The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

I did not expect what came next. “What is wrong with you?” he growled. “Do you like looking unattractive? Do you derive some kind of strange pleasure from looking asymmetrical? Do women feel sorry for you and give you sympathy sex? I’m offering you a chance to fix yourself in a very simple and elegant way. Why not just take it and be grateful?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just uncomfortable with the idea. Let me think about it some more.”

You may find it hard to believe that the department head could be so aggressive and harsh, but I assure you this is exactly what he told me. At the same time, it was not his usual manner with me, so I was puzzled by his unrelenting approach. In fact, he was a fantastic, dedicated doctor who treated me well and worked very hard to make me better. It was also not the first time I refused a treatment. Over many years of interacting with medical professionals, I had decided to have some treatments and not others. But none of my doctors, including the head of the burn department, had ever tried to guilt me into having a treatment.

In an attempt to solve this mystery, I went to his deputy, a younger doctor with whom I had a friendly rapport. I asked him to explain why the department head had put me under such pressure.

“Ah, yes, yes,” the deputy said. “He’s already performed this procedure on two patients, and he needs just one more in order to publish a scientific paper in one of the leading medical journals.”

This additional information certainly helped me better understand the conflict of interest I was up against. Here was a really good physician, someone I had known for many years and who had consistently treated me with compassion and great care. Yet, despite the fact that he cared a great deal about me in general, in this instance he was unable to see past his conflict of interest. It goes to show just how hard it is to overcome conflicts of interests once they fundamentally color our view of the world.

After years of experience publishing in academic journals myself, I now have a greater understanding of this physician’s conflict of interest (more about this later). Of course, I’ve never tried to coerce anyone into tattooing his face—but there’s still time for that.

The Hidden Cost of Favors

One other common cause of conflicts of interest is our inherent inclination to return favors. We humans are deeply social creatures, so when someone lends us a hand in some way or presents us with a gift, we tend to feel indebted. That feeling can in turn color our view, making us more inclined to try to help that person in the future.

One of the most interesting studies on the impact of favors was carried out by Ann Harvey, Ulrich Kirk, George Denfield, and Read Montague (at the time all were at the Baylor College of Medicine). In this study, Ann and her colleagues looked into whether a favor could influence aesthetic preferences.

When participants arrived at the neuroscience lab at Baylor, they were told that they would be evaluating art from two galleries, one called “Third Moon” and another called “Lone Wolfe.” The participants were informed that the galleries had generously provided their payment for participating in this experiment. Some were told that their individual payment was sponsored by Third Moon, while the others were told that their individual payment was sponsored by Lone Wolfe.

Armed with this information, the participants moved to the main part of the experiment. One by one, they were asked to remain as motionless as possible in a functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) scanner, a large machine with a cylinder-shaped hole in the middle. Once they were situated inside the massive magnet, they viewed a series of sixty paintings, one at a time. All the paintings were by Western artists dating from the thirteenth through the twentieth century and ranged from representational to abstract art. But the sixty paintings were not all that they saw. Near the top-left corner of each painting was the handsome logo of the gallery where that particular picture could be purchased—which meant that some pictures were presented as if they came from the gallery that sponsored the participant, and some pictures were presented as if they came from the non-sponsoring gallery.

Once the scanning portion of the experiment was over, each participant was asked to take another look at each of the painting-logo combinations, but this time they were asked to rate each of the pictures on a scale that ranged from “dislike” to “like.”

With the rating information in hand, Ann and her colleagues could compare which paintings the participants liked more, the ones from Third Moon or the ones from Lone Wolfe. As you might suspect, when the researchers examined the ratings they found that participants gave more favorable ratings to the paintings that came from their sponsoring gallery.