Primary Traps cause people to behave unethically.
Program Titles
- Defensive Traps are in a very different category: Advantageous Comparison
- Personality Trap is Social Dominance Orientation
- Obligation
- Tyranny of Goals
- How can business people avoid falling into the ethical traps
Robert Hoyk, Ph.D., identifies the many psychological reasons that people act unethically. So unprecedented is this approach that he had to name it, define it, and make himself an expert.
Hoyk‘s development of the Psychology of Ethics is innovative and historic; in all likelihood ?traps? will become the new nomenclature of organizations that contend with ethics.
Always a trailblazer, Robert Hoyk traveled for thirteen years throughout the world, living for periods of time in Tunisia, Spain, France, Greece, India, journeying by camel with the Bedouin in the Sahara, taking a donkey cart and school-age charges through the Spanish hills, creating a self-sustaining community on an island off the coast of Turkey, apprenticing to a furniture-maker in a Mexican village where no tourist had ever ventured.
Robert Hoyk received his doctorate at the California School of Professional Psychology in San Diego. Following graduation he met Dr. Paul Hersey, founder of Situational Leadership. Robert is the primary author of an advanced course of Situational Leadership entitled, Situational Communication Skills for Leaders (Management Learning Resources, Ltd., 2002.)
About six years ago, Dr. Hoyk had a successful private practice as a psychologist in Orange County. One morning he noticed a slight drag with his left foot. Six years later he‘s another Stephen Hawking – a scientist and author with Lou Gehrig‘s disease, probably caused by bad genetics.
For the first five years of his illness, Hoyk‘s diagnosis was Primary Lateral Sclerosis (PLS). PLS is not fatal and very rare. Perhaps 500 people in the U.S. have it. With PLS the motor neurons in the brain die. With Lou Gehrig‘s Disease, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord die. With Lou Gehrig‘s Disease the average person dies in three to five years. This year Robert‘s PLS has turned into Lou Gehrig‘s Disease.
It is said that Lou Gehrig‘s Disease has made Hawking who he is — hard working, brilliant and successful. Recently, Dr. Hoyk has accepted an invitation to give a keynote address for a conference on Ethics in Government in Austin, Texas. Hoyk‘s wife, the novelist and former psychologist Julie Brickman, has pointed out that people experience inspiration and hope when they see someone with a serious disease who remains determined and able to be accomplished and successful.
A survey conducted with over 200 people who survived life-threatening danger (car accidents, drownings, serious illnesses…) found they had subsequent personality changes due to their near-death experiences. One change was a need to ?accomplish something worthwhile before it‘s too late.? Robert Hoyk has always been inclined to work on projects that are worthwhile. And since his diagnosis has changed, working with his book, The Ethical Executive, has intensified.
Hoyk‘s lifetime model for courage is Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, a book generated from his experiences as a prisoner in a concentration camp in Hitler‘s Germany. In one passage, Frankl writes about a day when two inmates visit him to announce that they will commit suicide before the sun goes down. Frankl nods and then says, ?It‘s unlikely that we‘ll ever get out of here alive. But if we do, what would you like to accomplish?? One inmate said that he would like to help raise his nephew. The other one said that he would like to publish a book of his poetry. Frankl reports that the two men never did commit suicide.
In a way, Robert is a prisoner in his own form of torture: an illness that has robbed him of his speech, his swallowing, his walking, depleted his breathing, and may end up taking his life. But Robert wants to market The Ethical Executive well and write the next book. In spite of impossible adversity, the future is calling him.
Books by Robert Hoyk, Ph.D.
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