WGBH Radio; The Callie Crossley Show

I'm callin Crossley This is the Cali crossover show. We're talking about what makes us live and what keeps us honest. Yahoo executive forced to resign for padding his resume closer to home a New Hampshire legislator has stepped down for fudging his way into a law degree. It's not just politicians and high rolling CEOs who spin the truth. We're all guilty from cheating on diets to cheating on the ones we love. In his new book Dan Ariely looks at our capacity for honesty and dishonesty. He finds that dishonesty can be contagious. It can also be short circuited a minor white lie might not seem like a big deal. But Ariely says we need to discourage these daily dips into dishonesty. This bad behavior affects us all. And these seemingly small transgressions can grease the psychological skids to larger ones. Up next keeping us honest. First the news. From NPR News in Washington I'm Lakshmi saying the U.N.

Secretary General Ban Ki moon is calling reports of a new massacre in Syria. Shocking and sickening as we hear from NPR's Michele Kelemen international diplomats are struggling to avert a civil war in that country Banki Moon told the U.N. General Assembly that U.N. monitors trying to reach the scene of a reported massacre came under fire. The international envoy for Syria Kofi Annan says his heart goes out to the tens of civilians killed in the village near Hama. Those responsible for perpetrating these crimes must be held to account. We cannot allow mosque killing to become part of everyday reality in Syria. Annan has been trying to rally countries to unite behind his peace plan for Syria though he says the Syrian government hasn't complied with any of the six points in the plan. Michele Kelemen NPR News Washington. Another big worry for the global community is Iran the U.S. is demanding concrete steps from Tehran in the next round of nuclear talks this month.

State Secretary Hillary Clinton says one of the main concerns is Iran's 20 percent enriched uranium which the West worries has brought the Islamic Republic closer to developing a weapon. The U.S. and five other nations will negotiate with an Iranian delegation in Moscow June 18th through the 19th. The Fed is ready to buffer the U.S. economy if financial trouble mounts that promise today by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who's been monitoring the threats Europe's debt crisis poses to the U.S. his recovery. But Bernanke he told Congress today there's still plenty of reason to be optimistic. Well the most reading recent readings have been mixed consumer sentiment is nonetheless up noticeably from its levels late last year and despite economic difficulties in Europe the demand for U.S. exports has held up as well. The U.S. business sector is profitable and has become more competitive in international markets. Meanwhile the U.S. is struggling to figure out how to keep more people from defaulting on their loans especially students. NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports the Obama administration is trying

to turn the tide with a federal program that offers college graduates more help in paying back their government loans. There are 36 million students today who have borrowed from the government to pay for college. Fewer than 700000 are enrolled in the U.S. Education Department's income based repayment plan. So the Obama administration is making it easier for students to sign up beginning this September borrowers will be able to electronically transfer their personally income from the IRS directly to their income based repayment account powers in the program right now. Pay no more than 15 percent of their discretionary income towards their loan debt after 2014. They'll pay only 10 percent reducing their monthly payments by hundreds of dollars. Kalus Hatch's NPR News. Dow is up 97 points. This is NPR. Good afternoon from the WGBH radio newsroom in Boston I'm Christina Quinn with some local stories we're following. Thank you. Oh. Well it was a busy day of protests in downtown Boston today as advocates rallied outside a hearing of the Nuclear

Regulatory Commission or NRC to protest the relicensing of the Pilgrim nuclear plant. Meanwhile Pilgrim is embroiled in a labor dispute that has resulted in a lockout. Unionized plant workers are also at the rally to protest Entergy management. Kelly OBRIEN a locked down engineer at Pilgrim nuclear says the replacement workers aren't qualified to run the plant potentially compromising public safety with espionage. Everyone you see here oh these are all the different workers on the plant we got licensed reactor operators would normally be there running the plant as far as engineers like myself or maintenance guys would be in a fix and we're working on maintaining and testing the plant. So we're all blocked out and the one we place is a bunch of. Replacement workers. Entergy has said the plant implemented an emergency staffing plan because the union reserve the right to walk off the job at any time. An angry Massachusetts judge has ordered the abrupt end of a murder trial after learning that two possible witnesses were among four people stabbed near the Boston courthouse. Suffolk Superior Court Judge Linda Geils said today she had no choice but to end the

trial and dismissed the seated jurors because two of the people stabbed Wednesday suffered injuries so serious they may not be able to testify says she was concerned that the stabbings could set a precedent by sending the signal that to end a trial all you have to do is attack a participant. Could team Foreman enter all Raney are charged with fatally shooting to Nneka Jones in May 2010. They maintain their innocence. The Rhode Island House has approved a bill that would require the use of an ignition lock for people convicted of driving under the influence or refusing a sobriety test. The bill making ignition interlock mandatory for repeated offenders and those who repeatedly refuse a chemical test passed yesterday. We have mostly cloudy skies in Boston right now with a temperature of 63 degrees. You're listening to WGBH Boston Public Radio the time is 1 0 6. Good afternoon I'm Kelly Crossley. Today we're talking about honesty dishonesty cheating and lying. Just remember it's not a lie. If you

