[praptak]

CS Lewis has a speech about the ingroups and corruption. His thesis is that the mere desire to be "in" is the greatest driver of immoral behavior:

"To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”"

https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

[PaulHoule]

I'd note that it is common for fraudsters to prey on members of ingroups

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud

[EdwardDiego]

MLM vendors looove religious stay at home parents (usually, but not always, mothers) for precisely that reason.

And in my country there's been several ponzi schemes that targeted people through churches, because Dave is such a good Christian, he tithes every Sunday, he wouldn't at all mislead us about this exciting investment opportunity!

[bsenftner]

In undergrad I did a formal Philosophy / Sociology study, where we were looking at human motivations. The research indicated that prestige is the number 1 driver of human motivation. Gaining prestige "trumps" ethics. Nobody likes to hear that.

[derbOac]

I think this is one reason it is important to cast unethical behavior in terms of lack of competency — that someone has to break the rules to get ahead because they're not competent enough to do things fairly or ethically.

Empathy, while important in my opinion personally, often doesn't matter to certain people. So you have to decrease the prestige associated with unethical behavior, above and beyond it being unethical per se.

[fellowniusmonk]

Did that ever replicate?

Is prestige the number one motivator only statistically?

In other words is it the number one motivator for 31% percent of the college students that were tested and lets say empathy was at 29%?

Misanthropy and bald self interest gets overplayed I think. Often times because it allows bad actors to normalize and justify their own misanthropy.

Presenting this kind of unbacked, unqualified anecdotal data is great for "edgy truthtellers" but also deeply poisoning the well.

[EdwardDiego]

I see what you did there with your choice of verb, and you're spot on.

[sigwinch]

No, but I don’t think ethics is #2. Someone intrinsically motivated might be technically competent, autonomous and self-confident about his/her goals. I might skip your meetings about ethics; I might be too busy.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> "Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; But the harm does not interest them."

-T.S. Eliot

[rramadass]

Also Lord Acton - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”

[brazzy]

Acton was, by the way, an ardent supporter of the Confederacy. In his opinion, the federal government curtailing the independence of states was a more significant act of oppression than slavery.

[spigottoday]

Corruption empowers, and absolute corruption empowers absolutely. It seems to me that some people adopt this perspective.

[graemep]

I think this is absolutely spot on with the Epstein thing. Powerful individuals just helping each other, giving each other information and money, or facilitating or ignoring exploitation because it is "what we all do". Especially effective when the group believe (maybe implicitly) that they are "better" and entitled to put their interests before those of the public. Even more so when there is a huge advantage to be gained by being part of the group.

Join my networking group, pass on some info in return for money or vice-versa, turn a blind eye to abuse even if you are not involved....

[lo_zamoyski]

Absolutely. In an ideal setting, elites model excellence and serve as an example for others to follow. In practice, things are never so pure, and in bad cases, quite bad. This is why we may speak of the fish rotting from the head down. The general populace takes its example from what is taken to be its elite, even if in objective terms, that "elite" is a total failure.

You see this with political opinions. People generally don't think very deeply about politics. They generally reflect the political sensibilities of the in-group they aspire to remain part of or aspire to join. It's a signal. A reasonably intelligent person can make the distinction between signal and genuinely informed opinion, but often, and especially among the poseurs, it's not about the truth value of an opinion. It is about the signal. This is the very definition of bullshit: something said with total indifference to its truth value, and only valued for its instrumental usefulness.