Volume 8, Issue 1, 2011
Susanna Cahn, Victor Glas
Pages 7-12
Teaching Business Ethics with Cases
The Effect of Personal Experience
As a final project for a business and society course, students presented analyses of ethical dilemmas in business settings; each dilemma was different, chosen either from the student’s personal business experience or from a recent business news event. Students identified multiple decision criteria (financial, ethical, etc.) relevant to the dilemma and then recommended a decision, reflecting a prioritizing of the multiple decision criteria. The goal of this research was to learn whether personal experience led to different decision priorities. Analyses from 121 students taken from six semesters of the course were sorted by choice of topic, as well as by which decision criterion was given top priority. Results showed significant differences (Chi-square value of 38.50562, significance level of 5.45963E-10) between the personal examples and the news examples. Students typically put ethical concerns first when analyzing news events. However, when
it came to personal events, more self-serving concerns often took priority. These disparate results suggest that even when knowledge is gained from study of theory and cases, it may not be applied to dilemmas that arise in students’ own experiences.