1. Good or bad by nature?
Empathy and sympathy
‘We must stop seeing the people behind the counter as criminals.’ These are not the words
of a prison director or police chief. They are the words of a chairman of a big bank, and at a
signiicant moment too: at the low point of the inancial crisis in 2009. ‘It’s time we started
trusting our employees and clients.’
What was up with this chairman? Had he completely lost the plot? Had he been living on
another planet? Had the crisis not just exposed the fact that people are egotistical, and only
out for themselves? Bankers had sold defective products on a grand scale to maximize their
own bonuses.This was the quintessential white-collar crime, the greatest in history, according
to the ilm Plunder: The Crime of Our Time. And according to United States president Barack
Obama the cause of the crisis was ‘excessive greed’, which had been completely unjustiied.
Had this chairman understood nothing of the words of the American president?
In explaining and inluencing people’s behavior, we must irst address a fundamental
question: How do we regard ‘people’? If the management of an organization see their
employees and customers as criminals, then strict measures must be taken to keep them
in check. Their freedom of action is restricted and supervision and control are intensiied.
The company quickly becomes a prison, with the management seeing themselves as the
guards. The outside world, however, is bound to view the situation differently, seeing the
directors as top criminals, and is therefore particularly keen to restrict their power.
As long as science has existed people have debated whether humankind is good or evil, and
whether this is a matter of nature, or comes from upbringing, education and environment:
the nature-nurture debate. Classical economic theories would have us believe that man is
egotistical, and focused on satisfying his own needs. If we can choose, for example, between
two products of the same quality, then we choose the product with the lowest price, because
this is to our advantage. According to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679),
people are wolves: the bestial nature of man means that we are purely focused on our own
interest. We are heedless of others and competitive to the core. We only behave socially
1. Good or bad by nature? Empathy and sympathy
