Do You Throw Away Your Moral Values at the Market?

As many people may express objections against child labor, exploitation of the workforce or meat production that involves cruelty against animals, many also ignore the same things they stand for when it comes to the market, including searching for the cheapest electronics, fashion or food.

A new study by researchers from the Universities of Bonn and Bamberg suggest that markets, overall, reduce moral concern. Their study looks at how certain values may be eroded by decisions made in the market.

"Our results show that market participants violate their own moral standards," said Dr. Amin Falk of the University of Bonn. In a number of different experiments, several hundred subjects were confronted with the moral decision between receiving a monetary amount and killing a mouse versus saving the life of a mouse and foregoing the monetary amount, according to a press release.

"It is important to understand what role markets and other institutions play in moral decision making. This is a question economists have to deal with," said Dr. Nora Szech, from the University of Bamberg.

"To study immoral outcomes, we studied whether people are willing to harm a third party in exchange to receiving money. Harming others in an intentional and unjustified way is typically considered unethical," Falk said.

Animals used in the study were referred to as "surplus mice," and raised in laboratories outside Germany. The mice are no longer needed for research purposes. Without the experiment, they would have all been killed. As a consequence of the study many hundreds of young mice that would otherwise all have died were saved. If a subject decided to save a mouse, the experimenters bought the animal. The saved mice are perfectly healthy and live under best possible lab conditions and medical care.

A subgroup of subjects decided between life and money in a non-market decision context (individual condition). This condition allows for eliciting moral standards held by individuals. The condition was compared to two market conditions in which either only one buyer and one seller (bilateral market) or a larger number of buyers and sellers (multilateral market) could trade with each other. If a market offer was accepted a trade was completed, resulting in the death of a mouse. Compared to the individual condition, a significantly higher number of subjects were willing to accept the killing of a mouse in both market conditions. This is the main result of the study. Thus markets result in an erosion of moral values. "In markets, people face several mechanisms that may lower their feelings of guilt and responsibility," explains Nora Szech. In market situations, people focus on competition and profits rather than on moral concerns. Guilt can be shared with other traders. In addition, people see that others violate moral norms as well.

The findings for the study can be found in this months edition of the journal Science.