I have project which requires Self Analysis. I will upload the Project which needed to be done as a file with some Pages instructions and NPR listenings with subtitles(Honesty).
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honesty_npr.docx
hlth_101_project_1.doc
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You may either read or listen to the program. To listen you can either follow the link or go to
NPR.org – programs- Diane Rehm- Aug 13, 2012.
Dan Ariely: “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie To Everyone – Especially
Ourselves”
Transcript for:
Dan Ariely: “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie To Everyone – Especially Ourselves”
MS. DIANE REHM
11:06:56
Thanks for joining us. I’m Diane Rehm. Nearly everybody cheats, but usually just a little. But that little can
mean a lot. In a new book, author Dan Ariely explores the nature of cheating and why we make the
decisions we do. His new book is titled “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone Especially Ourselves.” Dan Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke
University.
MS. DIANE REHM
11:07:36
I hope you’ll join us with your questions and comments. Call us on 800-433-8850, send us your email to
drshow@wamu.org, join us on Facebook or Twitter. Good morning to you, sir. It’s good to have you here.
DR. DAN ARIELY
11:07:57
Wonderful to be here.
REHM
11:07:59
You’ve given me a little vial of pills. Tell me what these pills are for.
ARIELY
11:08:05
Well, they’re called Cure All, which is — first of all, it’s the ultimate placebo, and if you read the small
print, it does everything. It’s fixes hair, problems with your knees, just absolutely everything. So it’s kind of
a joke on the placebo industry on one hand, which is basically based on lying, and at the same time, it also
has some special things to help us with dishonesty. So it helps all kinds of things on that.
ARIELY
11:08:34
I should tell you, we also have an iPhone app, actually both on the iPhone and on the Android called
Consciousness Plus, Conscious Plus, and the Conscious Plus application is about giving you excuses to
either behave better or behave worse. So when you start the app, you can choose if you want the angel side
or the devil side, and then you look for what kind of excuses do you want, to cheat on your diet or to
behave well, to exercise or not, infidelity and so on, and on each of those things you can decide whether
you want excuses that would help you behave better, or excuses that would help you misbehave.
REHM
11:09:12
But Dan, you’re making jokes. Honesty is a very serious matter, and as we have learned in the past few
years, honesty does not always seem to have been the policy of many who had access, for example, to huge
amounts of money. You say that your interest in cheating sort of got ignited in 2002 with Enron. Talk about
that.
ARIELY
11:09:49
Yeah. So cheating is obviously a huge problem, right? And it’s not just a big problem in general, it’s
something that deteriorates our society. And once we get to a certain level of dishonesty, we can get to
what corrupt societies are dealing with. So it’s actually incredibly important to figure out, and it’s incredibly
important to figure out what’s causing the dishonesty. Because if we’re trying to prevent it, the first lesson is
to figure out what caused it in the first place.
ARIELY
11:10:13
So when I heard about Enron initially, everybody was very fast to raise a finger and accuse the three main
architects of Enron. And the question, of course, is this the right cause? I mean, if you think it’s about bad
apples, then you have a very simple way to stopping dishonesty. You just say, let’s not hire bad apples, or
let’s create procedures in which would let us take bad apples and kick them out of the system. But if you
think it’s not about bad apples, if you think that it’s about something more endemic in the system…
REHM
11:10:41
Deeper.
ARIELY
11:10:42
Deeper in the system that is about the actual way the system is built, and then you say, Dan, it might be the
case that it’s not about these bad apples. And if you and I were leading Enron, we too might have
misbehaved. And if that’s the case, then we need to think differently about the system. So think about
something like Wall Street. We can raise a finger and point to a few characters who have misbehaved on
Wall Street, but if that’s not the real problem, and the problem is the way the system is created, then we’re
not changing anything about the system. Then we’re just going to get into the same problem over and over
and over.
REHM
11:11:14
Do you think about the housing market in the same way?
ARIELY
11:11:18
I think so. From my perspective, the housing market is a symptom, it’s not the cause. What the real cause is
biased incentives, very complex rules, and the ability to rationalize all kinds of actions by a system.
REHM
11:11:34
And that leaves the entire system vulnerable then to that kind of lying.
