Wanted: Accountants With Hearts of Stone

Companies—especially financial companies—depend on employees to make tough, ethical calls under pressure. So what causes people to get it wrong? Pure greed? A love of risk? Disregard for rules? Frank Hartmann, a management and accounting professor in the Netherlands, has come up with a surprising answer: congeniality.

In a lab in downtown Rotterdam earlier this year, Hartmann outfitted students in something resembling a space-age swim cap and sat them in front of a screen to view clips of faces exhibiting signs of fear, disgust, or happiness. As they watched, their brain signals were recorded and fed into a computer. A few weeks earlier, the same 30 or so test subjects had been asked to complete a questionnaire on situations they might encounter in their future careers as controllers, the accountants whose duties include preparing a company’s financial statements and ensuring tax compliance. In each scenario, they were pressured by their manager to alter the company accounts for varying reasons: so the manager wouldn’t be fired, so the team would hit its targets, and so on.