It is often difficult to delineate where our personal life starts and where work or school ends. People are defined by what they do, and what you do on an everyday basis may influence your personality. Dr. Chen-Bo Zhong, an associate professor at the Rotman School of Management, took this idea one step further to see if performing mathematical procedures results in a calculative mindset.
The study, published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, questions whether doing calculative tasks has an effect on moral and ethical decisions, and what those effects are. It also attempts to understand whether certain external stimuli, such as the presence of family or friends’ photographs, have any bearing on the decision made.
The study was structured into five separate experiments. In the first four experiments, the subjects were asked to complete either a calculative or comparable non-calculative task, followed by a seemingly unrelated decision-making task. Calculative tasks included GRE math problems, whereas non-calculative tasks included GRE verbal problems. The subsequent decision-making task was chosen such that it could be seen how often subjects put their own interests above others, and vice versa. The fifth experiment was set up in a similar manner, except it introduced family photographs to participants, in order to evoke feelings of love and empathy in hopes of reducing the effect of the calculative task.
“Performing calculations, whether related to money or not, seemed to encourage people to engage in unethical behaviours to better themselves,” Zhong said in a press release.
While performing calculative tasks in general makes people more prone to rationalizing decisions made out of self-interest, the presence of family photographs had a noticeable effect on the altruism of the subjects. Thus, it may be rewarding to think about the workplace surroundings of financial workers as the outcomes are of high social value.
Zhong encourages financial companies to introduce policies encouraging family values, so as to promote ethical behaviour. These principles apply to anyone who performs calculative tasks, such as those in many STEM fields, finance, and other disciplines.
The next time you do that calculus problem set, you might want to think about how it could affect the way you think and act afterwards.
