Hire the guilt prone

In a recent edition of Knowledge at Wharton, Maurice Schweitzer of that school discusses a paper, “Who is Trustworthy? Predicting Trustworthy Intentions and Behavior,” he co-authored with T. Bradford Bitterly, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Taya R. Cohen, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, and Emma Levine, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Schweitzer notes:

We tapped into a personality trait that hasn’t received as much attention as say, the “Big Five” personality traits [extraversion, openness, agreeableness, neuroticism and conscientiousness.] The personality trait we tapped into is something called guilt proneness, or how prone someone is to feeling guilty. Imagine you’re out at a party. You have a glass of red wine, and you spill some red wine onto a white carpet. How would you feel? The people who would feel extremely guilty about that are the people who are prone to feeling guilt. Now what’s interesting is that people who are prone to feeling guilt, they don’t actually experience a lot more guilt because they spend a lot of effort trying to avoid putting themselves in that position. Those are the people who would say, if I’m if I’m going to be drinking wine over a white carpet, I’m having white wine. Those are the people that are thinking ahead to make sure they’re not missing deadlines. They’re not falling short of your expectations. They’re going to take their time and work extra hard to take other precautions. Those are the guilt-prone people. And it turns out that those people are pretty reliable. And when it comes to being trustworthy, those are the people we should be trusting.

This makes sense to me as an intuitive matter. But more than that, we have only to look at the example set by President Trump, who seems to show no guilt about anything – and who is as untrustworthy as any leader can be.

I’m not sure how compliance officers can operationalize this research. But for citizens the implications couldn’t be clearer.