Hello, my name is Kellie and I'm on a quest to understand greed. Not just any kind of greed. What mystifies me is when people do things to benefit themselves while knowingly harming someone else.

My fascination with greed started in 2008 when the financial crisis hit, and I suddenly realized I didn't know how to do my job. At the time, I led a team of writers at a global financial services firm and much of our day-to-day work centered on drafting educational materials for investors. But when the market crashed, investors didn't want education; they wanted someone to understand their pain.

A lot of people forget that the financial crisis reduced Americans’ life savings and their dignity. While financial markets plummeted, people struggled to make sense of complex financial jargon like credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities. These words and their complex meanings made people feel powerless and dumb during the biggest economic event of their lives. The language made it difficult for Americans to understand the evening news, and it made hard-working people feel like they’d been left behind.  

As communicators, my team and I wanted to connect meaningfully with customers. We developed new methods of aggregating customer insight that illuminated the human dimensions of the people who invested with us — revealing their hopes and their fears. We discovered a wide spectrum of financial sophistication among customers and created tools that ensured we would inform our investors without ever making them feel stupid.

But all the while, a larger question loomed: how did this happen? How did Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old firm, suddenly shutter its doors? And who was responsible?

The truth of what happened — the antecedents to the financial crisis — started to become clear in 2009 with investigative books like Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail and Mike Lewis’ 2010 book: The Big Short. Later, in January of 2011, the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission published their report documenting egregious acts of greed and revealing a culture of deception that had manifested among the sophisticated class of Wall Street bankers and traders.

The most searing part of this report was a 6-letter acronym: IBGYBG, which stood for: “I'll be gone, you'll be gone.” What these six letters meant was ‘when the house of cards falls, you and I will be gone.’ An email from a trader to a ratings analyst that ended in IBGYBG was a way of inducing unethical behavior; it was a form of bullying and a commonplace nudge influencing each person to think only of themself.

The answer to the question we asked in October of 2008 finally came into view. How did this happen? How did millions of families suddenly realize that their retirement savings, their college savings, and their home values were worth a fraction of their pre-2008 value? The answer was greed. Nefarious, systemic, culturally accepted greed that was defined by an overt willingness to harm others.

This culture that overtly cultivated wanton greed intrigued me. I wondered if people could suspend their moral code in one domain of their life while still being good parents and spouses. I wondered about the role of overt nudges like IBGYBG in cultural assimilation. Does corruption spread from one person to another like an illness? And is anyone motivated to act ethically when the tools used to swindle others are too advanced to be detected by the average victim?

Years later, when I found myself in a master’s program at the University of Pennsylvania with an opportunity to conduct a study, I knew with vivid and compelling clarity what I would research: greed.

But there was a problem. My master’s program was in the field of applied positive psychology, which investigates human strengths and explores what goes right — even in difficult situations.

From a research perspective, this meant I would design my study as a search for positive deviance, seeking to identify the less common — yet highly adaptive — behaviors of outliers.

For example, a positive deviance investigation of the financial crisis would have little to do with people who committed fraud. Instead, the focus would shift to those who upheld their own moral code despite pressures all around them to cheat.

Accordingly, my master’s research thesis shifted to reflect these tenets. Instead of studying greed, I studied moral exemplars — those who stayed true to themselves in difficult situations. In fact, a criterion for participating in my study was that each person had risked their own career growth in order to do what they felt was right. Each exemplar had been in a situation that challenged their beliefs and they had taken a risk to do what they felt was right.

My aim with this study was to discover something unique about moral exemplars that others could learn from. What did these extraordinary people have in common that enabled them to navigate their careers with such moral courage? I suspected it might be a centering routine such meditation or religious practice; or perhaps it would be the presence of an artifact — something imbued with meaning — that sat prominently in their work area. Another possibility was that they had all experienced a life-changing event that expanded their world views and heightened their awareness of suffering. Or maybe the commonality centered on their upbringing — things their parents had done to shape their moral code.

What I learned was not at all what I had suspected. How did the moral exemplars in my study nurture their own moral values in a world of conflicting priorities? By and large they relied on other people to reflect their own virtue. In fact, most exemplars in my study carefully selected the people they surrounded themselves with, believing that certain relationships shouldn’t be left to chance. One exemplar explained that he taught his sons to “pick your friends like you pick your fruit.”

When these exemplars encountered difficult situations, they turned to their trusted relationships for sense-making, affirmation, and comfort. For many exemplars, their trusted relationship was a spouse or sibling, but others turned to good friends amidst challenges. Oftentimes exemplars found that these special relationships influenced their choices even when they weren’t in contact. Two exemplars referred to their key relationships as “reinforcing mechanisms” that bolstered their confidence and clarity when choosing between conflicting priorities.

When writing up the report from my study, which is available for download here, it was this notion of a reinforcing mechanism — along with additional research on the motivating power of relationships — that led me to write: “Merely thinking about another person and our desire for them to hold us in high regard can shape our behavior. Moreover, the risk of eroding that special relationship, through which we feel that we are our very best, constrains our behavior and limits the choices we believe are available to us in any given moment.”

The report also identifies future lines of possible research, including: “If merely thinking about a relationship in which we feel that we are at our best can positively influence our behavior, then ethical culture and behavior leaders within organizations can integrate this insight into their programs.”

Later, I applied for and was awarded a fellowship with the Project on Positive Leadership at the University of Louisville to develop an instructional tool that would teach others how to cultivate these special relationships in their lives. The name of that tool — Anchor Relationships — is designed for college students, working professionals, and adults at every life stage.

What this work is revealing is that the right relationships can strengthen our resilience, our self-efficacy, and our ability to uphold moral values across the trajectory of our lives. Not surprisingly, these same relationships act as a wellspring for vitality and well-being. As Dr. Robert Waldinger, director of The Harvard Study of Adult Development explains, “People who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. People with strong social support maintained stronger mental health as they aged… Good relationships don’t just protect our bodies; they protect our brains.”  

My fascination with greed has morphed and evolved into a fascination with relationships — the kind of relationships that help us rise to our better selves and enable true human flourishing.