Does an unfair economy lead to bad behaviour? It’s generally understood that economic inequality makes people more likely to accept and expect unethical behaviour. According to a new study by Adrian Schroeder and his co-authors, those expectations aren’t limited to predictions of other people’s behaviour. When faced with making unethical choices that might benefit them, people even predict they would behave unethically themselves.
In preparation for his master’s studies, Schroeder, now a PhD student in the Department of Economics, University of Toronto, worked with Steven Heine and Anita Schmalor on a series of experiments to examine what they call “expectations of everyday unethical behaviours.” Examples include keeping the extra when a salesclerk makes a mistake when giving change, or keeping an online purchase delivered to the wrong address. These are the “everyday transgressions that violate social norms, although they aren’t necessarily against the law,” the authors explained.
In one experiment, participants were asked to imagine living in a make-believe society where there were three income tiers (low, medium, and high), with a randomly assigned amount of inequality (high or low). While all participants were assigned to the medium tier, when asked to choose a house, car and vacation appropriate to their tier, they could still see the options available to members of other tiers, whose options were influenced by inequality. They were then asked to predict how they would behave when faced with ten different scenarios where they could benefit by making an unethical choice. One example included breaking the rules by eating a fast food they hadn’t paid for at the fast-food restaurant where they were employed. A follow-up confirmed that participants really felt that the society with high income inequality was generally more unequal.
For the second experiment, subjects completed a survey about their own perceptions, beliefs, and experiences of economic inequality in the real world. They then went through the same ten scenarios and predicted how they would make the ethical choices.
When the authors conducted the third experiment, participants watched one of two videos suggesting that economic inequality was either high or low.
Across all three experiments, the authors found that “the more inequality people perceive, the more likely they are to say they would act unethically.”
“We found no effect when instead of fictional engagement, we tried to manipulate inequality perception by means of a video about the real world,” Schroeder explained. “Perhaps this is not just a difference in media: A possible solution is that there is a subtle difference between perceiving inequality in a pre-existing setting, versus one in which inequality is looked at as on outcome in society. People’s pre-conceived notion of societal inequality may make it hard to shift away from how they’re used to looking at society.”
Return to the Department of Economics website.
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