How Honest Are You?

June 25, 2012

Interview with Dan Ariely, author of the book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves

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Mike Carruthers:
While most of us like to think of ourselves as honest almost everyone is slightly dishonest.

Dan Ariely:
We think to ourselves that as long as we’re slightly dishonest we’re OK. You know you could go over the speed limit a little bit, we can add a few extra receipts to our tax return.
 

Dan Ariely, author of the book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty... 

In the same way that the people who deal with us professionally, your plumber, your mechanic, your physician, your dentist – they don’t feel OK taking money away from your wallet but recommending services you don’t really need feels much more comfortable. So there is this level of dishonestly that we can turn a slightly blind eye.

Dan did an experiment where he asked people to solve 20 math problems in 5 minutes.

At the end of the 5 minutes I asked them to take the sheet of paper count how many questions they got correctly and go to the back of the room and shred that piece of paper. After that they come to the front of the room and they tell me that they solved an average of let’s say 6 questions and I pay them $6. What the people in the experiment don’t know is that I played with the shredder and I can find out how many questions they really solved correctly. And what I find on average people solve 4 problems and report to be 6.

But if people think the paper is shredded and they can’t get caught why don’t they lie and say they solved all 20 problems?

What stops us is not the fear of being caught it’s our internal gauge. Only that it’s not perfectly controlling our behavior and it does leave some room for fudge factor and gets us to be slightly dishonest.