ARIELY
11:11:42
That’s right. So imagine that I made you a banker on Wall Street in 2005, and imagine that I paid you $10
million a year to view mortgage backed securities as better than they really are. So now, think about what
would happen with this force causing you to behave this way. Now, any sports fan know that if they go to a
game and the referee calls a call against their team they think the referee is evil, vicious, or stupid or
something. Every sports fan knows that their liking of a particular team paints their view of reality.
ARIELY
11:12:12
Well, $10 million can do the same thing. That can paint your view of reality in the same way. Now, on top
of that, there are other forces that make it easier to rationalize it. So not only do you have this push that will
make you want to see reality in a different way, now you have things like it feels like a game, it’s not really
about money, everybody else around you is doing those things, and all of a sudden you get to a system
where it’s easy for us to see reality in a different way, and creating tremendous devastation for society and
for those people as well.
REHM
11:12:44
Do you think that this kind of thinking, this kind of behavior, has become more prevalent in say the last 20
or 30 years, or have we as human beings always been vulnerable to the possibility?
ARIELY
11:13:05
So I think both are right. I think we haven’t really changed much as human beings, just because technology
has moved around, our main structure of our brain has not changed so much. However, there have been a
couple of things that I think are important to realize, and those social things might have created changes. So
let me take a step back and tell you how we measure dishonesty, and then tell you about this.
ARIELY
11:13:26
So for us to measure dishonesty, we always try to create a very strict standard for what dishonesty is. So in
our experiments, we take a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems, problems that everybody could
solve and we give it to people, and we say, hey, you have five minutes, solve as many of those as you can,
go. People solve as many of those as they can in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes we say stop,
put your pencil down, count how many questions you got correctly, and once you know that number, go to
the back of the room and shred your piece of paper.
ARIELY
11:13:54
Once you finish shredding it, come to the front of the room and tell us how many questions you got
correctly. People do this, they come to the front of the room, they say they solved six problems, we pay
them six dollars, they go home. What the people in the experiment don’t know is that we played with the
shredder only shred the sides of the page. So when you put it through the shredder, you get the satisfaction
of feeling it’s being shredded, but it’s not. So we can jump into the recycling bin and find out how many
questions people really solved correctly. So what did we find?
ARIELY
11:14:22
Lots of people cheated just by a little bit. In fact, the average person solved four problems, and reporting to
be solving six. And just kind of to give you a feeling for that, in the whole book I describe experiments
with about 30,000 people. And from those 30,000 people, we had about 12 who cheated a lot, and they
stole together about $150 from me. From those 30,000 people, we had about 18,000 who stole a little bit,
but there’s so many of them, together they stole about $36,000 from me.
REHM
11:14:50
Ah.
ARIELY
11:14:51
And if you think about it, that’s really kind of the essence of the issue. There’s some big cheaters out there,
and we pay lots of attention to them, but I think that the majority of the economic devastation from
cheating comes from a lot of little cheaters who cheat…
REHM
11:15:05
If you talk about shoplifting, for example, perfect example of people who may cheat a little bit, but are
affecting the entire process.
ARIELY
11:15:17
So the shoplifting is one example. You can think about brokers on Wall Street, right? I mean, very few
people cheat in an egregious way, but what happens if you shave a fraction of a penny here or there every
day just a couple of times. Together, because they’re so many of them, they accumulate. Now, let’s go back
to your question. Have things gotten worse over time? So in one experiment we did the following. We gave
people the same task, but when they finished they came to us and instead of saying, Mr. Experimenter, I
solved six problems, give me $6, they ask for tokens.
ARIELY
11:15:51
They say Mr. Experimenter, I solved X problems, give me X tokens, and we pay them in tokens. They took
these tokens, they walked 12 feet and changed them for dollars. Now, what’s the difference? The difference
is that now when you’re looking somebody in the eyes and you lie to them, you don’t lie for money, you lie
for something else. Something that would become money very quickly, but is not money yet. What
happened? Our participants doubled their cheating.
REHM
11:16:16
Doubled their cheating.
ARIELY
11:16:17
Doubled their cheating. And think about it. How comfortable — you don’t have to answer me. How
comfortable would you be taking 50 cents from a petty cash box compared to taking a pencil from the
office? They feel very different.
REHM
11:16:30
Yeah.
