THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Swiss pride themselves on their banking services so it would make sense to study bank workers. The results were not something the Swiss can be proud of.

Researchers in Switzerland studied bank workers and other professionals in experiments in which they won more money if they cheated, and found that bankers were more dishonest when they were made particularly aware of their professional role.

When bank employees were primed to think less about their profession and more about normal life, however, they were less inclined to dishonesty.

"Many scandals... have plagued the financial industry in the last decade," Ernst Fehr, a researcher at the University of Zurich who co-led the study, told reporters in a telephone briefing. "These scandals raise the question whether the business culture in the banking industry is favoring, or at least tolerating, fraudulent or unethical behaviors."

Fehr's team conducted a laboratory game with bankers, then repeated it with other types of workers as comparisons.

The first study involved 128 employees all levels of a large international bank - the researchers were sworn to secrecy about which one - and 80 staff from a range of other banks.

Participants were divided into a treatment group that answered questions about their profession, such as "what is your function at this bank;" or a control group that answered questions unrelated to work, such as "how many hours of TV do you watch each week?"

They were then asked to toss a coin 10 times, unobserved, and report the results. For each toss they knew whether heads or tails would yield a $20 reward. They were told they could keep their winnings if they were more than or equal to those of a randomly selected subject from a pilot study.

Given maximum winnings of $200, there was "a considerable incentive to cheat," Fehr's team wrote in the journal Nature, online November 19.

The results showed the control group reported 51.6% winning tosses and the treatment group - whose banking identity had been emphasized to them - reported 58.2% as wins, giving a misrepresentation rate of 16%. The proportion of subjects cheating was 26%.

And the cheating was driven by their recognition of their roles as bankers. So now we know that fiduciary responsibility is a driving force behind bankers dishonesty. That's a tough place to be.