“I saw what I believed to be a very corrupt system, and I’ve got to play along or I’ll be disadvantaged.”

When you also have insecurities, which a lot of highly motivated people do, you’re more apt to do what is necessary to achieve.

“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan,” she told him. “You have to get close.”

after conducting themselves with little concern for the public, they find themselves appealing to the public for mercy.

An unethical habit spreads through subtle cues that psychologists call “affective evaluations.” If people are rising on one measurement (wealth or status) even as they are falling on another (ethics or lawfulness), the verdict about which matters more will hinge on the culture all around them—on which values are most “exalted by members of their

“When I came into this field, the standard seemed to be ‘there are some things that one simply doesn’t do.’ Today, the standard is ‘if everyone else is doing it, I can do it too.’ ”

In effect, an increasingly remote world was an increasingly lawless world.

What had changed, though, was what he called the “psychological distance” between perpetrators and their victims: “Business is done with individuals at greater length now, which reduces the feeling that managers are harming others.”

Behind each new revelation of white-collar crime lurks an uncomfortable question about some of America’s most lucrative businesses: Are they attracting rogues or grooming them?