The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty by Dan Ariely

The good news is that I only recommend Dan Ariely’s new book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves to those of us who lie or cheat. The bad news is that this immoral group includes all of us, yes even you… and your family… and your co-workers… and your elderly neighbors… and your academic instructors, politicians (how shocking!), dentists, doctors… you get the idea.

While Dishonesty will certainly not be considered the “feel good” book of the summer, it represents a very important work in the field of behavioral economics which is the culmination of dozens of experiments and studies that have been performed by the author and his fellow researchers.

For the very few of you who may not be familiar with Ariely, he is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavior Economics at Duke University and the author of two past best sellers; Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality .

In Dishonesty, Ariely answers some very difficult questions such as; why/how do people act dishonestly and how can we prevent these acts. He starts by exploring the Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC) which attempts to explain the how we decide if and when we will act dishonestly. The premise of the book is that many factors and situations need to be taken into account to understand when and why people are dishonest and the bulk of the chapters are dedicated to exploring specific situations.

The first of these concepts is what Ariely calls the Fudge Factor which explains that regardless of the amount at stake most people will cheat at a certain small percentage. For instance we may slightly increase the stated value of an item when reporting damage or loss to our insurance company. Apparently if we are dishonest by only a small percentage we are satisfied with our gain while at the same time we can still view ourselves an upstanding citizens.

Next up is golf where Ariely introduces the concept of creating distance between ourselves and cheating. A great example of this is seeing how golfers are more likely to use their club to inch a golf ball into a better spot as opposed to touching it with their hands or shoes. Even though I am not a golfer there is a lot that we can learn about honestly and dishonestly from golf.

Among the other situations that affect our level of honestly which Ariely expertly explores are; depletion (why we are more likely to cheat when tired), conflicts of interests (read this before your next trip to your doctor or dentist!), wearing fakes (our morality interestingly seems to slip when we wear knockoffs), and cheating ourselves (I had visions of George Costanza when reading this section). Additionally, the two sections that I found more interesting are the ones dealing with creativity and the infectious spread of cheating.

I found the results of research linking creativity and dishonesty to be frightening. Okay I admit there have been times that when needing to make an insignificant decision I have flipped a coin to determine my direction. On some of those occasions I have found various reasons to keep flipping until the desired result in reached (although recently I have become more sophisticated and used a random number generator in a spreadsheet to help make an inconsequential decision – and of course it is very easy to recalculate the worksheet until the random number appears that I was awaiting).

Moving beyond my decision making process, the frightening part of this section is the revelation that creative people are more likely to use their creative talent for dishonest purposes (I.e. being able to more easily devise creative stories to justify dishonesty). Part of this creative story telling may be due to relative amounts of white and gray brain matter. Even scarier is the thought that as we take steps to improve creativity in people or a team the level of dishonesty may rise as well. While we should not start burning copies of Johan Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works in the streets to help prevent further declines in morality, we need to understand the connections between creativity and the increased chance of dishonesty along with finding methods for preventing this slippage for which Ariely provides advice.

The concept that dishonesty can spread like a virus should be a significant concern for society. Ariely demonstrates the results of several experiments which show how cheating can spread through our social circles by observation. I am now convinced that this powerful concept was a factor in the dramatic rise in financial cheating and dishonesty that we have witness over the last decade.

The alarming problem of course is that small amounts of cheating performed by the ‘honest and decent’ members of society, as documented so well in this book, likely surpass the economic damages caused but the ‘true criminals’.

So is there any hope? Fortunately there is!

To prevent readers from cutting all social ties and living like hermits, Ariely was thoughtful enough to include several simple strategies to help prevent dishonesty. These are well detailed in the book and include; supervision, moral/religious reminders (you will love the tzitzit story!), and pledges. So the next time you are frustrated at work when people are stealing from the coffee collection can, try printing a copy of the Ten Commandments and posting it next to the coffee pot.

Once again Ariely has shown why he is considered to be at the top echelon in the field of Behavioral Economics research and writing. Keep up the good work Dan! For your next book can you find a less depressing topic?