The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Our matrix test exists outside any cultural context. That is, it’s not an ingrained part of any social or cultural environment. Therefore, it tests the basic human capacity to be morally flexible and reframe situations and actions in ways that reflect positively on ourselves. Our daily activities, on the other hand, are entwined in a complex cultural context. This cultural context can influence dishonesty in two main ways: it can take particular activities and transition them into and out of the moral domain, and it can change the magnitude of the fudge factor that is considered acceptable for any particular domain.

Take plagiarism, for example. At American universities, plagiarism is taken very seriously, but in other cultures it is viewed as a kind of poker game between the students and faculty. In those cultures getting caught, rather than the act of cheating itself, is viewed negatively. Similarly, in some societies, different kinds of cheating—not paying taxes, having an affair, downloading software illegally, and running red lights when there is no traffic around—are frowned upon, while in other societies the same activities are viewed as neutral or even confer bragging rights.

Of course, there’s a great deal more to learn about the influence of culture on cheating, both in terms of the societal influences that help curb dishonesty and in terms of the social forces that make dishonesty and corruption more likely.

P.S. I SHOULD point out that throughout all of our cross-cultural experiments, there was one time we did find a difference. At some point Racheli Barkan and I carried out our experiment in a bar in Washington, D.C., where many congressional staffers gather. And we carried out the same experiment in a bar in New York City where many of the customers are Wall Street bankers. That was the one place where we found a cultural difference. Who do you think cheated more, the politicians or the bankers? I was certain that it was going to be the politicians, but our results showed the opposite: the bankers cheated about twice as much. (But before you begin suspecting your banker friends more and your politician friends less, you should take into account that the politicians we tested were junior politicians—mainly congressional staffers. So they had plenty of room for growth and development.)

CHEATING AND INFIDELITY

Of course, no book about cheating would be complete if it didn’t contain something about adultery and the kinds of complex and intricate subterfuges that extramarital relationships inspire. After all, in the popular vernacular, cheating is practically synonymous with infidelity.

In fact, infidelity can be considered one of the main sources of the world’s most dramatic entertainment. If modern-day adulterers such as Liz Taylor, Prince Charles, Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and many others hadn’t cheated on their spouses, the tabloid magazine and various entertainment news outlets would probably go belly-up (so to speak).