Bankers behaving badly

The financial environment makes bankers behave badly and become prone to dishonesty, new research has shown... 

Public opinion surveys place bankers amongst the least-trusted members of society, below even criminals and prisoners. This label might not be so wide of the mark, though, with a study in Switzerland showing that bankers playing a simple game are prone to cheat. 

Writing in Nature, Michel Marechal and his colleagues at the University of Zurich recruited over one hundred financiers to play a simple coin-tossing game. The participants were told to toss the coin and report whether they had thrown a heads or a tail. Through chance alone, half of the throws should return heads. The players were also told that for every head they would win $20. 

Critically, the throws were unobserved, so the bankers could elect to cheat if they wished and mis-report their outcomes to push up their winnings. But, before they played, the participants were asked some questions carefully chosen to make them think about their leisure activities or home-lives, or to put them into a banking mindset by asking them about their work. 

When the participants were primed in this way to think about out-of-work activities, there was no evidence of cheating - the win rates they reported were exactly what would be expected through random chance, showing that they were playing honestly. But when the players were primed first with work-related questions, they began to be dishonest, reporting significantly more wins than would be expected. 

"It's not so much the banking sector attracts dishonest individuals, because when they weren't thinking about work these people behaved honestly," says Marechal. "But when they are in their work mindset, then they begin to cheat."

Instead, Marechal speculates that it is the environment in which they work that skews bankers' perceptions of what is morally or socially acceptable behaviour. 

"The banks should do more to cultivate a culture of good behaviour. I think perhaps these people should take an oath similar to the Hippocratic oath sworn by doctors."