Bankers more likely to lie, cheat

Today in surprising news, researchers have found bank employees are more likely to be dishonest.

A study published in Nature found that while bank employees are not naturally more dishonest or honest than other workers, their jobs favour dishonesty.

To establish this researchers recruited 198 bankers and split them into two groups. Both groups were asked to complete a task that could increase their income if they behaved dishonestly. One group was reminded of their role as bankers while completing the task while in the other group the workers were reminded of what they did in their leisure time. The researchers found that when bankers were reminded of their jobs, they behaved dishonestly.

When they repeated a similar experiment with workers from other industries, they found there was no effect on people's dishonesty when they were reminded what they did for a living.

Michel Maréchal, Professor for Experimental Economic Research at the University of Zurich, says: "Our results suggest that the social norms in the banking sector tend to be more lenient towards dishonest behaviour and thus contribute to the reputational loss in the industry."

Lead author Dr Alain Cohn suggested to combat this banks could ask their employees to take a Hippocratic oath, similar to the one doctors have to take.

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