After 2008, the reputation of bankers took a nosedive, but are bankers really that bad?

“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” That’s what Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father and third president of the United States, once said. If that’s true, then you might think that bankers are stuck on the first page, such is the public perception of them. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, the reputation of bankers took a nosedive. Public scandals and negative press coverage portrayed bankers as greedy and dishonest. This was compounded by the findings of a Swiss study published in Nature in 2014, entitled “Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry”. By using an experimental task, the authors of this study explored the culture of the banking industry to see if it made bankers more likely to act dishonestly to maximise profits compared to professionals from other industries. Their findings suggested bankers were more dishonest than other professions, when they were asked to think about their profession – which the researchers put down to the culture of the banking industry. These findings garnered plenty of press attention and further painted the banking sector in a negative light. We assembled a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to see whether the study’s findings were the same across other countries and contexts.