The following eight chapters lay the foundation which enables us to better examine the
behavior of organizations and individuals. We discuss the moral nature of people and the
inluence of the environment on their behavior. We shall see that concepts such as ‘right’
and ‘wrong’ are present from an early age and that the environment plays a signiicant role.
This knowledge forms the foundation for examining in the rest of the book how organizations
inluence people’s behavior and how we can use this for good.
Chapter 1 discusses the fundamental question of the extent to which people are good or bad
by nature. Chapter 2 shows that the goodness of people depends on the price one is prepared
to pay for it. The question is then not so much whether a person is honest, but rather in what
situation and to what extent. There is also the question of whether people are better able to
resist big or small temptations. Chapter 3 shows that this is a nuanced issue. Chapter 4 then
addresses the question of the extent to which people are helpful and altruistic by nature, and
thereby do good, even when it conlicts with their own interests.
How we see people affects the way we treat them. Chapter 5 is about how we can set up a
‘self-fulilling prophecy’: whether people do right or wrong depends in part on how we see
them. Chapter 6 looks at the way in which our image of ourselves affects our own behavior
and asks to what extent people are capable of self-knowledge. In chapter 7 it will become
clear that we have our own prejudices, which distort our perspective and raise all kinds of
problems. Chapter 8 inally examines the extent to which people’s environment inluences
their behavior. Here a distinction is made between ‘situational’ and ‘systematic’ inluences.
Why good people sometimes do bad things 52 relections on ethics at work
