The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

In case you’ve got a parole hearing coming up, make sure it’s first thing in the morning or right after lunchtime. Why? According to a study by Shai Danziger (a professor at Tel Aviv University), Jonathan Levav (a professor at Stanford University), and Liora Avnaim-Pesso (a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), judges on parole boards tend to grant parole more frequently when they are most refreshed. Investigating a large set of parole rulings in Israel, the researchers found that parole boards were more likely to grant parole during their first cases of the day and just after their lunch breaks. Why? The default decision of parole boards is not to grant parole. But it seems that when the judges felt rejuvenated, which was first thing in the morning or after just having eaten and taken a break, they had an increased ability to override their standard decision, make a more effortful decision, and grant parole more frequently. But over the many difficult decisions of the day, as their cognitive burden was building up, they opted for the simpler, default decision of not granting parole.

I think that PhD students (a slightly different sort of prisoner) instinctively understand this mechanism, which is why they often bring doughnuts, muffins, and cookies to their dissertation proposals and defenses. Based on the results of the parole study, it is likely that their judges are more likely to grant them academic parole and let them start their own independent lives.

Testing the Moral Muscle

In the TV series Sex and the City, Samantha Jones (the blondest and most salacious one, for those not in the know) finds herself in a committed relationship. She begins eating compulsively and consequently gains weight. What’s interesting is the reason behind this baffling behavior. Samantha notices that her eating compulsion started when a good-looking man moved in next door—just the kind of man she would have gone after when she was single. She realizes that she’s using food as a bulwark against temptation: “I eat so I don’t cheat,” she explains to her friends. Fictional Samantha is depleted, just like a real person. She can’t resist all temptation, so she compromises by falling for food instead of promiscuity.

Sex and the City is no cinematic or psychological masterpiece, but it poses an interesting question: Might people who overtax themselves in one domain end up being less moral in others? Does depletion lead us to cheat? That is what Nicole Mead (a professor at Católica-Lisbon), Roy Baumeister, Francesca Gino, Maurice Schweitzer (a professor at the University of Pennsylvania), and I decided to check out. What would happen to real-life Samanthas who were depleted by one task and then given an opportunity to cheat on another? Would they cheat more? Less? Would they predict that they are more likely to succumb to temptation and therefore try to avoid the tempting situation altogether?

Our first experiment included several steps. First, we split our participants into two groups. We asked one group to write a short essay about what they had done the previous day without using the letters “x” and “z.” To get a feeling for this task, try it yourself: In the space below, write a short synopsis of one of your favorite books, but don’t use the letters “x” and “z.” Note: you cannot simply omit the letters from the words—you must use words that do not contain an “x” or “z” (e.g., “bicycle”).