believe. That of course was George stanza from Seinfeld one of TV's most prolific liars here with me to talk about why we lie and how we lie is behavioral economist Dan Ariely. His new book is The Honest Truth About Dishonesty How we lie to everyone especially ourselves. Dan Ariely thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Good to be back you. I think when it comes to basic morality I want to see ourselves in black and white mostly mostly white right up to the good. But what your book makes it clear that when it comes to being dis honest it's not such a bright dividing line. So the thing is that we have two motivations what we find is that people are on one hand we want to look at ourself as allness two wonderful caring people that on one hand on the other hand we want to benefit from cheating. And you could say how could you do that right how could you both view yourself as honest and be dishonest the same time it turns out you can

as long as you have flexible cognitive skills which we all do and as long as you teach just a little bit you can get both of them. So as long as we cheat just a little bit we can benefit from cheating at the same time keep viewing ourself as all this people and you can just ask yourself right in the last week right how many times you think you've lied. You don't have to say it. You know notice the silence. You know we like many times a day. And when you ask people how on this do you think you are perfect your honest wonderful person. And this is exactly the kind of conundrum that I wanted to explore in this research. But it's also important practically right because if you think about it what we have the model in our minds that is very much like the rational model of crime. We think that the reason people lie is because of cost benefit analysis that people think what do I stand to gain what do I stand to lose what's the chance of being called how much I get in prison. Is it worth it or not. And because the debts the more let's what we think we are that's also how we tried to

protect ourselves as individuals but also as companies and also in policy and we put a tremendous amount of effort to try and create that kind of crime that is basically about the cost benefit analysis. But we almost don't pay any attention to the small cheating that we can all do day than they are to many times and the reality is that there's much more Konami devastation coming from the second part that we don't really pay attention to. Before I move on to some of the more common themes that you articulate in your book about how we act I was curious because you are a behavioral economist and you've done other books looking at different aspects of our behavior. Was there something that evidenced itself in those experiments and studies that made you say you know I really need to pay attention to this not just the United States. So it's every time I do research I do it about one particular topic and something that makes me curious about that and this honesty actually for me came about not because of a particular study it came about because of Enron. So when Enron came

and bowed I basically asked the question what is a better description of Enron that there were three bad apples in the company. And they kind of did everything. Or is it a better description to think that there's a whole barrel of slightly bad apples with nobody particularly being evil and this was an important question from the perspective of how do you prevent crime. If you think it's all about bad apples just trying not to hire bad apples or try to fire them quickly. But if you think that we can all do that then maybe we should think very carefully about it. And then the financial crisis hit. And again the question was What is the financial crisis or should we think about people in Wall Street as evil as people who've kind of planned and plotted to take money away from us and teach in a business school I used to teach here at MIT I moved to Duke a few years ago and I had some of my students who called me up my ex students who became traders in Wall Street and some of them I know and love and it's really hard to think of them as evil.

But not only that they lost their we took entire fortune as well. I think they had their own money in in those terrible stocks as well. So all of a sudden it was harder to basically think that it's just about evil in the world and maybe we should look more carefully in small details. And finally you know if you look at behavioral economics. I think it's a field that is saying that small details matter. Right that you look at how if form is being created in terms of opt in opt out of what the default. That will make a big effect whether we're being served a bigger meal or a smaller meal will affect how much we eat I mean it's a basically a discipline that looks at the small small effects and how they're going to have consequently and across many people in many situations big effects and behavior. So all of that kind of drew me to that perspective on irrationality and then this honesty and I tell you it's been really interesting to do these experiments.

Yeah. I can only imagine. Well a couple of big things that you point out. First of all that dishonesty is contagious I just found this fascinating. So here I am I'm I think I'm pretty honest but if I'm hanging around some people who are doing stuff I I'll catch it. Yes. So so first of all let me kind of describe the basic paradigm the basic paradigm we use for measuring cheating because first of all you want to measure cheating and or to try and see what makes it bigger and smaller. So to measure cheating we take a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems problems that anybody could solve if they had enough time and we say to people you have five minutes solve as many as you can will give you a dollar per question. People start working on those as fast as they can. At the end of the five minutes we say stop put your pencil down in count how many questions you got correctly people count how many question they got correctly and then say please go to the back of the room and shred the piece of paper and then come back to the front of the room and tell us how many questions you got correctly. People do that on average people

report that they solved six problems we pay them $6 but people don't know when the experiment is that we played with the shredder so the shredder only shred the sides of the page but the main body of the page remains intact and we can jump into the recycling bin and we can find out how many questions people really solved correctly. What do we find. The vast majority of people solve for problems so the vast majority of people saw four and report six and we have very few people who report to solve everything very few big cheaters a ton of little cheaters. So what about social contagion. In one experiment we did two changes the first thing we did was we prepaid people so everybody had an envelope with all the money and we asked them that when they finish counting how many question they got ready to pay themself and leave the remaining money in the envelope. That was the first thing. The second thing is we hired an acting student in the acting student 30 seconds into the experiment raised her hand and said Excuse me Mr. Experimenter I solved everything what do I do know that if you an experiment you're still in problem 1. You know there's no way that this person has solved everything. You know that they are cheating and the experimenter

