Dan Ariely on the Psychology of Cheating
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it’s OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we’re predictably irrational — and can be influenced in ways we can’t grasp.
Related Situationist posts:
Francesca Gino on the Situation of Being Sidetracked
The Cheater’s Situation
The Creative Situation of Cheating
The Situation of Cheating
The Interior Situation of Honesty (and Dishonesty)
The Situation of Lying
The Facial Obviousness of Lying
Cheating Doesn’t Pay . . . So Why So Much of it?
Dan Ariely, a Situati...
Source: The Situationist - June 6, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Morality Social Psychology Video Source Type: blogs
Francesca Gino on the Situation of Being Sidetracked
Excerpts from an interview of Situationist friend Francesca Gino by Gareth Cook from Scientific American:
There is an area of self-help devoted to advice on completing tasks, and the focus is generally on the positive: How to get organized, how to choose good goals, how to stay motivated, etc. Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, also wants to help you achieve your goals, but she begins with the negative. What are the psychological forces that send people off the rails? In Sidetracked, she argues that to succeed we first need to know our enemy, the often-unconscious factors that stop us from ...
Source: The Situationist - June 3, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Choice Myth Emotions Marketing Positive Psychology Public Policy Source Type: blogs
The Relational Situation of Whistle-Blowing and Ethical Behavior
Earlier this week, NPR broadcast an excellent (situationist) story titled “Why Do Whistle-Blowers Become Whistle-Blowers?” by David Greene and Shankar Vedantam. In it, they discussed recent research by David Mayer and his co-authors (Mayer, D. M., Nurmohamed, S., Treviño, L. K., Shapiro, D. L., & Schminke, M. 2013. Encouraging employees to report unethical conduct internally: It takes a village. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 121: 89-103).
Listen to their story by clicking here.
Related Situationist posts:
The Situation of Morality
Social Status Loss Situations Drive Ethicalit...
Source: The Situationist - May 30, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Morality Social Psychology Source Type: blogs
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 ...
Source: The Situationist - May 28, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Ideology Positive Psychology Social Psychology Source Type: blogs
The Cheater’s Situation
From a very good 2011 NYTimes article by Benedict Carey, here are a few excerpts on some of the psychological dynamics behind cheating:
[P]aradoxically, it’s often an obsession with fairness that leads people to begin cutting corners in the first place.
“Cheating is especially easy to justify when you frame situations to cast yourself as a victim of some kind of unfairness,” said Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the use of prescription drugs to improve intellectual performance. “Then it becomes a matter of evening the score; you’re not cheating, you’re restor...
Source: The Situationist - May 25, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Conflict Morality Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
The Financial Situation of Think Tanks
For The Nation, Ken Silverstein has a revealing article, titled “The Secret Donors Behind the Center for American Progress and Other Think Tanks.” Paying special attention to the Center for American Progress, the article shows how ideas, policies, and people gain credibility, legitimacy, and influence through unseen corporate investments in think tanks. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Nowadays, many Washington think tanks effectively serve as unregistered lobbyists for corporate donors, and companies strategically contribute to them just as they hire a PR or lobby shop or make campaign donations. And unlike lo...
Source: The Situationist - May 23, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Deep Capture Ideology Marketing Politics Public Policy Source Type: blogs
The Situational Benefits of Compassion
Emma Seppala, for The Observer, has an outstanding overview of some of the health consequences and contagiousness of compassion. Here is a portion of her article:
Decades of clinical research has focused and shed light on the psychology of human suffering. That suffering, as unpleasant as it is, often also has a bright side to which research has paid less attention: compassion. Human suffering is often accompanied by beautiful acts of compassion by others wishing to help relieve it. What led 26.5 percent of Americans to volunteer in 2012 (according to statistics from the US Department of Labor)? What propels someone to s...
Source: The Situationist - May 21, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Altruism Distribution Emotions Morality Positive Psychology Source Type: blogs
The Gendered Situation at Harvard Law School – Part III
The Harvard Crimson‘s Dev Patel has an outstanding series of articles last week on gender inequality at Harvard Law School. Here are some excerpts from the third article, titled “Female HLS Graduates Enter a Job Market Dominated by Men” in the series.
