The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Fuzzy Reality

In a third set of questions, we asked the golfers to imagine that they shot 6 strokes on a par–5 hole (a hole that good players can complete in 5 strokes). In one version of this question we asked whether the average golfer would write down “5” instead of “6” on his scorecard. In the second version of this question, we asked how likely the average golfer would be to record his score accurately but then, when it comes to adding the scores up, count the 6 as a 5 and thus get the same discount on the score but doing so by adding incorrectly.

We wanted to see whether it would be more easily justifiable to write down the score wrongly to start with, because once the score is written, it is hard to justify adding incorrectly (akin to repositioning a ball by hand). After all, adding incorrectly is an explicit and deliberate act of cheating that cannot be as easily rationalized. That was indeed what we found. Our golfers predicted that in such cases, 15 percent of golfers would write down an improved score, while many fewer (5 percent) would add their score inaccurately.

The great golfer Arnold Palmer once said, “I have a tip that can take five strokes off anyone’s golf game. It’s called an eraser.” It appears, however, that the vast majority of golfers are unwilling to go this route, or at least that they would have an easier time cheating if they did not write the score correctly from the get-go. So here’s the timeless “if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest”-type question: if a golfer shoots a 6 on a par–5 hole, the score is not recorded, and there is no one there to see it—is his score a 6 or a 5?

LYING ABOUT A score in this way has a lot in common with a classic thought experiment called “Schrödinger’s cat.” Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist who, in 1935, described the following scenario: A cat is sealed in a steel box with a radioactive isotope that may or may not decay. If it does decay, it will set off a chain of events that will result in the cat’s death. If not, the cat will continue living. In Schrödinger’s story, as long as the box remains sealed, the cat is suspended between life and death; it cannot be described as either alive or dead. Schrödinger’s scenario was intended to critique an interpretation of physics that held that quantum mechanics did not describe objective reality—rather, it dealt only in probability. Leaving the philosophical aspects of physics aside for now, Schrödinger’s cat story might serve us well here when thinking about golf scores. A golf score might be a lot like Schrödinger’s alive-and-dead cat: until it is written down, it does not really exist in either form. Only when it’s written down does it obtain the status of “objective reality.”

YOU MAY BE wondering why we asked participants about “the average golfer” rather than about their own behavior on the course. The reason for this was that we expected that, like most people, our golfers would lie if they were asked directly about their own tendency to behave in unethical ways. By asking them about the behavior of others, we expected that they would feel free to tell the truth without feeling that they are admitting to any bad behavior themselves.^*

Still, we also wanted to examine what unethical behaviors golfers would be willing to admit to about their own behavior. What we found was that although many “other golfers” cheat, the particular participants in our study were relative angels: when asked about their own behavior, they admitted to moving the ball with their club in order to improve their lie just 8 percent of the time. Kicking the ball with their shoe was even more rare (just 4 percent of the time), and picking up the ball and moving it occurred only 2.5 percent of the time. Now, 8 percent, 4 percent, and 2.5 percent might still look like big numbers (particularly given the fact that a golf course has 18 holes and many different ways to be dishonest), but they pale in comparison to what “other golfers” do.

We found similar differences in golfers’ responses regarding mulligans and scorekeeping. Our participants reported that they would take a mulligan on the first hole only 18 percent of the time and on the ninth hole just 4 percent of the time. They also said that they would write in the wrong score only 4 percent of the time, and barely 1 percent copped to something as egregious as mistallying their scores.

So here’s a summary of our results:

I am not sure how you want to interpret these differences, but it looks to me as though golfers not only cheat a lot in golf, they also lie about lying.