Entitled Financial Deprivation Selectively Shifts Moral Standards and Compromises Moral Decisions, the study concludes that people who feel financially deprived are more likely to cheat for financial gains and also have a more lenient standard for moral offenders who appear to be under financial duress. The study was conducted by a group of researchers, including Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at the Fuqua School of Business.
“For years, people believed that dishonesty was unusual, and that only “bad” people cheat, lie, and steal,” Adam Alter, one of the researchers behind the study and an assistant professor of marketing at Stern School of Business at New York University, wrote in an email Wednesday. “The truth is that everyone behaves at least a bit dishonestly sometimes, and researchers have begun to devote plenty of time and energy to the question of what makes otherwise “good” people behave badly.”
Before the experiments, most subjects indicated in a survey that they would not condone immoral conduct on the basis of financial deprivation. But most of these same subjects cheated in the experiment when they were placed in a hypothetical situation of financial distress.
"This result suggests that we don’t have great insight into the factors that will or won’t cause us to behave less honestly than we might normally behave,” Alter said.
Being aware that individuals are generally prone to compromise their moral standards in deprived situations is crucial to the functioning of the current society, where the economic downturn causes most people—even the wealthy—to feel insecure about their financial situation, Alter said.
Although the U.S. economy has been recovering since the 2008 recession, the effects of the financial crisis are still evident. Real median household income in the United States in 2011 was seven percent below that of 1999, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The study suggests there may now be an increasing presence of minor forms of workplace dishonesty, such as pilfering office stationery, Alter added.
But, Alter said that if employees feel that they are valued and are happy to be working for the company, they will no longer feel the need to skim the company’s resources.
“[The paper] suggests that firms might be able to offset some of these losses by ensuring that their employees are well taken care of,” Alter said.
Shamoor Anis, Law ’13 who is currently working as a judicial law clerk, said he does not feel that these minor cheating behaviors are a common occurrence in his working environment.
A rise in workplace dishonesty would still seem unintuitive, Anis added, because the difficulty of securing employment should stop employees from engaging in behaviors that could get them in trouble with their companies.
“However, desperation is definitely a factor in immoral behaviors and I wouldn’t be surprised if crime rate grows because of unemployment or desperation,” Anis said.
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