The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves

by Dan Ariely

our behavior is driven by two opposing motivations. On one hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. We want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves (psychologists call this ego motivation). On the other hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money as possible (this is the standard financial motivation). Clearly these two motivations are in conflict. How can we secure the benefits of cheating and at the same time still view ourselves as honest, wonderful people? This is where our amazing cognitive flexibility comes into play. Thanks to this human skill, as long as we cheat by only a little bit, we can benefit from cheating and still view ourselves as marvelous human beings. This balancing act is the process of rationalization, and it is the basis of what we’ll call the “fudge factor theory.”

human beings are ready and willing to steal something that does not explicitly reference monetary value—that is, something that lacks the face of a dead president. However, we shy away from directly stealing money

the “sign here” honor code method works both when there is a clear and substantial cost for dishonesty (which, in the case of Princeton, can entail expulsion) and when there is no specific cost (as at MIT and Yale). The good news is that people seem to want to be honest, which suggests that it might be wise to incorporate moral reminders into situations that tempt us to be dishonest.

Cheating becomes much simpler when there are more steps between us and the dishonest act. Our respondents felt that moving the ball with a club was the easiest, and they stated that the average golfer would do it 23 percent of the time. Next was kicking the ball (14 percent of the time), and finally, picking up and moving the ball was the most morally difficult way to improve the ball’s position (10 percent of the time).

it seems that it is easier to rationalize a do-over on the first hole than on the ninth hole. If you’re on the first hole and you start over, you can pretend that “now I am really starting the game, and from now on every shot will count.” But if you are on the ninth hole, there is no way for you to pretend that the game has not yet started. This means that if you take a mulligan you have to admit to yourself that you are simply not counting a shot. As we would expect based on what we already knew about self-justification from our other experiments, we found a vast difference in the willingness to take mulligans. Our golfers predicted that 40 percent of golfers would take a mulligan on the first hole while (only?) 15 percent of golfers would take a mulligan on the ninth hole.

Psychological studies show that we quickly and easily start believing whatever comes out of our own mouths, even when the original reason for expressing the opinion is no longer relevant (in the doctors’ case, that they were paid to say it). This is cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are telling others about a drug, it must be good—and so their own beliefs change to correspond to their speech, and they start prescribing accordingly.

The main takeaway is this: disclosure created even greater bias in advice. With disclosure the estimators made less money and the advisers made more. Now, I am not sure that disclosure will always make things worse for clients, but it is clear that disclosure and sunshine policies will not always make things better.

Ego depletion also helps explain why our evenings are particularly filled with failed attempts at self-control—after a long day of working hard to be good, we get tired of it all. And as night falls, we are particularly likely to succumb to our desires (think of late-night snacking as the culmination of a day’s worth of resisting temptation).

one immoral act can make another more likely and that immoral acts in one domain can influence our morality in other domains. That being the case, we should focus on early signs of dishonest behaviors and do our best to cut them down in their budding stages before they reach full bloom.

we don’t make choices based on our explicit preferences. Instead, we have a gut feeling about what we want, and we go through a process of mental gymnastics, applying all kinds of justifications to manipulate the criteria.

the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not. The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests.

Intelligence, however, wasn’t correlated to any degree with dishonesty. This means that 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.

When the cheater is part of our social group, we identify with that person and, as a consequence, feel that cheating is more socially acceptable. But when the person cheating is an outsider, it is harder to justify our misbehavior, and we become more ethical out of a desire to distance ourselves from that immoral person and from that other (much less moral) out-group.