Tag Archives: dishonesty

Social Sciences

Dishonesty and Intelligence

Another day, another survey. This time it’s one that links honesty and intelligence. Apparently, the more intelligent you are — as measured by a quick intelligence test — the less likely you’ll be to lie. Fascinatingly, the survey also shows that those who do lie from the small subgroup of the most intelligent tell smaller whoppers; people in the less intelligent subgroup tell bigger lies, for a bigger payoff.

From Washington Post:

Last summer, a couple of researchers ran a funny experiment about honesty. They went to an Israeli shopping mall and recruited people, one-by-one, into a private booth. Alone inside the booth, each subject rolled a six-sided die. Then they stepped out and reported the number that came up.

There was an incentive to lie. The higher the number, the more money people received. If they rolled a one, they got a bonus of about $2.50. If they rolled a two, they got a bonus of $5, and so on. If they rolled a six, the bonus was about $15. (Everyone also received $5 just for participating.)

Before I reveal the results, think about what you would do in that situation. Someone comes up to you at the mall and offers you free money to roll a die. If you wanted to make a few extra bucks, you could lie about what you rolled. Nobody would know, and nobody would be harmed.

Imagine you went into that booth and rolled a 1. What would you do? Would you be dishonest? Would you say you rolled a six, just to get the largest payout?

The researchers, Bradley Ruffle of Wilfrid Laurier University and Yossef Tobol, of the Jerusalem College of Technology, wanted to know what kinds of people would lie in this situation. So they asked everyone about their backgrounds, whether they considered themselves honest, whether they thought honesty was important. They asked whether people were employed, how much money they earned, and whether they were religious. They also gave people a quick intelligence test.

Out of all those attributes, brainpower stood out. Smarter people were less likely to lie about the number they rolled.

It didn’t matter whether they claimed they were honest or not; it didn’t matter whether they were religious, whether they were male or female, or whether they lived in a city. Money didn’t seem to be a factor either. Even after controlling for incomes, the researchers found that the most honest people were the ones who scored highest on the intelligence test.

Read the entire article here.

Idea Soup

Lies By Any Other Name

Lies_and_the_lying_liarsCertain gestures and facial movements are usually good indicators of a lie in progress. If your boss averts her eyes when she tells you “what a good employee you are”, or if your spouse looks at his finger nails when telling you “how gorgeous your new dress looks”, you can be almost certain that you are being told some half-truths or mistruths. Psychologists have studied these visual indicators for as long as humans have told lies.

Since dishonesty is so widespread and well-studied it comes as no surprise that there are verbal cues as well — just as telling as sweaty palms. A well-used verbal clue to insincerity, ironically, is the phrase “to be honest“. Verbal tee-ups such as this are known by behavioral scientists as qualifiers or performatives. There is a growing list.

From the WSJ:

A friend of mine recently started a conversation with these words: “Don’t take this the wrong way…”

I wish I could tell you what she said next. But I wasn’t listening—my brain had stalled. I was bracing for the sentence that would follow that phrase, which experience has taught me probably wouldn’t be good.

Certain phrases just seem to creep into our daily speech. We hear them a few times and suddenly we find ourselves using them. We like the way they sound, and we may find they are useful. They may make it easier to say something difficult or buy us a few extra seconds to collect our next thought.

Yet for the listener, these phrases are confusing. They make it fairly impossible to understand, or even accurately hear, what the speaker is trying to say.

Consider: “I want you to know…” or “I’m just saying…” or “I hate to be the one to tell you this…” Often, these phrases imply the opposite of what the words mean, as with the phrase, “I’m not saying…” as in “I’m not saying we have to stop seeing each other, but…”

Take this sentence: “I want to say that your new haircut looks fabulous.” In one sense, it’s true: The speaker does wish to tell you that your hair looks great. But does he or she really think it is so or just want to say it? It’s unclear.

