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Honesty is a mental illness
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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In early June, a book by behavioral economics professor at Duke University Dan Ariely, “The (Real) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves,” will be published in the United States. The main thesis is this: only a few people cheat in big ways, but almost everyone cheats in small ways, and the second type of dishonesty is much more harmful, the Wall Street Journal reports, having received excerpts from the book from the author himself.
At the beginning, Dr. Ariely recalls a story told by a student about changing a lock. The locksmith he called turned out to be a philosopher and said that locks on doors are only needed to keep honest people honest. There is one percent of people who will always behave honestly and never steal. Another percent will always behave dishonestly and constantly try to pick your lock and take your TV; locks are unlikely to protect you from inveterate thieves - these, if they really need to, will find a way to get into your house. The purpose of locks, the locksmith said, is to protect you from the 98% of mostly honest people who might be tempted to try to force your door if there were no lock on it.
So what is the nature of dishonesty? Ariely and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to solve as many problems as possible in 5 minutes. For money. The researchers experimented with the size of the reward and came to the conclusion that this factor did not have the expected effect on the outcome of the experiment. Moreover, when assigning the highest price for one solved problem, the number of cheating decreased. Perhaps in such conditions it was more difficult for participants to cheat, while maintaining a sense of their own honesty, Ariely suggests.
Changing the probability of being caught red-handed also does not affect the final results. In order to verify this, the scientists introduced a "blind" leader into the experiment, allowing the subjects to take payment from the common basket according to their results.
In the second part of the experiment, the reward for cleverness was not money, but tokens (which could then be exchanged for money). It turned out that the more indirect the benefit that can be obtained from fraud, the greater the chance that a person will succumb to the temptation to cheat.
A person is also encouraged to lie by the certainty that he is not the only one lying. At a certain stage, a fake "student David" was included in the scenario, who, a minute after the start of the experiment, declared that he had solved all the problems and, winking happily, left with a wad of money. After such impudence, the "performance" of the participants in the experiment, compared to the control group, jumped three times. Like, if he can, why can't I?
Among other factors that increase the tendency to deceive, Ariely cites mental exhaustion, when it is easier for a person to cheat in small ways than to honestly complete a difficult task. And also the understanding that lying will benefit not the deceiver himself, but a certain "team." And a lie for salvation, when a person gets used to "embellishing reality" for the sake of some good (in his opinion) goals.
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