The Daily Stat from Harvard Business Review

 

March 20, 2015 People in Creepy Businesses Might Be Nicer Than You Are Employees in two distinctly unsavory businesses — "cybersquatting" (registering misleading domain names) and online pornography — are, on average, twice as likely to be trustworthy as a group of graduate and undergraduate social-science students, according to a study by Mitchell Hoffman of the University of Toronto and John Morgan of the University of California Berkeley that involved a series of experiments. Moreover, in a trust game, people in those industries were more than 50% more likely to trust, and they lied one-third less than the students did. Past research has suggested that unsavory industries attract liars and cheats, but Hoffman and Morgan argue that semi-lawless businesses require higher levels of interpersonal trust and even altruism for success. SOURCE: Who’s naughty? Who’s nice? Experiments on whether pro-social workers are selected out of cutthroat business environments

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