Professor Dan Ariely’s recently released documentary “(Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies” highlights the blurred line between right and wrong by showing how deceit and deception are universal human traits.
Ariely, James B. Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics, has dedicated his life’s work to the study of rational and irrational decision-making. His research group, the Center for Advanced Hindsight, conducts retrospective research in fields such as health marketing, dating behavior and incentive systems. Ariely uses his research to help companies and nonprofits incorporate the insights of behavioral economics into their business models. In the film, he documents his recent systematic study of how people deceive both themselves and others.
“In standard economics, people are depicted as being all capable—they know what they want and they can compute everything,” Ariely said. “In behavioral economics, we find that people don’t always behave in a perfectly rational way, so we need to start describing people in different ways.”
Ariely was motivated to study the kinds of deception he discusses in the film after observing fallacies in his own life. While taking an intelligence test in a magazine, he realized that when he looked at the key for the answer to one question, he was glancing at other answers, which made the rest of the test easier.
"I came out as an unbelievable genius, but I began to wonder how much I was deluding myself,” he said.
After running multiple experiments related to this idea, Ariely observed that different “fudge factors”—such as a lack of supervision, the idea of lying for others, believing that cheating is socially acceptable and other conflicts of interest—can lead normally honest people to rationalize improper and deceptive behavior.
In the film, he documents these experiments along with candid interviews of normal people, ranging from former NBA referee Tim Donaghy—who was arrested for gambling on games he officiated—to Kelley Williams-Bolar, who lied about her home address so her kids could go to a better school and eventually went to jail for it.
The anecdotes and experiments in the film are critical to Ariely’s message that lying is not a hallmark of “bad people” but rather a natural part of being human.
"It's easy to point at a few bad people and say that these people are the ones causing all of the problems,” he said. “In my experiments, this was not the case. Instead of having some big cheaters, we had lots and lots of little cheaters.”
In addition to numerous examples of how otherwise honest people can be dishonest, the film depicts experiments that show it is possible to change incentives to prevent cheating.
In one experiment, Ariely had students sign an honor code before taking a test and found that simply reminding them of their own morality curbed cheating, whereas signing the honor code weeks or months prior to the test had no effect.
Ariely’s fascination with irrational behavior stems from his experiences being treated for burns from a magnesium fire explosion at age 18. While in the hospital, he often sparred with his nurses on how best to remove his numerous bandages—Ariely thought that a slow removal was less painful, but his nurses were trained to remove the bandages quickly.
He went on to test this hypothesis — that a slow removal is in fact optimal for the patient— as a part-time student at Tel Aviv University, eventually proving that he had been right.
“It made me think of how people with good intentions sometimes act on their intuition and as a result don’t act in the absolutely ideal way,” Ariely said.
Since then, he has published numerous bestsellers such as “Predictably Irrational” and “The Upside of Irrationality,” in which he explores behavioral anomalies such as how financial bonuses lessen performance and how people will purchase “free” items despite not actually wanting them in the first place.
The Center For Advanced Hindsight strives to not only generate scholarly research but to take these insights and create real-world solutions for behavior-related problems, said Mariel Beasley, a research associate at the center. Rebecca Kelley, another research associate, provided a recent example in which the center worked with a non-profit to improve nutrition in Uganda by introducing new nutrient-enriched food into African diets.
“The necessary conditions for really clean academic study can’t be met by many organizations looking for our help,” Beasley said. “That doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from the insights of behavioral economics.”
Ariely said he is hopeful that his research can help behavioral economists like himself design a more honest world.
“If we understand how people fall prey to these fudge factors, then we can try and eliminate them as much as possible,” Ariely said.
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