SPOILER WARNING! DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE
People have varying levels of empathy. Psychopaths and narcissists can recognize emotions in other people, but can not respond appropriately. Hence why psychopaths can laugh while another suffers. People with severe autistic disorders have no desire to know the emotions of other people. And even "regular" people can have varying levels of empathy. If you flinched and looked away when Brown was threatening to blind Dark with a papercut then your empathy is probably healthy.
And here's the thing: I don't believe ANY of them were motivated by the salary or the benefits at all. They were portrayed as cut-throat career-driven "Alpha" people, but even though they probably were, by the time the movie happens they were just pretending to. Their desperation for the position runs deeper. Far deeper. Remember how they all pleaded when they were disqualified? People who do it for the money and power don't do that. They should have acted like it doesn't matter, but they had no problems groveling.
I believe the real reason all of them wanted it so much is because they were infected and/or know someone else close to them who they want to save by getting the position.
With such reasons, then you'd have the hard choice of where to place your compassion. On the people who are counting on you? On your rivals as fellow human beings with the same problems? On yourself facing the immediate threat of death from the virus? It's basically a "house is burning, you can only save one of your family members before it falls down" kind of situation.
To save one, you must try to turn off all feeling for the others even temporarily or it will haunt you, as Black warned White. Because even though Dark identified White as a narcissist, he tried to kill himself when he realized what he thought he's done (killed Black for nothing), which betrays that he can still feel. He was just desperate. The situation itself is desperate, and how empathic you are normally might not be how empathic you are in this situation.
In short, eight "average" people would probably have reacted in the same way. Coincidentally, that was the main attribute they were looking for in the person they wanted to hire. The ability to choose wisely and compassionately, because they were choosing people's lives.
P.S. And by "save", I don't mean by the "magic bullet" drug revealed at the end of the film (they don't know about that after all, they don't even know what the company was), but the drug White was taking. The drug which Brunette identifies as so expensive she needed the job to pay for treating her significant other. That would explain why White was the most desperate of them all. Because in his case, it was his own life on the line.
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