Heterogeneity in Banker Culture and Its Influence on Dishonesty

Abstract

The social sciences are going through what has been described as a ‘reproducibility crisis.’1,2 Highly influential findings derived from accessible populations, such as laboratories and crowd-sourced worker platforms, are not always replicated. Less attention has been given to replicating findings derived from inaccessible populations, and indeed recent high profile replication attempts explicitly excluded such populations.3 Pioneering experimental work4 offered a rare glimpse into banker culture and finds that bankers, unlike other professionals, are more dishonest when they think about their job. Given the importance of the banking sector, before the academy or policy-makers rely on these findings as an accurate diagnosis of banking culture, an exploration of their generalizability is warranted. Here we conduct the same incentivised task in five different populations, across three continents with 1,282 participants. In two studies (n=148, n=620), we observe some, though not significantly elevated, dishonesty among bankers primed to think about their work. We also find that having non-banking professionals (n=67, n=205, n=242) think about their job does not have a significant effect on honesty. We explore sampling and methodological differences to explain the variation in findings in relation to bankers and identify two key points: (i) general populations’ relative expectations of banker behaviour vary across jurisdictions, suggesting that the original results may not be generalizable across national contexts and (ii) having approached 27 financial institutions, many of which expressed concerns of adverse findings, we expect that only banks with a sound culture participated in our study. The latter introduces a substantial threat of selection bias that may undermine the generalizability of any similar field study. More broadly, our work highlights the complexity of undertaking a high-fidelity replication of sensitive, highly publicized field work with largely inaccessible populations due to institutional and geographic barriers. For policy-makers, this work suggests that caution should be exercised in generalizing findings to their national jurisdiction.