Programs booktv is covering this week. Go to our web site, booktv. Org and visit upcoming programs. Up next to a University Professor dan ariely said down to talk about his book the honest truth about dishonesty how we lie to everyoneespecially ourselves. In the book dan ariely discusses examples of dishonesty and looks at how dishonesty plays out in our society. This is part of booktvs college series. It is about 40 minutes. Do professor dan ariely. What do you teach at duke . A few classes, in the a, a behavioral economics, psychology for economists and an undergrad class and every year i change that. One year, it was code listed in economics and literature and i ask the students to run an experiment in behavioral economic tour to write short stories using principles from behavioral economics. The big undergrad class, last year i taught the class with cathy davidson, trying to learn from students and very what i teach. Host what is behavioral economics . Guest the best way to think about it, a view of the human being as being perfectly rational. And look into the future, just information, always makes the right decision. These are assumptions, not something the economics test, just assumed that this is the case. Puts people in different situations and you see how people behave. People behave in very irrational ways and systematically rational way of and we have different ways to do that so for example if you build the policy, you might have a particular policy, you think about obesity and might people be obese, they probably dont have the right information given the right information they will be better and you do Something Like new york city which is every fastfood place next to everything and what will happen is people realize they were a overeating or eating too many calories and it would stop directly. That was not the case. Basically nothing happened. Maybe tiny changes but not real. Because it is not about information, it is different and if you think about the mistakes people make when they make decisions you will think about very different interventions so we are not trying only to study Human Behavior but think about the human condition, think about how we do things to be better off and would changes we need to make in the environment, regulations to get people to have a better life. Host what is your education . Guest i have the be a from israel in psychology. And some loyalty, and after that i went somewhere else. And i came back and came back here since and a special feeling to be back. And other students are still here and i still feel it is a wonderful feeling and i met my wife when we were both in chapel hill going to chapel hill with my wife, feels again likely at dating which is wonderful. Host dan ariely has written two books, irrational and the upside irrationality, his most recent book is this one, the honest truth about dishonesty how we lie to everyoneespecially ourselves. How do you define dishonesty . Guest lots of ways to think about this but for the purpose of the experiment we decided this simple way we give people a task and see if they live. I described the task and theres not a lot of ambiguity. So we give people a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems and we say you have five minutes, sold as many of those as you can and i will pay you 1 for questions. People sold as much as they can. Please stop, put your pencil down, and now that you know how many questions you got correctly take a sheet of paper, go to the back of the room and shred it and once you finish reading it come to the front of the room and tell us how many questions you got correct, they come and we pay them and solve six problems and they go home. What people dont know is we played with the shredder. It is the side of the page but the main body of the page remains intact. When you put the sheet in it vibrates and shakes and it is getting shredded. We can find out how many people what we find is on average people solve four problems and report to be so that the switch and the switch by the way is not you to a few people land a ton of people. We think of this as the fudge factor. We can all cheat a little bit and still think of ourselves as good people. Host does everybody cheats . Not everybody. In the experiment around 65 of people cheat and we can push it up or down. What we dont know is if the people who dont cheat are the same people every time. Some people who dont cheat, they dont know it would be very important to try to figure out if it is the same people but we havent been able to do it for all kinds of reasons but it is on the list of things to do. Host people who cheat can they justify their cheating . Guest that is exactly what happens. There are two types of cheaters, those who did a costbenefit analysis, cheat and steal, and the cost is not worrying me and difficult, these are psychopaths who dont care about morality but just to costbenefit analysis. Thankfully there are very few psychopaths. We have a lot who cheat as long as they can justify. The question exactly is what causes you to justify something. Think about all kinds of areas in your life and think about the cases in which something would help you justify something. For example what kind of things in the world would help you justify something . I wont answer that question. Guest for example other people are doing it, other people are doing it. It is important to say when we look at the costbenefit analysis the standard fee of cheating is costbenefit analysis. What we stand to gain or lose or how much money, we dont find much on this. When we change how much people stand to gain from cheating with each question from 0. 10 to 0. 25 to 0. 