The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Meanwhile, as my sniffling neighbor’s pile of used tissues grew, I began wondering whether someone could become infected with an “immorality bug.” If there was a real increase in societal dishonesty, could it be spreading like an infection, virus, or communicable bacteria, transmitted through mere observation or direct contact? Might there be a connection between this notion of infection and the continually unfolding story of deception and dishonesty that we have increasingly seen all around us? And if there were such a connection, would it be possible to detect such a “virus” early and prevent it from wreaking havoc?

To me, this was an intriguing possibility. Once I got home, I started reading up on bacteria, and I learned that we have innumerable bacteria in, on, and around our bodies. I also learned that as long as we have only a limited amount of the harmful bacteria, we manage rather well. But problems tend to arise when the number of bacteria becomes so great that it disturbs our natural balance or when a particularly bad strain of bacteria makes it through our bodies’ defenses.

To be fair, I am hardly the first to think of this connection. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prison reformers believed that criminals, like the ill, should be kept separated and in well-ventilated places in order to avoid contagion. Of course, I didn’t take the analogy between the spread of dishonesty and diseases as literally as my predecessors. Some sort of airborne miasma probably won’t transform people into criminals. But at the risk of overstretching the metaphor, I thought that the natural balance of social honesty could be upset, too, if we are put into close proximity to someone who is cheating. Perhaps observing dishonesty in people who are close to us might be more “infectious” than observing the same level of dishonesty in people who aren’t so close or influential in our lives. (Consider, for example, the catchphrase “I learned it by watching you” from the antidrug campaign of the 1980s: the ad warned that “Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs.”)

Keeping with the infection metaphor, I wondered about the intensity of exposure to cheating and how much dishonest behavior it might take to tilt the scale of our own actions. If we see a colleague walking out of the office supply room with a handful of pens, for example, do we immediately start thinking that it’s all right to follow in his footsteps and grab some office supplies ourselves? I suspect that this is not the case. Instead, much like our relationship with bacteria, there might be a slower and more subtle process of accretion: perhaps when we see someone cheat, a microscopic impression is left with us and we become ever so slightly more corrupt. Then, the next time we witness unethical behavior, our own morality erodes further, and we become more and more compromised as the number of immoral “germs” to which we are exposed increases.

A FEW YEARS ago I purchased a vending machine, thinking it would be an interesting tool for running experiments related to pricing and discounts. For a few weeks, Nina Mazar and I used it to see what would happen if we gave people a probabilistic discount instead of a fixed discount. Translated, that means that we set up the machine so that some candy slots were marked with a 30 percent discount off the regular price of $1, while other slots gave users a 70 percent chance of paying the full price of $1.00 and a 30 percent chance of getting all their money back (and therefore paying nothing). In case you are interested in the results of this experiment, we almost tripled sales by probabilistically giving people back their money. This probabilistic discounting is a story for another time, but the idea of people getting their money back gave us an idea for testing another path for cheating.

One morning, I had the machine moved near a classroom building at MIT and set the internal price of the machine to zero for each of the candies. On the outside, each candy allegedly cost 75 cents. But the moment students shelled out three quarters and made their selection, the machine served both the candy and the money. We also put a prominent sign on the machine with a number to call if the machine malfunctioned.