“A new study finds that the mere sight of money warps judgment. In several experiments, researchers asked people to identify as many words as possible from a set of random letters – as in the games Scrabble or Boggle – and voluntarily score themselves. They were offered several dollars each time they reached a certain score. However, for some of the people, the researchers had put thousands of dollars in cash on tables in the middle of the room. For those people, the rate of cheating was much higher.”
Gino, F. & Pierce, L., “The Abundance Effect: Unethical Behavior in the Presence of Wealth,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (forthcoming).
