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We All Want to Be Good – Then Life Happens

Source | icubem.com | admin

Say you’re in sales and your boss offers you, privately, to choose between two accounts. Both clients have the same commission potential, but one of them has an unpleasant reputation. Will you hesitate before choosing the nicer client and letting your colleague deal with the other one?

More people than you might think would rather avoid making the obviously selfish decision in this kind of situation. So, if their boss offers to flip a coin, they are likely to do so. But should the coin fall on the “wrong” side, they are also likely to disregard the toss and ultimately assign themselves the nicer client. After all, the boss said that they could choose.

In essence, this is what Dale Miller of Stanford and I show in our recent paper, “A dynamic perspective on moral choice: Revisiting moral hypocrisy”. When people flip a coin (out of fairness), it is not with the intention of disregarding the outcome if it disadvantages them. They are sincerely hoping to get the better deal through luck, thus avoiding any damage to their self-regard. But if Lady Luck isn’t on their side, only then do they revise their decision, using the justification that flipping the coin was optional in the first place. It is a two-step process.

Fairness carries a weight

Acting fairly or doing good deeds for others often comes with a cost. For instance, you may need to expend time, money or effort. But acting selfishly is not cost-free either – the bill comes due when you look at yourself in the mirror. For many people, this creates a painful dilemma. My co-author and I ran four studies to examine how people deal with it.

In our first study, survey participants considered four possible ways of assigning the most advantageous of two tasks: assigning it to oneself or to someone else, or obtaining – or losing it – through chance (a coin toss). Getting the better deal via flipping a coin was perceived as the happiest possible outcome. On a scale of 7, participants rated it 5.91, higher than just assigning it to oneself (5.24). The least happy outcome was to lose the better deal based on a toss (3.58). If the other party is to get the better deal, it might as well be your own doing – at least you could feel good about being such a kind person.

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icubem.com
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