- Hello and welcome to our week 3 Office Hours.
Professor Ariel, thank you again for joining me this week.
- My, my pleasure. What, what happened, it's professional?
- yes well you corrected me last time so I'm, I'm trying to be official.
sorry Dan. [laugh] And thank you guys for continuing
to summit such awesome questions. Keep doing that.
And we'll keep doing this. So this week our topic was dishonesty.
So our Office Hours is going to be all about dishonesty.
And you've submitted tons of questions on that topic and I will ask you about them.
- Very good. - So, we've covered the topic of free
and, of course, some things are not intended to be free.
- Mm-hm. - Some things are taken as if they are
free, but they are, they do cost money. So one of our questions is about internet
piracy and illegal downloading of music. And this is, this is something that has
really increased over the years, and sort of become an accepted practice.
It's a socially accepted to download things off the internet, books and music,
for free. The question is what can we do about this
and why has this acceptance sort of prevailed?
- Yep. By the way, it's not illegal in every
place. So I think for example, in Switzerland,
if I remember correctly, it is legal to download things.
It's just not legal to upload things. -[laugh].
- And actually in Sweden there was a party that their main kind of ideology
for going into being part of the government was, or being elected was to
basically make internet piracy legal. And I think from that perspective,
internet piracy is a very interesting example for when it is easy for us to
rationalize bad behavior. And actually I, I gave a lecture
somewhere in San Francisco and I said something like in a side comment about
illegal downloads. And there was a young guy raised his hand
and he said, what do you mean illegal downloads.
He said musicians want their music to be heard and I'm actually helping them out.
He said on top of that record label companies are evil.
Terrible organization. They make too much money anyway.
He said and I would never pay for it anyway.
So, I'm not doing anything bad. In fact I'm helping a good cause.
Now if you would listen to him, you would think he was a, a knight in shining
armor. fighting the good fight to liberate
information from it's own shackles. But, but that's actually not, not a fair
characterization because if the artist really wanted the music to be for free,
they would put it up for free. And if the record labels wanted people to
be able to download this stuff, they would have just allowed this to happen.
Put a 0 price on it. But the reality is that the people who
have made this intellectual property, in many cases don't want it to be
distributed for free. But then we as individuals take the
liberty of taking it for free. And we justify it to ourselves in all
kinds of, all kinds of ways. And, and, from this perspective, if you
think about all kinds of things that we've discovered multiple ways to
rationalize it, large distance for money and internet downloads are almost a
perfect medium to not feel guilty about doing this.
And I think that, much like this young man, we can even create an envelope of
rationalization about why this is not just bad, but it's in fact good.
And, just imagine that somebody made $0.10 from creating a song, and now ask
yourself whether you would ever take $0.10 from their pockets.
The answer is probably, probably not. But downloading is something illegal.
We don't think about it in this way. We don't think of ourselves as taking
money from their pocket. Or imagine a different universe with
different rules of physics. I know it's hard to do.
But imagine there are some rules of physics that basically moving bytes and
atoms would cost some money. So that every time you downloaded
something illegally somebody would pay the bill.
Actually, you knew who was going to pay the bill.
Maybe it was your internet company in some cases, the people who produced the
music. But what if transferring this information
was costly? It wasn't free.
How would you feel under those conditions about downloading illegal stuff?
Probably very different. But the fact is that the moment that you
have something that has a high fixed cost in creating, but then 0, or very close to
0 distributional cost, we don't feel bad about stealing it.
And of course, on top of that we have the ideology, we have the distance and so on.
So it's almost a perfect medium to behave badly but don't feel bad about it.
And do you, do you download stuff illegally?
- I'm not going to admit to that. [laugh] - Okay, not going to admit.
Okay, I guess that, that answers the, the question.
I think that if the record industry in general are going to basically work on
guilt, it's not going to work out. It's going to be, the fight for people to
feel guilty, this environment is just going to be very, very tough.
I also think that when they fight for a, kind of, cost and benefit in us, it is
not working. So from time to time, in the US, they
catch somebody, then punish them in a big way.
And I don't think that has any effect either.
But I think that what has worked. What, what seems to me what have worked.
Is making the downloading more complex. So people who are less technically savvy
have a hard time, a harder time doing it. And actually my, my books are, are
available to download illegally in many, in many places.
- Are you sure you want to say that? - Well, you know.
I don't want to pro, promote it necessarily.
But when I, some of those places are very user friendly, but some of them, it's
really tough. [laugh].
even for me to, to get the illegal copy of that.
so, so some, and, and, and then there's all kinds of other, other schemes
connected to it. So, anyway, so I think that guilt is
going to be a very tough process. you know, and, and actually in the
discussion boards for, for Coursera when there was a discussion by some students
about downloading my books illegally or not.
the, the method the kind of the tone of the discussion did not have feeling a,
of, of guilt, or at, at least not by a lot of people.
There were some people who pointed out that it would be nice.
But it was not the, the feeling of, I really feel bad about, about doing it.
There was a feeling of reciprocation. But not feeling bad.
So anyway, back to the point. I think that it's going to be incredibly
hard to get people to feel guilty. I think it's going to be incredibly tough
to get people to be afraid of being caught.
