Think you’re honest? Dan Ariely will make you squirm
In ‘(Dis)honesty: The Truth about Lies,’ an Israeli-American academic gets to the discomfiting root of all our ‘little cheats’
NEW YORK — What you are about to read won’t be 100% true.
If there’s one thing “(Dis)honesty: The Truth about Lies” taught me is that deception is so ubiquitous only a complete pants-on-fire fibber would ever claim to be absolutely honest all of the time.
Israeli-American director Yael Melamede’s film uses Israeli-American author and Duke University professor Dan Ariely’s work as something of a spine, breaking off into case studies which show how “little cheats,” the opportunities that come our way and are difficult to pass up, have a huge impact. The documentary, which showed in abbreviated form on CNBC and is now available commercially, doesn’t really worry too much about morality.
Right and wrong can be debated within an inch of its life, so the film focuses on something more concrete: economics. When someone grabs that fallen candy bar from a vending machine, we all suffer. There are no victimless crimes.
Ariely’s interest in studying irrational behavior springs from a key incident from his youth. He is an exuberant speaker who appeared at a post-screening Q&A at Manhattan’s Civic Hall led by WNYC’s The Takeaway’s John Hockenberry, along with Melamede and NYU Business Ethics professor Jonathan Haidt. (Ariely and Haidt are part of a group pushing solutions for behavioral economics, whose clients include Wall Street bigshots and the military.)
When someone grabs that fallen candy bar from a vending machine, we all suffer. There are no victimless crimes
Burned by a faulty firecracker, Ariely had to spend a great deal of time in the hospital. His nurses would change his bandages by ripping them off — causing intense but brief pain. He began to suspect that doing this slowly, drawing the process out, would be less painful. It butted heads with the nurses’ intuition, but turned out to be correct. Melamede’s film connects the dots between this type of thinking, to how sharing benign-seeming facts from work can lead to a multi-million dollar insider trading scheme or an NBA betting scandal.
At the root of so many ethical dilemmas are conflicts of interest. Sometimes they aren’t as obvious as we might hope. Ariely talks about his doctor, whom he admires and who helped him recover from his disfiguring burn. He suggested Ariely get a cosmetic adjustment to his face “for symmetry.”
Ariely didn’t need it, and maybe didn’t even want it, but he felt a bit of pressure to do it. What the doctor neglected to tell him was that if he agreed, his work would be eligible for publication in a medical journal. This doesn’t mean the work wouldn’t be good, but he clearly had multiple motives.
The film doesn’t finger-point, though. We all live with conflicts of interest every day. Most of the time they are kept in check. As a journalist I could make this story a lot more interesting by adding a scene in which Ariely was confronted at the Q&A by a jilted lover who whipped out a pistol and fired into the air. I can’t do that, though, because all it takes is a little bit of research to discover that this isn’t true. But there are so many opportunities day-to-day to bend the truth in our favor in ways that we’ll never get caught. And this phenomenon is the most problematic.
There are so many opportunities day-to-day to bend the truth in our favor in ways that we’ll never get caught
“(Dis)honesty” returns time and again to one of Ariely’s experiments, in which students are given a test and granted money for how many questions they get right. They are told the actual tests are shredded, so they are on their honor. (In actuality, the shredder is a fake prop.) People inevitably take advantage, but what’s key is how the environment informs how they do so.
When someone (a plant) is shown blatantly cheating without repercussions, more follow suit. Similarly, when there is a “middle step” of plastic chips between handing in false evidence and getting paper money, this added layer of obfuscation increases dishonesty. But when people — even avowed atheists — are reminded about the Ten Commandments immediately prior to the experiment, the rate of cheating drops considerably.
The takeaway is this: white lies and little cheats are human nature, and distributed equally throughout the world. But everyone knows right from wrong. Frequent, prominent reminders of basic ethics, while maybe embarrassing, do have an effect.
An example is given from the UK tax form, which includes new lines reminding about the gross effect of small infractions. Has it eradicated fraud? Absolutely not, but it has pushed the needle five percent, which represents millions of pounds.
“(Dis)honesty: The Truth about Lies” is packed with interesting anecdotes where it is easy to sit in judgement. Like the Milgram tests or Stanford Prison Experiment you can fold your arms and say “I’d never do that.” This may be true in the case of the MCI (later WorldCom) accountant who pocketed millions of other peoples’ money, even if it was a slow and not-initially greedy impulse that got him there.
But the case of the woman who did jail time by fibbing ever-so-slightly about her place of address to get her kids in a better school is heartbreaking. (This tale, more than most, advocates for an ethical “ends sometimes justify the means” approach.)
Forthcoming screenings should all be set in glass houses and audience members should be handed rocks instead of popcorn. Let’s see how drafty it is after.
