“Built Different? Think Again: What the Coldplay Kiss Cam Scandal Teaches About Ethical Leadership”

At this point, you’re almost guaranteed to have heard of the “Coldplay Kiss Cam” scandal, but just in case you haven’t, let’s talk about it. Last month, during a “kiss cam” section of their concert, a couple hid from the camera after being caught in an embrace and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin made a joke that the couple must be having an affair. It wasn’t long before internet sleuths discovered that not only were they couple indeed having an affair, but that they were the CEO and CPO of the AI company Astronomer. The incident went viral, with memes galore, joking imitations at other events, and the sort of general pile-on that one expects in the era where social media has replaced the stocks for public shaming purposes.

On the one hand, the hubbub makes sense. It was brazen, almost hilariously so. Furthermore, if the couple had just played it cool during Chris Martin’s joke, it’s unlikely the story would have blown up. Additionally, both the CEO and the CPO come from money and work in the tech industry, putting them in two widely-disliked demographics that make schadenfreude at their misfortune that much more fun (3). Also, while the boundaries of what is and isn’t cheating might have shifted over the years (6), infidelity remains a uniquely despised and unforgivable transgression (13), and publicly shaming and deriding those caught out in it helps us to feel better about our own risk of experiencing (or committing) similar actions (9).

Others have written (and continue to write) about this pop culture moment’s implications for issues of marriage, infidelity, doxxing, privacy, and internet culture. However, I want to talk about what it means for leadership.

Leadership on the Kiss Cam

I’ll be honest, when I sat down to write this piece, I felt a little torn. It felt like the kind of corporate “everything is a nail to my hammer” think piece that benefits neither the field of leadership nor broader society.  Furthermore, what happened involved real people, real families, and real consequences. This isn’t a reality show or a scripted drama, and it’s no one's business but theirs to speculate about how it plays out for them.

The reason I’m writing about it anyway is that the public reaction to this scandal - the memes, jokes, and schadenfreude - exposes something bigger than just infidelity. Yes, Andy Byron, the CEO in question, was having an affair with his Chief People Officer—his head of HR— and that relationship crossed both personal and professional boundaries in ways any leader should have recognized as dangerous.

However, the intensity of the public backlash isn’t just about condemning infidelity or hypocrisy. It’s about something deeper: our collective need to believe we would never make the same kind of mistake. In this way, public shaming is becoming a kind of psychological self-defense. By turning others’ failures into a public spectacle, we attempt to reassure ourselves that we are somehow “built different,” and thus immune to making any kind of similar mistake.

The hard truth is that none of us - and I do mean none - is immune from ethical lapses. Even the most ethical, knowledgeable person can, given the right circumstances, cross lines they never thought they would.

That’s a deeply uncomfortable fact, and our reluctance to face it is precisely why we need to talk about it, especially in the context of leadership.

“It Couldn’t Happen Here!”

Reluctance to admit our vulnerability to unethical behavior is nothing new. It’s one of the core issues of modern psychology. One of the field’s most famous answers came from the 1960s, when Stanley Milgram, inspired by Social Psychologist Kurt Lewin’s view of behavior as a function of both the person and their environment, set out to test just how much the situation can override personal values.

Milgram had watched the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Holocaust, whose defense was simply, “I was just following orders.” Eichmann’s defense was widely derided as, at the time, many saw the Holocaust as resulting from something uniquely “German” and believed it could never happen in “civilized” societies like the U.S. Milgram didn’t buy it.

Milgram demonstrated that more than 65% of ordinary Americans would shock another person to death simply (or so they believed) simply because an authority figure in a lab coat told them “the experiment requires you to continue” (7). This finding has been replicated for decades across cultures and contexts (1). However, research still shows 92% of Americans are satisfied with their moral character, while 80% believe they’re more ethical than others (8).  In other words, most people assume themselves to be “built different” when it comes to ethical challenges.

That’s a dangerously naive assumption, especially for leaders. If the average person can be pushed to essentially murder another person by a stranger in a lab coat, how much easier is it to rationalize things like nepotism, insider trading, or inappropriate workplace relationships? 

“I’m more ethical than others” is just “It couldn’t happen here” with a fresh coat of paint, and leaders who believe it are the least likely to put safeguards in place before it’s too late.

"Build different" not "Built different" - Ethical Leadership as a Solution

It might seem like a bit of a leap to jump from a kiss cam to the holocaust and electrocution. However, the fact is that these phenomena are linked by the power of their situations.

Leadership research has repeatedly confirmed what Milgram demonstrated over six decades ago: even the most apparently upright person can behave unethically given the right situational pressures. Guido Palazzo, Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Lausanne,  goes so far as to say that “The values of a person play no role [in ethical behavior] when the context is very powerful” (11).

Recent history is awash with examples demonstrating this fact. Wells Fargo’s fake accounts scandal showed how aggressive sales targets and reward systems can normalize fraud. Boeing’s 737 Max crisis revealed how schedule pressure and market competition can override safety priorities. Theranos demonstrated how hype, secrecy, and loyalty to a charismatic leader can blind people to blatant deception. In each case, smart, experienced, and even well-intentioned leaders who “should have known better” succumbed to the power of the situation and behaved unethically - sometimes with devastating consequences.

