The Honest Truth About Dishonesty
- Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, we found that given the opportunity, many people did fudge their score. In the control condition, participants solved on average four out of the twenty matrices. Participants in the shredder condition claimed to have solved an average of six—two more than in the control condition. And this overall increase did not result from a few individuals who claimed to solve a lot more matrices, but from lots of people who cheated by just a little bit… Their predictions were that the claims of correctly solved matrices would increase as the amount of money went up. Essentially, their intuitive theory was the same as the premise of the SMORC. But they were wrong. It turned out that when we looked at the magnitude of cheating, our participants added two questions to their scores on average, regardless of the amount of money they could make per question. In fact, the amount of cheating was slightly lower when we promised our participants the highest amount of $10 for each correct answer… Once again, they predicted that the human tendency for dishonesty would follow the SMORC and that participants would claim to solve more matrices as the probability of getting caught decreased. What did we find? Once again, lots of people cheated, but just by a bit, and the level of cheating was the same across all three conditions (shredding half, shredding all, shredding all and selfpaying). 19
- in the control condition, advisers suggested an average value of $16.50, while in the conflict-ofinterest condition, the advisers suggested an estimate that was over $20. They basically goosed the estimated value by almost $4…. In the conflict-of-interest-plus-disclosure condition, the advisers increased their estimates by another $4 (from $20.16 to $24.16). And what did the estimators do? As you can probably guess, they did discount the estimates, but only by $2. In other words, although the estimators did take the advisers’ disclosure into consideration when formulating their estimates, they didn’t subtract nearly enough 52
- In the two control conditions, we found that both the depleted and nondepleted folks showed an equal ability to solve the math problems—which means that depletion did not diminish their basic ability to do the math. But in the two shredder conditions (in which they could cheat), things went differently. Those who wrote essays without the letters “x” and “z” and later shredded their answers indulged in a little bit of cheating, claiming to solve about one extra matrix correctly. But the participants in the shredder condition who’d undergone the ordeal of writing essays without the letters “a” and “n” took the proverbial cake: they claimed to have correctly solved about three extra matrices. As it turned out, the more taxing and depleting the task, the more participants cheated… As a result of their depletion, they suffered a double whammy: they picked the premarked bubble sheet more frequently, and (as we saw in the previous experiment) they also cheated more when cheating was possible. When we looked at these two ways of cheating combined, we found that we paid the depleted participants 197 percent more than those who were not depleted. 59
- The predictions of how well they would perform on the second phase of the test showed that participants not only used the answer key in the first phase to exaggerate their score, but had very quickly convinced themselves that they truly earned that score. Basically, those who had a chance to check their answers in the first phase (and cheated) started believing that their exaggerated performance was a reflection of their true skill. But what would happen if we paid participants to predict their score accurately in the second phase? With money on the line, maybe our participants wouldn’t so patently ignore the fact that in phase one they had used the answer key to improve their scores. To that end, we repeated the same experiment with a new group of participants, this time offering them up to $20 if they correctly predicted their performance on the second test. Even with a financial incentive to be accurate, they still tended to take full credit for their scores and overestimate their abilities. Despite having a strong motivation to be accurate, self-deception ruled the day 80
- When there was an obvious difference between the number of dots on the two sides of the diagonal, the participants simply had to decide whether to lie or not. But when the trials were more ambiguous and it was harder to tell if there were more dots to the right or the left of the diagonal, creativity kicked into action—along with more cheating. The more creative the individuals, the better they were at explaining to themselves why there were more dots to the right of the diagonal (the side with the higher reward)… those who cheated more on each of the three tasks (matrices, dots, and general knowledge) had on average higher creativity scores compared to noncheaters, but their intelligence scores were not very different. We also studied the scores of the extreme cheaters, the participants who cheated almost to the max. In each of our measures of creativity, they had higher scores than those who cheated to a lower degree. Once again, their intelligence scores were no different… the participants who had been primed with the creative words chose “right” (the response with the higher pay) more often than those in the control condition… the level of moral flexibility was highly related to the level of creativity required in their department and by their job. 91
