The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

“Imagine,” we asked the participants, “that as the average golfer approaches their ball they realize that it would be highly advantageous if the ball would lie 4 inches away from where it is currently. How likely do you think the average golfer would be to move the ball by these 4 inches?”

This question appeared in three different versions, each describing a different approach for improving the unfortunate location of the ball (it is a curious coincidence, by the way, that in golf lingo the location of the ball is called a “lie”). How comfortable do you think the average golfer would be about moving the ball 4 inches (1) with his club; (2) with his shoe; and (3) by picking the ball up and placing it 4 inches away?

The “moving the ball” questions were designed to see whether in golf, as in our previous experiments, the distance from the dishonest action would change the tendency to behave immorally. If distance worked in the same way as the token experiment we discussed earlier (see chapter 2, “Fun with the Fudge Factor”), we would expect to have the lowest level of cheating when the movement was carried out explicitly with one’s hand; we would see higher levels of cheating when the movement was accomplished with a shoe; and we would see the highest level of dishonesty when the distance was greatest and the movement was achieved via an instrument (a golf club) that removed the player from direct contact with the ball.

What our results showed is that dishonesty in golf, much as in our other experiments, is indeed directly influenced by the psychological distance from the action. 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).

These results suggest that if we pick up the ball and reposition it, there is no way we can ignore the purposefulness and intentionality of the act, and accordingly we cannot help but feel that we have done something unethical. When we kick the ball with our shoe, there is a little bit of distance from the act, but we are still the ones doing the kicking. But when the club is doing the tapping (and especially if we move the ball in a slightly haphazard and imprecise way) we can justify what we have done relatively easily. “After all,” we might say to ourselves, “perhaps there was some element of luck in exactly how the ball ended up being positioned.” In that case, we can almost fully forgive ourselves.

Taking Mulligans

Legend has it that in the 1920s, a Canadian golfer named David Mulligan was golfing at a country club in Montreal. One day, he teed off and wasn’t happy with his shot, so he reteed and tried again. According to the story, he called it a “correction shot,” but his partners thought “mulligan” was a better name, and it stuck as the official term for a “do-over” in golf.

These days, if a shot is egregiously bad, a golfer might write it off as a “mulligan,” place the ball back at its original starting point, and score himself as if the shot never happened (one of my friends refers to her husband’s ex-wife as a “mulligan”). Strictly speaking, mulligans are never allowed, but in friendly games, players sometimes agree in advance that mulligans are permitted. Of course, even when mulligans are not legal nor agreed upon, golfers still take them from time to time, and those illegal mulligans were the focus of our next set of questions.

We asked our participants how likely other golfers are to take illegal mulligans when they could do it without being noticed by the other players. In one version of this question, we asked them about the likelihood of someone taking an illegal mulligan on the first hole. In the second version of the question we asked them about the likelihood of taking an illegal mulligan on the ninth hole.

To be clear, the rules don’t differentiate between these two acts: they are equally prohibited. At the same 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.