The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

As difficult as it might be to appreciate this experimental support for the practice of Opus Dei, the results suggest that purification through the pain of self-flagellation might tap into a basic way we deal with feelings of guilt. Perhaps recognizing our mistakes, admitting them, and adding some form of physical punishment is a good recipe for asking forgiveness and opening a new page. Now, I am not recommending that we adopt this approach just yet, but I can think of some politicians and businessmen whom I would not mind trying it out on—just to see if it works.

A MORE SECULAR (and more elegant) example of resetting was told to me by a woman I met at a conference a few years ago. The woman’s sister lived in South America, and one day the sister realized that her maid had been stealing a little bit of meat from the freezer every few days. The sister didn’t mind too much (other than the fact that sometimes she didn’t have enough meat to make dinner, which became rather frustrating), but she clearly needed to do something about it. The first part of her solution was to put a lock on the freezer. Then the sister told her maid that she suspected that some of the people who were working at the house from time to time had been taking some meat from the freezer, so she wanted only the two of them to have keys. She also gave her maid a small financial promotion for the added responsibility. With the new role, the new rules, and the added control, the stealing ceased.

I think this approach worked for a number of reasons. I suspect that the maid’s habit of stealing developed much like the cheating we’ve been discussing. Perhaps it began with a single small action (“I’ll just take a little bit of meat while I’m cleaning up”), but having stolen once, it became much easier to continue doing so. By locking the freezer and giving the maid an additional responsibility, the sister offered the maid a way to reset her honesty level. I also think that trusting the maid with the key was an important element in changing her view on stealing meat and in establishing the social norm of honesty in that household. On top of that, now that a key was needed to open the freezer, any act of stealing would have to be more deliberate, more intentional, and far more difficult to self-justify. That is not unlike what happened when we forced participants to deliberately move the mouse to the bottom of the computer screen to reveal an answer key (as we saw in chapter 6, “Cheating Ourselves”).

The point is that the more we develop and adopt such mechanisms, the more we will be able to curb dishonesty. It is not always going to be simple, but it is possible.

IT’S IMPORTANT TO note that creating an endpoint and the opportunity for a new beginning can take place on a broader social scale. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa is an example of this kind of process. The purpose of this courtlike commission was to enable the transition from the apartheid government, which had sharply oppressed the vast majority of South Africans for decades, to a new beginning and to democracy. Similar to other methods of stopping negative behavior, pausing, and starting again, the goal of the commission was reconciliation, not retribution. I’m sure that no one would claim that the commission erased all memories and remnants of the apartheid era or that anything as deeply scarring as apartheid could ever be forgotten or fully healed. But it remains an important example of how acknowledging bad behavior and asking for forgiveness can be an important step in the right direction.

FINALLY, IT IS worth trying to examine what we have learned about dishonesty from a broader perspective and see what it can teach us about rationality and irrationality more generally. Through the different chapters, we have seen that there are rational forces that we think drive our dishonest behavior—but don’t. And there are irrational forces that we think don’t drive our dishonest behavior—but do. This inability to recognize which forces are at work and which are irrelevant is something we consistently see in decision making and behavioral economics research.

Viewed from this perspective, dishonesty is a prime example of our irrational tendencies. It’s pervasive; we don’t instinctively understand how it works its magic on us; and, most important, we don’t see it in ourselves.

The good news in all of this is that we are not helpless in the face of our human foibles (dishonesty included). Once we better understand what really causes our less-than-optimal behavior, we can start to discover ways to control our behavior and improve our outcomes. That is the real goal of social science, and I am sure that the journey will only become more important and interesting in the years to come.

Irrationally yours,

Dan Ariely