What's in it for me? Why people don't do the right thing

If you could improve one thing about yourself, what would it be? Most people want to change some aspects of themselves for the better – but according to Jonathan Berman, Associate Professor of Marketing at LBS, people are keener on improving some traits than others. Curiously, based on his latest studies, it seems that the traits people give lower priority to improving are those relating to morality.

Why? Two reasons, his latest studies suggest. One, we like to think we’re highly moral already. Two, we think that other improvements are more likely to help us be happy and achieve our goals, and that matters more to us. These are intriguing findings, and a little disturbing.

“People don’t want to be more moral!” says Berman. “That’s fascinating. It’s alarming – and if there really is a takeaway here, it’s: Don’t sit on your high horse, thinking that you’re sufficiently moral. It’s very easy to convince yourself that you’re doing enough just because you’re not doing anything terrible.”

Berman has been researching moral psychology for two decades (he was previously at Wharton), and especially the tension between acting selfishly and selflessly. In these interesting times, when the news is dominated by immoral behaviour, the topic of personal morality seems particularly salient – but Berman says it goes deeper than that.

“It’s a very fundamental question about how people view their character: what is it about themselves that they want to be changing? To what extent should I prioritise myself, and to what extent should I prioritise others for the greater good?”

It’s a question that goes beyond individuals to organisations and societies. “My overriding research question is, broadly, how do we make the world a better place?” he says. “If the world’s a better place, that’s better for everyone! That seems like an unambiguously good thing.”

In a world where ambiguity is the norm, the simplicity of this is compelling. But of course nothing about humans and how they behave is simple. It comes as no surprise, then, that when we start digging into the academic research around how people strive to better themselves, we find a nuanced and complex picture.

For a start, people have different definitions of morality. So looking at moral traits is a way of finding out what people really care about. “A moral philosophy that I subscribe to is, let’s value the traits in people that lead them to do good things,” says Berman. “There are a lot of traits we like that don’t necessarily lead us to do good things for the world. Take something like loyalty – people often value loyalty in themselves and in others. And it often feels good to be loyal to certain people, beliefs, and countries. But loyalty often comes at the cost of the greater good. In contrast, someone who is good at prioritising and understanding the consequences of their actions may in fact do more good.”

He believes that reputational incentives can be valuable, because people care about how they look and know they are being measured up. “When we evaluate other people, the first thing we care about is are they good or bad, trustworthy or untrustworthy, kind or selfish?” This is something that could be leveraged to get people to act more morally, he suggests, regardless of their motives. Good intentions are nice, but actions speak louder.

Previous research has shown that we want other people to be good, but we don’t seem to be that interested in developing our own goodness. Berman’s most recent research paper details how he and his co-author Jessie Sun, Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St Louis, tested four possible explanations for this strange fact.

The deficit-reduction hypothesis argues that people want to improve traits that they perceive greater deficiencies on – i.e. what they consider to be their weaknesses. The second pair of hypotheses is around identity: maybe people don’t want to change core traits because that would mean a fundamental change to who they are (theidentity-continuity hypothesis), or they prioritise improving central traits because they think doing so will facilitate others – for example, “If I reduce my anxiety, I’ll become more sociable” (the personality-enabling hypothesis).

Then there’s the personal fulfilment hypothesis: maybe people are less interested in changing traits that they think could lessen their personal wellbeing, for example if they involved making sacrifices, or they just think that other sorts of improvements would make more of a difference to their overall wellbeing. And finally: perhaps people believe that non-moral traits are just easier to change (the malleability hypothesis).

All four of these hypotheses were investigated via a series of meticulously designed experiments in which participants were invited to answer various questions about their traits, such as, “Please do your best to imagine what you would be like if you changed one aspect of yourself enough that it makes a noticeable difference in your daily life”; and then how improving one “input” trait would change another “outcome” trait.

Early findings prompted the researchers to refine their methods to try to get to as pure a set of results as possible. In the first experiment, for example, the definition of morality included the notion of self-sacrifice, and the researchers wondered if this was causing participants to be less interested in morality, and to make them think there was a tradeoff between morality and wellbeing, so this was omitted in the next experiment.

Do people think that being more moral comes at a personal cost? Apparently not. But the participants did believe that less morally relevant improvements would increase their goal attainment and happiness to a greater extent.

After analysing all of the results, Berman and Jessie reached their two conclusions: people already see themselves as being highly (or near-optimally) moral, and that people mainly seek to improve the traits that they believe will increase their ability to accomplish their goals and, to a lesser extent, their day-to-day happiness. “People prioritise their well-being, and in the context of self-improvement, people seem to primarily be asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’”

The fact that people give answers suggesting they don’t want to improve their morality may be less odd than it seems, says Berman. “Admitting to yourself that you’re not as moral as you should be requires a life reevaluation – more so than admitting that you’re not as organised as you should be. What does it say about you if you said ‘I’d like to be more moral but I’m not’?”

In addition, people tend to compare themselves to the worst examples of bad behaviour and think they’re not so bad. But this doesn’t mean they’re going above and beyond to be good. “The way people think about morality is it’s really bad to be less moral than a certain level, but they don’t see it as an obligation to be above that level.”

How does this play out in the working world? “My advice for leaders of organisations is to obtain moral clarity,” says Berman. Easier said than done – but worth the effort. “It’s very hard to be perfectly moral, but if you assess what really matters then that makes things a lot easier. In the business world, you need to project being moral, not just go with the flow. It’s important you communicate exactly what you’re doing, why you have this stance, and what your role is in this world. You have to be clear on your priorities and be willing to confront tradeoffs head-on.”

He encourages leaders to lead by prestige – earning respect and influence through competence and pro-social behaviour – rather than by dominance (authority, coercion and threats). “Leading by prestige is much more inspiring,” he says. And what of the rest of the workforce? Within organisations, Berman identifies three levels of morality: “Level 1: Are people actively being sneaky, or doing dishonest things, engaging in antisocial behaviour? Level 2: Are people respecting the rules, but no more than that? Level 3: Are people going out of their way to help other people?”

“It pays dividends for people to go out of their way to help others, and provide meaning in their work life,” he says. “It feels good to know you’re caring about others and vice versa. People want to work for companies that they view as a good force in the world, to work in environments where people care about wellbeing, and to work for managers who foster these types of environments. It’s a win-win: people like it, and it’s good for business.”