The law firm Brune & Richard is an anomaly. In a world where female lawyers represent fewer than 20 percent of partners in private practices, women make up 12 of the 18 lawyers at Brune & Richard.
And for founder Hillary Richard, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1988, that number makes a difference.
“What it presents for female lawyers, par...
Source: The Situationist - May 16, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Distribution Education History Law Source Type: blogs
The Gendered Situation at Harvard Law School – Part II
The Harvard Crimson‘s Dev Patel has an outstanding series of articles last week on gender inequality at Harvard Law School. Here are some excerpts from the second article, titled “In HLS Classes, Women Fall Behind” in the series.
Among the top students in their graduating classes, men and women entering Harvard Law School earn similar undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. But as soon as students step into Wasserstein Hall, a dramatic gender disparity emerges.
Indicators suggest that female students participate less and perform worse than their male counterparts over the course of their three years at the ...
Source: The Situationist - May 12, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Distribution Education History Law Source Type: blogs
The Gendered Situation at Harvard Law School – Part I
The Harvard Crimson‘s Dev Patel has an outstanding series of articles this week on gender inequality at Harvard Law School. Here are some excerpts from the first article, titled “Once Home to Kagan and Warren, HLS Faculty Still Only 20 Percent Female” in the series.
Just 20 percent of U.S. senators are female. Women make up a mere 21.6 percent of the lawyers who serve as general counsels to Fortune 500 companies. Only three of the nine Supreme Court Justices are women.
But these figures are still higher than the proportion of women within the ranks of the Harvard Law School faculty.
At Elizabeth Warren an...
Source: The Situationist - May 8, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Distribution Education History Law Source Type: blogs
The Stereotyped Situation of Dumb Jocks
From Michigan State News:
College coaches who emphasize their players’ academic abilities may be the best defense against the effects of “dumb jock” stereotypes, a Michigan State University study suggests.
Researchers found that student-athletes were significantly more likely to be confident in the classroom if they believed their coaches expected high academic performance, not just good enough grades to be eligible for sports.
“Coaches spend a lot of time with their players, and they can play such an important role to build academic confidence in student-athletes,” said lead author Deborah Feltz, University Dis...
Source: The Situationist - May 4, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Implicit Associations Positive Psychology Situationist Sports Social Psychology Source Type: blogs
The Helpful Crisis in Psychology
From The New Yorker, excerpts from an outstanding article by by Gary Marcus:
According to the headlines, social psychology has had a terrible year—and, at any rate, a bad week. The New York Times Magazine devoted nearly seven thousand words to Diederik Stapel, the Dutch researcher who committed fraud in at least fifty-four scientific papers, while Nature just published a report about another controversy, questioning whether some well-known “social-priming” results from the social psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis are replicable. Dijksterhuis famously found that thinking about a professor before taking an exam improves you...
Source: The Situationist - May 2, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Classic Experiments Social Psychology Source Type: blogs
Nalini Ambady Needs Our Help
Nalini Ambady has very little time to find a bone marrow match, but you can help! Spread the word and visit www.NaliniNeedsYou.com for more information. (Source: The Situationist)
Source: The Situationist - April 29, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Altruism Life Source Type: blogs
Not Your Granparents’ Prejudice
From NPR’s Code Switch (by Shankar Vedantam) a story about Situationist Contributor Mahzarin Banaji and Situationist friend Tony Greenwald.
Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji was once approached by a reporter for an interview. When Banaji heard the name of the magazine the reporter was writing for, she declined the interview: She didn’t think much of the magazine and believed it portrayed research in psychology inaccurately.
But then the reporter said something that made her reconsider, Banaji recalled: “She said, ‘You know, I used to be a student at Yale when you were there, and even though I did...
Source: The Situationist - April 27, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Book Implicit Associations Life Marketing Situationist Contributors Social Psychology Source Type: blogs
Julie Nelson – Today
Dr. Julie Nelson will speak at Harvard Law School today. She is the Department Chair, Professor of Economics, at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Please join us.
Julie Nelson currently conducts research on feminism and economics, with special interests in methodology and in implications for social and environmental policies. She has served as a Research Economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, an Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California-Davis, an Associate Professor of Economics at Brandeis University, a Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard University, a Fellow ...
Source: The Situationist - April 25, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Situationist Staff Tags: Events Source Type: blogs
