Personality // Current

Left vs. Right

What do you think?

Nettle
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23 days ago
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29 comments

The colors you like tell you about your personality

cool test, fun to take and short, but very accurate for me anyhow

franksalot
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1 month ago
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28 comments

3 Keys To Help You Live Your Life To Its Fullest

Your life is meant to be something great. At different times in your life you have... more

Healthylivinggal
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2 months ago
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1 comment

Ethics: They're Different For The Bosses

"Are rules made to be broken — or obeyed? Newly published research suggests your answer to that question depends largely upon whether you are mulling it over from a position of power.

“In determining whether an act is right or wrong, the powerful focus on whether rules and principles are violated, whereas the powerless focus on the consequences,” states the study “How Power Influences Moral Thinking,” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “For this reason, the powerful are also more inclined to stick to the rules — irrespective of whether this has positive or negative effects — while the powerless are more inclined to make exceptions.”

Joris Lammers and Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands conducted a series of five experiments to test the idea that being in a position of power changes one’s “style of moral thinking.” In the first test, they “primed” a group of 69 university students by having them focus on words evoking either control and authority or dependence and powerlessness. All were then asked to appraise a specific ethical dilemma involving whether a high school girl should break a promise made to a friend.

The result: Those who were pre-programmed to think in terms of having power “had a stronger preference for the rule-based moral considerations, compared to participants in the low-power condition, who had a stronger preference for the outcome-based moral considerations.”

In another test, 50 students were assigned to play the role of either manager or employee of a fictional company. “Participants were presented with two reward systems, of which one was outcome-based and another rule-based, and were asked to indicate which of the two criteria they thought was the fairest.”

The “managers” were more inclined to vote for the rules-based criterion, while the “employees” were more likely to contend that the ultimate results of a worker’s efforts were more important than whether they strictly followed company guidelines.

The researchers did find one exception to this pattern. In a final test, which was constructed so that rule-based thinking would not work to the advantage of the powerful, participants in the high-power category were less inclined than their low-power counterparts to endorse playing by the rules. Self-interest apparently trumps abstract ethical concepts.

It’s easy to react cynically to these results. If you rose to a position of power by following the rules, it makes sense that you would consider those guidelines inherently good and important. (Alternatively, if you got to the top by breaking the rules, it is in your interest to ensure that others don’t follow in your footsteps.)""Are rules made to be broken — or obeyed? Newly published research suggests your... more