The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone-Especially Ourselves

by Dr. Dan Ariely

Paperback, 2013

Collection

Disturbing Emotions

Status

Available

Call number

ARI-101

Publication

Harper Perennial (2013), Edition: Reprint, 336 pages

Description

The author, a behavioral economist, challenges our preconceptions about dishonesty; we all cheat, whether it is copying a paper in the classroom, or white lies on our expense accounts. He explores how unethical behavior works in the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects all of use, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral standards. He explores the question of dishonesty from Washington to Wall Street, and the classroom to the workplace, to examine why cheating is so prevalent and what can be done to prevent it.

User reviews

LibraryThing member Jaylia3

Entertaining, eye-opening, disturbing

This funny, fascinating, personal paradigm shattering book is in a genre I love, books that make me examine my thinking process, but this one caused me more soul searching than any other I’ve read. According to the Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC) we

decide whether or not to be dishonest based on a logical, mathematically calibrated cost-benefit analysis, and we’d all be as dishonest as we could be as long as it brought us a benefit greater than the likely cost. Fortunately, author Dan Ariely discovered that people aren’t as cold-bloodedly calculating as that. Unfortunately, the news about human morality isn’t all good.

Ariely is very skilled at conceiving, conducting and describing experiments that tease apart the tangle of human motivations. According to what he’s discovered, we’ll cheat, lie and steal, but only as much as we can rationalize because we want to be able to feel good about ourselves. We’re all capable of dishonesty, and being natural story tellers we’re extremely adept at creating perfectly logical seeming explanations justifying our less than moral actions, though we rarely understand exactly why we make the choices we do. We invariably underestimate how much we are influenced by a myriad of circumstances ranging from conflict of interest to how tired we are feeling.

Since we want to see ourselves as good, most of us never stray far from the straight and narrow path, but small frequent transgressions can create bigger problems than the egregious acts of a few bad apples. Our collective peccadilloes can wreck havoc, but with an improved understanding of the situations that increase dishonest behavior Arliey hopes his book can be a guide for corrective actions and legislation.

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LibraryThing member garcia6690

I really liked this book. It was interesting to see the way people would act to different situations and how some simple things could make people more honest. I would recommend this book to everyone. There is some very useful information, it helps you understand what can make people be a little

dishonest and some things you can do to minimize that behavior.

I won an uncorrected proof from goodreads First Reads.

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LibraryThing member rivkat

Ariely engagingly presents research on what encourages (and sometimes discourages) cheating of various kinds. If assured of not being caught, most people will cheat a little; if you authorize it with various kinds of social signals, they will cheat a lot, which explains a lot of progressively

worsening bad behavior in organizations. If they see someone from a group they think of as “not us” cheating, however, they will cheat a lot less, and they’ll even cheat less if they just see a picture of eyes. People who know they’re wearing counterfeit sunglasses cheat more. Et cetera—though some of this has appeared in his earlier work, it’s still quite interesting. Among other things, his research suggests that a context-neutral task—like the ones he uses in standard testing, where you solve matrices and then either self-report how many you solved or hand in your solutions (thus creating a control group for how many problems an average participant can solve)—people from different countries cheat at virtually the same rates, despite the researchers’ expectations. It’s only the contexts, like whether bribes for certain things are commonplace in your home country, that authorize or discourage cheating.

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LibraryThing member wbc3

I’m a big fan of Ariely’s work and this book is no exception. As in his previous books, he uses a number of behavioral experiments to understand how people act. This book was not as good as Predictably Irrational which I would recommend to everyone. But, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty is

well worth reading. The experiments he looks at are variations on one or two primary ones. Basically, they bring in people to take a test that is fairly hard and time consuming. Each person gets a reward such as one dollar for each correct answer. They then vary the conditions to allow for opportunities to cheat and see how that influences the score. One of the big things they do for most of the experiments is have people score the results themselves and then shred their answer sheets. Basically, that means they can cheat and no one will know. Generally, people cheat some, but not too much. So, if there are ten questions and people who can’t cheat would answer five, when given the opportunity to easily cheat, they might claim seven, but not ten. All of this is very interesting, but what makes the book for me are some of Ariely’s personal examples coupled with his conclusions. One of the interesting takeaways is that just reminding people not to cheat has a positive effect.

