The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

CLEARLY, THERE ARE no silver bullets for the complex issue of cheating in group settings. Taken together, I think that our findings have serious implications for organizations, especially considering the predominance of collaborative work in our day-to-day professional lives. There is also no question that better understanding the extent and complexity of dishonesty in social settings is rather depressing. Still, by understanding the possible pitfalls involved in collaboration, we can take some steps toward rectifying dishonest behavior.

CHAPTER 10

A Semioptimistic Ending

People Don’t Cheat Enough!

Throughout this book, we’ve seen that honesty and dishonesty are based on a mixture of two very different types of motivation. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating (this is the rational economic motivation), while on the other, we want to be able to view ourselves as wonderful human beings (this is the psychological motivation). You might think that we can’t achieve both of these objectives at the same time—that we can’t have our cake and eat it too, so to speak—but the fudge factor theory we have developed in these pages suggests that our capacity for flexible reasoning and rationalization allows us to do just that. Basically, as long as we cheat just a little bit, we can have the cake and eat (some of) it too. We can reap some of the benefits of dishonesty while maintaining a positive image of ourselves.

As we’ve seen, certain forces—such as the amount of money we stand to gain and the probability of being caught—influence human beings surprisingly less than one might think. And at the same time other forces influence us more than we might expect: moral reminders, distance from money, conflicts of interest, depletion, counterfeits, reminders of our fabricated achievements, creativity, witnessing others’ dishonest acts, caring about others on our team, and so on.

ALTHOUGH THE FOCUS of the various experiments presented here was on dishonesty, it is also important to remember that most of the participants in our experiments were nice people from good universities who will likely attain positions of some power and influence later on in life. They were not the kind of people one typically associates with cheating. In fact, they were just like you, me, and most of the people on this planet, which means that all of us are perfectly capable of cheating a little bit.

Though that may sound pessimistic, the half-full part of the story is that human beings are, by and large, more moral than standard economic theory predicts. In fact, seen from a purely rational (SMORC) perspective, we humans don’t cheat nearly enough. Consider how many times in the last few days you’ve had the opportunity to cheat without getting caught. Perhaps a colleague left her purse on her desk while she was away for a long meeting. Maybe a stranger in a coffee shop asked you to watch her laptop while she went to the restroom. Maybe a grocery clerk missed an item in your cart or you passed an unlocked bicycle on an empty street. In any of those situations, the SMORC thing to do would be to take the money, laptop, or bike or not mention the missed item. Yet we pass up the vast majority of these opportunities every day without thinking that we should take them. This means that we’re off to a good start in our effort to improve our moral fiber.

What About “Real” Criminals?

Across all of our experiments we’ve tested thousands of people, and from time to time, we did see aggressive cheaters who keep as much money as possible. In the matrix experiment, for example, we have never seen anyone claim to solve eighteen or nineteen out of the twenty matrices. But once in a while, a participant claimed to have solved all twenty matrices correctly. These are the people who, having made a cost-benefit analysis, decided to get away with as much money as possible. Fortunately, we didn’t encounter many of those folks, and because they seemed to be the exception and not the rule, we lost only a few hundred dollars to them. (Not exactly thrilling, but not too bad.) At the same time, we had thousands and thousands of participants who cheated by “just” a few matrices, but because there were so many of them, we lost thousands and thousands of dollars to them—much, much more than we lost to the aggressive cheaters.