They gave 30,000 people a math test, to make it as culturally universal as possible. (THEY DOCTORED A SHREDDER.) What was it… 12 people cheated a LOT and 18,000 cheated a little. Whether this might be a first quantification of blue collar versus white collar crime, was mentioned. These cheatin’ tests were run in many countries around the world, but the results percentages stayed the same. Ariely’s group tried various variables to find out what motivated or enabled honest people to cheat (since apparently we’re all honest and we all cheat). They found the enabling factor was rationalization. We also tend to cheat to help other people–we like working with others.

An interesting effort was made to quantify who was more dishonest: Congressional aides in DC or bankers on Wall St. FWIW, the bankers cheated more. The Congressanimals were just aides, though, Ariely pointed out. I’d like to see more of this research.

A useful finding from this book, or at least it seemed new to me in my Alzheimer’s, was that asking people to think about something “ethical” before carrying out an action reduced their cheating during that action. Even reminding them of an honor code they had never signed up for. Documents tend to have an affirmation of accuracy at the end–when you’ve already misrepresented the numbers! If you swore and affirmed accuracy as the preface, it would apparently be more effective. Ariely seemed to make use of this at the start of his talk when he announced he would be answering audience questions and there were extra points for good questions.

Oh, has that man analyzed the motivations at play in an author’s signing line. I might prefer not to know what he knows about it. He is also very kind to the developmentally disabled and to children; it was a pleasure seeing him give advice to a young girl who was interested in economics! *sniff*

I stress ‘some’ though, don’t want to tar everyone with the same brush, even if it might be more accurate to say ‘most’.

Most catholics disagree with their church on contraceptives. Most christians disagree with the bible on stoning and a long list of other things.

There’s a very good Ted talk about exactly this topic, I’m too busy and important to go fish it out. But I recommend you go and have a quick look for it, was insightful.

Er, based strictly on precedent, what exactly is the real, objective, probability of being caught and spend any amount of time in prison if you do inside trading?

Because I’d say it is incredibly close to zero… which, in my view, supports the thesis that that kind of dishonesty *is* actually driven by a cost-benefit analysis.

I mean, the correlation is incredibly close to one, isn’t it?

I see the same thought of reason when believers in some religion (ok… Christians mainly, for some reason) go on and on about that if one is an atheist, what keeps you from murdering someone (meaning, they have Big Daddy in the sky keeping an eye on them to keep them moral, so an atheist having none apparently can freely go on a murderous rampage). All I can say to them is… never lose faith!

Dunno… I don’t need a Big Brother (either society or Sky Daddy) to not do what is wrong, and I would guess that’s the same for most as I would guess most grow up to not need a proxy for their parents. So I’m always baffled when I see people confess that only [insert watcher] is keeping them from doing [insert crime].

I worked at an office where a receptionist/secretary stole several thousand dollars over a couple of years.  It started out with just rounding up petty cash receipts to buy herself a small treat, then, when she got away with that, stealing larger and larger amounts.
She KNEW she would eventually be caught, and that the risk of a criminal record or at least a really bad reference would blight her income chances in the future, to a far greater extent than the money she stole.

But each step was a small one, and the cost of exposure remained the same whether she stopped now or stole more money, so why not go on?

The more years you are a patient with one particular dentist the costlier their solutions will be. Ariely’s lie backed this up but so did the actual data.

Is it ironic that he is now writing about lying and cheating? No, it is just fitting.

It does quite succinctly explain why our current justice system simply doesn’t work.