LET’S TRY TO ACCOUNT FOR TASTES45

To investigate the way the social context influences us, researchers at the University of Zurich recruited a group of bankers as experimental subjects and asked them to flip a coin ten times and report online the outcomes they got.⁴⁶ They were told that if they had more than a threshold number of heads (or tails) they would get twenty Swiss francs (about $20) for each extra head (or tail) they reported.

The key comparison was between those who, before the experiment began, were asked about their favorite leisure activity, highlighting their role as a “regular” person, and those questions about their role as a banker, effectively highlighting their banker identity. Those made to think of themselves as bankers reported many more heads, so many more that it could not have been pure chance. The estimated cheating rate went from 3 percent for those thinking of themselves as regular people to 16 percent for those thinking of themselves as bankers.

This was not because the bankers were better at figuring out how to do well in the game; everybody in the game was a banker, and what got highlighted about them (banker or not) was chosen at random. But being reminded of their profession seems to have brought out a different moral self, one more willing to cheat.

In other words, people seemed to act as if they had multiple personalities, each with different preferences. The context picks the personality that gets to decide in a particular situation. In the Swiss experiment, the context was whether or not the person saw himself as a banker, but in life it is often the people we are with, the schools we went to, what we do for work or for play, the clubs we belong to, and the clubs we would like to belong to that form us and shape our preferences. We economists, in our fealty to standard preferences, have tried very hard to keep all of that out, but it is increasingly obvious this is a hopeless quest.