I think that the, the way that this would probably move forward is to make the
process of downloading this stuff more difficult and the process of buying it
legally cheaper and easier. And I think that is eventually what would
convince people. So I think the iTunes store have done
some, a lot of good for the music industry because it's incredibly easy and
not that expensive. We can still argue about how much, how
much it should cost, but I think those would be kind of the type of intervention
that would work out. I, I also think that the moment that some
musicians, for example work not through a label but the payment goes to them
directly, people feel more connected to that as well.
That kind of shrinks some of the distance and people feel more connected to it.
so it's, it's kind of an interesting world because you have a we talked, we
talked last time, we have people being incredibly generous in things like
Kickstarter, and giving a lot to people they care about, musicians and so-on.
At the same time illegal downloading's so easy.
- Yes, definitely. and, what you were saying about on the
discussion boards. I actually deleted someone's, someone's
post who had posted your books online and it said something cheeky like, shame on
you. And it just got, he came back at me with
this huge argument about how he should be allowed to post your books for free.
[laugh] Like no, actually. - Yeah, it's, it's, it's really
interesting to think how, how easy it is to make this into ideology.
I, I think a good exercise for anybody to do for this, to kind of figure out for
themselves, needs to spend let's say a year, working on something.
To decide to post it for pay and then seeing it posted for free illegally.
And then see how you would feel about it. [laugh] - Right.
- It's, it's a slightly different way of thinking about it that when you're just
talking hypothetically about other people's work.
- Right, when you see your own creation being[laugh].
- And you know and, and there's some things that we create and we decide to
post for free. And it's perfectly up to your decision
but if you decide something is your livelihood and you decide not to post it
for free, that, that's a different feeling.
- Yes, definitely. Alright let's talk about altruistic
cheating. You talk a lot about cheating for
yourself you know, and the benefits of that and why we do so.
What about cheating for others? - Yes, so for me this was a terrible day
actually. So, I got a call from this organization
that I really love and they asked me if I would help them increase how much
donations they get. How they, how they solicit people to give
them money. And I give them money every year and I
was very happy to help them. And I said, okay, before I make some
suggestions, tell me, what have you tried before?
What has worked, what hasn't worked? Kind of, give me the, the lay of the
ground. So we can, you know, fit, understand
better what's going on and not repeat some mistakes you've done before.
And they described to me what they've done before, and I was appalled.
I, I couldn't believe the kind of immoral stuff that they were doing.
And you know, over the years I've seen lots of organizations trying to get
people to behave in certain ways. And this not-for-profit which is a
wonderful organization in every possible way, was nevertheless doing stuff that I
thought was just reprehensible. And I started wondering why?
And, one kind of the theory was, or one hypothesis was because it's for a good
cause. Because they could justify that this is
actually something positive. They could justify a higher degree of
dishonesty. So, so we tried it out and turns out
there's truth to this. So imagine that you work for yourself.
If you cheat, you are dishonest, you get to benefit from this.
Or another condition you’re dishonest, someone else gets to benefit from this.
Turns out that when somebody else gets to benefit from it you feel more free.
You feel a bit like Robin Hood. You’re helping the poor.
You're helping other people. And if you become good, better friends
with that, that person, but a friend of that person all of the sudden dishonesty
goes higher up. So I think there's something about
helping a group, helping individuals, helping society that helps people loosen
up. there are more reasoning.
I also think that's why politicians can lie so easily.
Right, because if you're a politician and you lie to get into elections.
I don't know if you realize this but there's, there's some politicians in some
parts of the world that have been known to be dishonest.
actually the gauge of political dishonesty is incredible right how much
dishonesty there is. And I think if you put yourself into the
role of a politician, it's very easy to say, if I got you to vote for me, it's
actually good for you. It's not for me that I just want to have
this position. It's actually good for you and for the
country and if you elect this other person, that will be devastating
political ideology for the country. And because of that I think they find it
much easier to, to tell lies. And not only that, we've done some
research on how much people expect their politicians to lie.
And people actually expect, actually people are willing to tolerate lots of
lies from the politicians who are on their side of the debate.
So if you're a democrat, you're willing for the democrats to lie more.
If you're a republican, you're willing for the republican to lie, to higher
degree. And I think because we understand that to
get things done in those cases it's important.
Like for the functional outcome of carrying out your job, we don't care
about how you do it. The outcome is what's important.
So politicians lie more and the people forgive them to a higher degree.
And I think there's some potential very negative escalation in that.
- So sort of like the ends justifying the means?
- The ends justifying the mean is for the good cause, therefore willing to tolerate
it. And the problem of course is that how
much of it are we willing to tolerate? And if we, if we're not going to be upset
with our politicians and particularly our politician who represents our side.
What are they going to be willing to get away with?
And then if the other side lies as well, there's going to be like a, a cold war.
- Right. - Of, of escalation of dishonesty, which
is. - Cascade.
- Very, very dangerous. - Do you think that more licensing also
can tie into this? - Yeah absolutely.
So more licensing is that all of the sudden you come up with justification
about why this is actually a good thing. So, you know, if you all just voted for
me the country would be better off. this particular program is really useful
so it's okay to hide some of the information.
And it basically takes away things from our kind of selfish realm of our selfish
benefit verses the cost to other people. And it's moving to a, kind of an exercise
of other people's cost verses other people's benefit verses dishonesty.