Language experts have textbook names for these phrases—”performatives,” or “qualifiers.” Essentially, taken alone, they express a simple thought, such as “I am writing to say…” At first, they seem harmless, formal, maybe even polite. But coming before another statement, they often signal that bad news, or even some dishonesty on the part of the speaker, will follow.

“Politeness is another word for deception,” says James W. Pennebaker, chair of the psychology department of the University of Texas at Austin, who studies these phrases. “The point is to formalize social relations so you don’t have to reveal your true self.”

In other words, “if you’re going to lie, it’s a good way to do it—because you’re not really lying. So it softens the blow,” Dr. Pennebaker says.

Of course, it’s generally best not to lie, Dr. Pennebaker notes. But because these sayings so frequently signal untruth, they can be confusing even when used in a neutral context. No wonder they often lead to a breakdown in personal communications.

Some people refer to these phrases as “tee-ups.” That is fitting. What do you do with a golf ball? You put it on a peg at the tee—tee it up—and then give it a giant wallop.

Betsy Schow says she felt like she was “hit in the stomach by a cannonball” the day she was preparing to teach one of her first yoga classes. A good friend—one she’d assumed had shown up to support her—approached her while she was warming up. She was in the downward facing dog pose when she heard her friend say, “I am only telling you this because I love you…”

The friend pointed out that lumps were showing beneath Ms. Schow’s yoga clothes and said people laughed at her behind her back because they thought she wasn’t fit enough to teach yoga. Ms. Schow had recently lost a lot of weight and written a book about it. She says the woman also mentioned that Ms. Schow’s friends felt she was “acting better than they were.” Then the woman offered up the name of a doctor who specializes in liposuction. “Hearing that made me feel sick,” says Ms. Schow, a 32-year-old fitness consultant in Alpine, Utah. “Later, I realized that her ‘help’ was no help at all.”

Tee-ups have probably been around as long as language, experts say. They seem to be used with equal frequency by men and women, although there aren’t major studies of the issue. Their use may be increasing as a result of social media, where people use phrases such as “I am thinking that…” or “As far as I know…” both to avoid committing to a definitive position and to manage the impression they make in print.

“Awareness about image management is increased any time people put things into print, such as in email or on social networks,” says Jessica Moore, department chair and assistant professor at the College of Communication at Butler University, Indianapolis. “Thus people often make caveats to their statements that function as a substitute for vocalized hedges.” And people do this hedging—whether in writing or in speech—largely unconsciously, Dr. Pennebaker says. “We are emotionally distancing ourselves from our statement, without even knowing it,” he says.

So, if tee-ups are damaging our relationships, yet we often don’t even know we’re using them, what can we do? Start by trying to be more aware of what you are saying. Tee-ups should serve as yellow lights. If you are about to utter one, slow down. Proceed with caution. Think about what you are about to say.

“If you are feeling a need to use them a lot, then perhaps you should consider the possibility that you are saying too many unpleasant things to or about other people,” says Ellen Jovin, co-founder of Syntaxis, a communication-skills training firm in New York. She considers some tee-up phrases to be worse than others. “Don’t take this the wrong way…” is “ungracious,” she says. “It is a doomed attempt to evade the consequences of a comment.”

Read the entire article here.

Image: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, book cover, by Al Franken. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

BigBang

Sign First; Lie Less

A recent paper filed with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that we are more likely to be honest if we sign a form before, rather than after, completing it. So, over the coming years look out for Uncle Sam to revise the ubiquitous IRS 1040 form by adding a signature line at the top rather than the bottom of the last page.

[div class=attrib]From Ars Technica:[end-div]

What’s the purpose of signing a form? On the simplest level, a signature is simply a way to make someone legally responsible for the content of the form. But in addition to the legal aspect, the signature is an appeal to personal integrity, forcing people to consider whether they’re comfortable attaching their identity to something that may not be completely true.

