Why good people do bad things and how they convince others to help them

A colleague today shared this NPR programme about Toby Groves – a man who committed large scale fraud – and how new research into fraud shows that a lot of fraud is unintentional.

Traditionally, when we think about bad behavior, we think about character.

But psychologists who study bad behavior — who study, say, fraud in the business world — have found that that character doesn’t explain everything. They’ve found that a lot of unethical behavior can be explained by cognitive errors — errors that affect almost everyone.

Listen to the full (~20 minute) recording here.