- We set up the machine so that some candy slots were marked with a 30 percent discount off the regular price of $1, while other slots gave users a 70 percent chance of paying the full price of $1.00 and a 30 percent chance of getting all their money back (and therefore paying nothing). In case you are interested in the results of this experiment, we almost tripled sales by probabilistically giving people back their money 102
- when participants learned that both they and someone else would benefit from their dishonesty if they exaggerated their scores more, they ended up engaging in even higher levels of cheating, claiming to have solved three more matrices than when they were cheating just for themselves… being closely supervised eliminated cheating altogether… altruism is indeed a strong motivator for cheating. When cheating was carried out for purely altruistic reasons and the cheaters themselves did not gain anything from their act, overclaiming increased to an even larger degree 118
- about a quarter of all patients receive attractive and expensive white fillings in their hidden teeth rather than the functionally superior silver fillings. In those cases, it was most likely that the dentists were making decisions that favored their own interests (higher initial pay and more frequent repairs) over the patients’ interests (lower cost and longer-lasting treatment). As if that weren’t bad enough, we also found that this tendency is more pronounced the longer the patient sees the same dentist (we found the same pattern of results for other procedures as well). What this suggests is that as dentists become more comfortable with their patients, they also more frequently recommend procedures that are in their own financial interest. And long-term patients, for their part, are more likely to accept the dentist’s advice based on the trust that their relationship has engendered 119
- we wanted to see whether being reminded of a guilt-related past experience would cause our participants to cleanse themselves by seeking more pain. As it turned out, in the neutral and sad conditions, the degree of self-inflicted pain was similar and rather low, which means that negative emotions by themselves do not create a desire for self-inflicted pain. However, those in the guilty condition were far more disposed to selfadministering higher levels of shocks. 131
- in the group that was asked to recall the Ten Commandments, we observed no cheating whatsoever. And that was despite the fact that no one in the group was able to recall all ten. This result was very intriguing. It seemed that merely trying to recall moral standards was enough to improve moral behavior. In another attempt to test this effect, we asked a group of selfdeclared atheists to swear on a Bible and then gave them the opportunity to claim extra earnings on the matrix task. What did the atheists do? They did not stray from the straight-and-narrow path. These experiments with moral reminders suggest that our willingness and tendency to cheat could be diminished if we are given reminders of ethical standards 29
- the brain scans showed the same effect; the presence of the sponsor ’s logo increased the activity in the parts of the participants’ brains that are related to pleasure (particularly the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is responsible for higher-order thinking, including associations and meaning). This suggested that the favor from the sponsoring gallery had a deep effect on how people responded to the art. And get this: when participants were asked if they thought that the sponsor ’s logo had any effect on their art preferences, the universal answer was “No way, absolutely not.” What’s more, different participants were given varying amounts of money for their time in the experiments. Some received $30 from their sponsoring gallery, others received $100. At the highest level, participants were paid $300. It turned out that the favoritism toward the sponsoring gallery increased as the amount of earnings grew. The magnitude of brain activation in the pleasure centers of the brain was lowest when the payment was $30, higher when the payment was $100, and highest when the payment was $300. These results suggest that once someone (or some organization) does us a favor, we become partial to anything related to the giving party—and that the magnitude of this bias increases as the magnitude of the initial favor (in this case the amount of payment) increases 46
References
- The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self- concept Maintenance, Dishonesty in Everyday Life and Its Policy Implication
- The Dirt on Coming Clean: The Perverse Effects of Disclosing Conflicts of Interest
- Too Tired to Tell the Truth: Self-Control Resource Depletion and Dishonesty
- A Temporal View of the Costs and Benefits of Self-Deception
- The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest
- Probabilistic Price Promotions—When Retailing and Las Vegas Meet
- “Out of Sight, Ethically Fine? The Effects of Collaborative Work on Individuals’ Dishonesty
- Are Consumers Too Trusting? The Effects of Relationships with Expert Advisers
- Moral Masochism: Guilt Causes Physical Self-punishment
- The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self- concept Maintenanc
- Monetary Favors and Their Influence on Neural Responses and Revealed Preferenc