The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Let’s say you’re working on a project with your coworkers. You don’t necessarily observe them doing anything shady, but you know that they (and you) will benefit if you bend the rules a bit. Will you be more likely to do so if you know that they too will get something out of it? Jennifer’s account suggests that collaboration can cause us to take a few extra liberties with moral guidelines, but is this the case in general?

Before we take a tour of some experiments examining the impact of collaboration on cheating, let’s take a step back and think about possible positive and negative influences of teams and collaboration on our tendency to be dishonest.

Altruistic Cheating: Possible Costs of Collaboration

Work environments are socially complex, with multiple forces at play. Some of those forces might make it easy for group-based processes to turn collaborations into cheating opportunities in which individuals cheat to a higher degree because they realize that their actions can benefit people they like and care about.

Think about Jennifer again. Suppose she was a loyal person and liked to think of herself that way. Suppose further that she really liked her supervisor and team members and sincerely wanted to help them. Based on such considerations, she might have decided to fulfill her boss’s request or even take her report a step further—not because of any selfish reasons but out of concern for her boss’s well-being and deep regard for her team members. In her mind, “bad” numbers might get her boss and team members to fall out of favor with the client and the accounting company—meaning that Jennifer’s concern for her team might lead her to increase the magnitude of her misbehavior.

Underlying this impulse is what social scientists call social utility. This term is used to describe the irrational but very human and wonderfully empathetic part of us that causes us to care about others and take action to help them out when we can—even at a cost to ourselves. Of course, we are all motivated to act in our own self-interest to some degree, but we also have a desire to act in ways that benefit those around us, particularly those we care about. Such altruistic feelings motivate us to help a stranger who is stuck with a flat tire, return a wallet we’ve found in the street, volunteer at a homeless shelter, help a friend in need, and so on.

This tendency to care about others can also make it possible to be more dishonest in situations where acting unethically will benefit others. From this perspective, we can think about cheating when others are involved as altruistic—where, like Robin Hood, we cheat because we are good people who care about the welfare of those around us.

Watch Out: Possible Benefits of Collaboration

In Plato’s “Myth of the King of Gyges,” a shepherd named Gyges finds a ring that makes him invisible. With this new-found power, he decides to go on a crime spree. So he travels to the king’s court, seduces the queen, and conspires with her to kill the king and takes control of the kingdom. In telling the story, Plato wonders whether there is anyone alive who could resist taking advantage of the power of invisibility. The question, then, is whether the only force that keeps us from carrying out misdeeds is the fear of being seen by others (J. R. R. Tolkien elaborated on this theme a couple millennia later in The Lord of the Rings). To me, Plato’s myth offers a nice illustration of the notion that group settings can inhibit our propensity to cheat. When we work within a team, other team members can act informally as monitors, and, knowing that we are being watched, we may be less inclined to act dishonorably.

A CLEVER EXPERIMENT by Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, and Gilbert Roberts (all from the University of Newcastle) illustrated the idea that the mere feeling of being watched can inhibit bad behavior. This experiment took place in the kitchen of the psychology department at the University of Newcastle where tea, coffee, and milk were available for the professors and staff. Over the tea-making area hung a sign saying that beverage drinkers should contribute some cash to the honesty box located nearby. For ten weeks the sign was decorated with images, but the type of image alternated every week. On five of the weeks the sign was decorated with images of flowers, and on the other five weeks the sign was decorated with images of eyes that stared directly at the beverage drinkers. At the end of every week, the researchers counted the money in the honesty box. What did they find? There was some money in the box at the end of the weeks when the image of flowers was hung, but when the glaring eyes were “watching,” the box contained almost three times more money.