The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

As is the case with many findings in behavioral economics, this experiment produced a mix of good and bad news. On the negative side, it showed that even members of the psychology department—who you would think would know better—tried to sneak off without paying their share for a common good. On the positive side, it showed that the mere suggestion that they were being watched made them behave more honestly. It also shows that a full-blown Orwellian “Big Brother is watching” approach is not necessary and that much more subtle suggestions of being watched can be effective in increasing honesty. Who knows? Perhaps a warning sign, complete with watchful eyes, on Jennifer’s boss’s wall might have made a difference in his behavior.

IN PONDERING JENNIFER’S situation, Francesca Gino, Shahar Ayal, and I began to wonder how dishonesty operates in collaborative environments. Does monitoring help to reduce cheating? Do social connections in groups increase both altruism and dishonesty? And if both of these forces exert their influence in opposite directions, which of the two is more powerful? In order to shed light on this question, we turned once again to our favorite matrix experiment. We included the basic control condition (in which cheating was not possible), the shredder condition (in which cheating was possible), and we added a new condition that introduced a collaborative element to the shredder condition.

As our first step in exploring the effects of groups, we didn’t want the collaborators to have an opportunity to discuss their strategy or to become friends, so we came up with a collaboration condition that included no familiarity or connection between the two team members. We called it the distant-group condition. Let’s say you are one of the participants in the distant-group condition. As in the regular shredder condition, you sit at a desk and use a number 2 pencil to work on the matrices for five minutes. When the time is up, you walk to the shredder and destroy your test sheet.

Up to that point, the procedure is the same as in the basic shredder condition, but now we introduce the collaborative element. The experimenter tells you that you are part of a two-person team and that each of you will be paid half of the group’s total earnings. The experimenter points out that your collection slip is either blue or green and has a number printed in the top-right corner. The experimenter asks you to walk around the room and find the person whose collection slip is different in color but with the same number in the top-right corner. When you find your partner, you sit down together, and each of you writes the number of matrices you correctly solved on your collection slip. Next, you write the other person’s score on your collection slip. And finally, you combine the numbers for a total performance measure. Once that’s done, you walk over to the experimenter together and hand him both collection slips. Since your worksheets have been shredded, the experimenter has no way to check the validity of your reported earnings. So he takes your word for it, pays you accordingly, and you split the takings.

Do you think people in this situation would cheat more than they did in the individual shredder condition? Here’s what we found: when participants learned that both they and someone else would benefit from their dishonesty if they exaggerated their scores more, they ended up engaging in even higher levels of cheating, claiming to have solved three more matrices than when they were cheating just for themselves. This result suggests that we humans have a weakness for altruistic cheating, even if we barely know the person who might benefit from our misbehavior. Sadly, it seems that even altruism can have a dark side.

That’s the bad news, and it’s not all of it.