I find this study a very interesting validation of Noah Brand’s theory of the Success Myth.
The researchers hypothesized that, because men are socialized to “get the job done” and solve the problem at hand, and experience more pressure to succeed in business, men are more likely to make business ethics decisions practically: that is, to judge ethical dilemmas based on what will help them achieve their goals, as opposed to what would actually be the ethical thing to do.
The research involved two studies, both of a few hundred MBA or undergrad business students. The first study asked whether it is an ethical duty to tell an elderly couple who loves their house and wants to sell it to someone who will maintain it that you, in fact, do NOT intend on maintaining their precious house and will tear it down. (My answer, for the curious, is yes.) Men were more likely than women to recommend that the buyers’ intentions not be revealed and, interestingly, tended to recommend that the buyers’ intentions be revealed if they identified with the seller, but not if they identified with the seller.
The second study involved administering two surveys to the students. Men tended to rate ethically ambiguous tactics (i.e. traditional competitive bargaining, attacking the opponent’s network, false promises, misrepresentation, and inappropriate information gathering) as less ethically ambiguous than women did; men who believed that negotiating prowess was innate tended to be more in support of ethically ambiguous tactics, while men who believed it could be learned tended not to be, an association that literally did not exist for women.
What does this tell us? First: THIS IS A STUDY OF MBAS THIS IS A STUDY OF MBAS THIS IS A STUDY OF MBAS. That means that it can be reasonably generalized to the population “businessmen,” insofar as male MBA students are similar to the overall businessman population, but it cannot be reasonably generalized to the population “men.” Plumbers, philosophers, or rock stars may have very different moral codes! We already know that MBAs are assholes*, male MBAs just happen to be assholier. That doesn’t mean that men are more assholish than women in general. So for the rest of this I’m going to be talking about MBAs.
To me, this seems like evidence in favor of the existence of the Success Myth. Most of the people who are MBAs are going to be pretty firmly in the grip of the Success Myth, given that the good points of most other majors involve intellectual curiosity and making one a well-rounded person, and the good points of the business major is that you will make a ton of money once you graduate. However, the Success Myth is specifically gendered: men are far more likely to approve of the use of ruthless tactics to succeed, perhaps because their self-worth is more tied up in their success. If you believe your worth as a human being is related to how much money you make, you’re going to use worse tactics to make that money. That’s just common sense.
I also find interesting the result that believing that negotiation skill is innate makes you more likely to approve of ethically ambiguous tactics. My theory? Believing that you can learn to negotiate better offers you some buffer for your self-esteem. If you can learn to negotiate and you don’t make the sale, you can comfort yourself with the idea that you can do better next time. If you don’t make the sale and you believe that negotiating skill is innate, you’re a shit negotiator, which means you aren’t a success, which saps your self-worth. People are going to be willing to use far more ethically ambiguous tactics if their sense of self-worth is on the line.
What this shows is that the Success Myth matters for more than people’s mental health. Think about all the businesspeople who made unethical choices over the years– if you’re having trouble recalling one, just walk two feet down Wall Street, I’m sure you’ll find one. If we could teach the next generation of businessmen that they can get their sense of self-worth not from their success– perhaps from being an actually good person– then we might get to stop dealing with the negative externalities of their attempts to get great wealth. And that’s something everyone needs.
*unless you read NSWATM, in which case you are not an asshole and are, in fact, awesome. I <3 my readers.
About ozyfrantz
Lol, I’m gonna have to tell Susan Walsh you called her an asshole
Great column BTW.
You bet male morality is malleable. It answers only to The Job and the ego, so it’s gotta do a lot of twisting around.
Wow, you sound like a really fun person
I agree with your reading. This too specific of a population subset to generalize the results to all men. Thanks for sharing.
Shawn, you’re right; it doesn’t generalize. If our moral center comes from honest ethical debate or religious searching, for example, we are not so dominated by task, ego, money, peer group. But the MBA-style male morality is stark and admits no ambiguity, and that is the ultimate hegemonic role model. I think it tends to take over in large group enterprises, like commerce and defense, where you really don’t know your competition, or indeed, even your compatriots. You feel obligated to put up a front, and that is where morality takes a back seat to stark dichotomy.
This article makes too many unanalyzed assumptions. First of all, it accepts that there is an objective morality that people’s stances can be judged by. Second, it regards a more immediate acceptance of “ambiguous” behaviors as evidence of malleability when it could be argued that that’s evidence of having clearer principles. Third, it assumes the fact that a sub-group of men having a starkly different morality than other men is sign of malleability as if we’re all gifted with a default morality that we can only deviate from. Groups of men having different moralities is a sign of male moral variety, not malleability. Malleability is an individual phenomenon that results in a person changing their morality based on situations, desires, argumentation, etc.
I’m not sure that this has anything to do with the success myth. If anything, this looks like it has a lot to do with “being a team player.”
Look at this part:
“Men identifying with the buyer were significantly less likely to recommend the buyer’s intentions be revealed than did men identifying with the seller” (quoted from the linked piece)
This suggests that the men, in general, were more supportive of the goals of their team. This is markedly different from the “success myth” because in this hypothetical real estate sale, if the buyer’s intention is revealed, then the sale is likely to fail, and the parties are probably not going to get paid (in real estate transactions, payment usually occurs only when a sale takes place). This means that the men who identified with the seller were willing to risk not getting paid in order to further the goals of their team: they literally put an intangible non-monetary goal (whether or not there house is maintained) above the monetary goal (will this deal go through today).
Men frequently compete in team events, and “having another guy’s back” is usually the mark of a “true friend.”
I’m just not sure we’re seeing anything more here than a basic expression of kinship with a perceived teammate.
I’m not sure how egocentrism (as mentioned in the paper) plays with identification, but I’m not very knowledgeable in this field…it seems a bit counterintuitive. There is a larger conversation that revolves around altruism, morality and kin preference that seems lacking in the analysis of the paper – interesting research paper nonetheless.
Not only should (and is) male morality malleable, everyone should have malleable morality.
Morality is supposed to be based on societal norms, as society changes, so too must it’s morality. Not doing so I believe is typically referred to as “religious dogma”.