ETHICS AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY IN LEGAL PRACTICE
In the decades following the Nazi Holocaust of World War II,endeavored to understand the psychology behind mass acceptance of andin large-scale moral atrocities. In 1967, Burt Ross' controversial "Wave"into group identification and blind obedience using high school studentsto offer insight into Nazi Germany. In 1972, Stanley Milgram designed a(filmed) experiments at Yale University, which dramatically illustrated thesusceptibility of otherwise "normal" individuals to perpetrate brutalitywas ever conducted on the post-war German population, for whom thewas initially intended (Luban, p.97). Almost simultaneously, in 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted another(filmed) experiments at Stanford University that were originally designedinvestigate the effects of captivity. Unexpectedly, they revealed dramaticrelating to the intoxicating power of authority and the acceptance ofbehavioral realities that had to be terminated very prematurely for theand emotional well being of some of the subjects. Indeed, Zimbardo was so
beat the ploughshare into a sword" (Haskell, p. Under subsequent analysis, the revelations of all these pioneeringstudies intothe roles played by agency, authority, obedience, corruption of judgment,andcognitive dissonance theory in human behavior suggest that as many as two-thirds ofthe human population is capable of accepting and participating in horrificmoralconduct under the right circumstances and external influences. Each previous decision desensitized the subject to the nextdecision. Ultimately, the types of psychological data gathered by Milgram andZimbardo apply equally to all professions and other human endeavors,probablybecause they are simply fundamental aspects of a genetic heritage thatfavored thenatural selection of behavioral traits consistent with group cooperationand a certaindegree of susceptibility to subservient behavior. 103)offers clinical results illustrating one component of the underlyingpsychologywith homeowners who agreed much more readily to hosting obtrusive lawnsigns ifthey had previously agreed to accept placement of a more innocuous windowsticker. More importantly in the law firm context,cognitivedissonance also allows one to maintain one's idealization of admired andlike co-workers and superiors whose conduct violates one's moral values. Zimbardo's famous experiment involved the creation of a"prison",using undergraduates assigned randomly to be prisoners and prison guards. Lawyers routinely requested voluminous amounts of paperwork, which areexpensiveto produce, or they responded to document requests by bombarding therequestingfirm with mountains of paper, requiring time and money to analyze. Luban, presents theexample of thesense of "proprietary" rights to "their documents" that lawyers oftenexpress,notwithstanding the rules of Evidence, Discovery, or the professional Codeof Ethics. In both instances, cognitive dissonance is the mechanism at work. Cognitive dissonance is the process ofchangingone's professed moral values prospectively, in order to justify compulsionsto embarkon more egregious violations. He outlines the slippery slope graduallyleading tosuspension of moral judgment and outright violation of professionalregulatory coderules in much the same fashion discovered by researchers like Milgram andZimbardo.
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Acceptance Essays
