Why People Do Bad Things

In 2006 I became intrigued by the story of David Verholt.  Mr. Verholt was working as a vice president of KeyBank in Cleveland Ohio making about $110,000 annually.  In 2006 he was arrested for an embezzling scheme at KeyBank in which he took $40M in fraudulent loans.  One intriguing aspect to this is that this went on for 10 years before he was caught.  One would think the internal controls at Key Bank would not let this continue for this length of time.  The other more intriguing aspect is why?  How does a successful family man with a good income get involved with this level of unethical behaviour?  Since this new story was published I would, from time to time, think about this question.  Of course David Verholt is just one person among many including Bernie Madoff, Enron execs, Worldcom execs, etc.  There has also been recently many journalists of unethical behaviour.  The  August 2, 2012 Christian Science Monitor reported on the story of Jonah Lehrer who resigned from the New Yorker magazine after admitting to fabricating quotations and attributing them to Bob Dylan.  The article went on to list other recent ethical failures by journalists.  From the article I quote,

“Two years ago, Daily Beast chief investigative reporter Gerald Posner resigned after it was revealed that he’d plagiarized sentences from other writers’ stories – he says he did so inadvertently, by rewriting things he’d read online. The New York Times was stunned in 2003 when it discovered reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated and plagiarized stories.
The problem is not limited to print. Earlier this year, Mike Daisey was forced to admit he had exaggerated storytelling about Chinese factories making iPods and Apple hardware in a story broadcast on the public radio program “This American Life.”
The most notorious case might be Janet Cooke, whose Pulitzer-Prize winning 1980 Washington Post story featured a person who did not exist. “

The cumulative effect of these ethical failures gives one pause. Are these just character flaws of a certain minority of people? Are these people “bad eggs”?  As I look upon these things from a Christian worldview, the Christian doctrine of the universal sinful nature appears very evident indeed.  This doctrine states that within each man and women there is a flawed (often very flawed) way of thinking. Although we know the right thing to do we (including me), very often fail to do the right thing.  It is not a matter of knowledge but rather one of the will.   I know that this line of thinking is diametrically opposed to current of popular thought today but there seemed to be no alternative explanation.  Therefore I was interested in an episode of NPR’s Planet Money broadcast earlier this year entitled “Why People Do Bad Things”.  I was interested because here was an opportunity to explain bad behavior from a secular perspective.  The program focused on a man Toby Groves who started off in business with very high ethical standards and even made a vow to his father that he would not fall into disgrace (you need to listen to the podcast).  Yet in the end, Toby Groves committed a multi-million dollar bank fraud, drove several companies out of business resulting in job losses of hundreds of people.   How could this happen?  Did Toby have an unusual character flaw?  Was Toby just a “bad egg”?  Lamar Pierce of Washington University in St. Louis weighed in on that question.  Dr. Pierce commented that this was actually not that unusual and that most of us could be lured into the same unethical behaviour given the same context.  But that still leaves the question why when a person is in that position that he crosses that ethical line.  What were Toby Groves and David Verhotz thinking?  Here is where a University of Notre Dame professor was interviewed to answer this psychological question.  The answer given is that when one is in the business frame of mind, one loses the ability to evaluate right and wrong.  She said that in certain contexts, the cognitive faculties do not work properly.  Toby couldn’t process the choices put before him. This almost sounds like a symptom of a mental illness in that Toby did not know right and wrong. (This also begins to resemble to doctrine of original sin!)  After listening to this program I realized that these explanations from secular academia fall far short of a satisfying reason for bad behaviour.  Of course Toby knew right and wrong and he knew the line he was crossing but did it anyway.  This wasn’t the case of incomplete knowledge.  Clearly the secularist has no explanation.  Could it be that the inference to the best explanation is the very idea that most people do not want to hear, namely,  the Christian idea of the basic sinfulness of man?  But why should it be hard to believe since it is the one Christian doctrine that is proven every day in the morning newspaper.  To quote Peter Kreeft, “Once the main obstacle to believe in Christianity was the good news. It seemed like a fairy tale; too good to be true. Today, the main obstacle is the bad news; people just don’t believe in sin even though that is the only Christian doctrine that can be proven by reading daily newspapers.”  Most people believe that they are like the children in Garrison Keeler’s Lake Woebegon - above average.  Yet those pesky facts do have way of getting in the way of our opinions.