And all of a sudden dishonesty can have a much better payoff.
- Alright, so, - It's very sad.
- It is very sad, it's very sad. And, and, this person actually made the
connection between Enron and you know, a lot of the people who are in Enron
involved in this, you know, this giant financial scandal, were very wealthy and
also charitable individuals. - Yeah.
- And so, notice that maybe the fact that they're giving so much away gave them,
you know, the impression that they could take a little more.
- Yeah, ability, and this, this, you could also think about this hand washing.
- Right. - Right, what happens if you misbehave in
one domain, can you cleanse yourself in another domain?
And, you know, in religious thought there's all kinds of things like that.
What do you ask forgiveness from. you know, a company who's polluting a
river, what can they do to cleanse themselves?
Can they give money to charity? Can they help some kids?
What about if they do something nice for the ocean?
and discussion of how we do, we deal with this as individuals is also interesting.
If we misbehave in one direction do we feel an extra need to give in something
else. - Right, right.
So do you think that there is some sort of deeply ingrained moral compass within
humans? - So, I don't know.
what is clear is that cheating in the animal kingdom is very different.
So let's take monkeys, for example. In the monkey world, there's a very
strict hierarchy and monkey at the top of the hierarchy should get all the first
stab, stab at the, stab at the good food and then it goes down to the lower
levels. But if you're a monkey at lower levels,
and you find a piece of good fruit you're not going to tell the person at the top.
if you can hide that piece of fruit and eat it without anybody seeing, that's
what you're going to do. and monkeys don't have guilt about it.
what's interesting about humans is that we've developed things like guilt.
Which means that even if nobody else would see it, if we make the equivalent
for the, say, fruit, we would still feel back about it.
Right, even if nobody else would find out, you would feel guilty about going
into one of your friends' homes at night, and taking some fruit.
Even if you they're ranked higher in the social hierarchy what, what, whatever it
is. something inside would, would stop you.
So, so from that perspective it is not ingrained like other things in decision
making. So, we, we mention this asymmetric
dominance and some other effects or relativity are common to us and to other
animals. Emotions of course are in many ways
connected to us and to animals. Inability to think about the long term
are connected and with, with the sense, a sense of moral compass, I don't really
know. Alright, so, it's, it's a unique skill
that we, skill or ability, that we have. And of course we develop it throughout
time. But whenever we measure something that
develops throughout time, it's hard to figure out what is the basis that have
been established in oue biology and was it just acquired socially.
So, I, I don't know. But it's a, it's a fascinating question.
And one way to try and answer it, of course, is to try and go to some small
scale societies. And try to examine variations across
cultures and maybe that could teach us something about that
And are you looking to, to travel somewhere?
- no, no. [laugh] That's the perfect segway to my
next question about the variations between cultures.
[laugh] so I'll take that. - Okay.
- you have gotten a plethora of comments about cultural differences, individual
differences. And how generalizable are your results?
How widespread are these phenomena? so let's start with, just, specifically
dishonesty. - Yeah.
- tell me a little bit about what you've done there.
And I have a, a, a nice long list of all of the variables that your students have
identified. I don't know if you want to tackle those.
- Okay, so, so let's start with, with cultural differences.
So we've tried these experiments with the Matrix in a few places.
we tried Israel so far. And the Israelis cheat just like the
Americans. I grew up in Israel and I expected
people, that Israel to cheat more. They don't.
They cheat just the same. By the way, just think about it for
yourself. I, I, know many of you are coming from
all kinds of other countries. think whether you, you would predict that
the people in your country of origin would cheat more or less than Americans.
And when I do, they say, fuck experiments.
But actually just think about it for a second.
And when I do these thought experiments, across every place I, I travel.
Many people think in their country of origin people cheat more than the
Americans, with the exception of the Canadians, of course, and some
Scandinavians. so anyway we, we tested this in a few
countries and we have a bigger project ongoing right now, so this is not the
final answer for this. This is just our current understanding.
In Israel, people cheat just the same. Franchesca Gino, my our Italian
collaborator said come to Italy, we'll show you what the Italians can do.
But as far as we can tell, the Italians cheat just the same.
we tried England. We tried China.
We tried Turkey and we tried Canada. Because the Canadian's think they are
better, they're not. And we we just did a first run of studies
in Columbia, in Bogota, in South America, America and so far we get the same, the
same results. and here is the kind of baffling
conclusion from this. Because everybody's who's traveled to
different places get a sense that cheating in different places is very
different. At the same time we also have amnesty has
this corruption index. that, that countries vary dramatically in
that in corruption is a kind of cheating. So what, what's going on here?
How come our results and what we see and experience in the market are so, are so
different? And we've done some studies in this and
this is what seems to be the picture. But again, not the final word on this.
Our experiments are detached from any cultural context.
Right, think about it. You do these matrix experiments or some
die rolling experiments. They're new.
They're novel. They're not connected to any particular
role in society. They're not a part of your relationship
with other people. Your role with the government.
Your relationship with[cough] insurance companies.
And because of that, because they're abstract, they measure the basic human
ability to cheat a little bit and feel good about it.
And that's something that it is just basic.
Our ability to rationalize is similar across the people.
Everybody we've tested so far, not everybody, but across, across places.
Now that doesn't mean that culture doesn't matter.
