reflections on the pinto fires case

read and answer questions (for question number 9 look up Cost-Benefit Analysis: An Ethical Critique to answer the question)

Reflectionson the Pinto Fires Case by Dennis A. ​Gioia

(used with permission)

Chapter 2​ ended with the provocative Pinto Fires case, highlighting some of the sordid
events in the history of the Pinto fires problem. As the authors indicate later in this
chapter, I was involved with this infamous case in the early 1970s. They have asked me
to reflect on lessons learned from my experience.

I take this case very personally, even though my name seldom comes up in its many
recountings. I was one of those “faceless bureaucrats” who is often portrayed as making
decisions without accountability and then walking away from them—even decisions with
life-and-death implications. That characterization is, of course, far too stark and
superficial. I certainly don’t consider myself faceless, and I have always chafed at the
label of bureaucrat as applied to me, even though I have found myself unfairly applying
it to others. Furthermore, I have been unable to walk away from my decisions in this
case. They have a tendency to haunt—especially when they have such public airings as
those involved in the Pinto fires debacle have had.

But why revisit 20-year-old decisions, and why take them so personally? Here’s why:
because I was in a position to do something about a serious problem—and didn’t. That
simple observation gives me pause for personal reflection and also makes me think
about the many difficulties people face in trying to be ethical decision makers in
organizations. It also helps me to keep in mind the features of modern business and
organizational life that would influence someone like me (me, of all people, who
purposefully set out to be an ethical decision maker) to overlook basic moral issues in
arriving at decisions that, when viewed retrospectively, look absurdly easy to make. But
they are not easy to make, and that is perhaps the most important lesson of all.

The Personal Aspect

I would like to reflect on my own experience mainly to emphasize the personal
dimensions involved in ethical decision making. Although I recognize that there are
strong organizational influences at work as well, I would like to keep the critical lens
focused for a moment on me (and you) as individuals. I believe that there are insights
and lessons from my experience that can help you think about your own likely
involvement in issues with ethical overtones.

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First, however, a little personal background. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was an
engineering/MBA student; I also was an “activist,” engaged in protests of social injustice
and the social irresponsibility of business, among other things. I held some pretty strong
values that I thought would stand up to virtually any challenge and enable me to “do the
right thing” when I took a career job. I suspect that most of you feel that you also have
developed a strongly held value system that will enable you to resist organizational
inducements to do something unethical. Perhaps. Unfortunately, the challenges do not
often come in overt forms that shout the need for resistance or ethical righteousness.
They are much more subtle than that, and thus doubly difficult to deal with because they
do not make it easy to see that a situation you are confronting might actually involve an
ethical dilemma.

After school, I got the job of my dreams with Ford and, predictably enough, ended up on
the fast track to promotion. That fast track enabled me to progress quickly into positions
of some notable responsibility. Within two years I became Ford’s vehicle recall
coordinator, with first-level responsibility for tracking field safety problems. It was the
most intense, information-overloaded job you can imagine, frequently dealing with some
of the most serious problems in the company. Disasters were a phone call away, and
action was the hallmark of the office where I worked. We all knew we were engaged in
serious business, and we all took the job seriously. There were no irresponsible
bureaucratic ogres there, contrary to popular portrayal.

In this context, I first encountered the neophyte Pinto fires problem in the form of
infrequent reports of cars erupting into horrendous fireballs in very low-speed crashes
and the shuddering personal experience of inspecting a car that had burned, killing its
trapped occupants. Over the space of a year, I had two distinct opportunities to initiate
recall activities concerning the fuel tank problems, but on both occasions I voted not to
recall, despite my activist history and advocacy of business social responsibility.

