Dishonesty and Banking

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Fascinating new RSA Animate featuring Dan Ariely talking about his new book The Truth About Dishonesty. Lots of nuggets in here including a really interesting thought on how tiny is the proportion of ‘big cheaters’ in society and how the magnitude of dishonesty we see is instead down to good people who think they are doing good but in fact are cheating just a little bit.

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The last minute of the film contains some truths about the financial crisis that feel intuitively right. Says Dan:

“The reality is that we all have the capacity to be quite bad under the right circumstances, and in banking we have created the right circumstances for everyone to misbehave. And because of that it’s not such a matter of kicking some people and getting some new people in, it’s about changing the incentive structure. Unless we change that, we are not going to move forward.”

Amen to that.

Image via flickr

Original Post: http://neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/2012/09/dishonesty-and-banking.html