It means that culture works on top of that.
And I think that the way culture works is culture takes a domain at a time.
Cultural takes one domain and says, this is not really a moral issue.
Don't worry about it, like illegal downloads.
Or culture takes another issue like infidelity and in some countries they say
worry about it a lot. In other countries, like France, they say
don't worry about it so much. It's not a cultural issue.
Actually, I was in Switzerland last week. Switzerland is particularly interesting
because you have the German speaking Swiss and the french speaking Swiss.
And their attitude toward infidelity are very, very different.
And sometimes it's a village next to a village with a line passing in the
middle, but their attitudes to the morality implied in those things is very
different. So, culture basically take the domain by
the domain and for each domain creates a different set of rules of how much we
should consider that. And, you know, what, there was an
interesting this discussion I had with, with Sam on, Sam Antar.
This is a guy who grew up in a crime family.
And one of the interesting lessons from the discussion with him was that in many
ways he was the poster boy for the Chicago School of Economics.
In many ways he didn't care about morals. He didn't care about his customers, his
suppliers, the insurance company, the government.
There's like no more, it was just about making money.
And the other hand he had the whole another domain which was internal to his
family. And in that domain internal to his
family. A handshake was a handshake, his word was
his word. There was no lattitude in not being
perfectly honest. And, and I think this is, more extreme
than any of us experience in our own life.
But he basically partitioned life into two.
Outside life and inside the family life. No morals here.
More morals there. And I think that's what society does.
It defines how you want to think about these different, these different domains.
And, and from that perspective when you come to all kinds of individual
differences, you want to say. Do these individual differences translate
into some social differential social norms?
So, for example, older people, right? When you test younger and older people,
as you become older you have different rules for behavior.
Not really. You don't really have different rules for
behavior and therefore I don't think there's a difference in dishonesty and so
on. There is one one domain in which there's
a huge gender difference. huge difference that your gender.
And what, what do you think is the difference is?
[laugh] - Oh gawd. - Difference is.
Not to put you on the spot. - No, well already know the answer so I'm
not going[laugh]. - Yeah, so the difference in gender is
that usually, actually not usually, it's always women will ask this question.
women think that there's a gender difference but in our experiments there
isn't. there aren't any gender differences and.
Now, again, this doesn't mean that in real life there are no gender differences
with dishonesty. But it's not because of the na, unnat,
natural ability to rationalize. It's because there are domains of life in
which men have created different standards for behavior and women have
created different standards as well. And, you know, so for, I would suspect
that in some domains men have a higher tendency to be dishonest and other
domains it's women but it's not about our basic ability to rationalize things.
- Okay so, where is the difference between genders?
[cough] - Well, the difference is that women think that they are more honest.
- Oh, okay, okay. [crosstalk] We don't want to share.
- Women think they are more honest and they ask these questions more frequently.
[laugh] - Okay, okay. Well, there are, there are a lot of men
and women who are confused about gender differences.
- Okay, I should say, so far. And by the way, the one difference that
I'm really, really fascinated with, and I've not had a chance to look at is age.
- Yes. There are a lot of people who are very
curious about that. - It's, it's really fascinating and, and
we tried to think about how to do this research.
It is so complex. You have to create a separate lab.
You have to get the parents involved. The parents have to agree.
It's dishonesty. Not all parents are interested in
knowing. - When you're younger.
- Yeah, yeah. - With kids, okay.
- Yeah, yeah. We wanted young kids.
And, so, developmental psychology in general is an, an amazing area of
specialization. but stepping into it is, is very tough.
You really need to kind of, spend all your effort and time in this.
I, I'm not ready yet to do that. So, so we're not going to do it, but it's
a fascinating important question. - Great.
so what about things like education, or IQ, happiness, self worth, these things
that people think are very important? - Yeah, so, so.
- And have, sorry, not that they're not important.
[laugh]. - You mean that the importance is always
there. - Right.
- Happiness. - Who needs to be happy?
- And, so, so we haven't tested lots of those but IQ doesn't matter.
The range we've tested. Creativity does.
If you think about our story, our story is that it's all about feeling good about
yourself and being dishonest. It's all about weaving a tale, telling a
story about why this is actually okay. And if you're more creative you can tell
by the stories. You can tell by the stories and be
dishonest at the same time. So that, that matters.
when we look at risk attitude. For example, are you, thinking
differently about being caught? We don't find any difference.
When we look at social economic status poor versus wealthy, we don't find a big
difference. We did find that if we get people to
believe that their particular place in society's unfair.
Right, you imagine I come to you and say, you know what?
You really look like a nice person. I, I measured your intelligence and
skill, and you know what? You should have done better.
But you're unlucky and life has not dealt you the right cards.
And it's no fault of your own. But you're really suffering more than you
should. You should, you deserve to do better.
If you can convince yourself in this story, that your real skill is higher
than what you're getting, now you feel more justified to be dishonest.
But pure social economic status doesn't explain it.
And there's much more to do in this. Area to try to understand it, but I think
we need to think about, at least try to now.
It looks at the personality differences that would matter are the one that feed
into the ability to explain why this is okay.
And, individual differences that have to do just with how much wealth do you have
or how afraid you are of being caught. It don't seem to matter that much.
- Alright. And what about religiosity?
