Give bankers some credit – they aren’t liars and are less likely to cheat than you’d think, new behaviour study finds
- The study examined the behaviour of hundreds of bankers on three continents
- Bankers were asked to flip a coin while thinking about their profession
- There was no notable increase in dishonesty when bankers think of their work
- This seems to disprove the results of an earlier study into banker behaviour
Bankers are more honest than people give them credit, according to the results of a study into whether people lie about the results of a coin flip game.
This contradicts the result of an earlier study that seemed to suggest bankers were likely to lie about the result when asked to think about their profession.
The new study found no notable increase in the likelihood of bankers lying about the result of the coin flip when they were thinking about work.
The earlier study likely involved a ‘bad batch of bankers’, according to researcher Zoe Rahwan from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
In total five different populations across three continents, with 768 bankers and 514 non-bankers were asked to play a coin-flip game while thinking about their work (stock image)
More than 800 bankers took part in the new study which found they were more honest than had been reported in the earlier study.
The 2014 research seemed to suggest that while bankers were generally honest if they were asked to think about their profession while tossing a coin they became more dishonest and more likely to lie about the result.
That study, led by Alain Cohn from the University of Chicago measured the honesty of 128 employees from a large international investment bank.
Dr Rahwan and colleagues replicated the experiment in five different populations across three continents, with 768 bankers and 514 non-bankers.
They found there was no significant increase in dishonesty when the bankers were primed to think about their work over the way they acted when not thinking about what they do for a living.
‘Professional culture may vary according to banking segments, individual institutions, jurisdictions or across countries’, said Dr Rahwen.
She said there needs to be a new approach to measure honesty in the financial services industry.
‘Professional culture may vary according to banking segments, individual institutions, jurisdictions or across countries’, said Dr Zoe Rahwen (stock image)
In response, Dr Cohn said: ‘It remains unclear to what extent the study is informative about the generalizability of our findings to other relevant contexts’.
He highlighted differences between the two studies including over the type of banking organisations samples, which he says could explain the different conclusions.
‘Many people in the financial sector may have been aware of our study, which may have affected the decision to participate or the responses given in the study by Rahwan’, Dr Cohn told Nature.
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