People Are More Selfish and Dishonest After Doing Math

Research participants who had spent 15 minutes solving math problems were 4 times more likely to lie for personal gain in an ethics game than those who had answered randomly selected verbal questions from a standardized test, says a team led by Long Wang of the City University of Hong Kong. The act of calculating appears to crowd out people’s social and moral concerns, resulting in behavior that is more self-interested and even immoral. Stimuli such as family photos that prompt thoughts about social values appear to diminish these negative effects, the researchers say.