You use religion as one of your moral reminders in a lot of experiments.
- Yeah. So, we, we did a study in, in Turkey
during Ramadan. Ramadan is a period of a month where
devout Muslims fast during the day. And we try to understand people's moral
convictions towards all kinds of aspects of life during Ramadan and also before
and after. And what we found.
Is that during Ramadan, the moral convictions changed but only for moral
convictions that had to do with religion. So, for example things that have to do
with washing hands and all kinds of rituals that have to do with religion.
People felt differently about it. but things that had to do with the state
and taxes and government and so on, there was no difference.
So, so I think religiosity does matter. But I think it matters to the thing that
we put together with the religious bucket.
So again, imagine you have life and you have all kinds of buckets.
You have a religious bucket. Now for people who are religious, more
religious, this bucket might include more things.
But the real issue is, is it part of the religious bucket or not?
So I, I would speculate that if you can convince religious people that paying
taxes, or paying only when you get the receipt from a cabdriver, and so on, are
part of the religious obligation, it would have an effect.
But if they view it outside of religion, it's not going to have not going to have
an effect. So, I think, I think the value of
religion would be in, in creating more honesty, depends on religious
encompassing more aspects of life. Which we should debate if that's a good
thing or a bad thing. - [laugh]Yeah probably not.
Why do people gossip? - Why do people gossip?
- Yeah. - So Douglas Adams one of my favorite
authors, actually sadly died. I actually think about him a lot, because
he died when he played squash. - Oh, oh.[laugh].
- And I don't play much and from time to time I go to play, and I
Actually chasing the little black ball caused many men in their forties to die
from heart attack. And, anyway, okay.
I'm not, how did we get there? - Yeah.
- Anyway so Douglas Adams had he wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
And he wrote at some point that, there's a, a spaceship that was driven by gossip.
That was the power that was, this. Because he discovered that gossip is
faster than the speed of light. -[laugh] So this was the fastest thing
possible. I, I think actually gossip does a few, a
few things. I think first of all it's a, it's a
social coordination mechanism. Right, so many times when we get together
with other people there's a question of what are we going to talk about that
would be of common interest. And gossip is one of those things that
have a, a common interest. That's I think why people read news about
celebrities. It's kind of a gossip lots of people in
society know about it and, it creates some kind of common platform to discuss
things. It's also something where you can signal
to other people that you are on top of things.
So again, think about celebrity gossip. If I read, what's a celebrity.
- Oh, gawd. - That is like Us Weekly or something?
- Sure. - Us?
People? - People.
Let's say we read People. If we discuss the gossip from People from
this week we know that if you come up and you talk about people from last week we
know you're not in the know. Right?
You're a week behind, or a month behind, and so.
So, so there's a social coordination. We agree what we're going to talk about.
You have to keep up with it, so that's part of it.
I think gossip is also a way for us to figure what is acceptable and not
acceptable. You know, how how would you figure out?
I mean we know the rules of society. You know, for many things we know what's
legal and not legal but what's acceptable and not acceptable we don't know to that
degree. Gossip helps us.
If people are gossiped about in a bad way we know that's just something that in our
particular circle is not acceptable. How do we, how do we figure it out?
So gossip is very useful in that regard. And, and finally, I think that gossip
helps people feel better in some sense. So we have this research showing that
sometimes people complain to show other people that they are not as bad off as,
as they think. So, imagine not you but somebody else,
came to me and said, you know what? My boss is just an awful human being,
life is terrible. - They're making me work hard.
I never get any recognition for my work. It's just like go on, and on and on.
One thing I could say, is I could say, you know what?
You think your life is bad? Let me tell you what's happening to
Ruthie. And now we can talk about how.
-[laugh] How things are for her, giving you a, a contrast to what, what we're
doing. So in this research work we show is that
sometimes complaining or sharing negative information is to provide for people a,
what's called a downward social comparison.
To say, oh you think you're doing bad? Just listen to that story, and through
that story create something and make people feel better.
So, lots, lots of fascinating things about, about gossip.
Which, which one of those is the more important, I don't know.
- That's an empirical question[laugh]. Could study it in our own lab.
- And I, I also don't know if at the end of the day how much of gossip is actually
beneficial versus not. - Or true.
[laugh] - But beneficial or not I think is also an interesting question.
So with this[unknown] comparison. - Does it help?
- I think it could, it could help. - Yeah.
Okay, so most of the cases where we talk about cheating and dishonestly we're
thinking about tangible goods where, where money is involved.
why would someone cheat with something like, in a sport, where there, there's no
reward. Or in this class where the reward is very
small you know, other than feeling good about yourself, or in a board game,
something yeah. - Yeah, so I, so I think
- So in all our experiments we use money as the, as the reward.
And it's not because I think it's the most important reward, or it's not the
only reward. But because it's both the reward and it's
measurable. It functions as both of those.
I think people would cheat just as much for all kinds of other things, like pride
and self worth and competition. There's all kinds of things that motivate
human beings. You know, if you think about our
experiments really. $10 that people can make or $5 an
experiment, is that the best reward we can create to motivate people?
Of course not. We can get people to do really crazy
stuff for small amounts of money if we train differently.
In terms of competition, for example, much more than money.
But money for us, was not just a way to motivate people.
