A question one might ask upon reading the essays in this book is why, at least for some people, ethical behavior is so challenging. Drawing in part on Latan é-Darley’s ( 1970 ) model of bystander intervention, I have constructed a model of ethical behavior that would seem to apply to a variety of ethical problems. The model specii es the specii c skills students need to reason and then behave ethically.

The basic premise of the model is that ethical behavior is far harder to display than one would expect simply on the basis of what we learn from our parents, from school, and from our religious training (Sternberg, 2009a , 2009b , 2009c ). To intervene in an ethically challenging situation, individuals must go through a series of steps, and unless all of the steps are completed, the individuals are not likely to behave in an ethical way, regardless of the amount of training they have received in ethics, and regardless of their levels of other types of skills. The example I draw on throughout this brief essay is one of questionably ethical behavior by a professor who is the director of a federally funded laboratory operating in the context of a university.