Almost nobody reaches a serious ethical failure by deciding wrongdoing is fine. They get there by not noticing, by reframing, by deferring, by being in a hurry. Turn the six dials on the left — they are the situational forces the research keeps finding — and watch the odds of the right action collapse in a person whose values never changed. Then switch on the countermeasures and see how much you can buy back before the moment arrives.
The situation you are building
Start from a preset
Six forces, turned up or down
Countermeasures — set in advance, not in the moment
What this situation does to a good person
Odds the right action gets taken
96%
Almost certain
Nothing is pressing on this person yet.
And here is what the decision now sounds like out loud
“Tell Mr. Alvarez his wife died during the procedure, and sit with him.”
Plain language. The human being is named. The moral content is still visible, so it can still be weighed.
Honest footnote. The behavioral-ethics literature has had to retract some of its own furniture. The much-taught 2012 finding that signing an honesty declaration at the top of a form reduces cheating failed to replicate (Kristal et al., 2020) and the paper was retracted in September 2021 after evidence one dataset was fabricated. Gino and Bazerman's 2009 slippery-slope study has also failed to replicate. The forces modelled here rest on the older, sturdier work — and on the accident record. Cite the retraction, not the headline.