The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

WHAT HAVE WE learned from this fairway adventure? It seems that cheating in golf captures many of the nuances we discovered about cheating in our laboratory experiments. When our actions are more distant from the execution of the dishonest act, when they are suspended, and when we can more easily rationalize them, golfers—like every other human on the planet—find it easier to be dishonest. It also seems that golfers, like everyone else, have the ability to be dishonest but at the same time think of themselves as honest. And what have we learned about the cheating of businesspeople? Well. When the rules are somewhat open to interpretation, when there are gray areas, and when people are left to score their own performance—even honorable games such as golf can be traps for dishonesty.

CHAPTER 3

Blinded by Our Own Motivations

Picture your next dental appointment. You walk in, exchange pleasantries with the receptionist, and begin leafing through some old magazines while waiting for your name to be called.

Now let’s imagine that since your last visit, your dentist went out and bought an innovative and expensive piece of dental equipment. It’s a dental CAD/CAM (short for computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing) machine, a cutting-edge device used to customize tooth restorations such as crowns and bridges. The device works in two steps. First it displays a 3D replica of the patient’s teeth and gums on a computer screen, allowing the dentist to trace the exact shape of the crown—or whatever the restoration—against the screen’s image. This is the CAD part. Then comes the CAM part; this device molds ceramic material into a crown according to the dentist’s blueprint. Altogether, this fancy machine comes with a hefty price tag.

But let’s get back to you. Just as you finish skimming an article about some politician’s marital troubles and are about to start a story about the next it-girl, the receptionist calls your name. “Second room to the left,” she says.

You situate yourself in the dentist’s chair and engage in a bit of small talk with the hygienist, who pokes around your mouth for a while and follows up with a cleaning. Before long, your dentist walks in.

The dentist repeats the same general poking procedure, and as he checks your teeth he tells the hygienist to mark teeth 3 and 4 for further observation and to mark tooth 7 as having craze lines.

“Huh? Caze wha?” you gurgle, with your mouth open wide and the suction tube pulling on the right side of your mouth.

The dentist stops, pulls the instruments out, carefully places them on the tray next to him, and sits back in his chair. He then starts explaining your situation: “Craze lines are what we call certain small cracks in the tooth enamel. But no problem, we have a great solution for this. We’ll just use the CAD/CAM to fit you with a crown, problem solved. How about it?” he asks.

You waver a little, but after you get his assurance that it won’t hurt one bit, you agree. After all, you have been seeing this dentist for a long time, and although some of his treatments over the years were rather unpleasant, you feel that he has generally treated you well.

Now, I should point out—because your dentist might not—that craze lines are basically very, very small cracks in the enamel of your teeth, and what’s more, they’re almost always completely asymptomatic; many people have them and aren’t bothered by them in the least. So, in effect, it’s usually unnecessary to target craze lines with any kind of treatment.

LET ME GIVE you one real-life story from my friend Jim, the former vice president of a large dental company. Over the years, Jim has encountered his fair share of oddball dental cases, but one CAD/CAM story he told me was particularly horrible.

A few years after the CAD/CAM equipment came onto the market, one particular dentist in Missouri invested in the equipment, and from that point on he seemed to start looking at craze lines differently. “He wanted to crown everything,” Jim told me. “He was excited and enthusiastic to use his brand-new gadget, so he recommended that many of his patients improve their smiles, using, of course, his state-of-the-art CAD/CAM equipment.”

One of his patients was a young law student with asymptomatic craze lines; still, he recommended that she get a crown. The young woman complied, because she was used to listening to her dentist’s advice, but guess what? Because of the crown, her tooth became symptomatic and then died, forcing her to go in for a root canal. But wait, it gets worse. The root canal failed and had to be redone, and that second root canal failed as well. As a result, the woman had no choice but to undergo more complex and painful surgery. So what began as a treatment for harmless craze lines ultimately resulted in a lot of pain and financial cost for this young woman.