The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

ALLOW ME TO tell you a story of a time when I embraced my own deception. In the summer of 1989—about two years after I left the hospital—my friend Ken and I decided to fly from New York to London to see another friend. We bought the cheapest flight to London, which happened to be on Air India. When the taxi dropped us off at the airport, we were dismayed to see a line of people trailing all the way out of the terminal. Thinking fast, Ken came up with an idea: “Why don’t we put you in a wheelchair?” I thought about his suggestion. Not only would I be more comfortable, but we could also get through much faster. (Truthfully speaking, it is difficult for me to stand for a prolonged time because the circulation in my legs is far from good. But I don’t need a wheelchair.)

We were both convinced that it was a good plan, so Ken jumped out of the cab and returned with the wheelchair. We breezed through check-in and, with an extra two hours to kill, we enjoyed coffee and a sandwich. But then I needed to use the restroom. So Ken pushed me in the wheelchair to the nearest bathroom, which unfortunately was not designed to accommodate a wheelchair. I maintained my role, though; we got the wheelchair as close to the toilet as possible and I tried to hit the mark from a distance, with limited success.

Once we made it through the bathroom challenge, it was time to board the plane. Our seats were in row 30, and as we neared the entrance to the plane, I realized that the wheelchair was going to be too wide for the aisle. So we did what my new role dictated: I left the wheelchair at the entrance of the plane, grabbed on to Ken’s shoulders, and he hauled me to our seats.

As I sat waiting for the flight to take off, I was annoyed that the bathroom in the airport wasn’t handicap-accessible and that the airline hadn’t provided me with a narrower wheelchair to get to my seat. My irritation increased when I realized that I shouldn’t drink anything on the six-hour flight because there would be no way for me to keep up the act and use the bathroom. The next difficulty arose when we landed in London. Once again, Ken had to carry me to the entrance of the plane, and when the airline didn’t have a wheelchair waiting for us, we had to wait.

This little adventure made me appreciate the daily irritations of handicapped people in general. In fact, I was so annoyed that I decided to go and complain to the head of Air India in London. Once we got the wheelchair, Ken rolled me to Air India’s office, and with an overblown air of indignation I described each difficulty and humiliation and reprimanded the regional head of Air India for the airline’s lack of concern for disabled people everywhere. Of course he apologized profusely, and after that we rolled away.

The odd thing is that throughout the process I knew I could walk, but I adopted my role so quickly and thoroughly that my self-righteousness felt as real as if I had a legitimate reason to be upset. Then after all that, we got to the baggage claim, where I simply picked up my backpack and walked away un-hampered, like Keyser Söze in the film The Usual Suspects.

TO MORE SERIOUSLY examine self-deception, Zoë Chance (a postdoc at Yale), Mike Norton, Francesca Gino, and I set out to learn more about how and when we deceive ourselves into believing our own lies and whether there are ways to prevent ourselves from doing so.

In the first phase of our exploration, participants took an eight-question IQ-like test (one of the questions, for example, was this: “What is the number that is one half of one quarter of one tenth of 400?”). After they finished taking the quiz, participants in the control group handed their answers over to the experimenter who checked their responses. This allowed us to establish the average performance on the test.^*

In the condition where cheating was possible, participants had an answer key at the bottom of the page. They were told that the answer key was there so that they could score how well they did on the test and also to help them estimate in general how good they were at answering these types of questions. However, they were told to answer the questions first and only then use the key for verification. After answering all the questions, participants checked their own answers and reported their own performance.

What did the results from phase one of the study show? As we expected, the group that had the opportunity to “check their answers” scored a few points higher on average, which suggested that they had used the answer key not only to score themselves but also to improve their performance. As was the case with all of our other experiments, we found that people cheat when they have a chance to do so, but not by a whole lot.

Helping Myself to a Higher MENSA Score