Everything I told you up to now was about one chance of cheating.
But of course, an imposing question is, what happens when we give people more
chances to cheat over time? So we created a task like that.
We showed people some dots. On the computer screen and we asked them
are there more dots on the right or more dots on the left.
Tell us which one has more dots, but just so you know, you're getting paid ten times
more if you say right. And this came up to equivalent conflicts
of interest tasks. When you ask a doctor for example, whats
better for this patient, treatment A or treatment B?
But you, the doctor, gets ten times more if you say.
Let them go for treatment A. So what happened with this task we could
do many, many, many of them, hundreds of ,them over time.
And what we saw was that many people started by cheating just a little bit.
Cheating just a little bit. Feeling good about myself, cheating a
little bit, feeling good. But at some point, many people switched.
And all of a sudden, started cheating all the time.
And this switch happened to different people at different times, but it was very
salient that there was this switch occurred.
Our issue was where is this switching coming from.
And one of the thoughts we had was that maybe this is what we call the What the
Hell effect. If you think about it, you've been trying
to feel good about yourself and cheat a little bit, and at some point you cheat
too much. And you can't feel good about yourself any
more. You might say, forget about it, let me
just enjoy it as much as I can, and cheat all the way.
And that's indeed what we see in the data. So if you had a little bit of cheating and
then cheating a lot. And by the way, a lot of people reported
it happened to them in dieting. When you start the day and you decide to
be good on your diet and then you eat the muffin or you eat something bad you say
forget about it. I'll star tomorrow, I'll start next, next
Monday. So if we have this pattern, when people
cheat a little bit and then they switch to cheating all the time.
We thought what ever stop people from cheating all the time?
What would ever reset this fudge factor? And, and we went back and we thought about
religion. And if you think about the Catholic
confession, I'm of course not Catholic. You can ask what is the logic of the
Catholic confession? Now if you actually came to the Catholic
confession from an economic perspective. You would say that if you can sin and get
absolved you should cheat more, because you can get absolved.
In fact, you should sin on the way to confession.
If you want to minimize time in purgatory, the only thing you want is to cheat just
before you confess. But of course this is not what the
religion thinks, and we went to talk to all kinds of Catholic priests about this.
So if we don't think that confession increases cheating, how could it reduce
cheating? One theory is that confession adds to the
cost of the crime. You say to yourself like in the Baker
theory, not only do I have a chance of being caught and go to prison, but I have
to talk to somebody and they would make me feel bad about it and let me, recite,
something 1,500 times, that's not good. Not worth it, let me not cheat.
Not much evidence on there. We thought maybe what happened is that
just like the Ten Commandment experiment, that the moment you get out of confession.
You feel wonderful and pure, and you don't want to disturb that feeling.
So for a little bit of time after that you're behaving more consistent with the
tenets of the religion. Or we thought maybe what's happening is
confession is a particularly useful idea for resetting a new page.
If you cheat all the time, why would you ever stop?
Unless you can start a new page and therefore start again.
So we tried experiments like this. People cheated a little bit, they start
cheating a lot then we stop them. So here's a piece of paper.
Would you like to write something about something bad you have done recently?
People wrote something and we asked them to shred it.
Then we gave them another sheet and said, would you like to ask for forgiveness from
whatever deity you believe in? Please write it down, and shred it when
you're finished. What happened after people did both of
those elements? Saying what they have done and ask for
forgiveness? Cheating went down dramatically.
Now regrettably, later on, it went up again.
But at least for awhile, this idea of opening new pages seemed to be effective.
And I think this is one of the things that we can actually take from religion.
We can say, if religion has evolved to help men deal with some of our challenges,
some of our fallacies, some of our weak points as human beings.
What can we learn from religion and should we incorporate similar mechanism in other
places in society? For example, should we create a
confession-like mechanism for citizens submitting the IRS?
Should we create a confession-like mechanism for some of our politicians for
some of our CEOs? Is there something important in starting a
new page and allowing people to all of a sudden reset the level of honesty and
behave better? And of course, a big scale version of this
was the Reconciliation Act in South Africa, where they basically created the
structure. Where people basically, in, in, in a very
important public stage both ask for forgiveness and started a new, a new page.