It was more important to think about it as a way to to measure it.
but, but I think the same basic results about what would get us to be more
dishonest and what would get us to be more honest, would function in all kinds
of other areas. And, and when we came up with this Matrix
task, to start with it was, which was very important to us that people don't
take pride in it. So we need lots of pre-testing when we
thought about these task. And we wanted to create something that
people don't feel happy about solving. They don't think it reflects on them in
any way. So if we use IQ questions.
Or something from the Mensa Test and so on.
If you answer more questions you would feel good bout it.
So we picked these questions that had, you know, find two numbers among a list
that add to ten. People who do this don't think they're
smarter in any way. They're just, it's, it's everybody could
do it. It's a simple math problem.
It's just have you compared all of these elements.
Or we do other experiments with detecting, are there more dots on the
right side or the left side? Or do you guess correctly what happened
on the cube? On the, on the die when you toss it.
So, so, we actually try to stay away from these other motivations but, just for the
cleanliness of the experiment. But I think their absolutely, absolutely
part of this. let's just talk about cycling for
example. You know, people want to win.
winning is an incredibly important thing. You work for a long time, you practice
for a long time. And not just if you're at the top like
Lance Armstrong. But, but throughout the way.
You dedicate your life to this, and you want to be better.
And there's all kinds of interesting ways to convince yourself that you're better
and to actually let you, let you do this. And, you know, one of the cyclists I
talked to who, who doped, again, I asked him about where he ended up being, and he
said he could have never imagined he would have gone there.
But everything was step by step. so in the beginning one of his teammates
had gone to this doctor. And he went to that doctor and somebody
was wearing a white coat and that person gave him a prescription.
And he went to the pharmacy and he got filled it up.
And then his insurance paid for it. And the first time he injected himself he
felt strange about it. But he quickly made it a part of his
daily regime of just kind of kind of you know took all those supplements, it does
all kinds of things. He also inject himself and he did not
think of it as a different part in his routine.
And then, he moved to another team. And there it was more open and they got
lots of other drugs and not just this one.
And then there was a shortage of this drug.
But he know somebody, he knew somebody from a Chinese team.
So they send him the drug and then he found other people.
He started selling the drugs and then, anyway.
It got worse and worse and worse until eventually he was drug he was dealing
drugs. But, there was no real question of money
here. There was a question of motivation to be
the best cyclist. That he could to keep up with the team,
to be not to disappoint people, to live up to expectation.
So, so when we think about this honesty. I'm getting to your question, I'm
thinking. [laugh] When we think about dishonesty, I
don't want us to think it's just for money.
There's a ton of human motivations. Many of them are more powerful than
money. And we will cheat for all of them.
- So in most of these examples, dishonesty is a bad thing.
We don't want to cheat. We don't want to be dishonest.
But are there cases in which dishonesty could be a good thing?
Where we want to lie? - Absolutely, and that's, and that's kind
of the, the really essential part of the problem.
So there's a story in the Bible. Can I?
- Can you quote the bible? [laugh] - I can quote the bible?
- I guess. - There's a story in the Bible that God
comes to Sarah, and said Sarah you're going to have a son.
And Sarah laughs. And she says how can I have a son when my
husband is so old? God said don't worry about it.
By the way, this is my version of the Bible, the original is slightly
different. and then God goes to Abraham and he said,
Abraham, you're going to have a son. And Abraham says, did you tell Sarah?
And God said yes. And Abraham says, and what did Sarah say?
And Sarah said, how could she have a son when she is so old?
And the religious scholars have wondered how could God lie?
Lots of discussions about this. The final conclusion is that it's okay to
lie for peace at home. [foreign] In, in Hebrew.
by that way, that's a wonderful rationalization if you, if you need it.
And I've talked to all kinds of religious leaders about it.
And one of them basically said that there's lots of human values.
And sadly not all human values are compatible with each other all the time.
And there's a question of what do you do when some human values collide with other
ones? And what religion has told us, at least
some religions, is that honesty is not the most important one.
And sometimes when it's your honesty versus the good feeling of somebody else
that you care about, that good feeling should should win.
And in some sense we all know that, right.
Nobody thinks that the right question to the, the right answer to the question,
honey how do I look in that dress is always the right, the right answer.
By the way, this is a great dress. - Thank you.
[laugh] - You're welcome. and, and you can also think about how
many of you would want to live with somebody who always told you nothing but
the honest truth. Right?
No? Not so much.
And, and not only that but we teach our kids to lie.
We teach our kids not to tell people the ab, absolute truth and to hide some
things and to be polite. And we understnad that the honest,
perfect truth is a antidote for social lubrication.
We need some dishonesty to get people to feel happier about themselves and to live
harmoniously with ourselves. The problem is that we learn all these
lessons in the social domain as we grow up.
We learn from our parents to lie in social circumstances.
And then we move to a world that has both the social life.
Where lying is okay. Some lying is okay, and dishonesty and so
on. To the business world, when it's not the
case. So, in the regular life, I want my
friends and family to be, to care about my feelings and not to tell me the brutal
truth. Do I really want my accountant to care
about my feeling and not tell me the honest truth?
No. Do I want the, the CEO of a company to
care about my feelings? No.
So, so it's kind of a strange situation. When we grew up in a social environment
where the rules are one, but then we need to apply them in a different environment,
and that environment actually has different rules to it.