Based on some figures in a new PNAS paper, the signatures on most forms are miserable failures, at least from the latter perspective. The IRS estimates that it misses out on about $175 billion because people misrepresent their income or deductions. And the insurance industry calculates that it loses about $80 billion annually due to fraudulent claims. But the same paper suggests a fix that is as simple as tweaking the form. Forcing people to sign before they complete the form greatly increases their honesty.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that signing at the end of a form does not promote accurate reporting, given what we know about human psychology. “Immediately after lying,” the paper’s authors write, “individuals quickly engage in various mental justifications, reinterpretations, and other ‘tricks’ such as suppressing thoughts about their moral standards that allow them to maintain a positive self-image despite having lied.” By the time they get to the actual request for a signature, they’ve already made their peace with lying: “When signing comes after reporting, the morality train has already left the station.”

The problem isn’t with the signature itself. Lots of studies have shown that focusing the attention on one’s self, which a signature does successfully, can cause people to behave more ethically. The problem comes from its placement after the lying has already happened. So, the authors posited a quick fix: stick the signature at the start. Their hypothesis was that “signing one’s name before reporting information (rather than at the end) makes morality accessible right before it is most needed, which will consequently promote honest reporting.”

To test this proposal, they designed a series of forms that required self reporting of personal information, either involving performance on a math quiz where higher scores meant higher rewards, or the reimbursable travel expenses involved in getting to the study’s location. The only difference among the forms? Some did not ask for a signature, some put the signature on top, and some placed it in its traditional location, at the end.

In the case of the math quiz, the researchers actually tracked how well the participants had performed. With the signature at the end, a full 79 percent of the participants cheated. Somewhat fewer cheated when no signature was required, though the difference was not statistically significant. But when the signature was required on top, only 37 percent cheated—less than half the rate seen in the signature-at-bottom group. A similar pattern was seen when the authors analyzed the extent of the cheating involved.

Although they didn’t have complete information on travel expenses, the same pattern prevailed: people who were given the signature-on-top form reported fewer expenses than either of the other two groups.

The authors then repeated this experiment, but added a word completion task, where participants were given a series of blanks, some filled in with letters, and asked to complete the word. These completion tasks were set up so that they could be answered with neutral words or with those associated with personal ethics, like “virtue.” They got the same results as in the earlier tests of cheating, and the word completion task showed that the people who had signed on top were more likely to fill in the blanks to form ethics-focused words. This supported the contention that the early signature put people in an ethical state of mind prior to completion of the form.

But the really impressive part of the study came from its real-world demonstration of this effect. The authors got an unnamed auto insurance company to send out two versions of its annual renewal forms to over 13,000 policy holders, identical except for the location of the signature. One part of this form included a request for odometer readings, which the insurance companies use to calculate typical miles travelled, which are proportional to accident risk. These are used to calculate insurance cost—the more you drive, the more expensive it is.

Those who signed at the top reported nearly 2,500 miles more than the ones who signed at the end.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump, or follow the article at PNAS, here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Faux Fashion is More Than Skin-Deep

Some innovative research shows that we are generally more inclined to cheat others if we are clad in counterfeit designer clothing or carrying faux accessories.

[div class=attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

Let me tell you the story of my debut into the world of fashion. When Jennifer Wideman Green (a friend of mine from graduate school) ended up living in New York City, she met a number of people in the fashion industry. Through her I met Freeda Fawal-Farah, who worked for Harper’s Bazaar. A few months later Freeda invited me to give a talk at the magazine, and because it was such an atypical crowd for me, I agreed.

I found myself on a stage before an auditorium full of fashion mavens. Each woman was like an exhibit in a museum: her jewelry, her makeup, and, of course, her stunning shoes. I talked about how people make decisions, how we compare prices when we are trying to figure out how much something is worth, how we compare ourselves to others, and so on. They laughed when I hoped they would, asked thoughtful questions, and offered plenty of their own interesting ideas. When I finished the talk, Valerie Salembier, the publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, came onstage, hugged and thanked me—and gave me a stylish black Prada overnight bag.

