Honouring One's Conscience

"It shows that when we make a decision whether to be dishonest or not, it's not only 'What can I get out of it versus what's the punishment, what's the effort'?"
"It actually matters that people have morals and they like to think of themselves as good human beings."
Nina Mazar, behavioral scientist, Boston University

"The evidence suggests that people tend to care about the welfare of others and they have an aversion to seeing themselves as a thief."
Alain Cohn, assistant professor of information, University of Michigan

"[A survey found that] without money, not reporting a wallet doesn't feel like stealing."
"With money, however, it suddenly feels like stealing and it feels even more like stealing when the money in the wallet increases."
Christian Zund, study co-author

Wallets with cash, a key, a grocery list and business cards were used to test honesty.  (Christian Zünd via Associated Press)

A new study appears to confound the generalized theory that people finding a wallet with money in it are unlikely to return it to its owner, intact. This three-year study considered to be the most all-encompassing world-wide test of peoples' inherent honesty came to the conclusion that people are, after all, inclined to want to do the right thing and return a lost wallet they find. The finding was a surprise to the researchers and it goes a long way to confirming that people in general tend to be mindful of ethical conduct to the extent of actually practising it.

Not only was the discovery made through this study that people value honest behaviour in themselves which will benefit others, but that the incentive to respond honestly is enhanced when a greater amount of money found in a lost wallet is involved. Published in the journal Science, experts in the field of human behaviour feel on the basis of the study and its finding that business and lawmakers might take notice that dishonesty can be prevented through moral expectation absent punitive reactions.

No fewer than 17,303 wallets were used in a giant research ruse that took place in 355 cities on every continent. Wallets complete with transparent business card cases and visible contents containing three business cards reflecting male names identifiable with the country they were distributed in were used to seed the experiment. Each of the business cards came complete with an email address, the wallet owner identified as a freelance software engineer.

A key, a handwritten grocery list in the language of the country the wallet was used in also occupied the wallet, along with in most instances a modest amount of cash in local currency, while others had no money in them at all. They were distributed by research assistants entering post offices, hotels, police stations, banks, museums and other public arenas to approach someone in authority with the spiel: "Hi, I found this on the street around the corner".

'The evidence suggests that people tend to care about the welfare of others, and they have an aversion to seeing themselves as a thief,' said Alain Cohn of the University of Michigan, one author who reported the results. (Christian Zünd via Associated Press)

The research assistant would then hand the wallet over to the individual they had addressed, perhaps someone behind a reception desk, with the additional explanation: "Somebody must have lost it. I'm in a hurry and have to go. Can you please take care of it?" Most people emailed the purported wallet owners with a view to returning the wallet. Peru and Mexico were the two countries where fewer wallets were returned than in any other.

An average of 40 percent of people into whose hands cashless wallets were placed reported them while 51 percent of people given wallets with money, did the same. The experiment was repeated in three countries, just to make certain of the outcomes. In Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States the routine was given a second round and this time greater amounts of cash were added.

Where the initial experiment used around $13.45 in local currency, the repeat performance upped the ante considerably, adding $94.15 in cash. The response to the lost wallets was even more dramatic, when greater numbers of people dutifully emailed the presumed owners to return the wallets; 72 percent compared with the 61 percent attempting to return the wallets with $13.45, and 46 percent of the cashless wallets.

The gender, age and friendliness of each wallet recipient was recorded by research assistants, including how busy they happened to be at the time; whether they had instant use of computers to enable swift response, and whether co-workers, security guards, or cameras could have recorded the exchange in possession of the wallet, from the 'finder' to the individual taking responsibility for its return.

The theory that any of these potentially compromising details could influence the person to feel compelled to return the wallet appeared not to make a difference at all. As Alain Cohn, one of the study's authors noted, "the psychological cost of the dishonest act" in withholding the wallet with cash seemed to propel people toward honesty and the wallet's return.

And how did the experiment end? In a way that acknowledged people's positive decision making by informing those reporting lost wallets through emails by thanking them and advising that the wallet's owner had left town, and the 'finder' could feel free to retain the money, or if preferred, donate it to charity.

"[Our team] would go into these various institutions ... like a bank or a post office, and they would go to the receptionist at the front and they would say, 'Hey, I found this wallet on the street around the corner. I have to leave right now. Can I just leave this wallet with you?'"
"And then we were interested to see how often people would return these wallets, or at least report to us that they found these wallets."

"When the wallet doesn't have money inside of it, it feels like stealing. But when the wallet has money inside, you start to question: 'Hey, if I don't turn this in, what does that say about me?'"

"And so there is this aversion to viewing yourself negatively and that's part of what's motivating people."

"That's not valuable to the person who we turned the wallet in to, but it is valuable to the owner [keys inspiring people to return wallets to their owners]."

David Tannenbaum, social psychologist, study co-author 

If you came across a lost wallet containing cash, would you return it to its rightful owner? Researchers were surprised to find that a majority of people would indeed return it rather than pocket the cash. (Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images)

Challenge Nature's Character Designs : And Then, What?

