Abstract
In the midst of the Great Recession of 2008, corporate scandals overflowed newspaper headlines. Companies such as Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and others contributed to the most recent stock market crash on Wall Street. There is some evidence that the calculative mindset may have contributed to these corporations’ decisions to act unethically. An individual with a calculative mindset analyzes non-quantitative problems, such as social and moral issues, mathematically. When individuals crunch numbers, the mechanical, mathematical problem-solving techniques they employ may carry over to other decisions they make, including decisions about moral and social matters. Past research has shown that a calculative mode of thinking can lead people to behave more greedily and lie more than non-calculative modes of thinking. Calculative mindsets also lead people to feel detached from their own feelings. This detachment from the self may spillover to feeling detached from others. Additionally, the calculative mindset causes individuals to act more self-interestedly. As a result, calculative individuals may reduce others to the means they serve for the calculative individual’s own goals rather than recognizing other people as intrinsically valuable. Lacking empathy for another person’s feelings and perceiving another person solely as a mean to an end can facilitate the dehumanization of that person. The present study investigates whether calculative mindsets incite people to dehumanize others. Two different calculative manipulations were used to test this hypothesis. Data collected from a series of three studies failed to support the hypothesis. However, the studies resulted in questions regarding how the calculative mindset has been examined in past studies, and what it means to study the implications of “pure” number-crunching on behavior without including exposure to monetary or economics subject matter.