I headed downtown to my next meeting. I had some time to kill, so I decided to take a walk. As I wandered, I couldn’t help thinking about my big black leather bag with its large Prada logo. I debated with myself: should I carry my new bag with the logo facing outward? That way, other people could see and admire it (or maybe just wonder how someone wearing jeans and red sneakers could possibly have procured it). Or should I carry it with the logo facing toward me, so that no one could recognize that it was a Prada? I decided on the latter and turned the bag around.

Even though I was pretty sure that with the logo hidden no one realized it was a Prada bag, and despite the fact that I don’t think of myself as someone who cares about fashion, something felt different to me. I was continuously aware of the brand on the bag. I was wearing Prada! And it made me feel different; I stood a little straighter and walked with a bit more swagger. I wondered what would happen if I wore Ferrari underwear. Would I feel more invigorated? More confident? More agile? Faster?

I continued walking and passed through Chinatown, which was bustling with activity. Not far away, I spotted an attractive young couple in their twenties taking in the scene. A Chinese man approached them. “Handbags, handbags!” he called, tilting his head to indicate the direction of his small shop. After a moment or two, the woman asked the Chinese man, “You have Prada?”

The vendor nodded. I watched as she conferred with her partner. He smiled at her, and they followed the man to his stand.

The Prada they were referring to, of course, was not actually Prada. Nor were the $5 “designer” sunglasses on display in his stand really Dolce&Gabbana. And the Armani perfumes displayed over by the street food stands? Fakes too.

From Ermine to Armani

Going back a way, ancient Roman law included a set of regulations called sumptuary laws, which filtered down through the centuries into the laws of nearly all European nations. Among other things, the laws dictated who could wear what, according to their station and class. For example, in Renaissance England, only the nobility could wear certain kinds of fur, fabrics, laces, decorative beading per square foot, and so on, while those in the gentry could wear decisively less appealing clothing. (The poorest were generally excluded from the law, as there was little point in regulating musty burlap, wool, and hair shirts.) People who “dressed above their station” were silently, but directly, lying to those around them. And those who broke the law were often hit with fines and other punishments.

What may seem to be an absurd degree of obsessive compulsion on the part of the upper crust was in reality an effort to ensure that people were what they signaled themselves to be; the system was designed to eliminate disorder and confusion. Although our current sartorial class system is not as rigid as it was in the past, the desire to signal success and individuality is as strong today as ever.

When thinking about my experience with the Prada bag, I wondered whether there were other psychological forces related to fakes that go beyond external signaling. There I was in Chinatown holding my real Prada bag, watching the woman emerge from the shop holding her fake one. Despite the fact that I had neither picked out nor paid for mine, it felt to me that there was a substantial difference between the way I related to my bag and the way she related to hers.

More generally, I started wondering about the relationship between what we wear and how we behave, and it made me think about a concept that social scientists call self-signaling. The basic idea behind self-signaling is that despite what we tend to think, we don’t have a very clear notion of who we are. We generally believe that we have a privileged view of our own preferences and character, but in reality we don’t know ourselves that well (and definitely not as well as we think we do). Instead, we observe ourselves in the same way we observe and judge the actions of other people— inferring who we are and what we like from our actions.

For example, imagine that you see a beggar on the street. Rather than ignoring him or giving him money, you decide to buy him a sandwich. The action in itself does not define who you are, your morality, or your character, but you interpret the deed as evidence of your compassionate and charitable character. Now, armed with this “new” information, you start believing more intensely in your own benevolence. That’s self-signaling at work.

The same principle could also apply to fashion accessories. Carrying a real Prada bag—even if no one else knows it is real—could make us think and act a little differently than if we were carrying a counterfeit one. Which brings us to the questions: Does wearing counterfeit products somehow make us feel less legitimate? Is it possible that accessorizing with fakes might affect us in unexpected and negative ways?

Calling All Chloés

I decided to call Freeda and tell her about my recent interest in high fashion. During our conversation, Freeda promised to convince a fashion designer to lend me some items to use in some experiments. A few weeks later, I received a package from the Chloé label containing twenty handbags and twenty pairs of sunglasses. The statement accompanying the package told me that the handbags were estimated to be worth around $40,000 and the sunglasses around $7,000. (The rumor about this shipment quickly traveled around Duke, and I became popular among the fashion-minded crowd.)

