Market Interaction Erodes Moral Values
An interesting article appears in Science in May 2013, titled Morals and Markets (A. Falk, and N. Szech.vol., 340, pp. 707-711). The article sets out to explore how market participants change their attitudes towards harm and damage done to third parties. The act of producing and trading goods in a market produces negative externalities that can lead to exploiting the workforce through poor working conditions, child labor, and environmental damage. It has been observed that people who participate in markets buy goods without much regard to their own moral standards. The researchers devised an experiment to show that if people participate in markets than their moral standards are lowered. The researchers state “Our paradigm for studying moral values and detrimental effects on third parties is the trade-off between a mouse life and money. In our main treatments, human subjects faced … Read more