said if you solve everything you're free to go get up and go and they go. Now imagine you in the room and you see somebody cheating the Regis way. What happens. Lots of people cheat all of a sudden. But there's another interesting twist to this because if lots of more people cheat you can say why is that. One reason could be that people are now realizing there's no cost there's no penalty. Right you sit there in the room you see somebody cheat you say hey there's no cost to this. Another possibility is that it's not about the. But it's about the fact that you think it's more acceptable more socially acceptable. After all you sit with a group of people just like you in the room they're all kind of similar social economic status the same university. Maybe people are viewing it is OK so the test is by the way the experiment we ran it calling it real. Everybody was a Carnegie Mellon student their cheating student was the Carnegie Mellon. Everybody was a calling him a student. In the second condition we dressed him up with University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt. So now when he cheated it was the same in the same way that he portrayed it in this experiment you can get away with it. But

he did not give people the social cue of saying people from your university from your society are doing it. What happened now. Cheating actually went down. So social containment happens. But it's important these people from our social group the people we identify with are going to do that. Now you know you could just think about something like illegal download illegally downloading music. I asked my students about it everybody has in the computers and everybody thinks it's OK because everybody else is doing it right now. That's an extreme case because really everybody is doing it and there's no moral consideration. If I asked my students and I did how many of you would be upset if the New York Times for example published your name and said that you have illegally downloaded music on your computer and nobody feels embarrassed. Right. It's basically became socially accepted. And there's lots of layers like that. Now you can think about it. In other cases what about accounting rules about what about misbehavior to customers or behavior to customers and what do we do in our personal relationship. How do Boston

drivers decide what's OK. What are the rules okay and not okay to drive all of those things are socially constructed and once we see bad behaviors around us we have a tendency to think to basically gravitate toward that. We got to the final problem with that in reality is to think about which examples do you see. Do you see the examples of people who behave well or do you see the examples of people who behave badly. And we have a bias toward seeing people who behave badly the people kind of go extreme out of the norm are much more visible. Not to mention the fact that they're also going to be likely to be in the news they're going to be more salient people going to talk about them. So there is this escalation that can happen over time when we see the behavior of others. And we kind of feel that they'll be finding the new normal the new normal. Well more about that new normal My guest is Dan Ariely. His new book is The Honest Truth About Dishonesty How we lie to everyone and especially ourselves. You can join the conversation at 8 7 7 3 0 1 8 9 seventy 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70. When do you justify

lying. Do you think it compromises your integrity. Call to defend the white lie. Call the stick up for straight up honesty at 8 7 7 3 0 1 0 8 0 9 7 8 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70. You can write to our Facebook page or send me a tweet at. Kelli Crossley this is WGBH Boston Public Radio. From. WGBH programs exist because of you. And Russell's a family gardening tradition for over 135 years with annual perennials herbs and shrubs birdbaths statuary pots plus jewelry gifts and toys. Russell's garden

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for two to the Windy City the Aegean Sea Caribbean or any other JetBlue destination. You might even find yourself with tickets to see the New England. Patriots. Become. A hotel here. For Public Broadcasting. You're a great deal of SingTel. It's easy to do it auctioned on WGBH dot org. If two heads are better than one how about a hundred or a thousand. I'm Karen Miller and this week on innovation have been investigating the power of crowdsourcing. Saturday morning at 7:00 here on eighty nine point seven. Welcome back to the Calla Crossley Show. You want answers. I think on the title you want the truth. Yeah OK Bill the truth. At some classic Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men can you handle the truth can you tell the truth. That's what we're talking about with behavioral economist Dan Ariely. His

new book is The Honest Truth About Dishonesty How we lie to everyone is specially ourselves. You can join us at 8 7 7 3 0 1 8 9 seventy 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70. Do you see the potential for small lies paving the road to bigger more harmful transgressions. How do you negotiate when to lie and when not to lie. We're at 8 7 7 3 0 1 8 0 9 7 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70. You can write to our Facebook page or send us a tweet at Kelly Crossley and we have a tweet Dan Ariely that I want to read to you. This comes from Karen. She says for the weak in spirit I believe lying is contagious. One might view lying as just an embellishment but I think we all lie about something much of the time. On the in quotes rare occasions when I lie I do it to avoid deep inspection into my life by someone else or to protect their feelings. I believe the current culture has accepted lying as a way of life. Spinning a story

years ago most were ashamed to be caught in a lie. These days many have no guilt about lying. It's accepted as part of life just spinning the truth. It's a little bit of what you were saying. Yes I think this is really about rationalization right the moment you could say I'm doing it to help other people really it's not I'm kind of altruistic in that regard this is something useful and you know sometimes there's truth to that. And the real issue is that the moment things become more easily to rationalize we do it to a higher degree. So again if you say it's all about cost benefit analysis it's one model if you say it's about freshness zation long as the question of what gets you to rationalise to a higher degree what's allowed you to do that. So for example in one experiment what we find is that we got people to work with somebody else. So imagine you and I are a team and in one case if I cheat I get the money and if you cheat you get the money. In other condition if I cheat we both share the revenues. What happened now all of a sudden my cheating goes up. Why because it's not just for me. It's for you and I can justify to a higher degree in fact. In one condition we got it such as if you're

