What I try to convey to students is that it’s not so much that bad things are done by bad people, it’s that the world is one vast gray space. And we, as human beings, are incredibly good at coming up with rationalizations for doing that which is expedient.
The problem is that it’s never really clear what’s right or wrong, and we will take that ambiguity and use it effectively as a tool to align what is expedient with what we tell ourselves is actually the moral course of action. I tell students that I’ve probably engaged in a dozen self rationalizations by the time I walk into the classroom at 9 a.m.
Take for example the coin-toss experiment. It runs something like this: You give a subject the following instructions: go into that room and flip a coin. If it comes up heads you’ll get $10, and if it comes up tails you get nothing.
(By the way, this is also something we economists couldn’t do, because we can’t lie to subjects or mislead them, and in this experiment there is a hidden camera in this room.)
What we find is that people don’t just walk in to the room, stand there for five seconds, and then walk out and say it was heads. Some flip the coin, so they at least have a 50 percent chance of not having to lie. But the most common outcome is that they flip the coin until it comes up heads. Then they walk out and say, “I got heads.” So they are taking advantage of the ambiguity in the instructions to do what is clearly expedient (the instructions don’t specify how many times you flip the coin).
When I tell the students about this, I tell them what I would do: walk into the room, wait for five seconds, and walk out and say I got heads. The reason I would do that is that I would be thinking to myself: This is a ludicrous experiment; I’m sure this psychologist is misleading me in some way, and in general this is just an illegitimate exercise so I may as well get $10 out of it. Which is just a self rationalization of another sort.
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