This is point of inquiry from Monday, September 24th, 2012.
Welcome to Point of inquiry. I’m Indre Viskontas point of inquiry is the radio show and podcast of the Center for Inquiry, a think tank advancing reasons, science and secular values in public affairs and at the grassroots. There is no doubt that our world is populated with cheats and liars and most of us slaves to the first examples that come to mind. Think of major players like Bernie Madoff, Tiger Woods and Barry Bonds as causing the most damage in our society. But just how honest are we, not only with others, but even with ourselves? The surprising finding from countless experiments in social psychology is that we engage in little acts of dishonesty far more frequently than we think. To give us insight into the dark world of our self-deception, behavioral economist Dan Ariely walks us through the counterintuitive fact that the consequences of everyday deceptions can far outweigh the ill effects of even the biggest cheaters.
Welcome to Point of Inquiry, Dan Ariely. Hello. Hello. It’s great to have you here. I’ve just finished reading your book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, How We Lie to Everyone, especially ourselves. And I must say, I have quite a few questions for you. Feel free.
Go for it.
So I’d like to start out, first of all, just asking you how you came about deciding to do some experimentation on cheating.
Yes. So actually, this was very practical. You know, when they the Enron catastrophe disaster came about, I think everybody was very quick to point out fingers and blame the architects of Enron, that they are the causes of this a travesty. And I did the same thing until I met John Perry Barlow, who is a very, very sweet guy and used to be the manager and lyricist for the Grateful Dead. If you remember, they the group and I was always a big admirer of his. And when we got to meet, I also learned that he was a consultant for Enron. And what was amazing for me is to meet somebody I admire so much that was part of this seeming conspiracy. And in what John told me at the time was that he actually created an ideology for himself and the whole company created an ideology that made them feel that they were not cheating. That, in fact, they will kind of engulf in this twisted logic that got them all to just not see reality correctly and instead believe that they were somehow advancing the world in directions. And this was a very different view because he was a guy I really admired and still do and who was part of this. And I couldn’t actually think of him as a bad person. Now, maybe I was just wrong, but maybe a dishonesty was also not the stronghold of only bad people. Maybe all of us could do it right. So this was for me, the big question, should we think about this? Honesty is kind of good people and bad people and good people behave well and bad people behave badly. Or should we think about the situation, to think about the setup, the company, the incentive structure and so on, and say that maybe if we take good people and put them in bad situations, we should expect nothing but bad results. And if you think about it, it’s not just important to figure out what how is honesty structured? If we want to prevent it, we need to think about what is causing it. So, for example, if you think that people are doing the cost benefit analysis, like economists say, that you think, what do I get to gain? What do I get to lose? Is it good? Is it bad? Then you say, let’s do punishments. Let’s do big punishment at the end. And people would look at the big punishment and they would say, oh, this is not worth it. But the reality is we don’t see evidence for that. California, for example, under these sad logic, created the three strikes and you’re out. You do three little crimes and you go to prison for life. Have they decreased crime? No. They just feel that the prisons and you would think, you know, somebody committed to pieces of crime, they should never commit the third one, they would go for prison, for life. We don’t see any effect. There’s a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences looking at the death penalty. You would think that every state that has the death penalty would not have any crime because, you know, people would say cost benefit, not was it a death penalty? What what can be worse. But the fact is, we don’t see any evidence that the death penalty is reducing the crime. So we have these standard model of beds, people who are doing the cost benefit analysis. Turns out that’s not a good description of what we see around us. And we need a different model if we want to understand how people behave and why they misbehave and be think about how to prevent it. So that’s basically been my journey. And I’m incredibly motivated to try to understand how this is happening and how can we decrease the amount of dishonesty we see all around this.
Mm hmm. So I in the beginning of your book, I was really struck by how what kind of experiments you designed in order to entice people to cheat in everyday situations. So I’m hoping that maybe you could describe for us observe how this this experiment in particular, I’m thinking of the Matrix task. You could describe that for us and how it works so that our listeners can understand how you study dishonesty.