And you know, apartheid, apartheid is of course a complex, difficult thing.
It will take a long time for anybody to get over it completely.
But it is taking these ideas of saying you're sorry and starting a new page that
might be important not just in religion, but in civic society, in many cases.
Another question people ask me many times, is what about cultural differences?
We travel around the world, we see all kinds of other cultures, some of us grew
up in a different culture. And you can ask yourself, how is cheating
different in different places. So we try this out.
So I grew up in Israel, so the first thing I did was to try Israel.
So what do you think? Do the Israelis cheat more or less than
Americans? Actually I'll tell you that when you ask
most people whether they think that people in their home countries cheat more or less
than Americans. Most people think that people in their
home countries cheat more than Americans, aside from the Canadian and the northern
European countries. And in general, when we ask people what do
you think, that Israeli cheat more or less than Americans, most people say that the
Israelis probably cheat more but the reality was not that.
We found that the Israelis were cheating just the same as the Americans.
Francesca, my Italian, my Italian collaborator said you want to see
cheating, come to Italy, we'll show you what this cheating is all about.
We went to Italy, we tried the experiment there.
Same results as in the States. We tried Turkey, we tried England, we
tried Canada. So far, we don't find any differences.
Now, we haven't tried everything, but so far, we don't find any differences.
Now, how can it be that in one hand, when you travel in other countries, or you grew
up in other countries, you feel the cheating in different countries is very
different. On the other hand we don't find it in our
experiment. How would you balance these two views?
Is one of them right and is one of them wrong?
No, I think they're both correct and here is what I think happens.
Our experiments are basically without any cultural context.
And therefore they check the basic fudge factor.
And the fudge factor is in it's basic is something we all share.
We can all rationalize about 15% of our actions.
In a slightly moral way, and still feel of ourself as good people.
So that's kind of the basic thing that is similar across many people.
But culture is important, but what culture does, it doesn't change your morality
across the whole range. It attacks a particular domain.
Think about something like plagiarism. Cheating on exams.
University cheating, different cultures have said, oh, this is really important,
you can't cheat much. Other cultures have said that is not a big
deal, you can cheat more. Other cultures have said, this is not a
moral question. It is not a part of the moral domain at
all, cheating in this case is just like playing poker.
Don't worry about it. What about infidelity?
Some cultures have said oh, this is a real big issue.
Other countries have said this is not such a big issue.
What about cheating on your taxes? Issue or not issue.
Illegal downloads. Buying fake counterfeit fashion product.
So basically what I think is going on, is that there is this basic fudge fact that
we all share. But the way it plays out in different
domains are influenced by culture. Where the culture can either shrink or
expand the fudge factor. And in some cases, it can even take a
particular behavior. And say this is not a moral question.
In some countries with cultures with high corruption, bribing a policeman is not
something that is immoral. It is just, this is how you do business,
and so on. So then we need to think about, both about
the fudge factor, as well as about what the effect of culture is on top of that.
I did find one experiment. One experiment that showed a difference in
cheating across cultures. Every time we do these experiments, it's
important to conduct them in a similar way across different places.
So what we do is, we go to other universities and we check students, or we
go to bars. And when we go to bars, what we do is also
adjust the payment scale. So a dollar in the states is not a dollar
in, in India. It's not a dollar, a dollar in England.
It's not a dollar in Turkey. So what we do is we go to bars.
And we create a payment situation, such as answering four questions will equal one
glass of beer. So now, this is kind of our international
currency. Every four questions is a glass of beer.
And the one place we found the difference was when we went to a bar in Washington,
D.C. Where congressional staffers hang out.
And then we went to a bar in New York where bankers hang out.
And the question is, which one of those two groups cheated more?
Now, I have to admit that I expected the politicians to cheat more than the
bankers, but the results were the opposite.
The banker cheated twice, two to one. But I do have one word of caution, which
is these were congressional staffers. So these were junior politicians, and
maybe over time there's room for growth in terms of their dishonesty.
[music].