"Five or ten years ago the evidence seemed to suggest oxytocin was just this universally good thing -- that if we just dosed everybody up with oxytocin they'd all be walking around like love puddles."
"We no longer consider ADHD a moral failing because we've medicalized that moral failing. And that is part of what moral enhancement is about -- to recognize the natural diversity of brains, and that some of us are just born with a poor roll of the dice that doesn't give us enough self-control, executive function or capacity for compassion or moral cognition."
"The world will be happier; we'll probably all be happier."
"[Or] We could end up in a world where every kind of political or moral deviance is subject to some kind of mandatory treatment."
James Hughes, executive director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Willington, Connecticut

"The reality is that there is not much out there that allows us to do these sorts of things. Look at the miserable failure that is modern psychiatry. We just don't really understand how the brain works."
"But it's also true they're making progress in leaps and bounds, and I have personally no doubt that these kinds of drugs will eventually exist."
"Your gut response would be, well this would be a pleasant place to be. But what if the country next to us did the exact opposite, and invested in drugs that made their compatriots more aggressive, more competitive?"
"How do we decide that constitutes a moral deficiency? Who should be allowed to make these decisions about what is good and what is bad?"
Udo Schuklenk, bioethicist, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario

Fotolia    Ethicists warn that a pill to make people more "moral" could pave the way to a world where every bad act begets chemical treatment, voluntary or not.

Most people -- at least those who use their cerebral capacity to observe and to hope to achieve a moral balance within themselves to better reflect the positive elements of human nature -- make a well-considered effort to observe standards of thought and behaviour consonant with self-respect, to become a part of the social contract that urges individuals to think of others even as they think of themselves, to achieve the golden rule of moderation in all things, and to emulate a well-known pattern of moral behaviour while feeling empathy for those whose condition in life stifles them.

At the same time we are very well aware that among us live other people who have no intention of succumbing to an iota of compassionate attitude toward the unfortunate of the world, and look only to advancing their own lives to acquire wealth and social position and in some instances, power. These are the manipulators who feel entitled to investing all their energies and using any means seen as useful to promoting themselves to arrive at their ego-laden destiny. Move down the scale a little further and the sociopaths and psychopaths appear, those against whom civilization guards itself.

With another turning into yet another new year, people look at themselves to appraise where they appear on the judgement scale, and many vow to change certain elements of their character and values and priorities, and behaviour in the hope of improving themselves to match self-set standards. Usually, those promises-to-self, earnestly arrived at and with full intention of reaching those goals fade with the passage of time as we resort to old habits, comforting ourselves with the assurance that we're not so bad the way we are, after all.

What if all this rigmarole could be by-passed by the simple expedient of using an engineered chemical meant to steer our natures toward making better choices for ourselves, to make us more moral, caring and careful individuals without breaking a sweat? Just such ideas are the precinct of neuroethicists enthralled with the idea that altering the chemical balance and hormones that people are naturally endowed with, by the use of prescribed artificial enhancements could make of us all the people we strive to be proud of.

Who imagine that pharmaceuticals, implanted brain electrodes and/or other types of bio-medical means should be promoted to alter society to make us less selfish and self-absorbed, more attuned to the world around us and how we may better live our lives while at the same time being valued members of a co-operative society. Thoughts of tamping down aggression and other emotions that make people anti-social appears to attract those who believe in the efficacy of such interventions

Proponents of moral enhancement through such means point to the technical advances that science has enabled the world for good and for ill. Technology allows us to live with the kind of comfort and communication, ease and stress that has catapulted the world toward a tighter global community. Yet it is also one that issues threats and commits deplorable acts of violence, reducing opportunities for those who are tyrannized and forced to live in penury. With the larger threat of weapons of mass destruction capable of annihilating populations and laying the world to utter ruin.

So, if bioenhancement could be undertaken on a universal scale we could, in theory, become more decent, moral and responsible, to ourselves and to others. Those who value free will and the capability to make their own personal decisions, to be responsible and responsive, won't regard that potential with welcoming assent. They may have achieved a laudable moral plateau distinguishing them from others who have no intention of so doing. And those whose character disposition is venal and controlling would see no reason to alter the way they are, giving them great satisfaction as despots.

At the present time people use prescribed drugs for other purposes; high blood pressure and depression, where antidepressants such as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), along with drugs affecting the release or metabolism of oxytocin, known as the love and bonding hormone are already involved in moral modification through the auspices of the drugs, yet they are not fully aware of the effects such drugs have on them. In a 2013 study, 40 healthy volunteers were given the high blood pressure drug propranolol, resulting in men and women being steered toward judging harmful actions as being morally unacceptable.

This is a drug whose use increased a natural aversion to doing harm to others, as well. SSRIs, in addition, seem to act on people to make them more trusting of others. Yet a 2014 Princeton University study concluded people given oxytocin were likelier than others not taking the drug to engage in "group-serving dishonesty", where they took to lying often and more spontaneously, in a concerted effort to bring benefit to the group they represented. Trifling perhaps, in comparison to altering the character of psychopaths.

"They're so far off out of the norm that maybe bringing them back to the norm would be generally understood to be advantageous", offered Brian Earp, associate director of the Yale-Hastings program in ethics and health policy at Yale University. "...You might take a pill that makes you more susceptible to, or find more compelling the sorts of moral lessons you're already engaged in", he offered. Unless we just decided to work with greater deliberation on our own initiative, under our own agency, without artificial chemicals, to achieve a lifetime goal of decency.

What if all it took to make you a better human was a little pill? -- Postmedia files