Saturday, October 24, 2009

Send the office cleaners into the City

Cleaning up the trading rooms physically could be the way to amend the traders' behaviour (htp: Overcoming Bias)

People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study...

... The first experiment evaluated fairness. As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic "trust game." Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money...

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