An Anonymous Girl

by Greer Hendricks

We all have reasons for our actions. Even if we hide the reason from those who think they know us best. Even if the reasons are so deeply buried we can’t recognize them ourselves.

When money and morality intersect, the results can illuminate intriguing truths about human character. People are motivated to break their moral compasses for a variety of primal reasons: survival, hate, love, envy, passion. And money.

Trust is a necessary component of a committed relationship.

This is known as the Hawthorne effect, named after the place where this result was first encountered, the Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works. A basic study to determine how the level of light in their building affected the productivity of laborers revealed that the amount of luminosity made no difference in the employees’ productivity. The workers increased output whenever the light was manipulated, whether from low to high or vice versa. In fact, a change in productivity occurred when any variable was manipulated, which made the researchers postulate that the staff altered their behavior simply because they were aware that they were under observation.

Self-preservation is a powerful motivator, more reliably so than money or empathy or love.