And it's actually quite, quite tough for us to, to manage.
And by the way, I think for students this is one of the toughest org, structures
because students in the US at least they basically live and work with their fellow
students. So they, they overlap between the social
life and the business life. What, you know, the, the, this
professional student part is almost perfectly overlapping.
And what you do if one of your best friends sits next to you and say could
you help me answer this question on the exam?
Which, which one of those win, right? So, so it's actually.
A, I think there's lot of places we want some dishonesty.
But we also have to understand that the social world and the professional world
are overlapping and as they become more and more overlapping it becomes more
questionable what are the boundaries for honesty and dishonesty?
if you work with some people but you also enjoy them socially, right, what does it
mean? How should you treat them?
Very, very difficult. - Indeed.
so one of the ways that you've found to increase honesty is by presenting people
with moral reminders. And this works once, maybe twice.
do you think that the effect of increasing this honesty would wear off
after repeated exposure if constantly you're having to sign at the top of a
quiz, or at the bottom? - Yeah.
[laugh] So, so I think that the question of whether it would keep on working or
not. Is a question of whether people would
keep on thinking about it or not. So if you basically just sign something
and after a while you just stop thinking about what you're signing.
You just said I know it is a blank space on that document that I need to put my
signature on. I don't think that would work.
I think if you basically have a thoughtful process and every time you
read the statement you say, what does it really mean, what do I care about and so
on, it would matter. the, the so, so they real issue is not
what, whether the signature will become automatic but whether will people still
think about it or not. So, one approach, which I hope we will
test one day, is to not just do the signature, but ask, ask each person to
write down their own version to an honor code.
And I think if you had to write your own version, you would actually think about
it. It would be very hard for you not to
think about what your version of the honor code is.
Then you would have to explicit about it, the chances are, are much higher.
So, the issue is not the writing. The issue is thoughts and whether we
think that people would keep on thinking about this or they will stop.
but, and if they will keep on thinking, it will keep on working.
If they'll stop, it will stop. - Okay.
Alright. I have so many good questions.
I'm having a really difficult time choosing because we're running out of
time, I think. But I really want to ask you to talk
about how a little bit of cheating by a lot of people is much bigger problem that
a lot of cheating by a few people. Do have any numbers that sort of back up
the real societal cost of the, these trends in cheating?
- It, it's very hard to, very hard to quantify and exactly how it works.
But I'll give you a couple of, a couple of numbers.
there was a study a few years ago that showed the amount of stealing from, by
people who work for the Los Angeles government, the local government.
People who, you know, don't steal money it's not embezzlement.
But, you know, fuel their cars on the gas bill from the company and take chairs
home and papers and all kinds of things like that, was a billion dollars.
This is just in L.A., where did you grow up?
[laugh] - Possibly Los Angeles. [laugh] - Possibly.
And, and as also frightening numbers on employee theft.
Right, employee theft is a huge problem. People basically kind of find it easy to
rationalize taking extra all kinds of things.
From work, these are, these are devastating numbers compared to fighting
with external, external theft. Now you could say all the people who work
for people, for company X are just evil, and they're just stealing the most they
can. Most likely it's not just that, it's they
can. They say I worked so hard.
I didn't get paid enough and they can justify it.
And then of course there's the financial crisis.
And, you know, if you looked at the magnitude of the financial crisis, you
said how much of it can we really attribute to bad people.
You know, even Madoff, I'm not sure. we, we can decide he was just, it was
just evil. And, but, but if you look at, at the
financial crisis and, if you try to quantify how much it costs the, the
economy, it, it's really hard to imagine anybody being able to, you know, steal
and get amounts that are even close to that.
And, and the people who can aff, the many, many people who engineered that.
It's also hard to think of them as evil people.
It's, it many, many, many of them right. It's basically an environment in which
you have a tremendous incentives to see reality in a different way and easy to
rationalize all kinds of things. Actually if you think about all of the
building blocks of dishonesty, the financial markets are basically the
perfect environment to rationalize bad behavior, even better than iIlegal
downloads. to basically rationalize very, very bad,
bad behavior. So, you know, I, it's very hard to come
up with a good example and compare things directly.
but I think that if you look at something like the financial crisis and you say how
much of it was done by people to like really thinking carefully about what
they're doing and saying I want to be wealthy, I don't care about those other
people. Or another way, how many of the people
who were involved in some way in the financial crisis would've taken money
from an old person's home, even if they knew they couldn't get caught.
I think very, very few of them. At the same time, with the right
circumstance, it's easy to justify all kinds of things.
So, it's hard for me to give a good numerical answer.
I just think that the magnitude are dramatically different.
And there's, there's a few numbers that are worthwhile thinking about.
So, what do you, what do you think is the average payoff in the US for somebody who
robs a home? You know, when they rob a home of course
there's a cost for the people who lost the property, there's broken windows and,
and so on. And maybe somebody lost a TV and a
computer. And, and they lost that and it's
terrible. But then, for the criminal themselves,
they can't sell it at market value, it, it's stolen property.
They also can't directly, they have to sell it to somebody else.
And I think the number is that in the US, the average criminal gets about $200 for
burglary and entry on average. if you think about the risk of that job,
that's, that's a , not very, not a very high, high payoff.