the one who benefiting and if you cheat I'm the one who's benefiting and that's when people cheated the most. It's as if people became a little bit like Robin Hood. You know I do these experiments in the lab and these are kind of scientific and we have statistical data but they also try to talk to big cheaters. When I talked to a guy who was involved in the MCI accounting fraud one of the MCI accounting for quite a few of them. And what was interesting about him is that he was in charge of collecting money from all kinds of people who used the services and including people like phone sex in astrology and stuff like that people who would not pay him very very frequently and he was really frustrated about that. And he was trying to cut them off but the company would not let him cut them off because the people who signed them up wanted to keep on signing up and eventually he discovered a way to deal with this which is just to go into the accounting system and take their bill whatever it was a million dollars and replace it with zero. And they won't pay anyway at least the debt was not showing on the books. And. When he was doing it what was amazing is that he was not getting any

personal gain. He was doing it for the company. And actually if you look at many cases there are a lot of people who cheat for another cause all these rogue operators and so on. I mean eventually those people take a huge blame and sometimes go to prison this particular guy went to prison for quite a while for this. But when he was cheating he wasn't cheating for himself. He was cheating for the company he was working for and somehow this was the goal to kind of help out all this is a friendship way. And I think this is basically what the White lies are. We have lots of values as humans not all of them are compatible. I mean sometimes when the values are incompatible we have to decide which one do we adhere to. And sometimes loyalty gets higher and sometimes when you can rationalize it's even easier to do it a step further. All right Seth from Chelmsford Go ahead please you're on the callee Crossley Show eighty nine point seven. Hi hi. I was listening earlier and it said about the. You've got a group of people that are in the room and if one person cheat then

the other people think it's OK to cheat. Yes. I'm not sure if they think it's ok we haven't tested what they think I can just oh they cheat more. Well I think that it's because if they see the other person cheating they see that the other person is going to get ahead and it's going to it's going to get a better score. So if they're going to do it then I can do it because you know I don't want them to win yet. So there's a couple of things to think about here. One is is it is it really about kind of competition and I'm sure there are some cases in which is about competition. But if you remember we had another trial in another condition and in this condition the person was wearing University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt instead of University of Carnegie Mellon switcher. And now when they were cheating they were still getting the most money but now people would not take it is a sign that this was actually something ok to do. So I think this experiment we also have other ones that showed that in this particular case I don't

think it's about competition. In fact we have another experiment in which we took some people and we said to them the average amount of problems that a person solves in five minutes is eight when in fact it's four. So some people would tell it's four and you would expect that if people are compelled by. Winning and getting over other people they would cheat more when we tell them other people are solving it. We did not find anything that experiment. I think people basically have a fudge factor. They say well I solve for I really want a little bit what else can I justify and competition is not always helping them to justify. Now this is not to say that this will not happen this will happen in every case I think there are many cases in which competition is going to further increase the incentive to be dishonest but in our case we don't see that as a main driver. South that answer your question. I guess so. I look at it when you drive on the highway and someone starts

starts speeding and I think we've lost you sense. Well yeah so let's just say start speeding and you did everybody else is encouraged to try. Yeah but I think it's not so much because you want to get somewhere fast. You know so he's going to get to fast in time it's a competition. It's often saying OK this is probably OK to drive five miles. You know lots of people have built how much beyond the speed limit do you think it's OK to drive and not get caught 5 5. Like how you get to that number. You know you drive around you see what other people do you probably never talk to a policeman that says what do you really catch and what I'll give you a practical reason because five is what you can go down too fast if you see the cop can get back to 50. Very fast from 60 but at 70 that's the difference as an area. Let me ask this question is there is specific dis honest action whether it be lying cheating on your wife bilking your company whatever that is the gate way dishonest action to bigger things. Yes that's a very interesting question and we just started looking at this. So

one one thing you can ask is whether being dishonest in one ear is of one area for life necessarily mean that you're going to be dishonest in another area of your life and a good example is to think again about students they all have illegally downloaded material on their computers does it mean that they also do other things that are illegal. But see at this point as you pointed out nobody thinks it's illegal so so. Well they know they would know that you know cheating on a test is illegal. I mean it's wrong so so. So here is what I think so one of the can kind of walk you through this so one of the questions I've often asked what are cultural differences. Everybody who's traveled have seen different types of shooting in different places. And so we've tried that. I grew up in Israel so the first place we checked was Israel to see whether the Israelis cheat more than the Americans by the way what would you predict. I have no prediction. Well what do you do. Politically correct now now I just have no prediction Well the answer they cheated just the same. OK then FRIEND JUST DID YOU KNOW my Italian collaborator said come to italy We'll show you what they tell you and you can do the same as the Americans we

tried China we try Turkey we tried the UK we tried the Canadian The Canadians were always think that they should listen the Americans they don't like you just the same. Now here's the thing when we do our experiments we find it everybody cheats the same but when you travel around you see very different behaviors not to mention the corruption index ride there's lots of things it's very dramatically from country to country. And here is my current understanding of this I think that when we deal with the basic ability of humans to rationalize this kind of 10 15 percent fudge factor that we can all exaggerate a little bit and feel good about it. But what culture does doesn't mean that culture is not important what culture does is it takes a particular domain of life. Infidelity cheating on your taxes dealing with insurance company dealing with customers and basically say that this something is not something we should worry about in the moral sense right in the same way that students don't worry about illegal downloads in the same way the French don't seem to worry about infidelity. Different cultures basically take particular activities It's not morality across the board. And I think that

