What I've Been Reading

The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely. The title and the contents of the book may be hilarious and Dan's talks and his blog posts might also sound funny but this is no laughing matter. His "findings" are anything but funny and if heeded properly will have a profound social consequences for good - one the most important books of this year.

• Of course, I am not arguing that people are entirely uninfluenced by the likelihood of being caught— after all, no one is going to steal a car when a policeman is standing nearby— but the results show that getting caught does not have as great an influence on as we tend to expect, and it certainly did not play a role in our experiments.
• We cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self-image as reasonably honest individuals.
• In short, I believe that all of us continuously try to identify the line where we can benefit from dishonesty without damaging our own self-image. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere.” The question is: where is the line?
• As it turns out, people are more apt to be dishonest in the presence of nonmonetary objects— such as pencils and tokens— than actual money. From all the research I have done over the years, the idea that worries me the most is that the more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips. If being just one step removed from money can increase cheating to such a degree, just imagine what can happen as we become an increasingly cashless society. Could it be that stealing a credit card number is much less difficult from a moral perspective than stealing cash from someone’s wallet?
• Wisdom of a Locksmith -  Locks are on doors only to keep honest people honest. “One percent of people will always be honest and never steal,” the locksmith said. “Another one percent will   always be dishonest and always try to pick your lock and  steal your television. And the rest will be honest as long  as the conditions are right— but if they are tempted enough, they’ll be dishonest too. Locks won’t protect you from the thieves, who can get in your house if they really want to. They will only protect you from the mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock.”
• When we face serious decisions in which we realize that the person giving us advice may be biased (such as a physician) we should spend just a little extra time and energy to seek a second opinion from a party that has no financial stake in the decision at hand.
• If you wear down your willpower, you will have considerably more trouble regulating your desires, and that difficulty can wear down your honesty as well.
• Being human and susceptible to temptation, we all suffer in this regard. When we make complex decisions throughout the day (and most decisions are more complex and taxing than naming the colors of mismatched words), we repeatedly find ourselves in circumstances that create a tug-of-war between impulse and reason. And when it comes to important decisions (health, marriage, and so on), we experience an even stronger struggle. Ironically, simple, everyday attempts to keep our impulses under control weaken our supply of self-control, thus making us more susceptible to temptation.
• The basic idea behind self-signaling is that despite what we tend to think, we don’t have a very clear notion of who we are. We generally believe that we have a privileged view of our own preferences and character, but in reality we don’t know ourselves that well (and definitely not as well as we think we do). Instead, we observe ourselves in the same way we observe and judge the actions of other people— inferring who we are and what we like from our actions. For example, imagine that you see a beggar on the street. Rather than ignoring him or giving him money, you decide to buy him a sandwich. The action in itself does not define who you are, your morality, or your character, but you interpret the deed as evidence of your compassionate and charitable character. Now, armed with this “new” information, you start believing more intensely in your own benevolence. That’s self-signaling at work.
• If someone wears counterfeit products, be careful! Another act of dishonesty may be closer than you expect.
• We should not view a single act of dishonesty as just one petty act. We tend to forgive people for their first offense with the idea that it is just the first time and everyone makes mistakes. And although this may be true, we should also realize that the first act of dishonesty might be particularly important in shaping the way a person looks at himself and his actions from that point on— and because of that, the first dishonest act is the most important one to prevent. That is why it is important to cut down on the number of seemingly innocuous singular acts of dishonesty. If we do, society might become more honest and less corrupt over time.
• There are probably many reasons why people exaggerate their service records. But the frequency of stories about people lying on their résumés, diplomas, and personal histories brings up a few interesting questions: Could it be that when we lie publicly, the recorded lie acts as an achievement marker that “reminds” us of our false achievement and helps cement the fiction into the fabric of our lives? So if a trophy, ribbon, or certificate recognizes something that we never achieved, would the achievement marker help us hold on to false beliefs about our own ability? Would such certificates increase our capacity for self-deception?
• We persist in deceiving ourselves in part to maintain a positive self-image. We gloss over our failures, highlight our successes (even when they’re not entirely our own), and love to blame other people and outside circumstances when our failures are undeniable.
• We may not always know exactly why we do what we do, choose what we choose, or feel what we feel. But the obscurity of our real motivations doesn’t stop us from creating perfectly logical-sounding reasons for our actions, decisions, and feelings. sometimes (perhaps often) we don’t make choices based on our explicit preferences. Instead, we have a gut feeling about what we want, and we go through a process of mental gymnastics, applying all kinds of justifications to manipulate the criteria. That way, we can get what we really want, but at the same time keep up the appearance— to ourselves and to others— that we are acting in accordance with our rational and well-reasoned preferences.
• The link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not. The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests.
• Cheating is not only but that it is infectious and can be increased by observing the bad behavior of others around us. Specifically, it seems that the social forces around us work in two different ways: When the cheater is part of our social group, we identify with that person and, as a consequence, feel that cheating is more socially acceptable. But when the person cheating is an outsider, it is harder to justify our misbehavior, and we become more ethical out of a desire to distance ourselves from that immoral person and from that other (much less moral) out-group. More generally, these results show how crucial other people are in defining acceptable boundaries for our own behavior, including cheating. As long as we see other members of our own social groups behaving in ways that are outside the acceptable range, it’s likely that we too will recalibrate our internal moral compass and adopt their behavior as a model for our own. And if the member of our in-group happens to be an authority figure— a parent, boss, teacher, or someone else we respect— chances are even higher that we’ll be dragged along.

So what should we do about dishonesty? We recently experienced a tremendous financial crisis, which has provided an excellent opportunity to examine human failure and the role that irrationality plays in our lives and in society at large. In response to this man-made disaster, we’ve taken some steps toward coming to terms with some of our irrational tendencies, and we’ve begun reevaluating our approach to markets accordingly. The temple of rationality has been shaken, and with our improved understanding of irrationality we should be able to rethink and reinvent new kinds of structures that will ultimately help us avoid such crises in the future. If we don’t do this, it will have been a wasted crisis.