By Chuck Gallagher — Business Ethics Keynote Speaker and Trainer
TL;DR: Chuck Gallagher, business ethics keynote speaker, argues that human nature has not grown more or less ethical over the past decade — the forces behind bad choices are constant. What changed is exposure: employees now report misconduct at far higher rates (86% in 2020 versus 69% in 2017, per the Ethics & Compliance Initiative), so the same human behavior is simply harder to hide. The real measure of ethics is not the scandal count but whether your culture lets people speak up without retaliation.
In 2007, just before the financial system cracked, 54 percent of American workers told the Ethics & Compliance Initiative they had personally seen misconduct at work. By 2020 that figure had settled at 49 percent. Read only the headlines and you would swear we are sliding backward. Look at the survey data and the picture gets stranger, and more honest, than that.
People ask me all the time whether we are less ethical than we used to be. It feels true. Every week brings another fraud settlement, another data breach, another executive doing a perp walk. But “feels true” and “is true” are different animals, and the numbers refuse to cooperate with the gloom. As a business ethics keynote speaker, I have learned to distrust the headline and trust the pattern. The pattern says human nature has not changed. The forces that push a decent person toward a bad choice — need, opportunity, and rationalization — are the same in 2026 as they were in 1996, or 1956.
So Why Does It Feel Like We Are Getting Worse?
What changed is exposure. According to the Ethics & Compliance Initiative, 86 percent of employees who saw misconduct in 2020 reported it, up from 69 percent in 2017 and barely 56 percent two decades earlier. That is not a sign of moral decay. That is the sound of people refusing to look away. The misbehavior was always there. What we have built, slowly and imperfectly, is a workforce less willing to swallow it in silence.
That said, I am not here to sell a feel-good story. The same research shows pressure to compromise ethical standards hit 30 percent of U.S. workers in 2020, the highest level in twenty years and more than double the 2017 figure. Pressure is the warning light on the dashboard. When people feel squeezed by quotas, by fear, by a boss who wants the number no matter what, the conditions for a bad choice are loaded and waiting. I know that pressure intimately, because I once let it run my life straight into a federal courtroom.
I was a trusted CPA with every opportunity in the world and a need I told myself was temporary. I rationalized that borrowing was not really stealing as long as I intended to pay it back. I even paid some of it back, which felt like proof of my good character. It was not. It was the glue holding a lie together. The lesson I carry from that is plain: I was not a uniquely bad person living in a uniquely bad decade. I was an ordinary person who met the three forces with no system in place to stop me.
Here is where the question gets interesting. We may be reporting more, but we trust less. Edelman’s data shows trust in employers to do what is right slipped from 78 percent in 2018 to 73 percent by 2025, and roughly 70 percent of people now believe business leaders deliberately mislead the public. Behavior and trust are moving in opposite directions. We hold each other to a higher standard and believe each other less. That gap, between what an organization writes in its values statement and what it actually lives, is the real crisis, and it is wider than it was ten years ago.
What Should Leaders Actually Do About It?
So are we more ethical? My honest answer is that we are more aware, more vocal, and more measured — and not one bit more virtuous by nature. The companies pulling ahead are not the ones with the thickest compliance manual. Only about 13 percent of employees worldwide say they work inside a strong ethical culture, according to the 2023 Global Business Ethics Survey, which tells you that a code of conduct sitting on the intranet changes almost nothing. As an AI ethics speaker and author, I would add that the tools have only raised the stakes: automation now lets a single rationalized choice scale to millions of people before anyone files a report. The fix is not technical and it never was. Build a culture where reporting is safe, where pressure gets named out loud, and where leaders model the behavior they put on the wall. Do that and you remove opportunity, the one force you can actually control.
Every choice still has a consequence. That has not changed in a decade, and it will not change in the next one. What we get to decide is whether we keep mistaking exposure for decline, and whether we build the systems that catch a bad choice before it becomes a headline. You can read more of how I think about this at ChuckGallagher.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Are people actually less ethical today than ten years ago?
A: The evidence says no. The Ethics & Compliance Initiative found observed misconduct in the U.S. moved from 54 percent in 2007 to 49 percent in 2020 — roughly flat, not climbing. What rose sharply was reporting, from 69 percent in 2017 to 86 percent in 2020, meaning more bad behavior surfaces rather than more of it occurring.
Q: If misconduct is steady, why does it feel like ethics is getting worse?
A: Because exposure rose while trust fell. Edelman reports trust in employers to do what is right dropped from 78 percent in 2018 to 73 percent by 2025, and about 70 percent of people believe business leaders intentionally mislead them. We see more wrongdoing reported and trust each other less, which feels like decline even when behavior holds steady.
Q: What drives an ordinary person to make an unethical choice?
A: Chuck Gallagher, business ethics keynote speaker, points to three forces working together: need (perceived pressure), opportunity (the opening to act), and rationalization (telling yourself wrong is right). The Ethics & Compliance Initiative found 30 percent of U.S. workers felt pressure to compromise standards in 2020, the highest in two decades, and pressure is a leading predictor of misconduct.
Q: Does having an ethics and compliance program make a company ethical?
A: Not on its own. The 2023 Global Business Ethics Survey found only about 13 percent of employees worldwide work inside a strong ethical culture, despite most large companies having a written code of conduct. Culture, not paperwork, is the single biggest determinant of employee conduct.
Q: What is the one thing leaders can do to improve ethics now?
A: Make reporting safe and remove opportunity, the only one of the three forces leaders truly control. Retaliation against reporters held at 46 percent globally in both 2020 and 2023; until that number falls, people stop reporting, problems fester, and the consequences compound.
I want to hear from you. When you look at your own organization, do you see behavior getting worse, or do you simply see more of it coming to light because people finally feel safe enough to say something? Drop your take in the comments below — I read them, and I respond. And if you want to sit with this a little longer, here are five questions worth your reflection.
Five Questions for Further Thought and Consideration
- If misconduct rates have held steady but reporting has surged, are you measuring ethics by the right number?
- Where in your own work life are the three forces — need, opportunity, and rationalization — quietly lining up right now?
- Would an employee on your team report wrongdoing if it implicated their own boss? What is your honest answer, and what does it reveal?
- Has your trust in institutions fallen faster than the actual evidence of their behavior justifies, and if so, why?
- If you removed the opportunity for one specific unethical shortcut tomorrow, what would you have to change to make it happen?
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