The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

We examined this question by analyzing data from millions of dental procedures over twelve years. We looked at instances when patients received fillings and whether the fillings were made of silver amalgam or white composite. You see, silver fillings last longer, cost less, and are more durable; white fillings, on the other hand, are more expensive and break more easily but are more aesthetically pleasing. So when it comes to our front teeth, aesthetics often reign over practicality, making white fillings the preferred option. But when it comes to our less visible back teeth, silver fillings are the way to go.³

What we found was that about a quarter of all patients receive attractive and expensive white fillings in their hidden teeth rather than the functionally superior silver fillings. In those cases, it was most likely that the dentists were making decisions that favored their own interests (higher initial pay and more frequent repairs) over the patients’ interests (lower cost and longer-lasting treatment).

As if that weren’t bad enough, we also found that this tendency is more pronounced the longer the patient sees the same dentist (we found the same pattern of results for other procedures as well). What this suggests is that as dentists become more comfortable with their patients, they also more frequently recommend procedures that are in their own financial interest. And long-term patients, for their part, are more likely to accept the dentist’s advice based on the trust that their relationship has engendered.^*

The bottom line: there are clearly many benefits to continuity of care and ongoing patient-provider relationships. Yet, at the same time, we should also be aware of the costs these long-term relationships can have.

HERE’S WHAT WE’VE learned about collaborative cheating so far:

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! In our initial experiments, both the cheater and the partner benefited from every additional exaggeration of their score. So if you were the cheater in the experiment and you exaggerated the number of your correct responses by one, you would get half of the additional payment and your partner would get the same. This is certainly less financially rewarding than snagging the whole amount for yourself, but you would still benefit from your exaggeration to some degree.

To look into purely altruistic cheating, we introduced a condition in which the fruit of each participant’s cheating would benefit only their partner. What did we find? As it turns out, altruism is indeed a strong motivator for cheating. When cheating was carried out for purely altruistic reasons and the cheaters themselves did not gain anything from their act, overclaiming increased to an even larger degree.