Overcoming the Impulse of Bad Morals

Only minutes after my 10th period class ended, I realized that I had left my coat in my seventh period class. I ran back upstairs to retrieve it, but to my disappointment, it was already gone and my teacher had no clue where it was. After messaging my class group chat, asking the class of ‘27 Facebook group, and checking all of the classrooms I had classes in, my efforts proved fruitless and I returned home cold and coatless. For the next week, I continued to sift through the lost and found and, in desperation, checked Mr. Moran’s office. Despite this, my coat was still nowhere to be found.

A few weeks after replacing my missing coat, I lost my new one, this time in my fifth period class. Again, it was nowhere to be found.

Aside from proving that I desperately need to work on keeping track of my belongings, this situation also made me consider where my two coats had gone. The only logical conclusion I reached was that someone had stolen them. The disappearance of my coats alone isn’t evidence enough to claim that stealing at Stuyvesant is a problem. However, it did make me question if this was a widespread experience for many students.

I started to ask my peers if they had stolen anything they found at school or had any of their belongings stolen. After having conversations with a range of Stuyvesant students across multiple grades and social circles, I found that the vast majority of Stuy students who have stolen items within the building—with only a couple of exceptions—typically don’t seek out valuable items to steal. Rather, when given the opportunity, or when they stumble upon something of value, they take it.

An anonymous sophomore recalled a time when she was walking with her friend and came across a black North Face coat lying in the hallway. She said that her friend spent around 10 minutes trying to locate its owner before taking the opportunity to put on the coat. She shared, “[My friend] said [the coat] had just been added to her wishlist, and she thought it was a sign that she should take the coat.”

Meanwhile, an anonymous freshman reported that his AirPods had been stolen by someone at school. How did he know it was a Stuy student? When he tracked them on the Find My app, he could see that another student had been charging them, using them, and keeping them at school every day.

Countless other students told me about the mysterious disappearances of their items inside the school building. However, according to extensive psychological research, the vast majority of these instances don’t stem from uniquely bad moral principles, but rather from an error in them. 

Turns out, it’s not about stealing. It’s about moral opportunism, which is defined as the impulsive taking of opportunities without regard to one’s personal principles. Though it may sound negative, this practice is extremely human. As humans, we psychologically tend to take actions that don’t align with our morals or identity. Most Stuy students, along with the majority of the population—don’t necessarily want to steal—nor do they view stealing as morally justified in almost any case. Yet, a huge number of students report their coats, phones, and AirPods were stolen within the school.

A study conducted by Duke University professor Dan Ariely found that just under 60% of the population would steal something when allowed to do so. By this statistic, Stuyvesant students are merely a sample group of the larger population. Students may not have been seeking out AirPods or coats, but when they happened upon them—or when the opportunity arose—they chose to take them. As I continued to talk with and interview more students, I found that psychological opportunism was present in our community—a better and more reasonable explanation than students outright aiming to steal items. Students shared one-time instances in which they or one of their friends had taken an item of someone else’s, but when asked if they would ever enter a store with the intention of stealing, almost every student was sure that they would never.

Opportunism isn’t rooted in principle—it’s rooted in impulse. Working on one’s principles can be difficult and often impossible. Since so many people in a larger society participate in large crimes, opportunism can’t so easily be applied to society’s thieving as a whole. However, items that are stolen at Stuyvesant are often less valuable, meaning that theft is less likely to stem from bad intentions. This makes it a much easier issue to solve because working on impulse is not only quite doable but a valuable practice. Just because moral opportunism factors into the way that we are wired to think doesn’t mean that it should be normalized. Furthermore, it doesn’t mean that Stuy students—who strive to be the best in so many aspects of our lives—shouldn’t also strive to be the best when it comes to employing our moral principles and working against moral opportunism.

By treating opportunist impulses the same way one would treat other psychological urges not linked to someone’s full identity, mind, or morals, we can work against them. The Mayo Clinic describes a response to impulses in the context of a range of conditions, including anger management or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Although these conditions greatly differ from the problem of stealing at Stuyvesant, the strategies utilized to work against these conditions can be applied in Stuy’s context. For all issues impulse-related, the Mayo Clinic emphasizes the distinction between reality and disordered thinking. Disordered thinking is any form of thinking that’s not actually your brain, you, or your beliefs, meaning that impulsive theft would fit into this category. For almost all disordered thinking, the Mayo Clinic describes the first step in working against it as identifying that it’s disordered. For Stuyvesant students, this can mean taking a moment to recognize that we might not actually believe in stealing things, and rather, it’s a disordered, impulsive, and opportunistic part of our mind telling us to steal something. Separating our impulses from the rest of who we are is often enough to keep the impulse at bay.

However, students working on impulse control on an individual level should only be part of the solution—the school administration can and should also play a role. A large factor that allows impulses to overpower morals, or spur-of-the-moment opportunities to outweigh long-term consequences, is a lack of moral—not rule-related—accountability. I am not suggesting that the administration ought to hang posters and send emails that will just annoy students and be deleted. Rather, the moral consequences of students’ actions—the impacts they have on fellow students—should be put on full display. The theory is that when otherwise kind students are unable to see the moral consequences of their actions, there is less fuel for them to resist these impulses. Therefore, a large bulletin board should be placed by the lost and found on the second floor where students stick large, personalized note cards listing items they have lost. Students who’ve stolen items must face the harm they’ve inflicted on their classmates. Granted, when it comes to students who truly struggle with issues of moral behavior, this board won’t do much. However, for the vast majority of theft cases at Stuy in which opportunism is the driving force, seeing the impact of their actions puts a stopper in the quick, spur-of-the-moment, impulses.

After researching moral opportunism and understanding strategies to combat it, I discovered its positive impact on my own life. Indeed, when I saw that my sister had left a full-sized Twix bar sitting in the middle of the dining table, I was tempted to grab it as I had on previous occasions. However, it only took a moment of reflection to realize that I was not craving dessert. Furthermore, I acknowledged that taking my sister’s items did not align with my morality, causing the opportunistic impulse to cease.

The impulse to steal my sister’s chocolate bar—while on a different scale—wasn’t unlike that of the people who stole my two coats. Just like me, chances are the thieves likely weren’t immoral. Rather, they saw an opportunity and chose to take it. However, if they had stopped to think about stealing in the context of themselves and their morals as a whole, they might have made a different decision that day. Opportunism may be ingrained into our society and possibly even innate, but the free choice that upholds opportunism itself implies that we have the capacity for deeper, stronger morals. It’s not feasible to implore society as a whole to re-evaluate our morals, their origin, and their implications and expect actual change, but at the small level of danger and theft present at Stuyvesant, we have the psychological foundation and tools to change the way we think. Evaluating our impulses to work against opportunism is a difficult yet necessary process to make our community a safer one.