With those hot commodities in hand, Francesca Gino, Mike Norton (both professors at Harvard University), and I set about testing whether participants who wore fake products would feel and behave differently from those wearing authentic ones. If our participants felt that wearing fakes would broadcast (even to themselves) a less honorable self-image, we wondered whether they might start thinking of themselves as somewhat less honest. And with this tainted self-concept in mind, would they be more likely to continue down the road of dishonesty?

Using the lure of Chloé accessories, we enlisted many female MBA students for our experiment. We assigned each woman to one of three conditions: authentic, fake or no information. In the authentic condition, we told participants that they would be donning real Chloé designer sunglasses. In the fake condition, we told them that they would be wearing counterfeit sunglasses that looked identical to those made by Chloé (in actuality all the products we used were the real McCoy). Finally, in the no-information condition, we didn’t say anything about the authenticity of the sunglasses.

Once the women donned their sunglasses, we directed them to the hallway, where we asked them to look at different posters and out the windows so that they could later evaluate the quality and experience of looking through their sunglasses. Soon after, we called them into another room for another task.

In this task, the participants were given 20 sets of 12 numbers (3.42, 7.32 and so on), and they were asked to find in each set the two numbers that add up to 10. They had five minutes to solve as many as possible and were paid for each correct answer. We set up the test so that the women could cheat—report that they solved more sets than they did (after shredding their worksheet and all the evidence)—while allowing us to figure out who cheated and by how much (by rigging the shredders so that they only cut the sides of the paper).

Over the years we carried out many versions of this experiment, and we repeatedly find that a lot of people cheated by a few questions. This experiment was not different in this regard, but what was particularly interesting was the effect of wearing counterfeits. While “only” 30 percent of the participants in the authentic condition reported solving more matrices than they actually had, 74 percent of those in the fake condition reported solving more matrices than they actually had. These results gave rise to another interesting question. Did the presumed fakeness of the product make the women cheat more than they naturally would? Or did the genuine Chloé label make them behave more honestly than they would otherwise?

This is why we also had a no-information condition, in which we didn’t mention anything about whether the sunglasses were real or fake. In that condition 42 percent of the women cheated. That result was between the other two, but it was much closer to the authentic condition (in fact, the two conditions were not statistically different from each other). These results suggest that wearing a genuine product does not increase our honesty (or at least not by much). But once we knowingly put on a counterfeit product, moral constraints loosen to some degree, making it easier for us to take further steps down the path of dishonesty.

The moral of the story? If you, your friend, or someone you are dating wears counterfeit products, be careful! Another act of dishonesty may be closer than you expect.

Up to No Good

These results led us to another question: if wearing counterfeits changes the way we view our own behavior, does it also cause us to be more suspicious of others? To find out, we asked another group of participants to put on what we told them were either real or counterfeit Chloé sunglasses. This time, we asked them to fill out a rather long survey with their sunglasses on. In this survey, we included three sets of questions. The questions in set A asked participants to estimate the likelihood that people they know might engage in various ethically questionable behaviors such as standing in the express line with too many groceries. The questions in set B asked them to estimate the likelihood that when people say particular phrases, including “Sorry, I’m late. Traffic was terrible,” they are lying. Set C presented participants with two scenarios depicting someone who has the opportunity to behave dishonestly, and asked them to estimate the likelihood that the person in the scenario would take the opportunity to cheat.

What were the results? You guessed it. When reflecting on the behavior of people they know, participants in the counterfeit condition judged their acquaintances to be more likely to behave dishonestly than did participants in the authentic condition. They also interpreted the list of common excuses as more likely to be lies, and judged the actor in the two scenarios as being more likely to choose the shadier option. We concluded that counterfeit products not only tend to make us more dishonest; they also cause us to view others as less than honest as well.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]