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Business Ethics Reflection

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I chose to study health science when I was admitted to Simon Fraser University in the first place. It was a peculiar and challenging choice for an international student as most of my international friends went with business administration. I did not like business because of two reasons. First of all, I was not interested in dealing with numbers, money in particular; secondly, at that time on, if someone asked me to describe the defining characteristic of businesspeople with one word, venality would be the first that came into my mind. In my opinion, I thought that business people do not and should not care about anything other than maximizing profit; otherwise they are not good business people. But now, especially after I encouraged myself to take some business courses at school (Business Ethics in particular), I am embarrassed to have to admit this because I realized that I was totally ignorant and biased to have such negative impressions on all the business people. According to Chimamanda Adichie’s words, I have been “reading a single story”. (Adichie, 2009) I found Adichie’s speech was a mind-blower to me. I have always considered myself to be more considerate and knowledgeable than others who are about my age and have similar amount of experience as I do. Even so, whenever people talk about Africa, poverty and epidemic of certain diseases always come into my mind first. I even tried to rationalize my opinion by searching for data from my limited book selections, which I realized later that I was merely using particular cases to generalize the whole, just as how unfairly I judged all business people. I also realized that I was caught up into the overconfidence cognitive bias by considering myself as more considerate and knowledgeable than my peers. It is lucky for me that I understand now how dangerous rationalization is and how difficult it is to avoid it

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