Does Thinking Quantitatively Cause Us to be More Selfish, More Unethical?

Scholars Long Wang, Chen-Bo Zhong and Keith Murnighan have conducted new research examining the link between a "calculative mindset" and selfish/unethical behavior.  They used the ultimatum game and the dictator game to conduct their studies.  These two exercises often used in business schools to teach basic principles of game theory.   They split study participants into two groups.    In the control condition, participants were primed by reading a historical account of the industrial evolution.  In the experimental condition, participants were primed by reading a tutorial about net present value analysis.   What did the scholars find?   The participants who examined the net present value tutorial acted more selfishly, and they lied more often during these games than those who read about the history of the industrial revolution.  In other words, those primed to think quantitatively tended to act more selfishly and unethically.   The scholars argue that the calculative mindset is not problematic in and of itself, but it becomes dangerous when it comes to dominate people's thinking.  They also point out that business schools often emphasize the calculative mindset a great deal.  They should question the impact of asking students to think quantitatively so often. 

Hiring Unqualified Candidates: Why Do We Make That Mistake?

Samuel A. Swift and Don A. Moore of the University of California at Berkeley, Zachariah S. Sharek of Carnegie Mellon University, and and Francesca Gino of the Harvard Business School have conducted some fascinating new research that might explain why we often make the mistake of hiring someone who isn't as qualified as we think he or she is.  The scholars find that, "Across all our studies, the results suggest that experts take high performance as evidence of high ability and do not sufficiently discount it by the ease with which that performance was achieved."    How does this problem manifest itself?  Imagine that you are looking at a candidate for a sales position who worked in a high-flying business that was growing very rapidly.    You might fail to account for the fact that it is much easier being a sales person in that type of company as opposed to working for a mature company with low organic growth. 

The scholars conducted several experimental studies which showed that people often select candidates who have excelled at easier jobs/tasks over those individuals who may have performed slightly worse at a much more challenging task.   The scholars also looked at actual admissions data for graduate schools of business.   They found that students are at an advantage if they went to an undergraduate institution with a grade inflation problem!  In other words, if you went to a school that gave out easy A's, you have a better shot at getting into a good MBA program; the admissions officers are not doing a good enough job evaluating the difficulty level of various undergraduate programs. 

As a business school professor, I'm saddened that we appear to be rewarding grade inflation.   The study shines a spotlight on an important problem.  The research has much broader implications though; it shows us why many kinds of organizations may make poor hiring decisions.