The key question is how, in the space of two short years, I could have engaged in a
decision process that appeared to violate my own strong values—a decision process
whose subsequent manifestations continue to be cited by many observers as a
supposedly definitive study of corporate unethical behavior. I tend to discount the
obvious accusations: that my values weren’t really strongly held; that I had turned my
back on my values in the interest of loyalty to Ford; that I was somehow intimidated into
making decisions in the best interests of the company; that despite my principled
statements I had not actually achieved a high stage of moral development, and so on.
Instead, I believe a more plausible explanation for my own actions looks to the foibles of
normal human information processing.

I would argue that the complexity and intensity of the recall coordinator’s job required
that I develop cognitive strategies for simplifying the overwhelming amount of
information I had to deal with. The best way to do that is to structure the information into
cognitive “schemas,” or more specifically “script schemas,” that guide understanding
and action when facing common or repetitive situations. Scripts offer marvelous
cognitive shortcuts because they allow you to act virtually unconsciously and
automatically, and thus permit handling complicated situations without being paralyzed
by needing to think consciously about every little thing. Such scripts enabled me to
discern the characteristic hallmarks of problem cases likely to result in recall and to
execute a complicated series of steps required to initiate a recall.

All of us structure information all of the time; we could hardly get through the workday
without doing so. But there is a penalty to be paid for this wonderful cognitive efficiency:
We do not give sufficient attention to important information that requires special
treatment, because the general information pattern has surface appearances indicating
that automatic processing will suffice. That, I think, is what happened to me. The
beginning stages of the Pinto case looked for all the world like a normal sort of problem.
Lurking beneath the cognitive veneer, however, was a nasty set of circumstances
waiting to conspire into a dangerous situation. Despite the awful nature of the accidents,
the Pinto problem did not fit an existing script; the accidents were relatively rare by
recall standards, and the accidents were not initially traceable to a specific component
failure. Even when a failure mode suggesting a design flaw was identified, the cars did
not perform significantly worse in crash tests than competitor vehicles. One might easily
argue that I should have been jolted out of my script by the unusual nature of the
accidents (very low speed, otherwise unharmed passengers trapped in a horrific fire),
but those facts did not penetrate a script cued for other features. (It also is difficult to
convey to the layperson that bad accidents are not a particularly unusual feature of the
recall coordinator’s information field. Accident severity is not necessarily a recall cue;
frequently repeated patterns and identifiable causes are.)

The Corporate Milieu

In addition to the personalized scripting of information processing, there is another
important influence on the decisions that led to the Pinto fires mess: the fact that
decisions are made by individuals working within a corporate context. It has escaped
almost no one’s notice that the decisions made by corporate employees tend to be in
the best interest of the corporation, even by people who mean to do better. Why?
Because socialization processes and the overriding influence of organizational culture
provide a strong, if generally subtle, context for defining appropriate ways of seeing and

understanding. Because organizational culture can be viewed as a collection of scripts,
scripted information processing relates even to organizational-level considerations.
Scripts are context bound; they are not free-floating general cognitive structures that
apply universally. They are tailored to specific contexts. And there are few more potent
contexts than organizational settings.

There is no question that my perspective changed after joining Ford. In retrospect, I
would be very surprised if it hadn’t. In my former incarnation as a social activist, I had
internalized values for doing what was right, as I understood rightness in grand terms;
but I had not internalized a script for applying my values in a pragmatic business
context. Ford and the recall coordinator role provided a powerful context for developing
scripts—scripts that were inevitably and undeniably oriented toward ways of making
sense that were influenced by the corporate and industry culture.

I wanted to do a good job, and I wanted to do what was right. Those are not mutually
exclusive desires, but the corporate context affects their synthesis. I came to accept the
idea that it was not feasible to fix everything that someone might construe as a problem.
I therefore shifted to a value of wanting to do the greatest good for the greatest number
(an ethical value tempered by the practical constraints of an economic enterprise).
Doing the greatest good for the greatest number meant working with intensity and
responsibility on those problems that would spare the most people from injury. It also
meant developing scripts that responded to typical problems, not odd patterns like those
presented by the Pinto.