The good news is that leadership can be part of the solution as well as part of the problem. Leaders shape the ethical climate of an organization, and that influence trickles down to every level. Here are five ways leaders can strengthen that climate:

1. Model ethical behavior. Don’t just avoid active misconduct. Instead, openly make values-driven choices. Turning down a lucrative but dubious contract or publicly crediting a competitor sends far louder signals than abstract commitments to “ethical standards” (10).
    
2. Foster open communication and promote values. Create safe spaces to raise concerns without retaliation. For example, some organizations hold monthly “ethics huddles” where staff anonymously submit dilemmas for open discussion, linking each back to stated values. Leaders should also model this kind of communication by explaining tough calls in relation to core ethical values and principles (12).
    
3. Enforce accountability. Ethical breaches must be treated as non-negotiable, regardless of impacts on rank or revenue. Quietly excusing misconduct from a high performer or well-liked individual  tells everyone that results or popularity matter more than integrity or ethics. Consequences for ethical breaches must be set in advance and enforced even when doing so is costly (4).
    
4. Cultivate moral humility. Acknowledge and emphasize that no one - no one! -  is immune to situational pressures and that ethical behavior has many points of possible failure, which means that everyone should remain vigilant to their own vulnerabilities (5).
    
5. Make ethics ongoing. Go beyond mandatory annual seminars or video trainings. Instead, regularly and objectively assess vulnerabilities across all levels of an organization. Rather than relegating ethics to specific trainings or occasions,  integrate them into daily work through “moral laboratories” where dilemmas are practiced, norms are explicit, and incentives reward ethical behavior (2; 10; 12).

From Memes to Meaning

We’ll probably never know (hopefully) what situational pressures Andy Byron and his CPO faced that led them to get caught on the Coldplay Kiss Cam.

However, what we do know, and should remember, is that when we see “obvious” ethical breaches, whether on social media or in our own circles, our first instinct shouldn’t be pointing, laughing, or meming as if we’re somehow immune. That reaction might be comforting, but it’s also dangerous.

The harder, but more effective response is to recognize our own vulnerabilities to situational pressures. None of us is “built different” when it comes to ethics, and each of us has the capacity to do horrible things given the right circumstances.

That’s why the work of leadership is to BUILD different: to creat environments with policies, norms, expectations, and incentives that help us and those we lead resist those pressures before lines are crossed that can’t be uncrossed.

In the end, the best safeguard against ethical failure isn’t believing “it couldn’t happen here,” but helping to build a world where it’s harder for “it” to happen at all.

References

1. Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0010932
2. Cicero, F. R. (2021). Behavioral Ethics: Ethical Practice Is More Than Memorizing Compliance Codes. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 14(4), 1169–1178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-021-00585-5
3. Cikara, M., & Fiske, S. T. (2013). Their pain, our pleasure: Stereotype content and schadenfreude. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1299, 52–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12179
4. Demir, T., Reddick, C. G., & Perlman, B. J. (2023). Ethical Performance in Local Governments: An Empirical Study of Organizational Leadership and Ethics Culture. The American Review of Public Administration, 53(5–6), 209–223. https://doi.org/10.1177/02750740231175653
5. Garrigan, B., Adlam, A. L. R., & Langdon, P. E. (2018). Moral decision-making and moral development: Toward an integrative framework. Developmental Review, 49, 80–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2018.06.001
6. Kruger, D. J., Fisher, M. L., Edelstein, R. S., Chopik, W. J., Fitzgerald, C. J., & Strout, S. L. (2013). Was That Cheating? Perceptions Vary by Sex, Attachment Anxiety, and Behavior. Evolutionary Psychology, 11(1), 159–171. https://doi.org/10.1177/147470491301100115
7. Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral Study of obedience. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371.
8. Prentice, R. (2014). Teaching Behavioral Ethics. Journal of Legal Studies Education, 31(2), 325–365. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlse.12018
9. Rothschild, Z. K., & Keefer, L. A. (2017). A cleansing fire: Moral outrage alleviates guilt and buffers threats to one’s moral identity. Motivation and Emotion, 41(2), 209–229. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9601-2
10. Roy, A., Newman, A., Round, H., & Bhattacharya, S. (2024). Ethical Culture in Organizations: A Review and Agenda for Future Research. Business Ethics Quarterly, 34(1), 97–138. https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2022.44
11. Sinclair, J. (2019, November 13). Ethical blindness explains why good people do bad things. Aalto Leaders’ Insight. https://www.aaltoee.fi/en/aalto-leaders-insight/2019/ethical-blindness-explains-why-good-people-do-bad-things
12. Smith, I. H., & Kouchaki, M. (2021). Ethical Learning: The Workplace as a Moral Laboratory for Character Development. Social Issues and Policy Review, 15(1), 277–322. https://doi.org/10.1111/sipr.12073
13. Twenge, J. M., Sherman, R. A., & Wells, B. E. (2015). Changes in American Adults’ Sexual Behavior and Attitudes, 1972-2012. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44(8), 2273–2285. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-015-0540-2