The author fully endorses Jay Blumler's statement that "It is the distinctive mission of uses and gratifications research to get to grips with the nature of audience experience itself." Yet, to ...investigate their ethical experiences, we may need to develop some sensitizing concepts first.
ChatGPT has promising applications in health care, but potential ethical issues need to be addressed proactively to prevent harm. ChatGPT presents potential ethical challenges from legal, humanistic, ...algorithmic, and informational perspectives. Legal ethics concerns arise from the unclear allocation of responsibility when patient harm occurs and from potential breaches of patient privacy due to data collection. Clear rules and legal boundaries are needed to properly allocate liability and protect users. Humanistic ethics concerns arise from the potential disruption of the physician-patient relationship, humanistic care, and issues of integrity. Overreliance on artificial intelligence (AI) can undermine compassion and erode trust. Transparency and disclosure of AI-generated content are critical to maintaining integrity. Algorithmic ethics raise concerns about algorithmic bias, responsibility, transparency and explainability, as well as validation and evaluation. Information ethics include data bias, validity, and effectiveness. Biased training data can lead to biased output, and overreliance on ChatGPT can reduce patient adherence and encourage self-diagnosis. Ensuring the accuracy, reliability, and validity of ChatGPT-generated content requires rigorous validation and ongoing updates based on clinical practice. To navigate the evolving ethical landscape of AI, AI in health care must adhere to the strictest ethical standards. Through comprehensive ethical guidelines, health care professionals can ensure the responsible use of ChatGPT, promote accurate and reliable information exchange, protect patient privacy, and empower patients to make informed decisions about their health care.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is (re)shaping strategy, activities, interactions, and relationships in business and specifically in marketing. The drawback of the substantial opportunities AI systems ...and applications (will) provide in marketing are ethical controversies. Building on the literature on AI ethics, the authors systematically scrutinize the ethical challenges of deploying AI in marketing from a multi-stakeholder perspective. By revealing interdependencies and tensions between ethical principles, the authors shed light on the applicability of a purely principled, deontological approach to AI ethics in marketing. To reconcile some of these tensions and account for the AI-for-social-good perspective, the authors make suggestions of how AI in marketing can be leveraged to promote societal and environmental well-being.
We demonstrate that some lies are perceived to be more ethical than honest statements. Across three studies, we find that individuals who tell prosocial lies, lies told with the intention of ...benefitting others, are perceived to be more moral than individuals who tell the truth. In Study 1, we compare altruistic lies to selfish truths. In Study 2, we introduce a stochastic deception game to disentangle the influence of deception, outcomes, and intentions on perceptions of moral character. In Study 3, we demonstrate that moral judgments of lies are sensitive to the consequences of lying for the deceived party, but insensitive to the consequences of lying for the liar. Both honesty and benevolence are essential components of moral character. We find that when these values conflict, benevolence may be more important than honesty. More broadly, our findings suggest that the moral foundation of care may be more important than the moral foundation of justice.
•Deception is sometimes perceived to be ethical.•Prosocial liars are perceived to be more moral than honest individuals.•Benevolence may be more important than honesty for judgments of moral character.•The moral principle of care is sometimes more important than justice.
This article uses behavioral theories to develop an ethical decision-making model that describes how psychological factors affect the development of unethical intentions to commit fraud. We evaluate ...the effects of the dark triad of personality traits (i.e., psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism) on fraud intentions and behaviors. We use a combination of survey results, an experiment, and structural equation modeling to empirically test our model. The theoretical insights demonstrate that psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism affect different parts of the unethical decision-making process. Narcissism motivates individuals to act unethically for their personal benefit and changes their perceptions of their abilities to successfully commit fraud. Machiavellianism motivates individuals not only to act unethically, but also alters perceptions about the opportunities that exist to deceive others. Psychopathy has a prominent effect on how individuals rationalize their fraudulent behaviors. Accordingly, we find that the dark triad elements act in concert as powerful psychological antecedents to fraud behaviors.