once you start behaving this way in one particular aspect it helps escort down that particular behavior. I think now we did the one study that showed one kind of cross behavior across across morality. It was kind of an interesting experiment with fashion goods. So there's a phenomena we called it what the hell effect in the what the hell effect is the idea that you start cheating small and you think of yourself as a good person. And at some point you say you know what I'm not. Person I might as well enjoy it. And this is something people know in dieting right you start your morning you're on a diet then you eat a muffin and today I'm not going to might as well have a burger and shake. Maybe I'll start next Monday. So what we did was we took a counterfeit goods. Actually we took real goods we knew we got a designer called Chloe. Yes you sent a sunglasses and we told half the people that they were wearing fake glasses and half the sunglasses have the people they were in the real ones and we ask them to walk around campus for a while and after walking around campus for a while they came

back and then we said before you take off your glasses please do this task and we could measure cheating on the task and what we found was that people were cheating to a higher degree if they were wearing the counterfeit glasses or what they thought was what they thought they thought I was going to test and I think what happened is that once you think of yourself is tainted in some way and you still have residue of that and you know sunglasses kind of remind you when they have the logo and you know it's the people thought it was counterfeit and so on. All of a sudden if you think of yourself as being slightly tainted it's easier to take the next step out the question is do you think of yourself as being tainted in that regard. On the. There's one more thing I I do want to mention is that when we do these cross-cultural studies we usually don't find any differences but we do find one difference. When we do these studies we either go to universities and to students or we go to bars and we go to bars we assume that people go to bars in every place or kind of the same and we pay people such that every four question they solve correctly they get one glass of beer. So we went to Washington D.C. and we went to a bar where

congressional staffers hang out in. And we went to New York City. We went to a bar where bankers hang out and we tested who cheated more. So what do you think any predictions. Well of course we all go for the bankers. You know you're right. So I actually thought it would be the politicians but it was the bankers 12:58. They cheated twice as much. But I should point out these were junior politicians right so maybe there's room for growth. You're listening to Ed and I avoid seven WGBH and online at WGBH dot org. We're talking about lying and cheating with behavioral economist Dan Ariely is new book is The Honest Truth About Dishonesty How we lie to everyone especially ourselves. You can join the conversation at 8 7 7 3 0 1 8 9 seventy 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70. Or you can write to our Facebook page or send us a tweet at Kelly Crossley. So right now there seems to be a time where dishonesty is just everywhere we look. You know we've got the John Edwards thing happening. We have Yahoo with the

executive falsifying his rest his resume his resume and so it leads me to think Is there a spy something going on in this time that allows for more dishonesty or are we just catching it more. I think probably we're catching it's more as one part but I think there's also things that are making it more likely. So I'll give you a couple of examples so we talked already about the contagion what you think is acceptable not acceptable but one of the most worrisome experiments we created was an experiment in which we paid people not in money but in tokens. So imagine it's the same experiment. You finish your shredded piece of paper you come to the experimenter and usually you would look them in the eye and say Mr. Experimenter I solved X problems give me X dollars and they would pay you a dollar per question. In this other condition you say Mr. Experimenter I solved X problems give me X tokens and we pay them in pieces of plastic. Now they take this piece of plastic and they walk 12 feet to the side and they change for a dollar. So in a sense people are not lying for money but if something would become money very very quickly

what happened in our experiment people doubled their cheating. Now this experiment worries me the most because if you think that money the physical version of Money keeps us on this and keeps on morality at bay. What happens is we get multiple steps removed from money. What happens with stock stop options the river tive mortgage backed securities what happened when we moved to an electronic wallet. Would all of those create cases in which people can steal to a higher degree or be slightly dishonest to a higher degree. And nevertheless have a very easy time justifying to themselves. And if you think about it we're moving in that direction. We're moving in the direction of having things that are much more abstract and because of that I think we're not as we don't face to the same degree the consequences and the realisation of how we Moral our acts. What I found fascinating in the book is this part where you talk about you know many things many things for fastening I'm sorry. I want to lie to you. But many things are fascinating and I was particularly interested in the in your point making that even people who are mostly honest this is by their actions need

some kind of boundary to keep them honest. Yeah. You know religion used to do that for us. Religion used to tell us exactly what is acceptable and not acceptable what the lines are and once you have religion they're really not that much flexibility. Also when you have a military rule recently visit the Virginia Military Academy. The students there have no degrees of freedom there's no question that they are under control every moment of the day is regulated they have no almost no decisions to make almost no gray zones and then you look at that and you say let's look at medicine let's look at accounting let's look at banking them out of grey zones are just incredible and weed out with such large gray zones it's really hard to figure out what is right and what is wrong and how much to bend the rules and what is acceptable. And here's another thing we just did. We asked people to take the role of a CEO of a bank. And we say your CEO of a bank you get paid some salary mostly by stock options and your bank you want to make more money for the bank.