Yeah. So this is kind of entrapment. I have to say that we’re kind of trapping people through to be dishonest. But then if nobody’s honest on terms, we can measure it.
So basically, here is here is the idea. We take a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems. And these are math problems that everybody could solve if they have enough time. But we don’t give people enough time. So we give people these problems. We said you have five minutes, solve as many as you can. We’ll give you a dollar per question. People start solving as fast as they can. At the end of the five minutes, we say, please stop, put your pencil down and count how many questions you got. Correct. People count how many questions you got correctly. And then we say, please take your sheet and go to the back of the room and shred this piece of paper. And people go to the back of the room to shred a piece of paper. And then say, please come forward and tell us how many questions you got correctly. We will pay you accordingly. We do this, we pay people, they go home. On average. In this experiment, people say they solved six problems. We pay them six dollars. Everything is fine. Now, what people don’t know in the experiment is that we actually played with the shredder, which means that the shredder. Sure. The size of the page. But the main body of the page remains intact, which means that we can jump into the shredding or the recycling box and we can find out how many questions people really solve. And what do we find? We find that people so full problems and report to be solving six. No, this is important that it’s not driven. This increase in the amount of reporting is not driven by a few bad apples. It’s driven by lots and lots of little rotten apples. And in the whole book, I described many experiments and in total we’ve had about 30000 people in these studies. And from these study thousand people, we found about 12th who were big cheaters that cheated all the way and they lost about 150 dollars to them. At the same time, from these 30000 people, I had about 18000 little cheaters and they lost about thirty six thousand dollars to them. And I actually think that this is probably not a bad reflection of what’s happening in society. Sure, we have some big cheaters out there and from time to time, the, you know, reared their ugly heads and we lose to them, but are not that many, thankfully. And and instead, what we have is we have lots of little cheaters and the little cheaters because there are so many and because they could do so many little activities together, end up cheating and from society much, much more. And for example, think about what’s a better model for the financial crisis. It is a better model of a few evil people who decided to steal lots of money from the economy, or if it’s better to think, no, there’s lots of little cheaters who would just kind of shading prices here and there and think of themselves as good people and just plain with the numbers a little bit. But because there was so many of them created tremendous devastation. I think it’s the second.
Yeah. I mean, it’s the same way when we think about our own, you know, the ways in which we can die. We think about these horrible massacres, say, the one in Colorado. That’s particularly salient because they’re in our minds and we can remember them. But in fact, we’re much more likely to die from some mundane event like a heart attack or a car accident. And yet we don’t necessarily put as much money into preventing those kinds of things as we do, or at least intellectual energy, thinking about how to how we prevent the next massacre, even though it’s extremely rare. So in some ways, the Bernie Madoff cases is one of your rare bad apples. But my question is, what about the 12000 people or so who did cheat? What makes them different?
Yeah. So first of all, we don’t know the data. It’s a really important question. So we know we can choose to look at the good side. We could choose to look at the bedside and we can talk about both of those. So we had a really substantial number of people that didn’t cheat. In fact, if an economist would look at the results that would say these people are stupid, they should have cheated.
In fact, even the other people who cheated just a little bit in the experiments who have cheated more in our experiments, you could shoot a lot and get away with it. People very, very few people didn’t. So an economist would look at it and say that he’s concerned because people don’t cheat enough. Something is wrong. Now, here is what we don’t know. We don’t know if it’s the same people who would not cheat time after time. So in every experiment, we have people who don’t cheat. And we have to ask ourselves, are these people who would not cheat under any circumstance? Or these people who just didn’t happen to cheat? Now, you know, maybe they woke up in some particular mood or maybe they just finished reading the Bible or maybe something just happened to them. They don’t cheat. No. Now, because of the way we run the experiments. And because of the way we keep the anonymity of the participants, we can actually not trace them across different experiments. So we have a very hard time doing that. But I think it’s a very, very important question. But sadly, I don’t have an answer for you yet for this.
But you do present another alternative to the sort of cost benefit model. And I wanted you to describe that a little bit. I believe you call it the fudge factor theory.
