Bank error in your favour
Contents
Synonyms
Definition
When Richard went to the ATM, he got a very pleasant surprise. He requested £100 with a receipt. What he got was £10,000 with a receipt – for £100.
When he got home, he checked his account online and found that, sure enough, his account had been debited by only £100. He put the money in a safe place, fully expecting the bank swiftly to spot the mistake and ask for it back. But the weeks passed and nobody called. After two months, Richard concluded that no one was going to ask for the money. So he headed off to the BMW dealership with the hefty down-payment in his pocket.
On the way, however, he did feel a twinge of guilt. Wasn’t this stealing? He quickly managed to convince himself it was no such thing. He had not deliberately taken the money, it had just been given to him. And he hadn’t taken it from anyone else, so no one had been robbed. As for the bank, this was a drop in the ocean for them, and anyway, they would be insured against such eventualities.
And it was their fault they had lost the money – they should have had safer systems. No, this wasn’t theft. It was just the biggest stroke of luck he had ever had.
Source
TBC
Motivation & Background
I don’t know anyone who, on picking the ‘bank error in your favour – collect £200’ card in Monopoly, returns the cash to the bank on the grounds that it is not really theirs. In real life, however, we might expect an honest person to do just that. But how many people would? Not that many, I’d guess.
It is not that people are plain immoral. Indeed, we make quite fine discriminations in such cases.
For instance, if people are accidentally given too much change by a small, independent business, they are more likely to point out the mistake than they are if it is made by a large corporation. The principle seems to be that it is wrong to take advantage of the mistakes of a fellow human being, but big businesses are fair game. This is probably in part because we sense that no one is really harmed by the error of a corporate entity, and the loss to them is insignificant compared to the benefit to us. In a strange way, then, our willingness to take the money is fuelled in part by a peculiar sense of justice.
But even if we do conclude that this is a form of justifiable theft, it is theft nonetheless. The fact that it is the result of an accident, with no intention to steal, is irrelevant. For example, imagine you mistakenly take someone else’s bag at the luggage reclaim and subsequently find that it contains many more valuable items than were in your own. If you then make no efforts to return it, the accidental nature of the initial acquisition does not justify the later, very deliberate, decision not to do anything about it. Similarly, you would be rightly annoyed if someone took something of value which you had accidentally left unattended, reasoning that it was your fault for not being careful enough.
Richard’s thought that the bank could well afford the loss is also spurious, for if that justifies his actions then it also justifies shoplifting. Shops are also insured and a small theft will barely dent their profits.
The reason why Richard was so easily persuaded by his own arguments is that, like all of us, he is prone to self-serving bias in his thinking. Reasons that justify benefits to ourselves seem more persuasive than those that don’t. It is very difficult to disable this bias and think impartially. After all, why would we want to do that?