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LibraryThing member blatherlikeme

I read this book in one sitting. It is a fascinating look into the inherent dishonesty that lies in all of us. We all cheat. Just a little. White Lies, Pens from the office, travel expenses, etc. But what is interesting is what allows us to cheat; What factors are in place that let us choose to

cheat and by how much we will cheat; And how we trick ourselves into rationalizing our cheating.
It's a bit disheartening, and perhaps a bit relieving, to know it just apparently in our nature and that to control it we need to be monitored.
The book is an easy, entertaining and quick read. Like many of these types of books, in order to fill up pages there is a small amount of repetitiveness. But not nearly so much as others I could name that fill up 40 to 50% of the book by repeating themselves.

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LibraryThing member Othemts

This book is a psychological and sociological investigation into lying, with the emphasis on the ways in which all humans more or less lie and cheat throughout their whole lives. Ariely notes that while big scandals like say Enron get headlines for their irrational amount of dishonesty, that these

types of problems grow from the small actions of many people making cost-benefit analysis rather than high-level conspiracy. Interesting anecdotes about lying are backed-up by tests and studies. To be honest, I've allowed too much time from listening to this audiobook to writing about, so I'm now fuzzy on the details. But I do recall it is a fascinating book entertainingly performed by Simon Jones.

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LibraryThing member Cheryl_in_CC_NV

Five stars means everyone should read it. Two happy evenings in a quiet room should do it - but it'll probably take longer because you'll keep interrupting yourself to share bits with family or housemates.

Good science - Ariely takes his well-done experiments and research out of the college labs,

out of the ivory tower, out into the streets, and even around the world. I'm loving the fact that the so-called 'soft' sciences can be studied rigorously by researchers sufficiently dedicated.

Good writing - clear, smart, graceful, engaging, but no forced humor. He clearly cares, sincerely, about what he's studying, and wants to share it with us. No self-righteousness, no pretentiousness, no grubbing for fame or fortune... just a talented, hard-working teacher exploring the frontiers of behavioral economics & psychology with us.

I will say the book is not perfect. The man is influenced by his personal environment, of course. (He'd be the first to admit it.) One footnote mentions that he recently 'discovered' the concept of 'work-hours' (as in, how many hours of wages does it take to pay for a dinner out or a new jacket...). Well, I'm sorry, but I figured this out when I was 17, when I got my first paycheck. Didn't you?

Or more specifically, [W]e all remember the time college friends offered us pizza and beer in exchange for helping them move." Um, no, Dan, we don't.

But those are totally minor quibble. The book is *not* written at a college level, and *is* relevant to all.

We may think we understand white lies, the fudge factor, rationalizations & justifications, plagiarism, pirating, & counterfeiting, wishful blindness, the 'what-the-hell' effect and the 'knew-it-all-along' attitude, the benefits of cooperation, sunshine policies & transparency, story-telling & creativity, temptation & self-deception, etc. etc. - but we've never explored them like this before.

And what about contagion, ego depletion, and resetting rituals? Not sure what those are? Read and find out! And learn how to spot & counter dishonesty in yourself, your co-workers, even your doctor.

Yep, that's right. I'm now actually glad my doctor is joining MDVIP so I have an excuse to get a new one. Betcha you're intrigued now, even if you weren't before! :)"

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LibraryThing member TheCrow2

Why we break laws and rules? Why we are dishonest and why we lie? Dan Ariely`s book examining these basic human motivations from an interesting point of view.

LibraryThing member kwskultety

Mildly interesting.

LibraryThing member wvlibrarydude

A good read about Ariely's research on lying. I do agree with much of what is discussed in this book, but I am still left with a few questions that I would like to see investigated.

1. Many people did lie or cheat in different circumstances. Were there any consistent behaviors in some people? If so,

what was "unique" about those consistent liars or honest people?

2. Does religion, gender, education, age or any other traits change the results? Most of the studies occur on college campuses, which are not statistically applicable to all of humanity.

3. I would like to see more research into what methods would work in helping individuals see their own actions as dishonest. People always want a good self image and will be creative in telling themselves stories to explain their actions as good and not dishonest. What are some ways to help us keep from lying to ourselves? Ariely briefly looks at this issue, but more depth would be great.

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