Defend Your
Research: Adults Behave Better When Teddy Bears Are in the Room
The findings: Adults are
less likely to cheat and more likely to engage in “pro-social” behaviors when
reminders of children, such as teddy bears and crayons, are present.
The research: Sreedhari
Desai and her research partner Francesca Gino had people play classic
psychological games in which subjects controlled how much money other people
earned and could earn more themselves if they lied. Half the participants were either
in a room with children’s toys or engaged in children’s activities. Across the
board, those participants lied less and were more generous than the control
subjects.
The challenge: Could the
simple presence of toys really make people behave more ethically? Should we
stock boardrooms with stuffed animals? Professor Desai, defend your research.
Desai: In all our lab
studies, we found that when subjects were near toys or engaged in activities
like watching cartoons, the number of cheaters dropped almost 20%. In several
studies we had participants play games in which they filled the missing letters
to complete words. Those who were primed with childhood cues were far more
likely to form “moral” words like “pure” and “virtue” than those who weren’t.
In addition, people behaved better in the presence of childhood cues even if
they weren’t feeling particularly happy.
HBR: To us, these lab
games often feel completely detached from reality. How do you know people will
behave better in the real world based on this?
Desai: Larry Lessig, my
boss at Harvard’s ethics center, had the same question. He asked me
point-blank, “Can you demonstrate this kind of effect in the field?” So we took
KLD’s massive database of corporate information and cross-referenced it with
geographical data, and we found that if companies had five or more day-care
centers, nurseries, or kindergartens with a two-mile radius of their
headquarters, their charitable giving increases significantly.
How can you link charitable
giving to day-care centers in the area? There are a lot of variables at work
here. We ran a regression analysis that controlled for firm-specific
variables – size, age, risk, business performance. And we controlled for
population density, because research has shown that people are somewhat meaner
in very dense places. Even after controlling for all this, the more day-care
centers and kindergartens there were, the more likely the company was to engage
in charitable behavior. This was so exciting. For someone who does lab work, it
was nice to see the same pattern of results in the real-world data.
What do you think is happening
here? Our hypothesis focuses on the idea of purity. Child-related cues
might unconsciously activate notions of goodness and drive us to get to a pure
state and not want to pollute it. Think about it: As a parent, you behave
differently around kids. You don’t swear
as much. You don’t want others to swear. But we are finding that it’s not only
the presence of a child that makes us feel this way; it’s the idea of a child.
It just seems so unlikely that
the mere presence of crayons would be enough to change complex adult behavior. There
is mounting evidence. It’s been seen in primates. Male Barbary
macaques use their infants in this way, carrying them around to encourage
cooperative behaviors within the group, such as mutual grooming. Neuroscience
has shown that oxytocin is released when people are exposed to kids, and
oxytocin is associated with pro-social behavior.
Does it matter whether the
toys present are for younger children or older ones? We struggled with that
one a lot. We used cues that evoked children ranging from infancy to eight or
nine years of age. We can safely say cues from that range seem to work. But
what happens beyond it, we don’t know.
Is there a useful application
here? Should we put children’s items in our meeting rooms and work areas? One
suggestion is to put day-care facilities on corporate campuses. Not only would
it make parents more relaxed about their kids, but it might also have a
positive influence on everyone’s behavior. It could lead to a more ethical
climate. And yes, perhaps pictures of
children in cubicles would encourage people to act better. Or maybe elevators should pipe in
child-related music rather than dull easy-listening music. What if we used
colored ink sometimes or colorful fonts in messages? Would we act more ethically? I don’t know,
but it’s possible.
Where else do you want to take
this research? In all these studies we looked at financial,
ethical, and pro-social behavior. We want to look at more nonfinancial areas.
Would cues related to children of different races lead to more diversity, less
discrimination, less stereotyping? The other direction is to see if childlike
features trigger anything. Children have certain physical attributes – large
eyes, big foreheads, small chins, and chubbiness. Do we subconsciously assume
that companies headed by baby-faced CEOs are less likely to dump chemicals in
rivers or commit fraud? To me, that’s the dark side. It’s the same with
marketing. We’ve looked at lots of ads that use children in frankly bizarre
ways – babies drinking soda, old cigarette ads with kids talking about what
brand their daddy smokes, toddlers shaving, the “E* Trade baby.” There’s a fast
–food chain whose logo is a girl with pigtails. In light of this research, what
do we understand now about the effect these ads may have?
There’s an image of a teddy bear on this page. We’re doing our part to
improve the behavior of business leaders. Put a teddy bear on the cover? Think of the pro-social behavior you’d
create in the boardroom.
Sreedhari
Desai is a research fellow at the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard
University and an assistant professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Harvard Business Review
September 2011
Reprint F1109D
For Article Reprints visit www.hbr.org