And there's all these kind of shady activities you could take and what the people in the banking industry call revenue enhancements you can charge a little bit more for it. They are by the way the trial you know you could hold checks for a little longer you could do all kinds of kind of shady things that we give them a list of 15 of those and how much money they can expect to make in each of those. So which one of those would you add to your repertoire. And some people said that their bank is just a bank and some people we said that their bank has the ideology of maximizing shareholder value. And now what we saw is that people who were under the headline of maximizing shareholder values were willing to screw their customer to a much higher. I think when they basically had an ideology right they said it is not selfish that I want to do it for my own revenue I'm doing it because that's the goal of the bank could come it's a company the company is to maximize shareholder value. All of those things are much more easily justifiable. So all of those things really matter in the degrees of shades of gray that we face is really quite incredible when you stop and look at it.

Maryanne from Woods Hole Go ahead please you're on the Calla Crossley Show WGBH. Oh wow I had a question about what makes a person a good liar. Like when I try to write people read write let me know. Knowing the truth I don't know what it is and then I start laughing or whatever and I just I can't. And there are other people who are just naturally going good liars I don't know if they have the acting skills or what is right. I was just curious what makes a good question Marty and we're going to put it to Dan Ariely well known since the serious answer of course is practice just practice and practice leads to perfect no but we've tried to look at personality differences and what kind of people lie more and more people lie less and what we find is that one of the biggest predictors are creativity and here is the reason if you think that the reason that people log is that we try to both you know have the cake and eat it. Do we try to think of ourselves as honest people and live the same time.

Then if you create if you can tell better stories and office and if you can tell better stories you could lie a little bit more and still feel good about yourself. And if I may you're Have a great point in your book about how many students have killed their grandmother about a billion times because they're not creative about how to lie about what they're doing. Not having done the work we're going to love I love the excuses that the students come for that the end of the semester and I try to have a straight face with substories. But but we've done it in multiple ways we tried to measure creativity and see how it correlates with cheating we went to an advertisement advertising agency and we measured. The people in this advertising agency and we measured how much let's call it more flexibility people having different jobs in the in the company and the people who are in the counting heads were much more rigid in their moral fiber the people who were creative were much much less. So I think again you know there are some psychopaths out right there some people who just don't care about anything but there really really few

of them. Most people lying is really about being able to convince yourself why this is actually OK. And this is a story in creativity really helps. Also ideology helps like the story about shareholder value so the moment you have an ideology about why this is actually OK and you can justify cheating increases to a higher degree and you're able to lie easier when you have to like you know also the other thing is that it's really easy in retrospect to villainize cheaters. Right so we look at the words we can look at their person from Yahoo we can look at tomatoes we can look at all kinds of people. And in retrospect villainize them. But in my discussions with big cheaters it is almost actually not almost every time every cheater I've talked to basically started with one small step. That he could rationalize and they did not think about the end game. In fact even when I talk to judges and I asked him how many people did they really think do they think focus on imprisonment as a deterrent of crime. The basically said nobody but

most most cheating is really kind of one step at a time doing one thing just for ones to kill something else happened to protect something or to do something and then it just escalates. So its rationalization and slippery slope I think is the biggest cult and then you have to think about how you prevent that kind of this almost in a studied Dan Ariely that was not done by you as we go to break. It was done in Britain said Men lie more than women and they tell different kinds of lies alleged respond that we come back we're talking about honesty and dishonesty and how we can stop ourselves from going down that slippery slope of white lies deception and full blown fabrications. My guest is Dan Ariely his new book is The Honest Truth About Dishonesty How we lie to everyone especially ourselves. You can catch him tonight at 6 o'clock at the Brattle Theater and get him right here when we come back at 8 7 7 3 0 1 0 8 0 9 7 8 8 7 7 3 0 1 89 70 This is WGBH Boston Public Radio.

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partnership between ex-con Amee dot com and eighty nine point seven WGBH. Welcome back to the Calla Crossley Show. I'm talking to behavioral economist Dan Ariely about why we live from Big Lies to small ones like these. Now we're going to run a few tests. This is a simple lie detector. I'll ask you a few yes or no questions and you just answer truthfully. Do you understand. Yes. That clip was from The Simpsons that was Homer taking the lie detector detector test and failing badly and psychologically what is going on when we tell those small lies like that and what motivates us to tell those lies. Well so a lot of time it's about our selfish interest and what selfish interest does is it colors our view of the world and therefore let us tell small lies. So for example are you offended any particular sports team. No. No longer. Imagine you were Yeah if you talk to a sports fan and you say

Imagine that you went to a game and the referee called the call against your team what would you think about the referee. And most people admit that they would think the referees evil stupid fishes or something something like that. It's really hard to see reality in an accurate way when your motivation is to see it in a biased way. Now what happened is money is the same thing right in not fan of a particular teamwork we are fans of money more money is better than not money. So now imagine you're a banker and you get to get let's say paid five million dollars a year if you could only view mortgage backed security is a good price. Now I'm not asking whether you would live whether you would tell your clients Oh my goodness this is a fantastic product when in fact you believe it's not. But wouldn't your motivation color your view of them and now you would believe that they're slightly better than they really are. Absolutely. And what if there were complex and difficult to evaluate an easy to rationalize that all of those things now it will push you even further and what if everybody around you do the same thing. So now you can see how motivation basically a biased motivation can basically cause us to lie a little bit but do it consistently over a long time

