Via The Browser, Dan Ariely:
In my view, most people who behave badly are not bad people. They’re just good people who are put in bad situations—where it’s tempting and easy to cheat a little bit. Look at the whole financial crisis, if you and I were getting paid $8 million a year to view mortgage-backed securities as good products, we could do it. It’s inhumane to put people in situations that have tremendous conflict of interest and expect them to be unswayed by it. Ideally, professions eliminate these problems by not making people face them.
Previously on incentives.