The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Perhaps at the end of the semester, the students become so depleted by the months of studying and burning the candle at both ends that they lose some of their morality and in the process also show disregard for their grandmothers’ lives. If the concentration it takes to remember a longer digit can send people running for chocolate cake, it’s not hard to imagine how dealing with months of cumulative material from several classes might lead students to fake a dead grandmother in order to ease the pressure (not that that’s an excuse for lying to one’s professors).

Just the same, to all grandmothers out there: take care of yourselves at finals time.

Red, Green, and Blue

We’ve learned that depletion takes away some of our reasoning powers and with them our ability to act morally.

Still, in real life we can choose to remove ourselves from situations that might tempt us to behave immorally. If we are even somewhat aware of our propensity to act dishonestly when depleted, we can take this into account and avoid temptation altogether. (For example, in the domain of dieting, avoiding temptation could mean that we decide not to shop for groceries when we’re starving.)

In our next experiment, our participants could choose whether or not to put themselves into a position that would tempt them to cheat in the first place. Once again, we wanted to create two groups: one depleted, the other not. This time, however, we used a different method of mental exhaustion called the Stroop task.

In this task, we presented participants with a table of color names containing five columns and fifteen rows (for a total of seventy-five words). The words in the table were color names—red, green, and blue—printed in one of these three colors and organized in no particular order. Once the list was in front of the participants, we asked them to say the color of each word on the list aloud. Their instructions were simple: “If a word is written in red ink, regardless of what the word is, you should say ‘red.’ If a word is written in green ink, regardless of what the word is, you should say ‘green.’ And so on. Do this as fast as you can. If at any point you make a mistake, please repeat the word until you get it right.”

For the participants in the nondepleting condition, the list of colors was structured such that the name of each color (e.g., green) was written in the same color of ink (green). The participants in the depleting condition were given the same instructions, but the list of words had one key difference—the ink color did not match the name of the color (for instance, the word “blue” would be printed in green ink, and the participants were asked to say “green”).

To try the nondepleting condition of this experiment yourself, time how long it takes you to say the colors of all the words in the “Congruent Color Words” list*. When you are done, try the depleting condition by timing how long it takes you to say aloud the colors of all the words in the “Incongruent Color Words” list.

How long did these two tasks take you? If you are like most of our participants, reading the congruent list (the nondepleting condition) probably took around sixty seconds, but reading the incongruent list (the depleting condition) was probably three to four times more difficult and more time-consuming.

Somewhat ironically, the difficulty of naming the colors in the mismatched list stems from our skill as readers. For experienced readers, the meaning of the words we read comes to mind very quickly, creating an almost automatic reaction to say the corresponding word rather than the color of the ink. We see the green-colored word “red” and want to say “red!” But that is not what we are supposed to do in this task, so with some effort we suppress our initial response and instead name the color of the ink. You may also have noticed that as you keep at this task, you experience a sort of mental exhaustion resulting from the repeated suppression of your quick automatic responses in favor of the more controlled, effortful (and correct) responses.

After completing either the easy or the hard Stroop task, each participant was given the opportunity to take a multiple-choice quiz about the history of Florida State University. The test included questions such as “When was the school founded?” and “How many times did the football team play in the National Championship game between 1993 and 2001?” In total, the quiz included fifty questions, each with four possible answers, and participants were paid according to their performances. The participants were also told that once they finished answering all the questions, they would be given a bubble sheet so that they could transfer their answers from the quiz to the sheet, recycle the quiz itself, and submit only the bubble sheet for payment.