An Academic Study on Reading Playboy for the Articles

"Humans are masters of lying and self-deception."

So begins a research paper from Harvard Business School with the equally provocative title, I read Playboy for the Articles: Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences. It looks at the lengths people will go to justify their own immoral or questionable behavior, to the point of forgetting they even committed the offensive behavior.

No, there are no pictures in this study by Zoë Chance and Michael I. Norton. So why else might a business person be interested in the findings?

• If you are a woman, such justifications can result in you not being selected for a job over a male, even though you are clearly the superior candidate.
• Ditto if you are a person of color.
• If you are a manager, you might be making a choice that is bad for your company or your career, i.e., "I hired my son because he is more qualified."

The paper touches briefly on how such behavior can be reduced, but there are no magic answers. Removing ambiguity from situations can help guide people to the "correct" decision. So can holding people accountable for decisions by making them explain their rationale.

But in general, we are much too devious to even see our justifications in the first place, so preventing them is difficult.

Are you ready to come clean and share your own whopper justifications with our reading audience?