Another way of noting how the organizational context so strongly affects individuals is to
recognize that one’s personal identity becomes heavily influenced by corporate identity.
As a student, my identity centered on being a “good person” (with a certain dose of
moral righteousness associated with it). As recall coordinator, my identity shifted to a
more corporate definition. This is an extraordinarily important point, especially for
students who have not yet held a permanent job role, and I would like to emphasize it.
Before assuming your career role, identity derives mainly from social relationships.
Upon putting on the mantle of a profession or a responsible position, identity begins to
align with your role. And information processing perspective follows from that identity.

I remember accepting the portrayal of the auto industry and Ford as “under attack” from
many quarters (oil crises, burgeoning government regulation, inflation, litigious
customers, etc.). As we know, groups under assault develop into more cohesive
communities that emphasize commonalities and shared identities. I was by then an
insider in the industry and the company, sharing some of their beleaguered perceptions

that there were significant forces arrayed against us and that the well-being of the
company might be threatened.

What happened to the original perception that Ford was a socially irresponsible giant
that needed a comeuppance? Well, it looks different from the inside. Over time, a
reasonable value for action against corporate dominance became tempered by another
reasonable value that corporations serve social needs and are not automatically the
villains of society. I saw a need for balance among multiple values, and, as a result, my
identity shifted in degrees toward a more corporate identity.

The Torch Passes to You

So, given my experiences, what would I recommend to you, as a budding organizational
decision maker? I have some strong opinions. First, develop your ethical base now! Too
many people do not give serious attention to assessing and articulating their own
values. People simply do not know what they stand for because they haven’t thought
about it seriously. Even the ethical scenarios presented in classes or executive
programs are treated as interesting little games without apparent implications for
deciding how you intend to think or act. These exercises should be used to develop a
principled, personal code that you will try to live by. Consciously decide your values. If
you don’t decide your values now, you are easy prey for others who will gladly decide
them for you or influence you implicitly to accept theirs.

Second, recognize that everyone, including you, is an unwitting victim of his or her own
cognitive structuring. Many people are surprised and fascinated to learn that they use
schemas and scripts to understand and act in the organizational world. The idea that we
automatically process so much information so much of the time intrigues us. Indeed, we
would all turn into blithering idiots if we did not structure information and expectations,
but that very structuring hides information that might be important—information that
could require you to confront your values. We get lulled into thinking that automatic
information processing is great stuff that obviates the necessity for trying to resolve so
many frustrating decisional dilemmas.

Actually, I think too much ethical training focuses on supplying standards for
contemplating dilemmas. The far greater problem, as I see it, is recognizing that a
dilemma exists in the first place. The insidious problem of people not being aware that
they are dealing with a situation that might have ethical overtones is another
consequence of schema usage. I would venture that scripted routines seldom include
ethical dimensions. Is a person behaving unethically if the situation is not even

construed as having ethical implications? People are not necessarily stupid,
ill-intentioned, or Machiavellian, but they are often unaware. They do indeed spend
much of their time cruising on automatic, but the true hallmark of human information
processing is the ability to switch from automatic to controlled information processing.
What we really need to do is to encourage people to recognize cues that build a “Now
Think!” step into their scripts—waving red flags at yourself, so to speak—even though
you are engaged in essentially automatic cognition and action.

Third, because scripts are context-bound and organizations are potent contexts, be
aware of how strongly, yet how subtly, your job role and your organizational culture
affect the ways you interpret and make sense of information (and thus affect the ways
you develop the scripts that will guide you in unguarded moments). Organizational
culture has a much greater effect on individual cognition than you would ever suspect
(see ​Chapter 5​).

Last, be prepared to face critical responsibility at a relatively young age, as I did. You
need to know what your values are, and you need to know how you think so that you
can know how to make a good decision. Before you can do that, you need to articulate
and affirm your values now, before you enter the fray. I wasn’t really ready. Are you?

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