The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves

Sorry I’m late, traffic was terrible.

My GPA is 4.0.

It was good meeting you. Let’s have lunch sometime.

Sure, I’ll start working on that tonight.

Yes, John was with me last night.

I thought I already sent that e-mail out. I am sure I did.

Set C: How likely are these individuals to take the action described?

Steve is the operations manager of a firm that produces pesticides and fertilizers for lawns and gardens. A certain toxic chemical is going to be banned in a year, and for this reason is extremely cheap now. If Steve buys this chemical and produces and distributes his product fast enough, he will be able to make a very nice profit. Please estimate the likelihood that Steve will sell this chemical while it is still legal.

Dale is the operations manager of a firm that produces health foods. One of their organic fruit beverages has 109 calories per serving. Dale knows that people are sensitive to crossing the critical threshold of 100 calories. He could decrease the serving size by 10 percent. The label will then say that each serving has 98 calories, and the fine print will say that each bottle contains 2.2 servings. Please estimate the likelihood that Dale will cut the serving size to avoid crossing the 100-calorie-per-serving threshold.

What were the results? You guessed it. When reflecting on the behavior of people they know (set A), participants in the counterfeit condition judged their acquaintances to be more likely to behave dishonestly than did participants in the authentic condition. They also interpreted the list of common excuses (set B) as more likely to be lies, and judged the actor in the two scenarios (set C) as being more likely to choose the shadier option. In the end, we concluded that counterfeit products not only tend to make us more dishonest; they cause us to view others as less than honest as well.

Fake It Till You Make It

So what can we do with all of these results?

First, let’s think about high-fashion companies, which have been up in arms about counterfeits for years. It may be difficult to sympathize with them; you might think that outside their immediate circle, no one should really care about the “woes” of high-end designers who cater to the wealthy. When tempted to buy a fake Prada bag, you might say to yourself, “Well, designer products are too expensive, and it’s silly to pay for the real thing.” You might say, “I wouldn’t consider buying the real product anyway, so the designer isn’t really losing any money.” Or maybe you would say, “Those fashion companies make so much money that a few people buying fake products won’t really make a difference.” Whatever rationalizations we come up with—and we are all very good at rationalizing our actions so that they are in line with our selfish motives—it’s difficult to find many people who feel that the alarm on the part of high-fashion companies is of grave personal concern.

But our results show that there’s another, more insidious story here. High-fashion companies aren’t the only ones paying a price for counterfeits. Thanks to self-signaling and the what-the-hell effect, a single act of dishonesty can change a person’s behavior from that point onward. What’s more, if it’s an act of dishonesty that comes with a built-in reminder (think about fake sunglasses with a big “Gucci” stamped on the side), the downstream influence could be long-lived and substantial. Ultimately, this means that we all pay a price for counterfeits in terms of moral currency; “faking it” changes our behavior, our self-image, and the way we view others around us.^*

Consider, for example, the fact that academic diplomas hang in many executive suites around the world and decorate even more resumes. A few years ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on executives who misrepresent their academic credentials, pointing to top moguls such as Kenneth Keiser, who at the time was the president and COO of PepsiAmericas, Inc. Though Keiser had attended Michigan State University, he never graduated; still, for a long time, he signed off on papers that claimed he had a BA from Michigan State¹ (of course, it is possible that this was just a misunderstanding).

Or consider the case of Marilee Jones, who coauthored a popular guidebook called Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond, in which, among other things, she advocated “being yourself” in order to be successful in college admissions and job searches. She was MIT’s popular dean of admissions, and for twenty-five years, by all accounts, she did her job very well. There was just one problem: she had added several fictitious degrees to her resume to land that job in the first place. It was an act of cheating, pure and simple. The irony of her fall from grace was not lost on Jones, who apologized for not “having the courage” to correct the “mistakes” on her fake resume at any point during her employment. When an extremely popular advocate of “being yourself” is toppled by false credentials, what are the rest of us to think?

If you think about this type of cheating in the context of the “what-the-hell” effect, it might be that fake academic credentials often start innocently enough, perhaps along the lines of “fake it till you make it,” but once one such act has been established, it can bring about a looser moral standard and a higher tendency to cheat elsewhere. For example, if an executive holding a fake graduate degree puts constant reminders of his fake degree on his letterhead, business cards, resume, and website, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that he could also start cheating on expense reports, misrepresenting billable hours, or misusing corporate funds. After all, given the what-the-hell effect, it is possible that one initial act of cheating could increase the executive’s general level of self-signaled dishonesty, increasing his fudge factor, which would give rise to further fraud.

THE BOTTOM LINE is that we should not view a single act of dishonesty as just one petty act. We tend to forgive people for their first offense with the idea that it is just the first time and everyone makes mistakes. And although this may be true, we should also realize that the first act of dishonesty might be particularly important in shaping the way a person looks at himself and his actions from that point on—and because of that, the first dishonest act is the most important one to prevent. That is why it is important to cut down on the number of seemingly innocuous singular acts of dishonesty. If we do, society might become more honest and less corrupt over time (for more on this, see chapter 8, “Cheating as an Infection”).

(DON’T) STEAL THIS BOOK

Finally, no discussion of designer counterfeits could be complete without mentioning their cousin, illegal downloading. (Imagine experiments similar to the ones on fake sunglasses but using illegally downloaded music or movies.) Allow me to share a story about a time when I learned something interesting about illegal downloads. In this particular case, I was the victim. A few months after Predictably Irrational was published, I received the following e-mail:

Dear Mr. Ariely,

I just finished listening to the illegally downloaded version of your audio book this morning, and I wanted to tell you how much I appreciated it.

I am a 30-year-old African American male from the inner city of Chicago, and for the last