The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Before I divulge the answer, I want to tell you about a related experiment. This time, rather than taking the matrix test themselves, we asked another group of participants to guess how many answers those in the shredder condition would claim to solve correctly at each level of payment. Their predictions were that the claims of correctly solved matrices would increase as the amount of money went up. Essentially, their intuitive theory was the same as the premise of the SMORC. But they were wrong. It turned out that when we looked at the magnitude of cheating, our participants added two questions to their scores on average, regardless of the amount of money they could make per question. In fact, the amount of cheating was slightly lower when we promised our participants the highest amount of $10 for each correct answer.

Why wouldn’t the level of cheating increase with the amount of money offered? Why was cheating slightly lower at the highest level of payment? This insensitivity to the amount of reward suggests that dishonesty is most likely not an outcome of a cost-benefit analysis. If it were, the increase in the benefit (the amount of money offered) would lead to more cheating. And why was the level of cheating lowest when the payment was greatest? I suspect that when the amount of money that the participants could make per question was $10, it was harder for them to cheat and still feel good about their own sense of integrity (we will come back to this later). At $10 per matrix, we’re not talking about cheating on the level of, say, taking a pencil from the office. It’s more akin to taking several boxes of pens, a stapler, and a ream of printer paper, which is much more difficult to ignore or rationalize.

To Catch a Thief

Our next experiment looked at what might happen if participants felt that there was a higher probability of getting caught cheating. Basically, we inserted the mental equivalent of a partially operating security camera into the experiment.

We asked one group of participants to shred one half of their worksheet—which meant that if they were dishonest, we might find some evidence of it. We asked a second group to shred the whole work sheet, meaning that they could get off scot-free. Finally, we asked a third group to shred the whole worksheet, leave the testing room, and pay themselves from a sizable bowl of money filled with more than $100 in small bills and coins. In this self-paying condition, participants could not only cheat and get away with it, but they could also help themselves to a lot of extra cash.

Again, we asked a different group to predict how many questions, on average, participants would claim to solve correctly in each condition. Once again, they predicted that the human tendency for dishonesty would follow the SMORC and that participants would claim to solve more matrices as the probability of getting caught decreased.

What did we find? Once again, lots of people cheated, but just by a bit, and the level of cheating was the same across all three conditions (shredding half, shredding all, shredding all and self-paying).

NOW, YOU MIGHT wonder if the participants in our experiments really believed that in our experimental setting, they could cheat and not get caught. To make it clear that this was indeed the case, Racheli Barkan (a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Eynav Maharabani (a master’s candidate working with Racheli), and I carried out another study where either Eynav or a different research assistant, Tali, proctored the experiment. Eynav and Tali were similar in many ways—but Eynav is noticeably blind, which meant that it was easier to cheat when she was in charge. When it was time to pay themselves from the pile of money that was placed on the table in front of the experimenter, participants could grab as much of the cash as they wanted and Eynav would not be able to see them do so.

So did they cheat Eynav to a greater degree? They still took a bit more money than they deserved, but they cheated just as much when Tali supervised the experiments as they did when Eynav was in charge.

These results suggest that the probability of getting caught doesn’t have a substantial influence on the amount of cheating. Of course, I am not arguing that people are entirely uninfluenced by the likelihood of being caught—after all, no one is going to steal a car when a policeman is standing nearby—but the results show that getting caught does not have as great an influence as we tend to expect, and it certainly did not play a role in our experiments.

YOU MIGHT BE wondering whether the participants in our experiments were using the following logic: “If I cheat by only a few questions, no one will suspect me. But if I cheat by more than a small amount, it may raise suspicion and someone might question me about it.”