Yes. So. So the model is a model in which we have two forces. Does one force in which we want to look at yourself in the mirror and feel good about ourselves. We call these ego utility. You want to think that you’re a good, wonderful person, on the other hand. And that’s that’s one force. That’s the other force is the force that has to do with our selfish motivation. You can think of these economic force that where we want to benefit from this honesty. Now, these forces are in opposite directions. And you could say you can’t do both. You could do one or the other. You either think of yourself as honest person or you cheat. You can’t do both. Well, it turns out that due to a flexible psychology, we can do both as long as you teach us a little bit. You can both benefit from cheating and still think of yourself. Is a good person. And that’s the key of what we find. The question is, under what circumstances can we do both? And the key here turns out to be rationalization. And if you think about the whole book is about different ways in which we can rationalize their actions. And what we find is that every time you can rationalize your behavior to a larger degree, we find more dishonesty. And every time you can rationalize your behavior to a lower degree, we have an easier time both cheating and thinking of ourselves as good people. And this is what what happened. I’ll give you just one kind of a general example for this is not research. You just kind of personal experience. So in the last two years, including yesterday, every time I go to a restaurant, I asked the waiter if there’s a good way to eat in that restaurant and escape without pain.
And it’s an odd conversation to start having. But I, I tell them, don’t worry, I’m not going to do it. I’m just interested in if you’re going to do it. How would you do it? And the restaurant, that was it yesterday, the guy looked so concerned, I offered him my credit card. I said, you can have my credit card to be sure I’m not going to do it. I really am just interested.
And aside from one time, every time they give me good suggestions of how to do it, they said as a back alley, as a door here, you can wait until all the waiters are there. I mean, they look for a big party. They all have good suggestions of how to do it and then ask them and how often do people do it? And they say almost never. In fact, when people do it, usually find them. And they made it by mistake. They they just forgot that they haven’t paid. It’s rarely the case. And somebody eats and then it goes away, even though it’s very, very easy. Now you can look at other easy things like downloading illegal music. When I asked my students about it, they all do it. And not only do they all do it, nobody feels ashamed about doing it. And what’s the difference between the two? The difference is that when you do one of them, if you eat in a restaurant and don’t pay, you can’t help but think of yourself as a bad person. You’ve taken something from somebody. You can’t rationalize it in the domain of, hey, I’m a good person. But if you’ve done the illegal music, you can tell yourself all kinds of stories. In fact, I hear lots lots of interesting stories. And recently there was a young guy who told me, he said, What do you mean? He said, illegal music. He said all musicians want to music to be heard and then label companies are evil. And besides, I wouldn’t have bought the music anyway. And he doesn’t cost anybody anything. Now, if you listen to this guy, he was not stealing music. He was liberating information and helping artists all over the world by his actions. Now, would the same guy take a penny from one of the artists he like from their pocket? Of course not. But being carried out this way by illegal downloads makes people able to basically rationalize what they’re doing, which is what he did in compatible terms and not think of themselves as being bad people. And that turns out to be the whole crux of the issues. Now you can think yourself what kind of things in human behavior would make people more easier to rationalize, make it easier for us to rationalize versus how to to rationalize.
Right. And that brings me to another part of your book in which you talk about if you’re one step removed from the actual act. So in the way of downloading music, you know, you don’t have the artist who’s pocket and you are picking instead you have this computer and this whole Internet and this whole other facade that it removes you from that direct action that people are more likely to cheat. So can you talk a little bit about how you discovered that particular phenomenon?