And now, just contrast it to somebody who manages millions of dollars and can, you
know, shave a fraction of a penny here and there but frequently here and there
and it gives you kind of a sense of the magnitude.
I think that, that the best estimate I saw, that the life, the expected lifetime
income from crime for the average blue collar American criminal is $30,000
lifetime income. Now it's true that they spend much of
their life in prison, so it's not a, you know, a fully productive life.
But, but nevertheless, it's a very it's kind of strange to talk about it as
salary. But, but the, the rewards, the financial
rewards from that line of work is, is incredibly low.
- Sounds like it. [laugh] - Yeah.
Don't go be criminals. - Right, right.
Doesn't sound very appealing. - By the way we Aline and I and other
people from the lab went a few weeks ago to the jail.
it was just so depressing to see the cycle of people who were caught for
something. Or are awaiting trial and then caught for
something else. And then the bail is so expensive.
And they, they have to get into more financial difficulty just to post bail
and then I think the cycle continues, it's a, it's an awful, awful.
- Yeah. - Situation was very depressing.
- It's like once you're get in it's very hard to get out.
- It's very hard, yeah. - So, let's not get in.
Alright, some of the students saw your cure all video, and were curious about
whether you've done any research with placebos.
That sort of thing. - Yes.
- And I happen to know you have. [laugh] So, would you like to 1 minute.
- 1 minute on placebos. - Yeah.
- Okay. So, I love placebos.
Really, 1 minute that's it? I can't have like 3?
- Okay. You can have 2 and a half.
- Okay. So, when I was in hospital many years
ago. each patient had a, a limited dosage of
morphine we could take throughout the day.
We had like a, a budget. And I basically followed, everybody
followed, did I take morphine? How many times a day?
How do much I want to space it out? And so on.
But, being slightly obsessive, I also followed how much other people in other
rooms were getting. And I was trying kind of to figure out,
to make sure I'm getting the right, the right, amount.
And sometimes at night, when I was out of morphine already, I took mine earlier in
the day. I would hear one of my fellow patients,
scream and shout and so on, then the nurse would go and give them morphine and
they would fall asleep. And then I would call the nurse and say,
hey! They got more than their regular budget,
I want extra too! And sometimes they would tell me that
they just gave them placebos. And you know you hear about placebos,
that's one thing. But when you know someone was
experiencing the same pain as you getting placebo and going to sleep?
That's a, that's an amazing, hard, hard to imagine.
So I started reading about placebos later on and I discovered that placebos really
work. And the way they work is that if somebody
gives you an injection and you expect it to be effective, it will actually be
effective. And what happens is when you get an
injection, your body secretes a substance very much like morphine, but you secrete
it from the inside. So, you might not get anything from the
outside, but you truly get morphine, but it's through your brain.
Now, you can't close your eyes and say, I feel like morphine now.
Go. But, the moment there's an injection,
it's the outside activity that creates expectation that creates a secretion.
So we've done some experiments with placebo painkillers.
And we've shown basically expensive painkillers work better than cheap
painkillers. And the idea is the same, is that when
something is expensive, your expectation for it is higher, therefore you secrete
more substance that is morphine-like, and therefore you get actual more relief.
And I think if we thought about this role of expectation in all kinds of ways you
can say what other things would get expectation to be higher.
Is it somebody with a white coat? Is it an injection?
Is it the high price, is it the nice brand name?
All kinds of things like that. Increase expectation and therefore
increase the efficacy of the product. - Alright.
- Was this two and a half minutes? - you know, I didn't actually count.
[laugh] I'm sure someone did. But we can check later.
so someone asked about self deception and actors, or people who are trained in
drama. Do you think that actors are actually
better at self deception? They're more they believe their lies
more? Or maybe they can discount for for their
lying and dishonesty because they're so used to putting themselves in that sort
of situation. - Wow, that's interesting.
So, so first of all we all have some capacity for, for self deception.
And, an evolutionary argument for self deception is very simple.
Right the, imagine life is poker. Which means that you want to lie, but you
don't want to tell. You don't want to give signals that
you're lying. So in poker if you really believe you
have a great hand. That's, that's kind of a good strategy
for poker. So the people who argue for the
evolutionary role of self-deception argue for a poker-like mechanism.
I think what's interesting in the question of actors is not just
self-deception, but it's deception more generally.
So if you think about the ability to compartmentalize part of life.
This is about illegal downloads and this is about this and society gives us these
boundaries. And therefore we can misbehave in one
area, illegal downloads, but don't think that we're bad people overall.
I think an interesting question is whether acting allows you to create more
boundaries around particular behavior, saying.
This was just a different behavior and that doesn't reflect back on my.
I mean image somebody's who's I guess they don't really do terrible stuff when
they act. But, but behaving in a terrible way, you
need to have some ability to basically say, this is not who I am.
So, let's say we're acting some scene and I'm saying really abusive stuff to you,
right. At some point I have to say, this is not
really me. And maybe the skill of separating things
and saying this doesn't reflect anything on me would generalize to, to other
misbehavior. Very interesting.
We should definitely try it out, I think it's a good, it's a good idea.
- Great, let's find some actors. [laugh] Alright that is all we have time
for today. Thank you for watching all of this and
see you next time.
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