50 to 5 we dont see an increase in sheeting. People cheetah little bit and are influenced by the game. If you have been caught it doesnt change. If you think about it, what causes in life to be honest and dishonest is not about the consequences. I will give you two examples. In the last three years everytime you go out to the i ask the waiter if i were going to eat here and try to escape without paying how would you recommend that i do that . Sometimes on my credit card, most of the time they give me gutted size, weight for a big party to coming, there is in alley, bathroom, they have suggestions and how often do people do that . Almost never. Sometimes people get up and leave without paying because they forgot about their credit card but sometimes they call back and say i forgot to pay. Something about restaurants it is easy to escape without saying but people dont do it. Think about illegal dollars. I asked my students, they all do it and nobody cares. They dont think of it as a moral issue. If you walk out of a restaurant without paying and they catch you you could say i forgot. If you have illegal dollars in your computer, you cant say that, you get serious trouble. For miss the aging, in a restaurant, somebody served us, we consumed foods, we took something from the restaurant and we would feel like villains if we didnt pay them back. Online we dont feel causformn s in one case and asleep heartache all the money and go and that person goes with all the money. What would happen to other people in the room . Lots more people cheat. If it is maybe it is because other people realize there are no downside consequences. You can get away with it, nothing happens, that is one possibility. The second possibility is everybody else, how do we test this . We change the outfit, we ran this experiment, the acting students, carnegiemellon students, in the second version he was wearing a University Textbook sweatshirt. Think about the group of University College students, university of pittsburgh students, he is the one whos cheating and going away with all the money. From a cost benefit analysis you learn that in this experience you can cheat and get away with it. Here is the approved but you dont get a signal that this is something people like you are doing. The signals that what other people are doing, people we dont like so much. What happened now . Cheating goes down so it is what do we find acceptable within our group . That is what is leading. I will give you another example. A funny experiment, study more than experiment. I own a vending machine. For a particular week i fix the vending machine the following way. I wrote on the outside 0. 75 for candy but on the inside of the machine and set it up to be zero. What would happen . You would press the button and get the candy and your money back. Here is a question, how many candys did people take . Did they stop after one . Did they do it more . What do you think . Host what is the answer . Guest a lot of people took three four. Nobody took more and four. Three or four was sensible. We had a big sign with a number to call in case the machine is not working. How many people do you think called . Zero. Nobody called. I think people may fend for themselves, i remember there was a machine that took away money and candy and the machine was probably a lot of this machine, restoring my vending karma in some ways. What is curious is when people were doing it they would call a friend to part take as well and that helped them justify, not just me but other people are doing it and you justify it. If you think about it like this, we balance two things, we want to live in the mirror and feel good about ourselves, that we are good honest wonderful people. We also want to benefit from cheating. You cant do both, you cannot do one or the other. You are either good or huge sheet. Cheating just a little bit, we could justify, we could do both. We cant cheat a lot and think of ourselves as good people. If we cheese she just a little bit we feel good about ourselves. Here is another way to think about it. We are sitting in washington in and this is a nice hotel, Nice Golf Club so let me tell you about experiments. We asked about 12,000 golf players questions about how they cheat at golf. Imagine your ball fell on the rough. Not a good place, you really wish it was to the left and we asked people what you pick it up and move it four inches . People said heaven forbid. I cant imagine doing that. This is not what gulf is about. Just by asking me these questions it proved to me you dont know the game. Fine. Nobody does it. Then we ask what about kicking the ball a little bit. No problem whatsoever. What about hitting it with the club, even easier. The easiest is when you are not looking. If you look up and kick, turns out to be easiest. If you would pick something and moved it, you would feel like a crook but if you just kick it able bit, could have gone there but if you dont look there is some role, the grass and so on, turned out to be incredibly curious about what we can justify and not justify, and the most disturbing study under this, there is a little joke that johnny comes home from school with a note from the teacher that says johnny stole the pencil of the kids sitting next to me and johnnys father is furious, so embarrassed and humiliated. You know johnnie when you need a pencil all you need to do is say something, if you mention it you can ask. I feel that taking 0. 10 from a petty cash box would feel like a crime. Even if we took 0. 10 for a petty cash box and went to buy cancel a pencil we would feel like crooks. The experiment we did on this people did the same math problems, shredded the piece of paper and the experiment, eyes of x problem, give me x dollars for this experiment, solve these problems, give me a token, we pay them in plastic to decide and change it so when you look somebody in the eyes and lied to them you lie for something that was not money but was going to become money quickly. Participantstheyre cheating with the plastic. For me this is one of the most worrisome results because as a society we are getting away from money. Money, checks, credit cards, derivatives, options, dealing with people directly, dealing with people over great distances and it is possible as these distances increase people could miss to be paid to a larger degree and still think of themselves as behaving well which means we needed to be very careful. The world in which we see each other face to face and deal with tangible goods we might not have to be as careful with morality and regulations but as we move further and further to this new world with more distance we need to be more careful. Host blurbed your book and outstanding encapsulation of the good hearted and easygoing climate of the age. Do we gee now more than we did 50, 100 years ago . I think we do but i dont think it is because we live in a different world, we live in a world that has more distance. And the derivative market is easier to teach. The second thing is there are more gray skills