Does banking make a person dishonest? That's the suggestion from a study published in the journal Nature this week. Researchers at the University of Zurich divided 128 employees at a large, international bank into two groups. One filled out a survey about their personal lives, and the other answered questions about their banking background.
They were then asked to toss a coin 10 times, without anyone watching, and report on the results. If they told researchers they guessed correctly on a toss, they collected $20 for each correct answer. The people who’d been asked about their personal lives said they won 51.6 percent of tosses, but those who talked about their banking jobs said they won 58.2 percent of the time. In the group of bankers told to think about their jobs, 8 percent reported winning all ten tosses, compared with 3 percent in the other group.
The researchers repeated the experiment was repeated with 133 employees at other companies and 222 university students. For those people, talking about money had no effect on their dishonesty.
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