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

token experiment, 33–34

Tolkien, J. R. R., 223

Tour de France, 155

tragedy-of-the-commons situations, 40–41

travel reimbursements, 46, 47

Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 253–54

Turkey, cheating in, 242

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 39–40

University of Newcastle, 224

University of Pittsburgh, 204–7

University of Waterloo, Canada, 155

Upside of Irrationality, The (Ariely), 177

U.S. Open (1925), 56

vending machine study, 194–95

veterans, exaggerated service records and, 152–53

Wall Street Journal, 135

Wang, Shirley, 241–42

Warner Bros., 150

watching or monitoring, as disincentive to cheating, 223–25, 227–28, 234–35

Watkins, Sherron, 215

Weiss, Dan, 6–7

what-the-hell effect, 127–31

combating moral deterioration of, 140

dieting and, 127, 130

fake academic credentials and, 136

fake products and, 127–31, 135

honesty threshold and, 130–31

resetting rituals and, 249, 250–53

white lies, 159–61

white matter, in brain, 170

Wilde, Oscar, 28

willpower, see temptation, resisting of

Wilson, Duff, 82

Wilson, James, 214–15

Wilson, Wim, 163–64

wishful blindness, 2

work hours, viewing decisions in terms of, 86n

workplace, stealing at, 31, 33, 193

WorldCom, 13, 215

Yale, honor code experiment at, 41–42

Yang, Yaling, 168–70

Thanks

I find writing about academic research to be fulfilling and stimulating, but the pleasure that I get day in and day out comes from working jointly with amazing researchers/friends—coming up with ideas, designing experiments, finding out what works and doesn’t work, and figuring out what the results mean. The research described here is largely a product of my collaborators’ ingenuity and efforts (see the following biographies of my outstanding colleagues), and I am grateful that we have been able to travel together in the landscape of dishonesty and together learn a bit about this important and fascinating topic.

In addition, I am also thankful to social scientists at large. The world of social science is an exciting place in which new ideas are constantly generated, data collected, and theories revised (some more than others). Every day I learn new things from my fellow researchers and am reminded of how much I don’t know (for a partial list of references and additional readings, see the end of this book).

This is my third book, and by now one might expect that I would know what I am doing. But the reality is that I