The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

We called this the nondepleting condition because, as you can tell, it’s pretty easy to write an essay without using the letters “x” and “z.”

We asked the other group to do the same thing but told them not to use the letters “a” and “n.” To get a better grasp of how this version of the task is different, try writing a short synopsis of one of your favorite movies while not using any words that contain the letters “a” and “n.”

As you probably discovered from your experience with the second task, trying to tell a story without using “a” and “n” required our storytellers to constantly repress the words that naturally popped into their minds. You can’t write that the characters “went for a walk in the park” or “ran into each other at a restaurant.”

All of those little acts of repression add up to greater depletion.

Once our participants turned in their essays, we asked them to perform a separate task for a different study, which was the main focus of this experiment. The other task was our standard matrix test.

How did things turn out? In the two control conditions, we found that both the depleted and nondepleted folks showed an equal ability to solve the math problems—which means that depletion did not diminish their basic ability to do the math. But in the two shredder conditions (in which they could cheat), things went differently. Those who wrote essays without the letters “x” and “z” and later shredded their answers indulged in a little bit of cheating, claiming to solve about one extra matrix correctly. But the participants in the shredder condition who’d undergone the ordeal of writing essays without the letters “a” and “n” took the proverbial cake: they claimed to have correctly solved about three extra matrices. As it turned out, the more taxing and depleting the task, the more participants cheated.

What do these findings suggest? Generally speaking, if you wear down your willpower, you will have considerably more trouble regulating your desires, and that difficulty can wear down your honesty as well.

Dead Grannies

Over the course of many years of teaching, I’ve noticed that there typically seems to be a rash of deaths among students’ relatives at the end of the semester, and it happens mostly in the week before final exams and before papers are due. In an average semester, about 10 percent of my students come to me asking for an extension because someone has died—usually a grandmother. Of course I find it very sad and am always ready to sympathize with my students and give them more time to complete their assignments. But the question remains: what is it about the weeks before finals that is so dangerous to students’ relatives?

Most professors encounter the same puzzling phenomenon, and I’ll guess that we have come to suspect some kind of causal relationship between exams and sudden deaths among grandmothers. In fact, one intrepid researcher has successfully proven it. After collecting data over several years, Mike Adams (a professor of biology at Eastern Connecticut State University) has shown that grandmothers are ten times more likely to die before a midterm and nineteen times more likely to die before a final exam. Moreover, grandmothers of students who aren’t doing so well in class are at even higher risk—students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother compared with non-failing students.

In a paper exploring this sad connection, Adams speculates that the phenomenon is due to intrafamilial dynamics, which is to say, students’ grandmothers care so much about their grandchildren that they worry themselves to death over the outcome of exams. This would indeed explain why fatalities occur more frequently as the stakes rise, especially in cases where a student’s academic future is in peril. With this finding in mind, it is rather clear that from a public policy perspective, grandmothers—particularly those of failing students—should be closely monitored for signs of ill health during the weeks before and during finals. Another recommendation is that their grandchildren, again particularly the ones who are not doing well in class, should not tell their grandmothers anything about the timing of the exams or how they are performing in class.

Though it is likely that intrafamilial dynamics cause this tragic turn of events, there is another possible explanation for the plague that seems to strike grandmothers twice a year. It may have something to do with students’ lack of preparation and their subsequent scramble to buy more time than with any real threat to the safety of those dear old women. If that is the case, we might want to ask why it is that students become so susceptible to “losing” their grandmothers (in e-mails to professors) at semesters’ end.