Yeah. So somebody gave it kind of the experiment and we can talk a little bit about it. So the first condition was the same as the one I described earlier. People finished doing The Matrix as they go to the back. They showed that piece of paper they come to declare. They said how much they’ve made and we pay them accordingly. In the second condition, when they finish shredding the piece of paper. They come to the experimenter and they say, Mr. Experimenter, I solved X problems. How many they solved? Give me X tokens and we pay them in tokens. They take these tokens, they walk 12 feet to the side and change in four dollars. Now, if you think about what’s different here is that when you look into somebodies eyes and you lie. You don’t lie for money. You life was something that he’s one step removed for money. What happens? Our participants doubled or cheated. Now think about it being one step removed for money for just a few seconds. Liberated people to death extend from the moral shackles. And think about what does it mean about other things? You know, as a society, we’re moving from cash to credit cards or Tecktonik wallets. Banks are moving from cash to to stop options and derivatives to mortgage backed securities. And when we deal with other people, we’re moving from dealing with people face to face to over the phone to over the distance, too, over the Internet. We have outsourcing. Lots of the things we have in society are moving into a direction of bigger and bigger distance. And there’s tremendous technological development that I don’t want to basically say they’re not important to useful. But at the same time, if this distance is creating a easier ability for people to be dis honest and think of themselves as honest, we should worry about it as well. And, you know, people often ask me always is just a generation of today. And people used to be more honest. I think people used to be more honest, but not because people have changed. I think that technology has changed. And I think in the current technology we have, it is just much more tempting to misbehave because there are all these opportunities in all this distance. And we should really think about what what are we doing? And I’ll give you one last example of this distance is probably my favorite example. We asked about 12000 golf players about how they would cheat in golf and we asked him any questions. But one of the questions was, imagine your your bowl. Fell in the rough and you kind of wish it moved four inches from the only four inches, would you be willing to pick it up and move it four inches? And people said, no, of course not. I can’t even imagine doing something. It’s just immoral. I wouldn’t do it. None of my friends would do it. This is not how you play golf. I can’t. I can’t imagine anything like this could ever happen. And then we ask them. And what about kicking it with your shoe? Oh, yeah. That that they could imagine much more much more easily. And what about hitting it with a club? Even easier. And again, you can see how this same outcome of moving the ball inches would feel very different depending on the method. And the more distance is between us and their actions, the easier it is to misbehave.
And this is really problematic, given that we really are becoming a cashless society. And it’s not I think it’s not just for cheating on ourselves, but also just in terms of the money that we spend. You know, credit card companies thrive on the fact that when you use your credit card, you tend to spend more than if you took out cash from a bank and paid in that in that way. So I suppose in some ways this this idea of one step removed can apply to a lot of behaviors that aren’t necessarily dishonest, but simply not the best decision.
Yeah. And you can think about all kinds of things in the way we treat other people, the way we treat our friends, the way we treat our customers or shareholders. And the concept of distance, I think, is very general. And it’s not just about money. Money is just one aspect of it. But but in general, I think we should really worry about about it.
So you did find, though, that when someone does cheat and they feel guilty about it, that there might even be some some ways in which society has already tried to reset the button and make them feel better about their lives again so that they don’t simply go on cheating. So, for example, you in your book mention what I thought was a really interesting sort of analogy to the Opus Day sort of Catholic sect and how the pain that they inflict upon themselves might then kind of relieve them of guilty feelings. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that and how someone who doesn’t believe in God might learn from that that type of behavior.
Yes. So so the federal debt, the question of belief in God versus naughties is quite, quite interesting. And I think there’s a whole discussion, is there what his religion discovered about and, you know, reigning people’s behavior in and what can we learn as social science from from religion? And I’ll tell you three things.
We’ve we’ve learned from from religion and maybe maybe for the first one is that when we do experiments in which we ask people to recite the Ten Commandments and then often we try to after they try to recite it into amendments, we tempt him to be this honest. We find it. Nobody’s dishonest, which suggests that it’s not just about feeling fearing God, but the moment you remind people about the moral standards, people behave better. And in fact, even when we take a group of self-declared atheists and we ask them to swear on the Bible after they finish swearing in the Bible, they don’t cheat. That’s amazing. And this is what he’s done in the court system has figured out. Right. When you go to court and you swear on the Bible, nobody’s asking you. Do you? Are you religious? They just assume that everybody’s swearing in the Bible. This is going to have an effect on them and we don’t really think about it. But, of course, it does work. And by the way, it’s also interesting to figure out how in court we swear first on the Bible and then we give our testimony, whereas in most forms we feel the forms out and only we sign at the end. Right. And nobody, of course, in a court testimony would get people to swear at the end, you know, give you a call and then you swear is everything you’ve said is the truth. We don’t do that. We think about priming people. We think about reminding people about their moral obligations first and only then getting the data from them. So so religious priming is incredibly important to reminding people about their obligations. And lots of religions have lots of reminders. Right. We have the cross. We have this stuff, David. Depending on the religion you have, you have lots of different reminders. The second thing we’ve we’ve learned from religion, which was kind of interesting for me and in the Bible is a story. And this story is that God comes to Sarah and he said, Sarah, you’re going to have a son. And Sarah said, How can I have a son when my husband is so old? And God said, don’t worry, you’re going to have a son. By the way, this is my version of the Bible itself.
