Are professionals in some fields more honest than others?

Work carried out by three researchers from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Zurich and published 19 last November in the prestigious journal Nature and which has echoed is NY Times, has wanted to show whether the lack of honesty is characteristic of banking professionals.

As Alan Cohn, Ernst Fehr and Michel André Maréchal, trust in others is a key component in the results to long-term companies and even countries. "However, in recent years, numerous fraud-related scandals have reduced confidence in banking. Different opinion leaders have attributed these scandals to the business culture of the banking sector, but there was no scientific evidence that would support it. Our research shows that a major international bank employees behave in a position of control, on average, in a honest way. However, when his professional identity as employees of the Bank comes to the light, a significant proportion of them become dishonest", warn the authors in the introduction of the article.

This effect is specific to employees of the Bank, because control with employees of other industries and students experiments show that they do not become more dishonest when their professional identity or issues related to banks are put on the table. "Our results suggest that business culture prevailing in the banking industry weakens and undermines the rule of honesty, which implies that measures to restore an honest culture are very important," they stressed.

The researchers recruited 128 employees of banks, which were assigned to two groups: the first answered questions about their profession ("what is your work?") or general questions ("do much TV you see?"). Then asked each employee that he threw a coin 10 times and report results online.

There was an advantage, however, Liars: said in advance to the participants that they would get a reward of $20 if a given release came out heads or tails whenever the global percentage of victories that reported was greater than that of another participant chosen at random.

The group that had not asked about his profession was largely honest, reporting a launch of currency winning 51.6% of the time. The second group reported a 58.2% of winning releases. Researchers estimate that 26% of the bankers in the last group had cheated, compared with almost none of the first group.

To confirm their findings, the authors of the work carried out the study again with people of other professions, which were no less honest when asked about his work.