Good people, bad choices

Novelists can be a pessimistic lot. Joseph Conrad believed we have a “heart of darkness” while William Golding went to great lengths to allegorically make the point that the veneer of civilisation we all carry about is lamentably thin. There is another well-known bestseller (title two words, first word “The” and found in most hotel rooms) that has suggested that humans are innately not too ethical. The common idea here is that, while you may behave well at times, there is a bad you inside just waiting to get out given the right circumstances. That idea has been canvassed in a new study and while the findings do suggest that good people can do bad things they also show a way to avoid that happening.

In the new study, business school students were divided into pairs, one to act as the broker for a “seller” and the other as the broker for a “buyer” of a historic New York brownstone. The dilemma was that the seller wanted to preserve the property while the buyer wanted to demolish it and build a hotel. Those acting as brokers for the seller were told to only sell to a buyer who would preserve the brownstone. However, the subjects acting as brokers for the buyer were told to conceal the buyer’s plan to build a hotel.

Before the negotiations began, half of the subjects were asked to recall a time when they cheated or bent the rules in order to gain advantage. The other half were given no instructions.

The results showed that only 45 per cent of people who had been asked to think about their ethics before the experiment behaved unethically in the negotiations. This compares to 67 per cent of people who behaved unethically when they had not thought about their ethics.

The researchers say that this shows that “good” people are more likely behave unethically if they believe the act is an isolated instance and they do not see it as an ongoing aspect of their behaviour.

So, next time you are tempted to not pay for that chocolate bar (80 per cent cacao of course!) that you take from the office snack box, think back to when you stole your friend’s ruler at school or perhaps when you blamed your sibling for that broken vase … you just might be more likely to drop coins in the box.