the honest truth about dishonesty_ how w - dan ariely

[...]... half, we moved the statement and signature line to the top In all other respects, the two forms were identical We mailed the forms to twenty thousand customers and waited a while, and when we got the forms back we were ready to compare the amount of driving reported on the two types of forms What did we find? When we estimated the amount of driving that took place over the last year, those who signed the. .. token experiment we discussed earlier (see chapter 2, “Fun with the Fudge Factor”), we would expect to have the lowest level of cheating when the movement was carried out explicitly with one’s hand; we would see higher levels of cheating when the movement was accomplished with a shoe; and we would see the highest level of dishonesty when the distance was greatest and the movement was achieved via an... be lower (I can think of many) might be tempted to lie and underreport the actual number of miles they drove The insurance company gave us twenty thousand forms, and we used them to test our sign-at -the- top versus the sign-at -the- bottom idea We kept half of the forms with the “I promise that the information I am providing is true” statement and signature line on the bottom of the page For the other... and be on your way If you were a participant in the shredder condition, what would you do? Would you cheat? And if so, by how much? With the results for both of these conditions, we could compare the performance in the control condition, in which cheating was impossible, to the reported performance in the shredder condition, in which cheating was possible If the scores were the same, we would conclude... from their immersion in the honor code, more honest when they completed the matrix task? Sadly, they were not When the Princeton students were asked to sign the honor code, they did not cheat at all (but neither did the MIT or Yale students) However, when they were not asked to sign the honor code, they cheated just as much as their counterparts at MIT and Yale It seems that the crash course, the propaganda... Berkeley She told me about a problem she’d had in her house and how a little ethical reminder helped her solve it She was living near campus with several other people—none of whom knew one another When the cleaning people came each weekend, they left several rolls of toilet paper in each of the two bathrooms However, by Monday all the toilet paper would be gone It was a classic tragedy-of -the- commons situation:... out two kilos (about 4.5 pounds) of tomatoes for them while they went on another errand Once they made their request, they left for about ten minutes, returned to pick up their tomatoes, paid, and left From there they took the tomatoes to another vendor at the far end of the market who had agreed to judge the quality of the tomatoes from each seller By comparing the quality of the tomatoes that were... played religious music when people were on hold? And of course, what if people had to sign at the top of the claim form or even next to each reported item? As is the way with such large companies, the people I met with took the ideas to their lawyers We waited six months and then finally heard from the lawyers—who said that they were not willing to let us try any of these approaches A few days later, my... would increase as the amount of money went up Essentially, their intuitive theory was the same as the premise of the SMORC But they were wrong It turned out that when we looked at the magnitude of cheating, our participants added two questions to their scores on average, regardless of the amount of money they could make per question In fact, the amount of cheating was slightly lower when we promised our... miles, while those who signed at the end of the form appeared to have driven on average 23,700 miles—a difference of about 2,400 miles Now, we don’t know how much those who signed at the top really drove, so we don’t know if they were perfectly honest but we do know that they cheated to a much lesser degree It is also interesting to note that this magnitude of decreased cheating (which was about 15 . Redrawing the lines until we see what we want … When irritation spurs us onward … How thinking creatively can get us into trouble. Chapter 8 Cheating as an Infection: How We Catch the Dishonesty. over. In what follows we will explore the forces that spur us to cheat, and we’ll take a closer look at what keeps us honest. We will discuss what makes dishonesty rear its ugly head and how we cheat. between truth and cheating. Chapter 2 Fun with the Fudge Factor Why some things are easier to steal than others … How companies pave the way for dishonesty … Token dishonesty … How pledges,