Why do we think businesses are trying to exploit us?

British media recently delivered a speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, at a conference of the British Trade Union Union in Manchester, in which he attacked capitalism and business.

Supporting and meeting in his speech strongly the unions, but he strongly opposed business enterprises, the rich, and their efforts to profit at the expense of the people.

He also blamed Amazon for not paying fair taxes from its perspective (and its size in the US market), and felt that the self-employment economy was a form of self-employment. incarnation of the old evil ".

The archbishop considers capitalism to be immoral in nature, because of his ideas of seeking huge profits and income inequalities.

In recent years, other religious have adopted ideas similar to those of Welby. In 2015, Pope Francis criticized capitalism and the relentless pursuit of money.

Similarly, following the global financial crisis of 2008, Bishop Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote an article in a British magazine criticizing capitalism.

Such views on business and profits are unusual. Some of these anti-profit ideas have been published in a recent article in Personal and Social Psychology.

As part of my research with postgraduate students, I discovered that human beings can have a bad image of the business world, which leads them to explain many things about the trade, such as increases of price and promotion of products, such as attempts to exploit consumers.

"Conscious entities"

But what is behind these views? Why is corporate profit seeking profitable?

We believe that the answer lies partly in the way people perceive these businesses and in the awareness of their efforts to make profits.

On the first point, people see businesses and businesses as "conscious entities," like any living organism with its ideas, intentions, feelings, and motivations.

According to research conducted using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices, the patterns of neurotransmitters we show when we think of the feelings and mental states of others are not distinguishable. from those we also think about the behavior of institutions.

This means that people are more likely to think clearly that there are specific human motivations behind the behavior and activities of the company.

In addition, consumers generally consider that their business transactions with businesses are zero-sum transactions, such as sharing a cake with other businesses, which means that a person gets more than the reduction of its balance.

This means that the search for profits by companies is considered to be at the expense of consumers.

Uncertainty about for-profit institutions

For this reason, profit-seeking by companies has become confusing. Businesses perceive our minds as conscious entities, and the profits and benefits of customers are therefore deliberate, which constitutes a violation of an important rule of conduct: people despise someone who seeks to derive from it profit to the detriment of someone else.

In our study, we found that many business processes were interpreted according to this ethical rule: price increases, discount offers for specific people, purchase recommendations and even product promotion.

This perspective does not stop even if people are not asked to buy certain goods or products from a company and therefore do not make profits with them. The simple search for profits by the institution pushes some customers to give negative answers.

Even the sales staff suspected!

In terms of sales, we find this more extreme: customers think that when sellers promote their company's products, they aim to make a profit to the detriment of their customers.

But we have not looked at the strategy that companies will adopt to mitigate the perceptions of these customers, or whether there is an ability to do so.

If our results are so important, some readers may consider these customer reactions as legitimate and should not be taken into account.

However, in our opinion, the purchasing process is a consumer decision: no company pays it against their will to buy their products.

In addition, companies run a lot of risk in providing products to consumers: the products that companies offer us are often of great value in our lives.

In the end, profitability is the main goal of creating businesses and providing products. If not, what is the purpose of starting a business?

You can read the original article on BBC Capital

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