with devastating consequences. We got a bunch of calls here Michael from Norwood you're in the Cali Crossley Show. Go ahead please. Telling her you don't want. Very well. Let's have a question for you. To me is more to do with I guess. Definition of terms we were talking about online. I'm curious do you I mean it's defined as just the absence of honesty or for the act of being dishonest because your people are going to think I'm getting confused with the cheating slash lying concept because when you're cheating you're not always lying. Say you're speeding if that's not a dishonest Farrelly Yeah so. So in my experiments actually I would refer to what we call the operational definition which is what we actually measure so in our experiments people solve a particular number of problems and then we say tell us how many questions you really solve and will pay you a call that we say pay yourself according to how much you really deserve so I look at in my experiment they used the word lying and cheating in the same kind of way. I talk about how much do people take money that they haven't really deserved. So that's kind of the definition I talk to. I talk

about in the one that we use in all of the experiments. Now I know that kind of does all kind of other more nuances you know is white lies really lies and so on. But but for me I kind of stick with these definitions of taking more money than you really deserve and that's what this book is about and all the experiments we do are with this particular version of flying. Thanks very much for the call Michael. Carroll from Worcester Go ahead please you're on the callee Crossley Show WGBH. Hi there. I wanted to mention that lying can be a learned behavior from childhood too because with my dad he would tell us that he could not abide a liar so if we did something wrong tell the truth. Well when we told the truth we got punished. We could come up with a good lie we could sidestep the punishment and everything was fine. So we tried over and that Dad didn't really want to hear the truth. You know it and this is not the most extreme behavior I mean if we if we are kind of thinking about it we have to recognize that we actually teach our kids to lie. So I have a

disability and often when I walk around the kids pointed to me and I asked her parents you know what what is this and the parents in you know 98 percent of the time pushes their hand down and say you don't do that. Now the kids I mean this is not lying but it's about telling people not to express externally what they're thinking internally and there's a difference between what you really think and what you're actually going to say. And this is what you need to be a civic person in society so now think about this imagine you work in an accounting firm and now you still care about other people and you still think about well there's a different version of the truth is we had meat inside in a different version of the truth that we tell outside an office and you realize that. Honesty is a really very tricky situation we have to be much more strict about the rules about the definition about when we want people to be perfectly honest and when it is kind of OK because it's socially needed to shade the truth a little bit. Carol thanks for the call James from Randolph you're on the callee Crossley Show. Eighty nine point seven WGBH either.

Well I was wondering if there is any kind of study or experiment showing that people are more dishonest with digital forms of money rather than physical forms of money and that maybe that has something to do with a lot of the issues that are going on on Wall Street or with different neutral country that sort of thing. Yeah. So the exposure that you described earlier when people cheat for tokens less than they cheat for money I think is one on one account and here's kind of intuition about this little Johnny comes home from school with a note from the teacher the to the Johnny stole a pencil from the kid who sitting next to him and Johnny's father is angry he's furious Ajani on you million embarrass you never never never take a pencil from the kid who sitting next to you. This is just awful. You're grounded for three weeks and just wait until your mother comes. And beside Johnny if you need a pencil you know very well you could just say something. You could just ask and I will bring you dozens of pencils from work. If you find that funny it's because you probably realize that we are taking 10 cents from petty

cash book to something that you can't do without thinking of yourself as a thief. But taking a pencil for work is something you can just to find all kinds of ways you could say everybody is doing it you could say work is putting it for me to take home you can tell all kinds of stories and I think digital money is probably similar. We can probably make up stories about why this is OK why did nobody is really losing and you know for example who is actually responsible for that and who is eventually going to pay. I think it's kind of shady in there for allowing people for much more rationalization. So we got a call. Dan Ariely behavioral economist from Duke from a dam in the car and he said he wanted to know how much lying you do how much money lying idle. Just as much as you are probably lying. Lying is lying is complex and something we do all the time. I'll give you my most recent salient lie. I was in London last week maybe two weeks ago and I was in a cab and this guy was like

an hour and 15 minute thing and the guy grew up in Iran and came to the UK when he was seven. And he basically was an anti-Semite. He described Jews and Israelis as kind of the devil spawns and how they are destroying the world and the Jewish conspiracy and I'm both Jewish and Israeli and kind of fully five minutes into it when I get his whole life perspective that he asked me where I'm from you know at that moment they could have said hey you know by the way it's interesting I'm Israeli and Jewish and why don't we talk a little bit about your beliefs and where they come from. I actually had no energy for that discussion. I didn't think I could convince him on anything that I actually wanted to understand where he's coming from to a degree. So I basically said I was American. You know which is you know I live in the States so it's kind of almost OK. But I think it's a standard example of I don't want to deal with the consequence of what will happen. So I say something that will not get me involved to that to that degree. I will tell you one one other thing so you know quite a few years ago I

ran an experiment at the lab at Harvard's Harvard where. And usually we run experiments I kind of hope that the results would show something right or so that I hope one group would be higher and one group would be lower. On that particular day we got the results and they were basically as I expected. Aside from one participant that was a participant that performed the worst possible way IQ couldn't be. I don't say dumber but you couldn't perform worse than that participant. So I looked carefully in his data and he was 25 years old and anybody else who came to the study and we all remember that there was one drunk guy that came to the study we paid quite well there was a drunkard that came off the street. It was the guy who was performing the worst Clearly he didn't understand instruction and so on. So we took him out. We took him out from the data and the results showed these beautiful patterns. But then a couple of days later when I thought about it with my students and we said what would have happened if by chance the drunk people would have been in the other group. The group we hoped would have a low result. Then first of all we've been very happy with him. We probably

