Not quite. The idea that corporate employees are fundamentally "not average" and therefore more prone to unethical behaviour than the general population relies on a dispositional explanation (it's about the person's character).

However, the vast majority of psychological research over the last 80 years heavily favours a situational explanation (it's about the environment/system). Everyone (in the field) got really interested in this after WW2 basically, trying to understand how the heck did Nazi Germany happen.

TL;DR: research dismantled this idea decades ago.

The Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments are the most obvious examples. If you're not familiar:

Milgram showed that 65% of ordinary volunteers were willing to administer potentially lethal electric shocks to a stranger because an authority figure in a lab coat told them to. In the Stanford Prison experiement, Zimbardo took healthy, average college students and assigned them roles as guards and prisoners. Within days, the roles and systems set in place overrode individual personality.

The other relevant bit would be Asch’s conformity experiments; to whit, that people will deny the evidence of their own eyes (e.g., the length of a line) to fit in with a group.

In a corporate setting, if the group norm is to prioritise KPIs over ethics, the average human will conform to that norm to avoid social friction or losing their job, or other realistic perceived fears.

Bazerman and Tenbrunsel's research is relevant too. Broadly, people like to think that we are rational moral agents, but it's more accurate to say that we boundedly ethical. There's this idea of ethical fading that happens. Basically, when you introduce a goal, people's ability to frame falls apart, including with a view to the ethical implications. This is also related to why people under pressure default to less creative approaches to problem solving. Our brains tunnel vision on the goal, to the failure of everything else.

Regarding how all that relates to modern politics, I'll leave that up to your imagination.

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socialcommenter 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I find this framing of corporates a bit unsatisfying because it doesn't address hierarchy. By your reckoning, the employees just follow the group norm over their own ethics. Sure, but those norms are handed down by the people in charge (and, with decent overlap, those that have been around longest and have shaped the work culture).

What type of person seeks to be in charge in the corporate world? YMMV but I tend to see the ones who value ethics (e.g. their employees' wellbeing) over results and KPIs tend to burn out, or decide management isn't for them, or avoid seeking out positions of power.

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pwatsonwailes 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Responded on this line of thinking a bit further down, so I'll be brief on this. Yes, there's selection bias in organisations as you go up the ladder of power and influence, which selects for various traits (psychopathy being an obvious one).

That being said, there's a side view on this from interactionism that it's not just the traits of the person's modes of behaviour, but their belief in the goal, and their view of the framing of it, which also feeds into this. Research on cult behaviours has a lot of overlap with that.

The culture and the environment, what the mission is seen as, how contextually broad that is and so on all get in to that.

I do a workshop on KPI setting which has overlap here too. In short for that - choose mutually conflicting KPIs which narrow the state space for success, such that attempting to cheat one causes another to fail. Ideally, you want goals for an organisation that push for high levels of upside, with limited downside, and counteracting merits, such that only by meeting all of them do you get to where you want to be. Otherwise it's like drawing a line of a piece of paper, asking someone to place a dot on one side of the line, and being upset that they didn't put it where you wanted it. More lines narrows the field to just the areas where you're prepared to accept success.

That division can also then be used to narrow what you're willing to accept (for good or ill) of people in meeting those goals, but the challenge is that they tend to see meeting all the goals as the goal, not acting in a moral way, because the goals become the target, and decontextualise the importance of everything else.

TL;DR: value setting for positive behaviour and corporate performance is hard.

EDIT: actually this wasn't that short as an answer really. Sorry for that.

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socialcommenter 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> That division can also then be used to narrow what you're willing to accept (for good or ill) of people in meeting those goals, but the challenge is that they tend to see meeting all the goals as the goal, not acting in a moral way, because the goals become the target, and decontextualise the importance of everything else.

I would imagine that your "more lines" approach does manage to select for those who meet targets for the right reasons over those who decontextualise everything and "just" meet the targets? The people in the latter camp would be inclined to (try to) move goalposts once they've established themselves - made harder by having the conflicting success criteria with the narrow runway to success.

In other words, good ideas and thanks for the reply (length is no problem!). I do however think that this is all idealised and not happening enough in the real world - much agreed re: psychopathy etc.

If you wouldn't mind running some training courses in a few key megacorporations, that might make a really big difference to the world!

