The glorification of greed beyond the business school: how popular wall street narratives relate to future work selves
通过三项混合方法实验，研究流行华尔街叙事（如《华尔街之狼》）如何影响学生和销售员工的未来工作自我，发现美化贪婪的角色更被向往，且与低共情相关。
Popular Wall Street narratives, such as The Wolf of Wall Street , have become large box-office successes, reaching wide audiences. In three exploratory mixed-method experiments, this study investigates how popular Wall Street narratives relate to students’ and sales employees’ future work selves – who they aspire to become in their future career. The findings indicate that characters in narratives glorifying greed are considered more desired future work selves in comparison to characters in critical or non-greed narratives. Morally ambiguous greedy characters were perceived through a “winner frame” of self-made success, and were associated with lower empathy levels, while narratives from a “victim perspective” – with characters suffering as a result of financial malpractice – were associated with higher empathy levels. This empirical study contributes to theory and practice on the appeal of greedy characters and how stories could perpetuate a culture of greed and dominant logic of shareholder-value maximization in Wall Street.