would have never looked at his drunk issue. And even if we did we probably would have a story about why Drunk people are actually good in the experiment. And we we didn't throw the data out in the river in the experiment but for me that experience was incredibly important because at that moment when I took the data out these particular data point out I was thinking I was like a knight in shining armor helping the data pattern shine through right I was clearing the path and letting the truth emerge. But the fact is there was and I had a particular bias and I had a particular way of wanting to see the results. I'm also kind of a creative guy and maybe I could have told another story if it wasn't a drug maybe I would have told another story. So now I have a set of very strict rules for myself. You could decide for example an experiment never to include data from drunk people but you have to decide it upfront. You can decide that people who don't read English you can do whatever you want but only up front after the fact you can do it. Not because we're lying to other people because we're lying to ourself and it's so easy to fool ourselves into what we want to believe and that's actually what what we're

getting. So so no I have to say that I think we're kind of much more strict about what we accept or not accept and how we behave because we're not as blinded to our own irrationality insofar as deception and self deception goes. Ryan from Randolph Go ahead please you're on the Calla Crossley Show in 1.7. Calling x. Would you agree that society kind of promotes lying and only thanks. We signed up for something online to actually agree to the terms and agreements and it's usually like a 90 page doc. People usually skip through it and just like they agree even reading a little word on it. Yes I would say that you're probably right in two ways the first one is that society encourages cheating because we teach people that there's lots of gray lines but the other thing that you're pointing out I think is the issue of revenge. So let me tell you a little story. We ran this experiment actually in Boston. We hired an acting student Daniel Berger Jones

who was a student here. And he walked around coffee shops and asked people whether they would do a study for five minutes for $5. Almost everybody said yes. He explained to them the task and five minutes later he came in take it took the task back and gave him nine dollars and he said Here's your five dollars please count it and sign a receipt for five dollars and the question was how many people in Boston would return the extra cash. I mean that particular condition about 50 percent of the people returned the money in another condition what he did was when he explained to them the task he picked up his phone he pretended somebody called him up to talk about pizza tonight and he talked for 12 seconds Hey John what's up. Later saw him put the phone down and came back to the instruction. No he annoyed people not a lot but just a little bit. What happened know about 15 percent of the people gave the money. So the moment we were annoyed we are more willing to justify cheating. We could basically feel like it's karma right we're just making the world a better place by being dishonest. The most disturbing thing about the experiment with Daniel though was that sometimes he

presented himself as it was his money and his experiment. So he is the person who did the violation. So if they took extra money from me he would be the person to suffer. And some other time he said always use other professor who is working I'm just working for him and it's not my money. People didn't care. The moment they could justify something they justify it to a higher degree took more money. So as companies annoy us I think it really helps people justify a higher degree of this honesty is kind of retaliation revenge karma call it whatever you want. The point of your book about people are more susceptible when tired and hungry is really got to me and I I downloaded your app called conscience and then I read the thing about healthy eating right before I was going to eat. And I was annoyed that I had to download the app unconscious because I was going to interview you and you're taking up my time on the weekend. So. Look at so I look at it and then actually it impacted me after I read. The reasons that I chose the healthy dish and then I was so full I couldn't have dessert so it works very good.

If you put boundaries nothing I got 30 seconds here wondering if anything surprised you in all of the experiments looking at this subject. The thing that surprised me the most is how strong conflicts of interest are and how susceptible people are to them and they can come up from favors and money and so on and we have to deal with them all the time we don't doctors and lawyers and so on and we really have to learn how to deal with these to a much better degree because if we don't we're going to really suffer. So that was the biggest surprise. And I think a surprise we're going to see more of that. I'm sure I'm sure we all unless we learn how to deal with it. But we really have to. OK so the first step I guess is getting an app called conscience. You know the first step is really to understand where you are in life where there's lots of conflicts of interest that is influencing you. And to realize that the people who are giving you advice with conflicts of interest are not a solely bad from the moment they have conflicts of interest they could behave extremely badly. And now you can say OK if my physician for example is going to get paid by one treatment over the other more can they really see things in an objective way. If my dentist is doing you can they really see an objective way. And if it's a big

decision you know if you go to a mechanic and they have conflicts of interest and they you know replace an extra carburetor or win or whatever maybe not a big deal. If you go to a doctor and they recommend someone needed treatment maybe maybe you should go for a second opinion maybe you should learn how to protect yourself in those cases. Well there's so much to talk about here and I think I'm honest but we're not so much. We've been talking about honesty and dishonesty with Dan Ariely. He's the James B do professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. His new book is The Honest Truth About Dishonesty How we lie to everyone especially ourselves. You can catch him tonight at 6 o'clock at the Brattle Theater to get tickets visit the Harvard bookstore at Harvard dot com. In the meanwhile you can keep on top of the callee cross the show at WGBH dot org slash Calla Crossley follow us on Twitter or become a fan of the Calla Crossley Show on Facebook. Today's show was engineered by Antonio only are produced by Chelsea mergers will Rose lip Abby Ruzicka are internists lone Piver where production of WGBH Boston Public Radio.