Does everyone lie? (and what situations make us lie more?)

Over the last decade, author and professor Dan Ariely has run a series of experiments designed to examine the roots and causes of dishonesty, and his ready conclusion is that, under the right circumstances, virtually everyone lies.  For his part, Ariely, author of “The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty,” is rather concerned about this cultural phenomenon.

Ariely maintains that, when it comes to honesty, people are constantly weighing two opposing forces – “we want to benefit from cheating” (i.e., more money) “vs. we want to being perceived as an honest, honorable person.”  Ariely insists that “it’s the small-scale mass cheating, and not the high profile cases,” (think Madoff, Enron) “that is most corrosive to society.”

It’s important, of course, to clarify what we mean by lying. At times, we lie to gain advantage (so often, money is the driver, as we finagle our expense report, insurance claim, taxes or resumes). But Ariely isn’t concerned about the white lie, he’s worried that we’re spending too much time guarding against the Madoffs, and too little time looking in the mirror.

So what would Ariely have us do? 

As a first step, he would probably have us sign our tax forms at the top instead of the bottom, pledging that the data we are about to enter is correct, honest and accurate. Currently, of course, we sign our tax forms, and other similar documents, at the bottom, after we have done the deed. And Ariely maintains that fines and enforcement are not effective tools.  He explains: “[Fines and enforcement are] “probably going to be of little consequence when it comes up against the brute psychological force of ‘I'm only fudging a little’ or ‘Everyone does it’ or ‘It's for a greater good.’”

What Ariely found was that when people were prepped to be honest (that is, sign first, not last), they were more honest.  Here’s how he described one experiment:

             “. . . my colleagues and I ran an experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles. We took a group of 450 participants, split them into two groups and set them loose on our usual matrix task.* We asked half of them to recall the Ten Commandments and the other half to recall 10 books that they had read in high school. Among the group who recalled the 10 books, we saw the typical widespread but moderate cheating. But in the group that was asked to recall the Ten Commandments, we observed no cheating whatsoever. We reran the experiment, reminding students of their schools' honor codes instead of the Ten Commandments, and we got the same result. We even reran the experiment on a group of self-declared atheists, asking them to swear on a Bible, and got the same no-cheating results yet again.

             “This experiment has obvious implications for the real world. While ethics lectures and training seem to have little to no effect on people, reminders of morality—right at the point where people are making a decision—appear to have an outsize effect on behavior.”

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* The Matrix Test – To examine how honest people are, Ariely and his colleagues used what is called the Matrix Test, a three by four grid with numbers in each square.  Participants are asked to, as quickly as they can, find numbers in the grid that add up to ten, and participants are rewarded (with cash) based on their accuracy and speed.  In their experiments, Ariely and his colleagues, kept changing the conditions under which participants solved the Matrix Test in order to isolate which elements influence cheating the most (for example, when a person saw someone else cheating, they were far more likely to cheat themselves; when a person knew they were helping teammates, that too increased the level of cheating).