Dan Ariely Interviewed about the Situation of Cheating

For Time, Gary Belsky recently interviewed Dan Ariely about Ariely’s 2012 book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.  In the interview, Ariely discusses seven lessons about dishonesty.  Here are some excerpts. 1. Most of us are 98-percenters. “A student told me a story about a locksmith he met when he locked himself out of the house. This student was amazed at how easily the locksmith picked his lock, but the locksmith explained that locks were really there to keep honest people from stealing. His view was that 1% of people would never steal, another 1% would always try to steal, and the rest of us are honest as long as we’re not easily tempted. Locks remove temptation for most people. And that’s good, because in our research over many years, we’ve found that everybody has the capacity to be dishonest and almost everybody is at some point or another.” 2. We’ll happily cheat … until it hurts. “The Simple Model of Rational Crime suggests that the greater the reward, the greater the likelihood that people will cheat. But we’ve found that for most of us, the biggest driver of dishonesty is the ability to rationalize our actions so that we don’t lose the sense of ourselves as good people. In one of our matrix experiments [a puzzle-solving exercise Ariely uses in his work to measure dishonesty], the level of cheating didn’t change as the reward for cheating rose. In fact, the highest payout resulted in a little less cheating, probably because the amoun...
Source: The Situationist - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Tags: Ideology Positive Psychology Social Psychology Source Type: blogs