The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Imagine that you are a student in the condition with the opportunity to cheat. You have just finished the Stroop task (either the depleting or nondepleting version). You have been answering the quiz questions for the past few minutes, and the time allotted for the quiz is up. You walk up to the experimenter to pick up the bubble sheet so that you can dutifully transfer your answers.

“I’m sorry,” the experimenter says, pursing her lips in self-annoyance. “I’m almost out of bubble sheets! I only have one unmarked one, and one that has the answers premarked.” She tells you that she did her best to erase the marks on the used bubble sheet but the answers are still slightly visible. Annoyed with herself, she admits that she had hoped to administer one more test today after yours. She next turns to you and asks you a question: “Since you are the first among the last two participants of the day, you can choose which form you would like to use: the clean one or the premarked one.”

Of course you realize that taking the premarked bubble sheet would give you an edge if you decided to cheat. Do you take it? Maybe you take the premarked one out of altruism: you want to help the experimenter so that she won’t worry so much about it. Maybe you take the premarked one to cheat. Or maybe you think that taking the premarked one would tempt you to cheat, so you reject it because you want to be an honest, upstanding, moral person. Whichever you take, you transfer your answers to that bubble sheet, shred the original quiz, and give the bubble sheet back to the experimenter, who pays you accordingly.

Did the depleted participants recuse themselves from the tempting situation more often, or did they gravitate toward it? As it turned out, they were more likely than nondepleted participants to choose the sheet that tempted them to cheat. As a result of their depletion, they suffered a double whammy: they picked the premarked bubble sheet more frequently, and (as we saw in the previous experiment) they also cheated more when cheating was possible. When we looked at these two ways of cheating combined, we found that we paid the depleted participants 197 percent more than those who were not depleted.

Depletion in Everyday Life

Imagine you’re on a protein-and-vegetable diet and you go grocery shopping at the end of the day. You enter the supermarket, vaguely hungry, and detect the smell of warm bread wafting from the bakery. You see fresh pineapple on sale; although you adore it, it is off limits. You wheel your cart to the meat counter to buy some chicken. The crab cakes look good, but they have too many carbohydrates so you pass them by, too. You pick up lettuce and tomatoes for a salad, steeling yourself against the cheesy garlic croutons. You make it to the checkout counter and pay for your goods. You feel very good about yourself and your ability to resist temptation. Then, as you are safely out of the store and on the way to your car, you pass a school bake sale, and a cute little girl offers you a free brownie sample.

Now that you know what you know about depletion, you can predict what your past heroic attempts of resisting temptation may cause you to do: you will most likely give in and take a bite. Having tasted the delicious chocolate melting over your deprived taste buds, you can’t possibly walk away. You’re dying for more. So you buy enough brownies for a family of eight and end up eating half of them before you even get home.

NOW THINK ABOUT shopping malls. Say you need a new pair of walking shoes. As you make your way from Neiman Marcus to Sears across a vast expanse of gleaming commercial temptation, you see all kinds of things you want but don’t necessarily need. There’s that new grill set you’ve been drooling over, that faux-shearling coat for next winter, and the gold necklace for the party you will most likely attend on New Year’s Eve. Every enticing item you pass in the window and don’t buy is a crushed impulse, slowly whittling away at your reserve of willpower—making it much more likely that later in the day you will fall for temptation.

Being human and susceptible to temptation, we all suffer in this regard. When we make complex decisions throughout the day (and most decisions are more complex and taxing than naming the colors of mismatched words), we repeatedly find ourselves in circumstances that create a tug-of-war between impulse and reason. And when it comes to important decisions (health, marriage, and so on), we experience an even stronger struggle. Ironically, simple, everyday attempts to keep our impulses under control weaken our supply of self-control, thus making us more susceptible to temptation.

NOW THAT YOU know about the effects of depletion, how can you best confront life’s many temptations? Here’s one approach suggested by my friend Dan Silverman, an economist at the University of Michigan who was facing grave temptation on a daily basis.