The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

INTERESTINGLY, WE ALREADY have many social mechanisms in place that seem to be designed specifically for resetting our moral compass and overcoming the “what-the-hell” effect. Such resetting rituals—ranging from the Catholic confession to Yom Kippur, and Ramadan to the weekly Sabbath—all present us with opportunities to collect ourselves, stop the deterioration, and turn a new page. (For the nonreligious, think of New Year’s resolutions, birthdays, changes of job, and romantic breakups as “resetting” opportunities.) We have recently started carrying out basic experiments on the effectiveness of these types of resetting approaches (using a nonreligious version of the Catholic confession), and so far it seems that they can rather successfully reverse the what-the-hell effect.

From the social science perspective, religion has evolved in ways that can help society counteract potentially destructive tendencies, including the tendency to be dishonest. Religion and religious rituals remind people of their obligations to be moral in various ways; recall, for example, the Jewish man with the tzitzit from chapter 2 (“Fun with the Fudge Factor”). Muslims use beads called tasbih or misbaha on which they recount the ninety-nine names of God several times a day. There’s also daily prayer and the confessional prayer (“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned”), the practice of prayaschitta in Hinduism, and countless other religious reminders that work very much as the Ten Commandments did in our experiments.

To the extent that such approaches are useful, we might think about creating related (albeit nonreligious) mechanisms in business and politics. Maybe we should get our public servants and businesspeople to take an oath, use a code of ethics, or even ask for forgiveness from time to time. Perhaps such secular versions of repentance and appeal for forgiveness would help potential cheaters pay attention to their own actions, turn a new page, and by doing so increase their moral adherence.

ONE OF THE more intriguing forms of resetting ceremonies is the purification rituals that certain religious sects practice. One such group is Opus Dei, a secretive Catholic society, in which members flagellate themselves with cattail whips. I don’t remember exactly how we started discussing Opus Dei, but, at some point Yoel Inbar (a professor at Tilburg University), David Pizarro and Tom Gilovich (both from Cornell University), and I wondered if self-flagellation and similar behaviors capture a basic human desire for self-cleansing. Can the feeling of having done something wrong be erased by self-punishment? Can self-inflicted pain help us ask for forgiveness and start anew?

Following the physically painful approach of Opus Dei, we decided to conduct an experiment using a more modern and less bloody version of cattail whips—so we picked mildly painful electric shocks as our experimental material. Once participants came to the lab at Cornell University, we asked some of them to write about a past experience that made them feel guilty; we asked other participants to write about a past experience that made them feel sad (a negative emotion but not related to guilt); and we asked a third group to write about an experience that made them feel neither good nor bad. After they reflected on one of these three types of experiences, we asked the participants to take part in “another” experiment involving self-administered electrical shocks.

In this next phase of the experiment, we connected the participant’s wrist to a shock-generating machine. Once the connection was secure, we showed the participants how to set the level of the electrical shock and which button to press to give themselves the painful jolt. We set the machine to the lowest possible level of shock and asked participants to press the switch, increase the level of the shock, press the switch, increase the level of the shock, press the switch, and so on until they could no longer tolerate the intensity of the shock.

We really aren’t as sadistic as it might sound, but we wanted to see how far participants would push themselves on the pain scale and to what extent their level of self-administered pain would depend on the experimental condition they were in. Most important, we wanted to see whether being reminded of a guilt-related past experience would cause our participants to cleanse themselves by seeking more pain. As it turned out, in the neutral and sad conditions, the degree of self-inflicted pain was similar and rather low, which means that negative emotions by themselves do not create a desire for self-inflicted pain. However, those in the guilty condition were far more disposed to self-administering higher levels of shocks.