How professionals think

Dan Little looks at How professionals think.

Little posits three (3) models about how actors arrive at their choices and behavior:

1. Rational Choice
2. Pragmatist Action
3. Character

Little examines a paper

…that appears to show that a certain segment of white-collar professionals (bankers) make very different decisions about their actions depending on the “frame” within which they deliberate (link). If they are thinking within the everyday frame of personal life and leisure, their actions are as honest as anyone else’s. But if they are prompted to think within the frame of their professional environment, their actions become substantially less honest. That professional environment is the large international bank.

Emphasis Mine

Littke concludes that:

These findings suggest that we should explore further the notion that actors possess distinct mental frames that they can take up or put aside readily, and that lead to very different kinds of behavior when confronting the same kinds of problems. Further, we should consider the possibility that these frames are highly portable and contingent: the actor can be led to choose one frame or the other, with important behavioral consequences. This finding seems to point in the same direction as ideas advanced by Kahneman and Tversky in much of their work together, including Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.

Emphasis Mine

My own take on Little's reading this paper is that it is a refutation of the Capitalist lie that all people are naturally greedy and that Capitalism is the best system that harnesses this so-called 'innate greed'.

This paper gives me hope that we can truly build a Communist society because people will tend to adapt their behaviour and expectations of norms to fit that society. This also means that a Communist society has to be built through continual agitation and propaganda until the people accept that acting in these new ways a better society can be built.