The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Or consider the case of Marilee Jones, who coauthored a popular guidebook called Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond, in which, among other things, she advocated “being yourself” in order to be successful in college admissions and job searches. She was MIT’s popular dean of admissions, and for twenty-five years, by all accounts, she did her job very well. There was just one problem: she had added several fictitious degrees to her résumé to land that job in the first place. It was an act of cheating, pure and simple. The irony of her fall from grace was not lost on Jones, who apologized for not “having the courage” to correct the “mistakes” on her fake résumé at any point during her employment. When an extremely popular advocate of “being yourself” is toppled by false credentials, what are the rest of us to think?

If you think about this type of cheating in the context of the “what-the-hell” effect, it might be that fake academic credentials often start innocently enough, perhaps along the lines of “fake it till you make it,” but once one such act has been established, it can bring about a looser moral standard and a higher tendency to cheat elsewhere. For example, if an executive holding a fake graduate degree puts constant reminders of his fake degree on his letterhead, business cards, résumé, and website, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that he could also start cheating on expense reports, misrepresenting billable hours, or misusing corporate funds. After all, given the what-the-hell effect, it is possible that one initial act of cheating could increase the executive’s general level of self-signaled dishonesty, increasing his fudge factor, which would give rise to further fraud.

THE BOTTOM LINE is that we should not view a single act of dishonesty as just one petty act. We tend to forgive people for their first offense with the idea that it is just the first time and everyone makes mistakes. And although this may be true, we should also realize that the first act of dishonesty might be particularly important in shaping the way a person looks at himself and his actions from that point on—and because of that, the first dishonest act is the most important one to prevent. That is why it is important to cut down on the number of seemingly innocuous singular acts of dishonesty. If we do, society might become more honest and less corrupt over time (for more on this, see chapter 8, “Cheating as an Infection”).

(DON’T) STEAL THIS BOOK

Finally, no discussion of designer counterfeits could be complete without mentioning their cousin, illegal downloading. (Imagine experiments similar to the ones on fake sunglasses but using illegally downloaded music or movies.) Allow me to share a story about a time when I learned something interesting about illegal downloads. In this particular case, I was the victim. A few months after Predictably Irrational was published, I received the following e-mail:

Dear Mr. Ariely,

I just finished listening to the illegally downloaded version of your audio book this morning, and I wanted to tell you how much I appreciated it.

I am a 30-year-old African American male from the inner city of Chicago, and for the last five years, I have been making my living by illegally selling CDs and DVDs. I am the only person in my family who is not in prison or homeless. As the last survivor of a family that represents all that is wrong with America, and as someone breaking the law today, I know it is only a matter of time before I join my family in prison.