ARIELY
11:16:31
In fact in another study, we did a study about a thousand golf players, and we said to these golf players,
imagine you want to move your ball by four inches. It’s in the rough and you want to move it by four
inches, how would you feel about picking it up and moving it by four inches? And people said, this is
awful, and I couldn’t think about it. I would never do it. Nobody I know would do it. Then we said, what
about kicking it a little bit with your shoe? Oh, that’s much easier, of course.
REHM
11:16:58
Huh.
ARIELY
11:16:59
And what about hitting it with your club? That’s even easier.
REHM
11:17:02
Wow.
ARIELY
11:17:02
As the distance between us and our actions increases, it is easier for us to be dishonest.
REHM
11:17:09
So what you’re saying is that all of us in one way or another cheat a little bit…
ARIELY
11:17:16
Mm-hmm.
REHM
11:17:17
…and that has not only an impact on society as a whole, but that getting away with those tiny amounts of
cheating may insight us to go onto further and larger examples of cheating.
ARIELY
11:17:39
That’s right. And what we do in society is we’re creating things that have this distance more and more.
Everything about the Internet is creating distance between us and our actions. It’s created a distance
between us and the people who would suffer the consequences. If you’re dealing mortgage-backed
securities, think about how many steps there are between you and the consequences of your action and how
easy it is, and if you’re a lobbyist in Washington, I mean, think about all the things that create lots and lots
of distance from the actual action.
ARIELY
11:18:08
And I’ll give you another example is downloading illegal stuff from the Internet. When I ask my students
about it, almost everybody has some illegal content on their computers, and when I asked them how
embarrassed they would be about it, they just don’t care. They said even if the New York Times had an
essay that they had illegal downloaded stuff, they wouldn’t care.
REHM
11:18:29
Dan Ariely, he’s professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. His new book is
titled “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.” Do join us. I look forward to hearing from you.
REHM
11:20:05
And if you just joined us, Dan Ariely is with me. He’s professor of psychology in behavioral economics at
Duke University, author of a new book titled, “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie To
Everyone – Especially Ourselves.” And you can join us by phone, by email, follow us on Facebook or
Twitter. Before the break, we were talking about the small actions and then the question becomes how they
affect the larger world.
ARIELY
11:20:49
Yeah. So, there’s — when you and I look at the big cheaters, we say to ourselves, we could have never done
the whole sequence of what they have done. This is unconceivable. But of course it’s not clear that the big
cheaters thought about the whole sequence of their actions from the beginning. Instead when I talk to all
kinds of people who’ve been in prison for all kinds of crimes and also judges and lawyers, I find that mostly
it’s about one step.
ARIELY
11:21:13
People take one step, just for now, just for this one quarter. And once we have taken that step, they become
slightly different people. They’ve rationalized them.
REHM
11:21:20
Give me an example.
ARIELY
11:21:22
One example is a case of MCI, in the case of the fraud at MCI with accounting. What happens once you do
something for one quarter, all of a sudden you think to yourself you’re doing it for one quarter. And then
what happens at the end of that quarter? You’ve gotten used to something. You’ve done something already.
The barrier of doing it the second time is much, much lower.
ARIELY
11:21:44
You know, even somebody in the police force told me that it’s really hard for police to shoot a criminal for
the first time. But once they shoot somebody, shooting a second time is much, much easier and they need to
be incredibly more careful about it. Once we misbehave in a certain way, it’s really easy to misbehave a
second time.
REHM
11:22:02
Of course, you’re not necessarily implying that police shoot someone for the wrong reasons.
ARIELY
11:22:09
No, no, no. I’m just saying for whatever…
REHM
11:22:10
Right.
ARIELY
11:22:11
…whatever you do. Now, we’ve done these experiments in which we give people chances to cheat many,
many times. And what we see is for a long time, they kind of balance it. They cheat a little bit, they try to
feel good about themselves, they kind of keep themselves to a small amount of cheating. But then at some
point, many people switch and start cheating all the time.
REHM
11:22:32
Oh.
ARIELY
11:22:33
And we call this the what the hell effect.
REHM
11:22:34
The what the hell effect.
ARIELY
11:22:36
And what’s the idea? The idea is that what we find is that people try to balance two forces. We try to feel
good about ourselves and we try to be slightly dishonest. Feeling good about ourselves is the way we want
to view ourselves. And benefiting from dishonesty is a selfish immediate motivation. And we try to balance
those, and as long as we cheat just a little bit we can balance it.
