A few years ago I received a letter from a woman named Rhonda who attended the University of California at Berkeley. She told me about a problem she’d had in her house and how a little ethical reminder helped her solve it.
She was living near campus with several other people—none of whom knew one another. When the cleaning people came each weekend, they left several rolls of toilet paper in each of the two bathrooms. However, by Monday all the toilet paper would be gone. It was a classic tragedy-of-the-commons situation: because some people hoarded the toilet paper and took more than their fair share, the public resource was destroyed for everyone else.
After reading about the Ten Commandments experiment on my blog, Rhonda put a note in one of the bathrooms asking people not to remove toilet paper, as it was a shared commodity. To her great satisfaction, one roll reappeared in a few hours, and another the next day. In the other note-free bathroom, however, there was no toilet paper until the following weekend, when the cleaning people returned.
More (#1) from Ariely’s The Honest Truth about Dishonesty:
Armed with our evidence that when people sign their names to some kind of pledge, it puts them into a more honest disposition (at least temporarily), we approached the IRS, thinking that Uncle Sam would be glad to hear of ways to boost tax revenues. The interaction with the IRS went something like this:
ME: By the time taxpayers finish entering all the data onto the form, it is too late. The cheating is done and over with, and no one will say, “Oh, I need to sign this thing, let me go back and give honest answers.” You see? If people sign before they enter any data onto the form, they cheat less. What you need is a signature at the top of the form, and this will remind everyone that they are supposed to be telling the truth.
IRS: Yes, that’s interesting. But it would be illegal to ask people to sign at the top of the form. The signature needs to verify the accuracy of the information provided.
ME: How about asking people to sign twice? Once at the top and once at the bottom? That way, the top signature will act as a pledge—reminding people of their patriotism, moral fiber, mother, the flag, homemade apple pie—and the signature at the bottom would be for verification.
IRS: Well, that would be confusing.
ME: Have you looked at the tax code or the tax forms recently?
IRS: [No reaction.]
ME: How about this? What if the first item on the tax form asked if the taxpayer would like to donate twenty-five dollars to a task force to fight corruption? Regardless of the particular answer, the question will force people to contemplate their standing on honesty and its importance for society! And if the taxpayer donates money to this task force, they not only state an opinion, but they also put some money behind their decision, and now they might be even more likely to follow their own example.
IRS: [Stony silence.]
And:
Over the course of many years of teaching, I’ve noticed that there typically seems to be a rash of deaths among students’ relatives at the end of the semester, and it happens mostly in the week before final exams and before papers are due. In an average semester, about 10 percent of my students come to me asking for an extension because someone has died—usually a grandmother. Of course I find it very sad and am always ready to sympathize with my students and give them more time to complete their assignments. But the question remains: what is it about the weeks before finals that is so dangerous to students’ relatives?
Most professors encounter the same puzzling phenomenon, and I’ll guess that we have come to suspect some kind of causal relationship between exams and sudden deaths among grandmothers. In fact, one intrepid researcher has successfully proven it. After collecting data over several years, Mike Adams (a professor of biology at Eastern Connecticut State University) has shown that grandmothers are ten times more likely to die before a midterm and nineteen times more likely to die before a final exam. Moreover, grandmothers of students who aren’t doing so well in class are at even higher risk—students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother compared with non-failing students.
In a paper exploring this sad connection, Adams speculates that the phenomenon is due to intrafamilial dynamics, which is to say, students’ grandmothers care so much about their grandchildren that they worry themselves to death over the outcome of exams. This would indeed explain why fatalities occur more frequently as the stakes rise, especially in cases where a student’s academic future is in peril. With this finding in mind, it is rather clear that from a public policy perspective, grandmothers—particularly those of failing students—should be closely monitored for signs of ill health during the weeks before and during finals. Another recommendation is that their grandchildren, again particularly the ones who are not doing well in class, should not tell their grandmothers anything about the timing of the exams or how they are performing in class.
Though it is likely that intrafamilial dynamics cause this tragic turn of events, there is another possible explanation for the plague that seems to strike grandmothers twice a year. It may have something to do with students’ lack of preparation and their subsequent scramble to buy more time than with any real threat to the safety of those dear old women. If that is the case, we might want to ask why it is that students become so susceptible to “losing” their grandmothers (in e-mails to professors) at semesters’ end.
Perhaps at the end of the semester, the students become so depleted by the months of studying and burning the candle at both ends that they lose some of their morality and in the process also show disregard for their grandmothers’ lives. If the concentration it takes to remember a longer digit can send people running for chocolate cake, it’s not hard to imagine how dealing with months of cumulative material from several classes might lead students to fake a dead grandmother in order to ease the pressure (not that that’s an excuse for lying to one’s professors).
More (#2) from Ariely’s The Honest Truth about Dishonesty:
On one particular flight, I was flipping through a magazine and discovered a MENSA quiz (questions that are supposed to measure intelligence). Since I am rather competitive, I naturally had to try it. The directions said that the answers were in the back of the magazine. After I answered the first question, I flipped to the back to see if I was correct, and lo and behold, I was. But as I continued with the quiz, I also noticed that as I was checking the answer to the question I just finished solving, my eyes strayed just a bit to the next answer. Having glanced at the answer to the next question, I found the next problem to be much easier. At the end of the quiz, I was able to correctly solve most of the questions, which made it easier for me to believe that I was some sort of genius. But then I had to wonder whether my score was that high because I was supersmart or because I had seen the answers out of the corner of my eye (my inclination was, of course, to attribute it to my own intelligence).
The same basic process can take place in any test in which the answers are available on another page or are written upside down, as they often are in magazines and SAT study guides. We often use the answers when we practice taking tests to convince ourselves that we’re smart or, if we get an answer wrong, that we’ve made a silly mistake that we would never make during a real exam. Either way, we come away with an inflated idea of how bright we actually are—and that’s something we’re generally happy to accept.
And:
During one unbearably long operation on my hands, the doctors inserted long needles from the tips of my fingers through the joints in order to hold my fingers straight so that the skin could heal properly. At the top of each needle they placed a cork so that I couldn’t unintentionally scratch myself or poke my eyes. After a couple of months of living with this unearthly contraption, I found that it would be removed in the clinic—not under anesthesia. That worried me a lot, because I imagined that the pain would be pretty awful. But the nurses said, “Oh, don’t worry. This is a simple procedure and it’s not even painful.” For the next few weeks I felt much less worried about the procedure.
When the time came to withdraw the needles, one nurse held my elbow and the other slowly pulled out each needle with pliers. Of course, the pain was excruciating and lasted for days—very much in contrast to how they described the procedure. Still, in hindsight, I was very glad they had lied to me. If they had told me the truth about what to expect, I would have spent the weeks before the extraction anticipating the procedure in misery, dread, and stress—which in turn might have compromised my much-needed immune system. So in the end, I came to believe that there are certain circumstances in which white lies are justified.
From Ariely’s The Honest Truth about Dishonesty:
More (#1) from Ariely’s The Honest Truth about Dishonesty:
And:
More (#2) from Ariely’s The Honest Truth about Dishonesty:
And: