One Bad Apple
On a recent road trip through Georgia, I stopped at an orchard store outside of Ellijay. Among my purchases was a half bushel of apples I couldn’t resist buying. They were this year’s crop and delicious. About a week later as I was selecting apples to make my Mom’s honey apple cake, I realized there was a rotten apple at the bottom of the bag. It was brown and nasty and I could see rot spreading to nearby apples. I needed to get rid of the rotten apple and separate the good apples from the bad in order to contain the damage.
The influence of “one bad apple” and its extension to observations of human behavior have been recognized for centuries. The metaphor “a rotten apple quickly infects its neighbor” was first used in 1340. The phrase has been used historically to warn us that the negative influence of one person (the rotten apple) can bring about the corruption of others who are in contact with that person (the other apples in the barrel).
Studies of social influence support this warning.
These studies have shown:
- Lying is contagious
- Stealing is contagious
- Violence is contagious
Unethical behavior tends to spread.
Studies find that observing unethical behavior in others often leads individuals to engage in unethical behavior themselves. It reduces the stigma attached to antisocial behavior. This is particularly the case when authority figures flaunt ethical norms. An interesting 2022 study found that publication of news about local corruption scandals increased the probability that a shopper would steal from an area supermarket.
So what should we do?
To quote David Brooks:
Left to our own, we human beings have an impressive capacity for selfishness. So people in decent societies agree on a million informal restraints — codes of politeness, humility and mutual respect that girdle selfishness and steer us toward reconciliation.
In other words, we develop codes of ethics, study what they mean and attempt to follow them in our interactions with others – regardless of what “others” may be doing.
We stop the contagion.
Related Resources:
Growing up, my folks were beekeepers and we lived on a farm with apple trees. Honey apple cake was a fall treat. Mom submitted the recipe for the community centennial cookbook which is where I found it when I was searching for recipes to use my abundance of apples.
To read more on bad apple metaphors and the flip in current usage, check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_apples
Lying is contagious:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4198136/
Stealing is contagious:
https://source.wustl.edu/2019/09/workplace-theft-is-contagious-and-strategic/
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4129462 This is the article discussed above that found that reporting of corruption lead to stealing.
Violence is contagious:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207245/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/violence-is-contagious/309459/ This article, particularly relevant today, discusses a study that found exposure to violence lead to violence in teens in Israel.
David Brook article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/