and the world than there were 50 years ago. University professor, a lot about morality and college. And the domain, there are all kinds of news things, think about a. D. Hd medication, 15 cups of coffee you can stay awake all night. It is not supposed to be used for Recreational Use the Drug Companies are making it so easy to go to the doctor and say i cant focus and they give you a medication. Where do you stand on a the morality of that . Is it moral to lie to a doctor to get some indication . Is it ok to exaggerate . If your friend exaggerates, what about wikipedia . Go to wikipedia and change the value in wikipedia and quote it. It is a strange world. There are lots of things like that. The gray scale is much more nuanced. And this is much more in the mia and if you think of everybody else is doing it i think it creates situations where we have a sense that everybody else is doing it to a higher degree than we did and if you think about Something Like athletes taking drugs and everyone else is doing it you might as well. Is more calm and i dont think it is because moral farber is different. All the young people i know online and i am sure you dont but you dont because you dont know how to do it but also your friends are not from that community. Are you more morals than they are . I am not sure but i think you basically have the domain of life that doesnt apply to you which is illegal terror. It is becoming more distance which is increasing cheating, we think it is more prevalent but we also have all kinds of new domains of life that create real challenges. Think of Something Like the stock market, today very different than the stock market 50 years ago. We have all these amazing Financial Products and. I used the word amazing enough loose way but these are products nobody understands that allow people to miss the eighth in all kinds of new ways that we didnt have 50 years ago. We are going in the wrong direction and one problem is we have a slippery slope going down, we have not discovered a slippery slope going up. Every deterioration is longterm deterioration we had to pay for seriously at some point. Host the old joke how the telephone politician is lying . His or her lips are moving. Guest here is the thing about politicians. We did a study, we have done it in lots of places around world and so on but one place we did it was in washington d. C. With congressional staffers hanging out and we also did it in new york city in a bar or bankers, who do you think is cheating more, bankers or politicians . Host new york. Guest two tales of caution. Sheeting with money which is the banker not a politician and these were congressional staffers, junior politicians grew for growth. We did the same one with the matrixes, we go to a bar and give the matrixes and change the payment of little bit, basically because of the beer in the establishment but the same experiment, we have some other versions of the experiment but so far they all look basically the same. Host dan ariely, you have a section called adventures with the irs. Guest lots of adventures with the irs but then you think about these results it is basically the question of what do we feel comfortable with . Is not about being afraid of being caught, not about punishment. If people were afraid of being caught or having negative consequences nobody would text and drive. I am talking about cheating on other people which we dont do, we dont think about consequences of our actions so the question is at the moment what do you think is okay . What we found out is when people think about their own morality they become more moral. Ask to reset the Ten Commandments or ask you to think about the code of conduct of journalists or ask you to think about something about morality, that stays with you for a while, not too long but for while and you become more ethical. The irs, to get people to sign first. Think about the form, fill out the form and sign at the end. The cheating is over, it is done. No one will say i have to sign, but begun back and fix everything i need to fix. It is over. We propose people sign up front and everything i am going to say will be the truth and then you fill it out. If you think about it is so natural to think this way. Imagine you went to court, would you swear at the end you finish your testimony and then say police swear that everything you said so far is the truth, of course not. In the world tradition we understand swearing on the bible is about preparing you to tell the truth, not about verification. Somehow and the written tradition we forgot this lessons so people will verify at the end, we need to do it in the beginning. The irs says you cant do it in the beginning because verification is crucial. We said why to peoples line twice . In the beginning and end, one for mindset alteration and verification which we dont think is important and then they said that can be confusing and of course if you have seen the irs form that is not what they need to worry about. And in other ways how do you increase morality . What is the first item on the tax form . Asked you whether you want to donate some money to a task force to fight corruption. You would think about your own morality and be a better but the irs, does not want to do any experiments. For obvious reasons. It would have been good but they are difficult organization, legal, they have their own complexities to deal with and my experiments are not high on their priority list but we did a similar experiment. Insurance Company Sends people a letter saying please give us if you get one of those letters you decrease your reading because then your cream goes up so the regular form is down to the reading and signed and we gave this form to 10,000 people and 10,000 other people we got them to sign first and then put the reading and people whose sign first report to be driving 2400 hours more on average, 50 more. This basically suggests that when you invoke peoples mindsets in a more honest way there is a good chance honesty would follow or a higher degree of honesty. I dont think it is easy to change peoples moral fiber but what we can do is get people to be more honest in the two hours they do their taxes. If there are professionals lee janzen to be more honest when gays crucial for that activity. Suddenly we dont do enough of those interventions. Host when a deity is invoked does