The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

You might think that this preference for the sponsoring gallery was due to a kind of politeness—or maybe just lip service, the way we compliment friends who invite us for dinner even when the food is mediocre. This is where the fMRI part of the study came in handy. Suggesting that the effects of reciprocity run deep, the brain scans showed the same effect; the presence of the sponsor’s logo increased the activity in the parts of the participants’ brains that are related to pleasure (particularly the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is responsible for higher-order thinking, including associations and meaning). This suggested that the favor from the sponsoring gallery had a deep effect on how people responded to the art. And get this: when participants were asked if they thought that the sponsor’s logo had any effect on their art preferences, the universal answer was “No way, absolutely not.”

What’s more, different participants were given varying amounts of money for their time in the experiments. Some received $30 from their sponsoring gallery, others received $100. At the highest level, participants were paid $300. It turned out that the favoritism toward the sponsoring gallery increased as the amount of earnings grew. The magnitude of brain activation in the pleasure centers of the brain was lowest when the payment was $30, higher when the payment was $100, and highest when the payment was $300.

These results suggest that once someone (or some organization) does us a favor, we become partial to anything related to the giving party—and that the magnitude of this bias increases as the magnitude of the initial favor (in this case the amount of payment) increases. It’s particularly interesting that financial favors could have an influence on one’s preferences for art, especially considering that the favor (paying for their participation in the study) had nothing at all to do with the art, which had been created independently of the galleries. It is also interesting to note that participants knew the gallery would pay their compensation regardless of their ratings of the paintings and yet the payment (and its magnitude) established a sense of reciprocity that guided their preferences.

Fun with Pharma

Some people and companies understand this human propensity for reciprocity very well and consequently spend a lot of time and money trying to engender a feeling of obligation in others. To my mind, the profession that most embodies this type of operation, that is, the one that depends most on creating conflicts of interests, is—of course—that of governmental lobbyists, who spend a small fraction of their time informing politicians about facts as reported by their employers and the rest of their time trying to implant a feeling of obligation and reciprocity in politicians who they hope will repay them by voting with their interest in mind.

But lobbyists are not alone in their relentless pursuit of conflicts of interest, and some other professions could arguably give them a run for their well-apportioned money. For example, let’s consider the way representatives for drug companies (pharma reps) run their business. A pharma rep’s job is to visit doctors and convince them to purchase medical equipment and drugs to treat everything from A(sthma) to Z(ollinger-Ellison syndrome). First they may give a doctor a free pen with their logo, or perhaps a notepad, a mug, or maybe some free drug samples. Those small gifts can subtly influence physicians to prescribe a drug more often—all because they feel the need to give back.¹

But small gifts and free drug samples are just a few of the many psychological tricks that pharma reps use as they set out to woo physicians. “They think of everything,” my friend and colleague (let’s call him MD) told me. He went on to explain that drug companies, especially smaller ones, train their reps to treat doctors as if they were gods. And they seem to have a disproportionately large reserve of attractive reps. The whole effort is coordinated with military precision. Every self-respecting rep has access to a database that tells them exactly what each doctor has prescribed over the last quarter (both that company’s drugs as well as their competitors’). The reps also make it their business to know what kind of food each doctor and their office staff likes, what time of day they are most likely to see reps, and also which type of rep gets the most face time with the doctors. If the doctor is noted to spend more time with a certain female rep, they may adjust that rep’s rotation so that she can spend more time in that office. If the doctor is a fan of the military, they’ll send him a veteran. The reps also make it a point to be agreeable with the doctor’s outer circles, so when the rep arrives they start by handing out candy and other small gifts to the nurses and the front desk, securing themselves in everyone’s good graces from the get-go.