HBR Daily Stat: People in Creepy Businesses Might Be Nicer Than You Are

An excerpt:

Employees in two distinctly unsavory businesses — “cybersquatting” (registering misleading domain names) and online pornography — are, on average, twice as likely to be trustworthy as a group of graduate and undergraduate social-science students, according to a study by Mitchell Hoffman of the University of Toronto and John Morgan of the University of California Berkeley that involved a series of experiments. Moreover, in a trust game, people in those industries were more than 50% more likely to trust, and they lied one-third less than the students did. Past research has suggested that unsavory industries attract liars and cheats, but Hoffman and Morgan argue that semi-lawless businesses require higher levels of interpersonal trust and even altruism for success.

Read more in HBR.