From the creators of the theory of ethical blindness, an investigation into how corporate scandals happen, revealing the common pattern behind them and how your organization can avoid them

Corporate scandals are narrated like Hollywood movies: the villains are the once-celebrated CEOs who are unmasked as sociopaths and ultimately convicted. What we fail to realize, however, is that most bad things are done by average people with honorable values and no bad intentions.

In The Dark Pattern, two experts in business ethics and decision-making challenge the conventional view that corporate misconduct happens because of a handful of bad actors. Instead, the book shows how entire organizations can fall off the moral cliff because a few good people become ethically blind.  

Drawing on the latest insights from behavioral science, the authors identify nine toxic elements that lead to corporate scandals and offer nine actionable lessons for building morally resilient organizations. The Dark Pattern will strengthen the awareness, defenses, and responses of tomorrow’s leaders against the subtle dynamics of moral erosion. 

Guido Palazzo is a consultant and professor of business ethics at the University of Lausanne and a business adviser in Switzerland. He is a highly cited business ethics scholar. His work has been published in the leading management journals such as the Academy of Management Review and the Academy of Management Journal. He obtained a PhD in philosophy from the University of Marburg. 
 
Ulrich Hoffrage is a professor of decision theory at the University of Lausanne. He is a highly cited psychologist who builds and tests models of bounded rationality to better understand how people decide and navigate in a social world characterized by risk and uncertainty. He earned a PhD in psychology from the University of Salzburg.