They seem so lovely. Don’t trust them with anything. Not even your name.
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Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
You’ve always had your suspicions, haven’t you?
You’ve always looked at them with a beady eye and a brain that says: “I wouldn’t hire you if I was the head of the CIA.”
Now science has weighed in and concluded with painful certainty: You just can’t trust college students.
A study of 3,108 of these young beings, performed by MIT and published by the National Institute of Economic Research, observed data so depressing that I hope you don’t have a college student or a hammer anywhere near you as you read this.
The researchers asked these students to give up their friends’ email addresses.
You wouldn’t do that, would you? Everyone knows that privacy is precious. We’re desperate to avoid pain from scams and hacks.
Yet here were 98 percent of the students giving up their friends’ email addresses.
If they were offered a slice of pizza, that is.
Please consider those last two sentences. Please accept the existential pain you’re feeling, now that you know humanity has no hope.
Please also let me depress you a little further.
94 percent of these students gave up their friends’ email addresses without even being offered the slice of pizza.
I’d like to commune with the 6 percent who resisted. I’d also like to commune with the further 6 percent that gave the researchers fake email addresses to protect their friends.
The study’s authors offered several sentences of condemnation. After all, 60 percent of people claim in research that they’re not at all comfortable sharing email contacts.
“Whereas people say they care about privacy, they are willing to relinquish private data quite easily when incentivized to do so,” said the researchers.
Let’s forget this idea that we’re all in this together. Let’s toss aside the notion that friendship matters, that human relationships are the most important element of happiness or that we’re surrounded by extremely nice businesspeople who say: “Trust me.”
If you can’t trust college students, whom can you trust?
Oh, what am I saying? What’s an email address? It’s nothing. Everyone’s got one. They’re easy to find. Aren’t they?
Moreover, we’re all hypocrites at heart. We just begin to really show it in college.
We all weigh values and benefits every day. Betrayals large and small course from us like calories from the pastry case at Starbucks.
We just hope no one ever finds out.
Consider the sadness, though. All it takes to break a friend’s trust is a little thick crust.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.