Cook: Man can't live by math alone

photo David Cook

Numbers, apparently, do lie.

A new study released by a team of university researchers suggests that men and women who spend more time making calculated, numbers-based decisions are more likely to engage in selfish acts.

"Not only more selfish ... they were also more likely to lie or cheat," reads the study titled "The Social and Ethical Consequences of a Calculative Mindset."

Seems that man cannot live by math alone. Across the land, poets and liberal arts majors are nodding their heads: Told you so.

Here are the nuts and bolts.

University researchers -- Long Wang (University of Hong Kong), Chen-Bo Zhong (University of Toronto) and Keith Murnighan (Northwestern University) -- divided volunteers into two groups.

We'll call them the Historians and the Calculators.

The Historians were given an essay to read and verbal problems to answer, maybe like your American history course in college.

The Calculators? They read economics texts, then worked graduate-level math problems, both of which were designed to activate what researchers call the calculative mindset.

That's our lean and mean mind. The way we analyze, coolly. Deliberately. It leans toward utilitarianism and away from romanticism and emotions. Think with your head, not your heart.

The calculative mind flourishes on Wall Street and in business schools. It loves the bottom line.

But does it love right from wrong?

Finished with their reading, both the Calculators and Historians then were given a series of ethical scenarios designed to measure how self-interested or selfless an individual was.

For example: the Dictator Game. Participants were randomly paired together. One person was given $10, and told to divide that $10 any way he or she wished -- none, all, halfsies -- with the other person.

Researchers found the Calculators -- people who had just spent time crunching numbers and thinking calculatingly -- were more likely to keep that money for themselves than the Historians, who had been using a different, more emotion-based part of their mind.

"They kept the entire $10 over three times as often," the study reads, "and they were over four times less likely to split the money equally."

Similar ethical scenarios -- by these researchers and many before them -- have proved the same: Calculating acts led to more self-interest.

"People are more selfish and dishonest after doing math," wrote one blogger for the Harvard Business Review.

Before we witch-hunt our math teachers and accountants, let's remember that many, many things do an immoral person make. Nobody's blaming numbers or math class.

However.

There is something within the hyper-focused task of calculating that also seems like an on-ramp toward a dehumanized life. When our focus narrows in only on the bottom line, we fall asleep to the human element around, and within, us.

Scrooge versus Bob Cratchit.

Isn't this what's gone wrong on Wall Street? How else do you explain the policies that allow this growing inequality gap?

We forget the human.

We're even encouraged to.

"The nature of many organizational roles compels people to take a calculative approach to nonquantitative problems, thereby reducing their consideration of the interpersonal, social and moral aspects of their decisions," researchers stated.

In other words, we've arranged the furniture -- the business world, schools, politics -- so that the process is heavily geared toward calculation, not reconciliation.

Not only does it affirm a Dilbertian philosophy -- spreadsheets really are demoralizing -- but it means we must begin to reclaim the intuitive and the emotional as vital, proper parts of our social and academic lives.

(Hamilton County still refuses to fund art teachers in every school. This ought to be as outrageous as not funding math teachers.)

The liberal arts and social sciences are the countermeasure to the perils of an overly calculative mind. They work vertically, calling us into question with our deeper selves, the world around us, and the one above.

Both our calculating minds and intuitive hearts create the full human.

Contact David Cook at dcook@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter at DavidCookTFP.

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