Why Good People Do Bad Things

NPR did a story yesterday, Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things. Go read or listen to it; I think it's very interesting. Here are a couple of money quotes.

Over the past couple of decades, psychologists have documented many different ways that our minds fail to see what is directly in front of us. They've come up with a concept called "bounded ethicality": That's the notion that cognitively, our ability to behave ethically is seriously limited, because we don't always see the ethical big picture.

We like to help each other, especially people we identify with. And when we are helping people, we really don't see what we are doing as unethical.

This doesn't really surprise me. Perhaps it explains something that occurred to me a while ago, which is this: Depending on how a story opens (especially a movie) otherwise moral people root for criminals. You know the kind of story I'm talking about--the bank robbing bandits who elude police, the prisoner trying to escape, the scammers who take on a casino, etc. If the story can get us to identify with the main characters, we root for their success even if it happens to be in conflict with the law and with our own moral principles.

Is there a practical application to all of this?

Now if these psychologists and economists are right, if we are all capable of behaving profoundly unethically without realizing it, then our workplaces and regulations are poorly organized. They're not designed to take into account the cognitively flawed human beings that we are. They don't attempt to structure things around our weaknesses.

Something to think about. It makes me glad that Mormons are often reminded of the need for honesty. (Some occasional spectacular failures notwithstanding.)

---