Never a year passes that I don’t get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.” Ariely has discussed incentive-caused bias in teacher evaluation before. Related to (6), disclosure does not seem to decrease incentive-caused bias. This reminds me of a quote by Charlie Munger in The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, “I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it.If we take Ariely seriously, the laws against conflicts of interest need to be stronger. He shows how pharma reps are masters of this game–and yet we allow it to continue. In a brilliant chapter called “Blinded by our Motivations,” Ariely discusses how incentives skew our judgment and our moral compass. We underestimate how blinded we can become to incentives.It was a rout: They consistently underestimated their own dishonesty versus others’. We think we’re more honest than everyone else. Ariely showed this pretty conclusively by studying golfers and asking them how much they thought others cheated and how much they thought they cheated themselves.In other words, we need to strengthen our morals just before we’re tempted to cheat, not after. And even more interesting, when Ariely took his findings to the IRS and other organizations who could benefit from being cheated less, they barely let him in the door! The incentives in organizations are interesting. A nudge not to cheat works better before we cheat than after.This ranges from being more willing to cheat to earn tokens exchangeable for real money than to earn actual money, to being more willing to “tap” a golf ball to improve its lie than actually pick it up and move it with our hands. This was an interesting one–it turns out the less “connected” we feel to our dishonesty, the more we’re willing to do it. The more abstracted from the cheating we are, the more we cheat.In Ariely’s experience, the cheating stayed steady: A little bit of stretching every time. Increasing the cheating reward or moderately altering the risk of being caught didn’t affect the outcomes much.People generally did not grab all they could, but only as much as they could justify psychologically. In other experiments, the outcome was the same. Nearly every time, he found evidence of a standard level of cheating. Ariely and his co-researchers ran the same experiment in many different variations, and with many different topics to investigate. Cheating was standard, but only a little.This is a beautiful setup that led him to a lot of interesting conclusions in his years of subsequent research. I also wondered if my friends and I would have behaved similarly if we had been the ones consulting for Enron. I started wondering if the problem of dishonesty goes deeper than just a few bad apples and if this kind of wishful blindness takes place in other companies as well. It was of course, possible that John and everyone else involved with Enron was deeply corrupt, but I began to think that there may have been a different type of dishonest at work–one that relates more to wishful blindness and is practiced by people like John, you, and me. It’s a how-to guide on our own dishonesty.Īriely was led down that path because of a friend of his who had worked with Enron: Those discussions are what make the book eminently practical, and not just a meditation on cheating. In The Honest Truth, Ariely doesn’t just explore where cheating comes from but he digs into which situations make us more likely to cheat than others. We’ve mentioned his demonstrations of pluralistic ignorance here before. His books, which include Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, are not filled with fluff. Let’s get in deep.ĭan is both an astute researcher and a good writer he knows how to get to the point, and his points matter. In fact, this is one of the most useful books I have ever come across, and my copy is now marked, flagged, and underlined. I read the book back closer to when it was released, and I recently revisited it to see how it held up to my initial impressions. Three years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychology and behavioral economics professor at Duke, put out a book called The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially Ourselves. Learning why we cheat can help us avoid incentivizing it. There are many things that make us less honest, like feeling disconnected from the consequences and when our willpower is depleted. We all like to think of ourselves as honest, but there are inevitably certain situations in which we’re more likely to cheat.
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