	▲	pwatsonwailes 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're not wrong strictly speaking - the challenge comes in getting KPIs for ethical and moral behaviour to be things that the company signs up for. Some are geared that way inherently (Patagonia is the cliché example), but most aren't. People will always find other goalposts to move. The trick is making sure the KPIs you set define the goalposts you care about staying in place. Side note: Jordan Peterson is pretty much an example of inventing goalposts to move. Everything he argues about is about setting a goalpost, and then inventing others to move around to avoid being pinned down. Motte-and-bailey fallacy happens with KPIs as much as it does with debates.

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throwaway743 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Idk where you're at, but it's been the complete opposite in my experience

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RobotToaster 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My favourite part about the Milgram experiments is that he originally wanted to prove that obedience was a German trait, and that freedom loving Americans wouldn't obey, which he completely disproved. The results annoyed him so much that he repeated it dozens of times, getting roughly the same result.

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jacques_morin 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Stanford prison experiment has been debunked many times : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/

- guards received instructions to be cruel from experimenters

- guards were not told they were subjects while prisoners were

- participants were not immersed in the simulation

- experimenters lied about reports from subjects.

Basically it is bad science and we can't conclude anything from it. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that top fortune-500 management have personality traits that make them more likely to engage in unethical behaviour, if only by selection through promotion by crushing others.

	▲	pwatsonwailes 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's instructive though, despite the flaws, and at this point has been replicated enough in different ways that we know it's got some basis in reality. There's a whole bunch of constructivist research around interactionism, that shows that whilst it's not just the person's default ways of behaving or just the situation that matters, the situational context definitely influences what people are likely to do in any given scenario. Reicher & Haslam's research around engaged followership gives a pretty good insight into why Zimbardo got the results he did, because he wasn't just observing what went on. That gets into all sorts of things around good study design, constructivist vs positivist analysis etc, but that's a whole different thing. I suspect, particularly with regards to different levels, there's an element of selection bias going on (if for no other reason that what we see in terms of levels of psychopathy in higher levels of management), but I'd guess (and it's a guess), that culture convincing people that achieving the KPI is the moral good is more of a factor. That gets into a whole separate thing around what happens in more cultlike corporations and the dynamics with the VC world (WeWork is an obvious example) as to why organisations can end up with workforces which will do things of questionable purpose, because the organisation has a visible a fearless leader who has to be pleased/obeyed etc (Musk, Jobs etc), or more insidiously, a valuable goal that must be pursued regardless of cost (weaponised effective altruism sort of). That then gets into a whole thing about what happens with something like the UK civil service, where you're asked to implement things and obviously you can't care about the politics, because you'll serve lots of governments that believe lots of different things, and you can't just quit and get rehired every time a party you disagree with personally gets into power, but again, that diverges into other things. At the risk of narrative fallacy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKDdLWAdcbM

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watwut 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments are the most obvious examples.

BOTH are now considered bad science. BOTH are now used as examples of "how not to do the science".

> The idea that corporate employees are fundamentally "not average" and therefore more prone to unethical behaviour than the general population relies on a dispositional explanation (it's about the person's character).

I did not said nor implied that. Corporate employees in general and Forbes 500 are not the same thing. Corporate employees as in cooks, cleaners, bureaucracy, testers and whoever are general population.

Whether company ends in Forbes 500 or not is not influenced by general corporate employees. It is influenced by higher management - separated social class. It is very much selected who gets in.

And second, companies compete against each other. A company run by ethical management is less likely to reach Forbes 500. Not doing unethical things is disadvantage in current business. It could have been different if there was law enforcement for rich people and companies and if there was political willingness to regulate the companies. None of that exists.

Third, look at issues around Epstein. It is not that everyone was cool with his misogyny, sexism and abuse. The people who were not cool with that seen red flags long before underage kids entered the room. These people did not associated with Epstein. People who associated with him were rewarded by additional money and success - but they also were much more unethical then a guy who said "this feels bad" and walked away.

	▲	pwatsonwailes 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not sure where you get that for Milgram. That's been replicated lots of times, in different countries, with different compositions of people, and found to be broadly replicable. Burger in '09, Sheridan & King in '72, Dolinski and co in '17, Caspar in '16, Haslam & Reicher which I referenced somewhere else in the thread...