time Pressure and Ethical Decision-Making

Abstract

Time pressure bedevils ethical decision-making. In one very telling experiment (Darley and Batson, 1973), divinity students were told that they had to deliver a lecture from prepared notes in a classroom across campus. Half the students were told they had to hurry to be on time, and the other half were told they had more than ample time. On the way the students came across a person in distress (actually an actor) who sat slumped motionless in a doorway, coughing and groaning with his head down and eyes closed. Shockingly, only 16 of the 40 divinity students stopped to help the needy man, most of them from the half that had ample time. To those in a hurry, the man was a distraction; a threat to their focus of giving a lecture about, ironically enough, The Good Samaritan.2 Reactions to this study vary. Proponents of the moral intensity model (Jones, 1991) may argue that the failure to give aid is understandable because:

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