Yeah. And doesn’t sound like King James had gone.
And and then God goes to Abraham and said, Abraham, you’re going to have a son. And Abraham said, Did you tell Sarah? God said, yes. And Abraham said, And what did Sarah said?
And God’s had Sarah said, How could you have a son when she is so old? And the religious scholars have been there wondering, how can God lie? Sarah said, how could she have a son? When Abraham is sold and God is misrepresenting, Sarah is accusing herself and their religious scholars came up to the conclusion that it’s OK to lie for peace at home, which, you know, in some sense it’s something we all know. Right? Nobody would raise their kids to say, you know, whenever somebody asked you, honey, how do I look in that dress? You should always say the truth. We know we know that lesson. We know the truth is not the important thing. But in that particular essay and I’ve talked to so Jonathan Sacks, who is the chief rabbi in England about about this and what he said, which which I find very interesting. He said that in Judaism it has been recognized that there are many human values and honesty is one of those human values. And sadly, not all human values are compatible all the time. And then you have to decide, what do you do when human values are incompatible? For example, you don’t want to upset your best friend or your wife. And at the same time, there’s honesty and they don’t fit together. And what do you do? And then the decision has been that honesty is not the most important thing. Now, the thing about this honesty is that we all understand this lesson. We all understand white lies, which are basically our way to be this honest, but not think of herself as being dishonest. The real problem, of course, is what happened when these white lies are not in the. Personal domain. They they enter into the professional domain. What what happens if your if your accountant offers and doesn’t want to upset you, right. Doesn’t want to put you to be a debt. Now, it’s not OK. The same tradeoff at the OK in the social domain or not not OK. Another kind of interesting lesson from religion has been about the Catholic confession. When when we do experiments and we give people a chance to cheat. Many times, hundreds of times as a 300 times. What we find is an interesting pattern. We find it for a while. People cheat just a little bit. Just once in a while. As if that scientia to balance. Feeling good about myself. Cheating a little bit. Feeling good about myself to a little. But at some point many people switch and start cheating all the time. And we call these the what the hell effect. And they deal with the what the hell effect is that we as people think of ourself in binary terms. We either good or not good. Now, we don’t have to be 100 percent good to be good. We can be maybe 93 percent or if we can rationalize maybe ninety one percent and so on. But we think of ourselves as in in binary terms. Now, what happens when you can think of yourself as a good person? You said yourself I might as well enjoy it. And then you go all the way. Being this honest. And then if you think that you’re going to hell in the extreme case, why would you ever stop being dishonest in the Catholic confession is kind of an interesting thing. And we tested the Catholic confession and we found out it’s what he does is to allow people to open a new page. Did people cheat a little bit? They start shooting a lot. And then if they give them a chance to confess, to say what they have done badly and to say that they are sorry about it, all of a sudden they reset the starting point and they start from a lower end point. And this is kind of interesting. It’s something religion has figured out and maybe we should try to do it in civic society as well. Right. What would happen if we thought about the confession like mechanism for bankers and our politicians? What what would happen if we wanted the world created a way for people to restart. And you know what it also means? Why do people restart? It tells you that they want to be more honest than they are. You tell the people who start cheating a lot would prefer to start from a blank slate, but we don’t usually give them a chance. But when they get a chance, people do become better, which I think is quite optimistic.
And I know in some ways we use New Year’s resolutions for exactly that as a chance to reset or, as you mentioned, a birthday.