This article presents, an analysis of the opinions of assurance providers regarding the quality and the limitations of sustainability reports and their recommendations to improve them using the ...Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) as a framework. The qualitative content analysis of 301 assurance statements for sustainability reports from mining and energy companies provides a comprehensive view of the main outcomes of the assurance process, including its limitations, the application of the GRI principles and suggestions for improving sustainability reports. Taking into account the perceptions of practitioners a priori well informed on the quality of sustainability reports—namely assurance providers—this paper complements the current literature on sustainability reporting and its assurance, including critical approaches that question the reliability of sustainability reports, stakeholder engagement and the accountability of reporting practices. This study contributes to the debates surrounding the quality of sustainability reports, the added value of assurance statements and the ethical issues underlying the assurance process. It also contains important practical implications for auditors, standardization organizations and stakeholders.
Prior studies have demonstrated that leaders’ ethical behaviors have an impact on followers’ unethical behaviors, and yet the explanatory mechanisms in this relationship have not been fully explored. ...To further explicate the relationship between ethical leadership and unethical employee behavior, we adopted a role-based perspective and introduced the concept of role ethicality. That is, we explored the impact that leaders’ actions and voice behaviors, particularly regarding ethical issues, have on perceptions of ethical role requirements and in turn the effect such perceptions have on unethical behavior. In a field study involving 394 employees and 68 supervisors and a randomized experiment conducted with 121 working professionals, we find that as predicted, leaders’ behaviors and ethical voice have a significant influence on role ethicality, which in turn impacts unethical behavior. Based on our empirical findings, we describe the implications, limitations, and future directions relevant to this study.
Corruption as a non-market strategy for firms has gained increasing attention in the field of strategy management. However, the effect of corruption on innovation is unclear, especially in the ...context of transition economies. Using institutional theory, we examine the relationship between corruption and new product innovation and identify the contextual conditions of the relationship. Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey data from China, our empirical results show that corruption has a positive effect on firms' new product innovation. Moreover, we find that policy instability and competitive threats from the informal sector positively moderate the relationship between corruption and new product innovation. Using post hoc analysis, we find that the potentially positive effect of corruption on new product innovation is the consequence of inherent institutional weaknesses in transition economies; as the level of institutional development increases, the effect of corruption on firms' new product innovation will gradually decrease. Overall, our findings provide new insights into understanding corrupt behaviors in transition economies and present managerial implications for firms' ethical dilemmas in a transition economy context. We argue that the key to overcoming these ethical dilemmas lies in promoting pro-market institutional reform to reduce the potential benefits of corruption.
Consumers’ participation on sharing economy platforms is crucial for the success of the products, services, and companies on those platforms. The participation of consumers enables companies to not ...only exist, but also to create value for consumers. The sharing economy has witnessed enormous growth in recent years and consumers’ concerns regarding the ethics surrounding these platforms have also risen considerably. The vast majority of the previous research on this topic is either conceptual and focused on organizational aspects, or only discusses privacy and security issues, thus providing a very limited scope of discussion. Therefore, drawing on the marketing and business ethics literature, the present study takes into account a multidimensional view of ethical issues surrounding consumers’ participation on sharing economy platforms. Findings reveal that privacy, security, shared value, fulfillment/reliability and service recovery are the strongest determinants of consumers’ ethical perceptions. These aspects strongly predict the consumers’ value co-creation intentions. Consumers’ participation also predicts their intention to engage in co-creating value, but this effect is stronger with the mediating role of the consumer’s ethical perceptions. The theoretical and managerial implications are also discussed.
The continued advance of global value chains as the mode of production for an increasing number of goods and services has impacted considerably on the economies and societies both of the developed ...world and the emerging economies. Although there have been many efforts at reform there is evidence of unresolved dilemmas of human rights, environmental issues and ethical dilemmas in the operation of the global value chain. This paper focuses on the role and performance of Apple Ine in the global value chain in Asia. Apple is the most successful corporation on earth measured in financial terms and yet has failed to find a solution to recurrent employment and environmental problems occurring in plants manufacturing Apple components. This analysis informs the current theoretical debate on the development of the global value chain and the continuing institutional failure that leaves employees vulnerable and the environment neglected.
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