The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Inspired by the lesson behind this joke, Nina, On, and I ran an experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). We took a group of 450 participants and split them into two groups. We asked half of them to try to recall the Ten Commandments and then tempted them to cheat on our matrix task. We asked the other half to try to recall ten books they had read in high school before setting them loose on the matrices and the opportunity to cheat. Among the group who recalled the ten books, we saw the typical widespread but moderate cheating. On the other hand, 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 self-declared 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. But although using the Ten Commandments and the Bible as honesty-building mechanisms might be helpful, introducing religious tenets into society on a broader basis as a means to reduce cheating is not very practical (not to mention the fact that doing so would violate the separation of church and state). So we began to think of more general, practical, and secular ways to shrink the fudge factor, which led us to test the honor codes that many universities already use.

To discover whether honor codes work, we asked a group of MIT and Yale students to sign such a code just before giving half of them a chance to cheat on the matrix tasks. The statement read, “I understand that this experiment falls under the guidelines of the MIT/Yale honor code.” The students who were not asked to sign cheated a little bit, but the MIT and Yale students who signed this statement did not cheat at all. And that was despite the fact that neither university has an honor code (somewhat like the effect that swearing on the Bible had on the self-declared atheists).

STEALING PAPER

A few years ago I received a letter from a woman named Rhonda who attended the University of California at Berkeley. She told me about a problem she’d had in her house and how a little ethical reminder helped her solve it.

She was living near campus with several other people—none of whom knew one another. When the cleaning people came each weekend, they left several rolls of toilet paper in each of the two bathrooms. However, by Monday all the toilet paper would be gone. It was a classic tragedy-of-the-commons situation: because some people hoarded the toilet paper and took more than their fair share, the public resource was destroyed for everyone else.

After reading about the Ten Commandments experiment on my blog, Rhonda put a note in one of the bathrooms asking people not to remove toilet paper, as it was a shared commodity. To her great satisfaction, one roll reappeared in a few hours, and another the next day. In the other note-free bathroom, however, there was no toilet paper until the following weekend, when the cleaning people returned.

This little experiment demonstrates how effective small reminders can be in helping us maintain our ethical standards and, in this case, a fully stocked bathroom.