But I’m wondering, does it? Have you looked at whether it matters if the person who’s giving the confession actually really believes in heaven and hell and that their sins are forgiven?
Or is it simply the act of confessing what you’ve done wrong that allows you to reset?
So so our sample for this is studies have mostly been undergrads, students and I think the mostly. Group of atheists. So and we find these results. So the question is, how is confession working? And by the way, I also think that confession is what South Africa has done with the Reconciliation Act. You ask yourself, how does a country move for me apartheid era to a post apartheid era? Can we just say, OK, we’ve changed. Let’s let’s move on? And I think that would be very hard. So the reconciliation committee basically announced this procedure in which people stood up and said all the awful things they’ve done and said that they will not do them again. And I think it’s incredibly important. And many more countries in Africa are now starting to adopt that a procedure as well. So I think there is something. It’s not about any particular belief. There is something about new pages. The question is, how frequently do we need them? Is it like in Judaism once a year? It’s like a Catholic confession. You could do it whenever you feel like it. Is it? And once a quarter, once an election, I mean, what’s what’s the right mechanism? But I think if we implement something like this, we would see the benefits.
Well, I know that you have a very busy schedule ahead of you, and I don’t want to take up much more of your time. But I do have one more question that I would love to ask you, and that is you talk a lot in your book about the relationship between people who describe themselves as creative and dishonesty, that people who skat score high on these kinds of self-proclaimed tests of creativity or even who use words such as innovative to describe themselves, tend to cheat more. Can you talk a little bit about that work?
Yes. If you think about it, our our story is basically about how can you both beedis honest and think of yourself as an honest person. And it’s all about weaving a story, telling a tale, a thing about why this is actually OK. Why is moving the ball actually OK? And some of it is influenced by other components like the environment and distance for money and what other people are doing. But some of it also has to do with your ability to build hills and who is good and telling tales. Well, more creative people. So it turns out that the more creative you get, the better stories you can tell. Tell yourself they’ll tell other people and you can convince yourself more easily that what you’re doing is actually OK. So we find this when when we measure creativity, we try to when we teach people how kind of primed them to be more creative. We find it in an. Advertising agency, when we look at the different levels of creativity of people. It’s all it’s all supporting this notion. That’s what we really need to think about, is the human ability to tell to tell a story. Now, if you think about the overall picture from the book, it’s basically saying the following. It’s saying that when we have a motivating force that is pushing us to see reality in a certain way, we are likely to be able to do it in the same way that if you like a particular sports team, you’re going to see life through the perspective of the sports team. And every time a referee calls a call against your team, you would think the referees evil, vicious, stupid, blind something. So that’s the first component. You need some kind of force that motivates you to see reality in a biased way. The second thing is that when you have fuzzy rules, when the rules are very clear and strict and you know on which side you are, no problem. But when the rules are fuzzy, all the sudden, you can think that you’re doing the right thing when in fact you’re not. And finally, it’s about rationalization. It’s about what kind of story you can tell yourself that this is OK. And I think that if we understood the importance of these three components, we could a erat try to eradicate or eliminate conflicts of interest. We tried to make fuzzy rules less fuzzy and more clear, and we should try to do things to reduce our ability to rationalize all kinds of behaviors.
And then, of course, if you’re ever in Hollywood, where storytelling is King, extremely wary. Well, thank you very much. It’s been wonderful to talk to you. And I do want to remind our listeners that they can get a copy of your book through our Web site.
The book is called The Honest Truth About Dishonesty How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves, by Dan Ariely. Thank you very much for being on point of inquiry.
My pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Point of Inquiry to join the discussion about today’s show on the honest truth about dishonesty. Visit point of inquiry dot org. You can also send questions and comments to feedback at point of inquiry, dot org on Twitter, at point of inquiry and on Facebook at slash point of inquiry. Views express on point of inquiry aren’t necessarily the views of the Center for Inquiry, nor its affiliated organizations.
One of inquiry is produced by Adam Isaac in Amherst, New York. And our music is composed for us by Emmy Award winning Michael Waylan. Today’s intro featured Debbie Goddard. I’m your host Indre Viskontas.
