Does goodness pay?

On my continuing quest to examine the common ground between religions, sciences and business, I'm looking for good research questions. A "good" question would be about something that all three areas claimed to know something about and have some different perspective and expertise to bring to bear.

The point wouldn't be to prove one side right and the others wrong, but to try to figure out what reality might explain all three viewpoints.

Even better, the topic should have clear medical, health, and public health consequences. And, people should care about the answer, but so should larger groups of people such as families, teams, businesses, neighborhoods, communities, cultures, and nations.

That restriction is from my general rule that if it's not true across multiple scales, it's probably not the right place to start looking for stable truths.

So, this morning's candidate research question is: Does goodness pay?

This complements an earlier posting on "Does crime pay?" and, of course, after those two soon come a post on "Which pays better - crime or goodness?"

Why does any stakeholder care?

At every level, people are looking for clues or rules about 'what works." CEO's and investors want to know whether there is some rule of thumb that lets them look at a proposed action and go "yes" or "no." Is "goodness" defined at a corporate level, and if so how, and if so is it a good guide to profitable action or investments? As Gil Grissom on CSI would say, what's the evidence?

First, what exactly does "pay" mean?

We need to sharpen the question more to make it suitable for an academic research study.

Researchers might ask whether goodness and financial rewards are "associated." That is, if we make a graph of goodness on the horizontal axis and financial rewards on the vertical axis, will we get pretty much a rising curve or straight line? Are "poor" people "bad" and are "rich" people "good"? (I'm asking that loaded question somewhat tongue in cheek.)

Then, we could ask whether this association if there is one, might be causal. Have we picked out of all possible choices just two variables that are causally related and not in some feedback loop, so that either goodness causes wealth, or wealth causes goodness? if there is some phenomenon that the religious might refer to as "God rewards the virtuous", we might see goodness preceding wealth. Or, it may be that rich people can afford to be "nice" because it doesn't really cost them much, relative to their total net worth. In that case we might see wealth precede goodness.

But, it would be frustrating to find an association without knowing which way the causality went. Certainly there are rich people who feel all wealth is justified because, almost by definition, they themselves must be rich because they are good and, of course, poor people must be poor because "God is punishing them for their sinful behavior." This was quite a popular view among the rich in England in the 1800's, and all the poor were considered "undeserving poor."

So, to get around the questions of causality and shorten the study, we could ask "Does an increase in goodness result in an increase in wealth?" If we study people who recently became "gooder" would we also find that, in general, they shortly thereafter became richer?

With any "psychosocial study" we're well advised to have at least half of the equation well defined. So, maybe, measuring dollars is not very satisfactory, but at least it can be done done, and many people would think they understand what is being measured.

Second, what exactly does "goodness" mean?

But, we still have a problem with the left side of the equation. There is no accepted scientific standard for what "goodness" means, or how to measure it reliably and reproducibly, let alone quantitatively.

A related question is "What is the entity is whose goodness we're trying to measure?" This is a systems thinking question of scale, of boundaries, of connectedness, and of our model of what a person, group, and society are.

So, for example, if "people" are actually tightly bound up in their local family, neighborhood, business, culture, and nation, then the "entity" whose goodness is being measured might get all smeared out. And, we can easily imagine that. If a whole neighborhood gets a boost because some new business moved in and pays taxes and hires people, individuals in that area might improve in wealth through no "fault of their own." How are we going to deal with this multi-level effect?

For example, Professor Kim Cameron's Positive Organizational Scholarship site has examples of businesses where an entire company "got religion", or, more precisely, changed their culture together to one that is more interactive, loving, compassionate, and cross-supportive and, as a result, it would appear, the whole group was vastly more successful and really boosted the financial "bottom line."

So, it may be that "goodness" has to be rather wide-spread across many people for it to have an "emergent effect" on outcomes.

Or, on an even larger scale, maybe people, businesses, etc. are only capable of fighting battles, and the outcome of the whole war, figuratively or the literal "war on terrorism" depends not on those battles, but on the larger scale goodness of the mission and purpose of the USA as a whole. Those "multi-level" effects may overlap and need to be teased apart.

This is no different than walking into the boss's office just after she's had a fight with the prior visitor and getting a harsh reaction to an innocent question - you're getting the feedback that was really someone else's fault.

Some feedback appears to spill over to innocent bystanders - both good and bad

It may be that even excellent morality and the best of efforts by individuals can be undone by corruption or incompetence at higher levels of the organization, so their work is wasted and more or less blood spilled on the sand. The "people" as individuals are "good", but collectively, the aggregate is "bad."

That makes it really hard to measure, if there is some bad financial outcome, whether it's because the person wasn't "good" enough, or whether the boss wasn't "good" enough, or whether the company as a whole wasn't "good" enough -- assuming that goodness causes profit.

Maybe some thing, on some scale, got what "it" deserved, and "you" just happen to be caught in the larger-scale cross-fire. We all know that does happen to people, in some cases the entire populations of countries seem to be suffering from acts of a few at the top. How do we separate those effects? Do the good people get less of the bad stuff?

The model is now looking like "goodness" of individuals may be beneficial, and would result in a net profit if everyone had it, but it is also rather easily defeated if not everyone joins in. So, in that scenario, bad outcomes financially, locally, can result despite good behavior. Maybe the people have earned a palace in Heaven after they die, but that is not measurable and not a scientific research question where everything has to be measurable in this life.

Where do we put the cut-off boundary?

The scale and boundary effects actually change the right side of the equation as well - the financial outcomes. When do we stop measuring? If there are effects, how long do they take? Is there a "lag time" before there is the amplifying effect of an influx in "wealth" resulting from an input of an increase in "goodness"?

Or, if the outside environment is active and reactive, the result may be hard to see. If the local tax rate is very regressive and goes up to capture, in an extreme case, 105% of the increase in wealth, the person or company may have done very well, but had it all taken away leaving it now poorer, net, than when it started. That would mess up the measurement. Or, the person may gain much wealth but give it away to the poor, and, again, on a financial scale they didn't benefit, net. (Which shows that dollars are not capturing all the important things that are going on.)

Designing a study that doesn't isolate the actor from society is the only way to make the effect, if any, occur - but it also makes it challenging to be trying to sift out what is a response, and what is a counter-response from that environment by some other actor.

And, regardless, tracing out the pathways for 'emergent behaviors" and "synergy" are a whole area we are just beginning to understand how to study. So, in many cases where Positive Organizational Scholarship or "Theory Y" has been implemented in some division of, say, Ford, upper management remains skeptical because it's just not clear exactly WHAT got changed, or HOW that change percolated through to CAUSE the change in the output or bottom line.

So, the question remains open and actually, despite the Templeton Foundation's research efforts, rather poorly studied. The World Bank and others are studying "social capital" to try to figure out how social goodness in that form makes sustainable development work, and how corruption tends to instantly destroy most of that good impact. Those studies are ongoing.

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References and further readings

Morality and Foreign Policy

George Kennan, Foreign Affairs

Professor Kim Cameron's work at the University of Michigan has certainly shown that psychosocial factors (squishy stuff with people being nice to each other and supporting each other) can make a $billion improvement in outcomes and make the impossible possible. That's a significant data point.

Video: "Making the impossible possible"

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