Why Good People Do Bad Things

Published in Living Now Magazine March 2019

Charging dead people banks fees, tampering with the ball in cricket, excessively sedating old people in aged car homes – viewed in isolation these things are confronting and cause us to immediately look for the ‘bad’ person to blame. But is this true? Are all bad things done by bad people? Social psychology research (Stout, 2005) shows that only about 4% of the population could be considered ‘bad’ – that is habitually acting in an amoral and antisocial way. And although other research (Babiak & Hare, 2006) indicates that the corporate world may in fact attract those with sociopathic tendencies, it’s a stretch to blame all bad things on bad people. So what’s going on? How do good people end up unintentionally creating bad outcomes?

The field of moral development has been dominated by Piaget’s (1932) work with children which dates way back to the 1930s. In translating this work to adults and the business world some key assumptions (Kohlberg, 1976) were made about how people make ethical …