The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

But what would happen if we paid participants to predict their score accurately in the second phase? With money on the line, maybe our participants wouldn’t so patently ignore the fact that in phase one they had used the answer key to improve their scores. To that end, we repeated the same experiment with a new group of participants, this time offering them up to $20 if they correctly predicted their performance on the second test. Even with a financial incentive to be accurate, they still tended to take full credit for their scores and overestimate their abilities. Despite having a strong motivation to be accurate, self-deception ruled the day.

I KNEW IT ALL ALONG

I give a considerable number of lectures about my research to different groups, from academics to industry types. When I started giving talks, I would often describe an experiment, the results, and finally what I thought we could learn from it. But I often found that some people were rather unsurprised by the results and were eager to tell me so. I found this puzzling because, as the person who actually carried out the research, I’d often been surprised by the outcomes myself. I wondered, were the people in the audience really that insightful? How did they know the results sooner than I did? Or was it just an ex post facto feeling of intuition?

Eventually I discovered a way to combat this “I knew it all along” feeling. I started asking the audience to predict the results of the experiments. After I finished describing the setup and what we measured, I gave them a few seconds to think about it. Then I would ask them to vote on the outcome or write their prediction down. Only once they committed to their answer would I provide the results. The good news is that this approach works. Using this ask-first method, I rarely receive the “I knew it all along” response.

In honor of our natural tendency to convince ourselves that we knew the right answers all along, I call my research center at Duke University “The Center for Advanced Hindsight.”

Our Love of Exaggeration

Once upon a time—back in the early 1990s—the acclaimed movie director Stanley Kubrick began hearing stories through his assistant about a man who was pretending to be him. The man-who-would-be-Kubrick (whose real name was Alan Conway and who looked nothing like the dark-bearded director) went around London telling people who he famously was(n’t). Since the real Stanley Kubrick was a very private person who shunned the paparazzi, not many people had any idea of what he looked like. So a lot of gullible people, thrilled to “know” the famous director personally, eagerly took Conway’s bait. Warner Bros., which financed and distributed Kubrick’s films, began calling Kubrick’s office practically every day with new complaints from people who could not understand why “Stanley” would not get back to them. After all, they had treated him to drinks and dinner and paid for his cab, and he had promised them a part in his next film!