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

Finally, your third and final task is a multiple-choice general-knowledge quiz comprised of fifty questions of varying difficulty and subject matter. The questions include a variety of trivia such as “How far can a kangaroo jump?” (25 to 40 feet) and “What is the capital of Italy?” (Rome). For each correct answer, you receive 10 cents, for a maximum payout of $5. In the instructions for this last test, we ask that you circle your answers on the question sheet before later transferring them to a bubble sheet.

When you reach the end of this quiz, you put down your pencil. Suddenly the experimenter pipes up, “Oh, my gosh! I goofed! I mistakenly photocopied bubble sheets that are already marked with the correct answers. I’m so sorry. Would you mind using one of these premarked bubble sheets? I’ll try to erase all the marks so that they will not show very clearly. Okay?” Of course you agree.

Next the experimenter asks you to copy your answers from the quiz to the premarked bubble sheet, shred the test sheets with your original answers, and only then submit the premarked bubble sheet with your answers in order to collect your payment. Obviously, as you transfer your answers you realize that you can cheat: instead of transferring your own answers to the bubble sheets, you can just fill in the premarked answers and take more money. (“I knew all along that the capital of Switzerland is Bern. I just chose Zurich without thinking about it.”)

To sum things up, you’ve taken part in three tasks in which you can earn up to $20 to put toward your next meal, beer, or textbook. But how much you actually walk away with depends on your smarts and test-taking chops, as well as your moral compass. Would you cheat? And if so, do you think your cheating has anything to do with how smart you are? Does it have anything to do with how creative you are?

Here’s what we found: as in the first experiment, the individuals who were more creative also had higher levels of dishonesty. Intelligence, however, wasn’t correlated to any degree with dishonesty. This means that those who cheated more on each of the three tasks (matrices, dots, and general knowledge) had on average higher creativity scores compared to noncheaters, but their intelligence scores were not very different.

We also studied the scores of the extreme cheaters, the participants who cheated almost to the max. In each of our measures of creativity, they had higher scores than those who cheated to a lower degree. Once again, their intelligence scores were no different.

Stretching the Fudge Factor: The Case for Revenge

Creativity is clearly an important means by which we enable our own cheating, but it’s certainly not the only one. In an earlier book (The Upside of Irrationality) I described an experiment designed to measure what happens when people are upset by bad service. Briefly, Ayelet Gneezy (a professor at the University of California, San Diego) and I hired a young actor named Daniel to run some experiments for us in local coffee shops. Daniel asked coffee shop patrons to participate in a five-minute task in return for $5. When they agreed, he handed them ten sheets of paper covered with random letters and asked them to find as many identical adjacent letters as they could and circle them with a pencil. After they finished, he returned to their table, collected their sheets, handed them a small stack of bills, and told them, “Here is your $5, please count the money, sign the receipt, and leave it on the table. I’ll be back later to collect it.” Then he left to look for another participant. The key was that he gave them $9 rather than $5, and the question was how many of the participants would return the extra cash.

This was the no-annoyance condition. Another set of customers—those in the annoyance condition— experienced a slightly different Daniel. In the midst of explaining the task, he pretended that his cell phone was vibrating. He reached into his pocket, took out the phone, and said, “Hi, Mike. What’s up?” After a short pause, he would enthusiastically say, “Perfect, pizza tonight at eight thirty. My place or yours?” Then he would end his call with “Later.” The whole fake conversation took about twelve seconds.

After Daniel slipped the cell phone back into his pocket, he made no reference to the disruption and simply continued describing the task. From that point on, everything was the same as in the no-annoyance condition.

We wanted to see if the customers who had been so rudely ignored would keep the extra money as an act of revenge against Daniel. Turns out they did. In the no-annoyance condition 45 percent of people returned the extra money, but only 14 percent of those who were annoyed did so. Although we found it pretty sad that more than half the people in the no-annoyance condition cheated, it was pretty disturbing to find that the twelve-second interruption provoked people in the annoyance condition to cheat much, much more.

In terms of dishonesty, I think that these results suggest that once something or someone irritates us, it becomes easier for us to justify our immoral behavior. Our dishonesty becomes retribution, a compensatory act against whatever got our goat in the first place. We tell ourselves that we’re not doing anything wrong, we are only getting even. We might even take this rationalization a step further and tell ourselves that we are simply restoring karma and balance to the world. Good for us, we’re crusading for justice!

MY FRIEND AND New York Times technology columnist David Pogue captured some of the annoyance we feel toward customer service—and the desire for revenge that comes with it. Anyone who knows David would tell you that he is the kind of person who would gladly help anyone in need, so the idea that he would go out of his way to hurt anyone is rather surprising—but when we feel hurt, there is hardly a limit to the extent to which we can reframe our moral code. And David, as you’ll see in a moment, is a highly creative individual. Here is David’s song (please sing along to the melody of “The Sounds of Silence”):

Hello voice mail, my old friend

I’ve called for tech support again

I ignored my boss’s warning

I called on a Monday morning

Now it’s evening and my dinner

First grew cold and then grew mold …

I’m still on hold!

I’m listening to the sounds of silence.

You don’t seem to understand.

I think your phone lines are unmanned.

I punched every touchtone I was told,

But I’ve still spent 18 hours on hold.

It’s not enough your program crashed my Mac