Mahzarin Banaji - The Psychology of Institutional Corruption: Ideas for Experiments

The September 28th Lab Seminar was led by Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Clark Cabot Professor of Social Ethics and Edmond J. Safra Research Associate. Banaji’s presentation included a hypothetical scenario involving a prospective graduate student and potential conflict of interest, as well as a discussion of some recent research her lab has conducted on psychological responses to money.

The scenario featured a prospective PhD applicant (“H”) to a psychology lab who is also the co-founder of a commercial startup called “Staffingscience.com.” If admitted to the PhD program, H would give up his administrative role in the company. However, as a founder of this company, H would continue to have access to an extraordinary amount of data that could be used in his thesis research, and which would be very useful (and otherwise unavailable) to the lab. Such research may ultimately reflect favorably on Staffingscience.com, thereby providing a commercial benefit to the company (and H). However, there is also a strong possibility that the research would produce results that are unfavorable to Staffingscience.com. In such a situation, would H’s investment in the company affect his interpretation and presentation of such results? And is it possible for radical transparency to neutralize such conflicts of interest in academic research? The seminar participants debated these questions through the lens of the hypothetical scenario described above.

Many of the participants felt that H’s investment in the company was an insurmountable obstacle, and that radical transparency would not mitigate the potentially contaminating effects of the conflict of interest. A few felt that the contaminating effects could be mitigated, and that they would not outweigh the value that could be derived from the proposed research. Some participants wondered whether having a personal investment at stake in the research could actually provide some advantage, though others were skeptical that having a monetary stake could be beneficial in any way.

Several people raised the issue of public trust, and the effect that such a relationship between a researcher and a commercial interest would have on the reputation of the department and the lab. Even if it is supposed that H’s research would not be corrupted by his connection with Staffingscience.com, there is a risk that people outside the lab would view it as being corrupted.

The second part of the seminar focused on the findings of some recent studies on the psychological understanding of money and “money love.” One study examined the effects of money on public trust, investigating whether the mere suggestion of a conflict of interest would reduce trust in individuals and institutions. Other studies looked at people’s unconscious feelings towards money, using implicit association tests. In a cheating experiment that had participants report their own scores on particular task, it was found that money love didn’t predict the likelihood of cheating, but that there was a far greater disparity between the self-report score and the actual score for people with high money love than for those with low money love. Some participants drew a connection between these findings and the hypothesis that the incidence of cheating increases when the payoffs are short term. This led to the suggestion that a variation of the study could offer to pay participants a week after completing the study (rather than right away) and observe whether the cheating behavior is altered. The seminar closed with observations from participants about the applicability and importance of these findings when considering problem of institutional corruption.

- Summary composed by Jennifer Campbell