Bankers and the neuroscience of greed | Ian Robertson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Bankers and the neuroscience of greed | Ian Robertson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

• power is one of the most potent brain-changing drugs known to humankind, unconstrained power has enormously distorting effects on behaviour, emotions and thinking.
• Researchers at Tilburg University showed that people made to feel more powerful cheated more when they believed themselves to be unobserved. Power also made ordinary people more hypocritical when making judgments about moral dilemmas, being much more strict in applying rules to others, but much more lax in applying them to themselves. Even tiny amounts of artificial power, in other words, increased both immorality and hypocrisy.
• Paul Piff of the University of Berkeley found in a US-based study that, compared with lower class people, upper class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, to show unethical tendencies in decision-making, to take valued goods from others, to lie in a negotiation, to cheat in order to improve their chances of winning a prize, and to endorse unethical behaviour in a work situation.
•  It has become a cliche to explain the behaviour of bankers in terms of greed, but cliches are not always wrong. Power and money both act on the brain's reward system, which if over-stimulated for long periods develops appetites that are difficult to satisfy, just as is the case for drug addiction. We call these appetites greed and greedy people are never satisfied. That is the challenge for politicians and regulators.