ARIELY
11:22:58
But if you step over the line at some point and you can’t think of yourself as a good person, you say to
yourself I might as well enjoy it and then you go all the way.
REHM
11:23:07
I have an email here which brings up a subject that is very much in the news right now. The email says
simply, what in the world would explain the brilliant Fareed Zakaria’s plagiarism? How do you respond to
that?
ARIELY
11:23:31
So, of course I don’t know the exact details and I haven’t looked at this. But I will tell you who that I think
many more of us are capable all kinds of bad things over time and under pressure. And my guess is that in
his mind, these were not acts of cheating at the moment that they were taking place. Our capacity for
rationalizing things is really quite, quite amazing. Now if you try to rationalize something big, all of a
sudden it’s very, very hard to do.
ARIELY
11:24:04
But if you do something quickly and you say, oh, this should have been like this and then you do something
else. And then you could say, I could have written this. And I probably would have written this if I had the
time and so on. All of those excuses kind of increase over time. And beyond a particular case, I think we
see examples of this everywhere. And I think what it tells us is how important rules and guidelines are.
ARIELY
11:24:28
If we have fuzzy rules and fuzzy guidelines of what’s acceptable, professional rules of ethics for example.
Then we don’t know where we are. But the moment we have very strict guidelines, then we know exactly
where we are and we’re not going pass them.
REHM
11:24:40
Did you ever find yourself confronted with one of those choices?
ARIELY
11:24:49
Many times. I can tell you two stories, one with (word?) on both sides. So, as you know, I was badly
injured many years ago and I spend many years in hospital. I was badly…
REHM
11:25:00
Badly burned.
ARIELY
11:25:01
Badly burned, almost 70 percent of my body.
REHM
11:25:05
And how did that happen?
ARIELY
11:25:07
And you know what a magnesium flare is? It’s one of those bombs that that military sends up to the sky to
light up a battlefield. And one of those by accident got exploded next to me. So I…
REHM
11:25:18
Where were you?
ARIELY
11:25:20
I was in Israel at the time. And basically it was very, very hot flames and very, very close proximity. And I
got very badly burned. And we all had little burns and they’d go away, extensive burns are not the same.
And so I spent a long time in hospital. I got lots of burns, lots of treatments. But going back to the conflicts
of interest. About quite a few years after I left the hospital already, I came back for a check-up.
ARIELY
11:25:48
And the head of the burn department finds me and said, Dan, I have a new fantastic treatment for you.
Come with me. So I go with him. And the left side of my face is not burned. So when I shave I have
stubble, little black dots. And the right side of my face is burned, so I have no stubble. So what was his
suggestion? He was going to tattoo the right side of my face to be the same as the left side of my face.
ARIELY
11:26:12
So he said, go home and shave. And I go home and I think to myself, what kind of shave do I want to be
symmetrical? Do I want the morning shave? The five o’clock shadow? Which is the best one? So I picked
the shave that I think is the right way. I go back to him and I said, you know what, I’m not sure I want this.
I said, can you show me some pictures of people you’ve done this?
ARIELY
11:26:32
So he shows me two pictures of other people that he did this with, but he can’t show me the whole face. He
shows me just the cheeks. And, you know, sure enough, they look like a cheek with little black dots. Then I
say, you know, what happens when I grow older and my hair becomes white? He said, don’t worry, we can
laser it out when the time. I said, you know what, I just don’t think it’s for me. I don’t think it’s for me.
Thank you, but no thank you.
ARIELY
11:26:53
And then he gives me the biggest guilt trip I ever got. And he said, Dan, what’s wrong with you? Do you
enjoy feeling — being non-symmetrical? He said, do you enjoy looking differently? He said, do women feel
sorry for you and give you sexual favors, which by the way never happened. And this was shocking to me,
because I was there for so many years.
REHM
11:27:13
I’m shocked as I hear this.
ARIELY
11:27:16
Yeah. So, I left his office. I went to his deputy and I said what’s going on. And his deputy told me that they
had two participants that did this already. And they were looking for a third one for an academic paper.
REHM
11:27:27
Of course.
ARIELY
11:27:28
No, here’s the thing, this was a fantastic physician. This right side of my eyebrow, he worked eight hours to
create this. He took blood …
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