What Would You Do?

Many people are put into uncomfortable situations where you find yourself asking what you should do. A new television show on ABC has found a way for people to be asked the question "What Would You Do?" more often then they thought. The show presents ethical and moral dilemmas in a public place that has on lookers, as the shows tag line asks, either "Stepping In, Stepping Up, or Stepping Away - What Would You Do?" This particular show fits right into to a chapter out of our Organizational Behavior textbook on making decisions. Decision making is defined as making choices among alternative courses of action, including inaction. That is exactly what this show is to the on lookers of these situations that the show sets up. The on lookers are choosing a course of either inaction to ignore the situation that they are witnessing or are going to choose a course of action and to step into the situation to either voice their opinion or try to help calm and fix the situation or dilemma they are witnessing. When put into these situations whether on a television show or not we are experiencing nonprogrammed decisions. On one episode of the show the host takes the show to Arizona to see if people will step in when a security guard approaches a hispanic man on the basis of the FB 1070 law that was passed in Arizona in April 2010 and asks him and his family for ID and proof that they belong here in this country.

What kind of decision making approach would you take to this situation. I hope that I am right when I say that your decision would be a nonprogrammed decision because this is a situation that we don't see very often in our country which we are all thankful for. But what would affect your decision to do something, would it be a framing bias or anchoring which would be relying to heavily on the fact that the patron looked Hispanic. Would groupthink take over. If one person presented one stance would everyone in the restaurant follow along or take their own stance?

What would you do?

Posted By: Amy Beagles