Ethics. If you look hard enough, news sources are brimming with companies exhibiting unethical behavior. Whether it be Uber's controversial post-riding tracking or their surge pricing that some believe took advantage of a New York Taxi Workers Alliance immigration protest. It might be Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf continuing to defend the bogus accounts created by 5,000 of his employees in order to hit their sales targets. Or possibly, Google's recent fine for preferential advertising.

As scrutiny for bad behavior gets stronger, we should look to the processes businesses have created to prevent it.

There has been an astonishing investment in compliance in the last decade. Compliance jobs saw the third highest salary increase in the UK last year. 89 percent of banking professionals report that spending on compliance has increased exponentially in the last five years.

Yet, despite this tsunami of expenditure, we still find that misdemeanors are as great as ever before. Global research shows that the level of observed misconduct has remained relatively stable at 14 percent since 2008, falling a mere 0.2 percent. In a recent event, we asked a group of Chief Compliance Officers from 20 banks whether they had seen a healthy return on their compliance investment. The answer was a resounding no.

The problem seems to be that decisions about how to solve the conduct crisis have been made by economists. Economists make claims based on how people should behave: If you fine people they'll behave better; if you give clear rules, people will behave well; if you encourage whistleblowing, you'll create an ethical climate.

But ask a behavioral scientist, and they'll ditch the 'should', and make suggestions based on how people actually behave.

If you fine people, they don't always behave better. A recent study looked at the impact of giving a fine to parents who were late picking up their child from school. To everyone's surprise, the fine actually increased the number of parents being late. The addition of the penalty (in this case, around £30) turned the decision from a moral one ('is it right for me to keep the teachers here after the day ends?') into an economic one ('is it worth £30?').

If you give clear rules, good behavior does not necessarily follow. There is no correlation (let alone causation) between publishing a code of conduct and either ethical behavior, or even intention to behave ethically. True, you may need to have a code of conduct for legal reasons, but as with many things, it is necessary but by no means sufficient.

If you encourage whistleblowing, you won't create an ethical climate. From childhood we're imbued with words like sneak, snitch, tell-tale, super grass. At least 50 percent of whistle-blowing is done for reasons of pure self-interest – research indicates people wouldn't do it otherwise. Many admit that they would never blow the whistle for two reasons: fear of the negative personal consequences, and futility – that nothing will be done.

And if, like many organizations have tried to do, you go one step further and provide ethical dilemma training, sadly people will not magically do the right thing when that scenario arises in real life. Like the divers who died fixing oil rigs in the North Sea, and Chesley Sullenberger who landed his plane in the Hudson River, no matter what the training and handbooks tells us we should do, how we respond in a 'cold' state bears no resemblance to how we'd act in a 'hot' one.

So, sticking to the rules is not good enough. People are now expected to do the right thing. But when all the things businesses have tried to encourage good behavior are failing, what's the answer?

Our research has pointed to clear actions which create an ethical climate.

No, it's not about ensuring executives are beacons of moral standards. Research consistently shows that we all think we're much more ethical than the average person (and we're better drivers, with a better sense of humour, etc. etc.). This puts the benchmark for what it means for someone else be considered 'ethical' off the scale. Even if the senior team were relative angels, it probably still wouldn't do the trick.

Broadly, we end up behaving as well as we predict the 'average' person will but our delusion comes down to the strength of our moral identity. The vast majority of us want to look in the mirror and think of ourselves as a good person. When examiners swapped 'please don't cheat' with 'please don't be a cheater' on the top of test papers, incidences of cheating halved.

Getting people to behave ethically therefore comes down to understanding why, when we consider ourselves to be such 'good' people, do we do 'bad' things?

The answer is that we need ethics to be front of mind, or at least somewhere in our decision-making repertoire, for us to do the right thing. Often, other motivations push ethics out. Research shows that if we feel excluded, unfairly treated, tired and emotional or socially pressured, ethics somehow gets lost. Most forgeries (in art, wine, archaeology), were not done to make any money – they were done to fit in. Judges tend to be more lenient after lunch, when they've had a renewal of physical energy.

The answer, then, is to acknowledge these universal human tendencies, and help people keep ethics front of mind. That way, they at least stand a chance of doing the right thing.

A study showed that simply asking participants to recall the 10 commandments ahead of a test more than halved the level of cheating, no matter their religious beliefs. Using prompts and nudges to remind ourselves of our moral identity is a strong start. Similarly, encouraging regular conversations about moral issues that avoid moralizing will mean ethics features more prominently in our consciousness. And helping people to see when they're at risk of succumbing to other pressures, and what they can do to overcome them, is a sure fire way to help.

To learn more about our ethics point-of-view, or to download our full white paper The Only Way is Ethics, please visit our website: www.themindgym.com