“The gates of hell are open night and day / Smooth the descent, and easy is the way” – Virgil, The Aeneid

Are you a liar? We tend to assume some people just are: that they consistently cheat in life. An Enron theory of dishonesty, if you will. Ariely, though, argues in The (Honesty) Truth About Dishonesty that the reality is that almost everyone cheats a little given the right circumstances. The key, he says, is to still be able to tell ourselves that we’re a good person: after all, we haven’t cheated that much.

Unfortunately, this means we can’t just assume people cheat when the money is good. Instead, he points to experiments where people cheat more when they’re knowingly wearing counterfeit brand clothes, when they’re representing a cause that doesn’t benefit them, and when tokens exchangeable for cash, not cash, is the prize. What’s worse, he also shows we usually aren’t aware of the effect, with individuals unconsciously preferring art from one gallery over another if they’ve been told the funding for the experiment came from that gallery (and even showing increased activity in their brain’s pleasure centers when they see “their” logo), while remaining completely certain of their objectivity.

There is hope, however. Dishonesty diminishes when it becomes harder to self-justify an act: we might take a coke but we wouldn’t take a dollar bill from a fridge, for example. Even small reminders of morality reduce cheating, whether trying to remember the Ten Commandments (even if you only remember one or two), or signing a commitment to an honour code at the top of the page (even if the honour code is fictional). If we can stop the small acts of dishonesty, he argues, we can prevent it from gathering momentum and becoming contagious.

For me, the implication is that if we’re trying to stop a firm from committing fraud or a politician from lying, the answer isn’t to fire the bad apples or even have them declare conflicts of interest. It’s environmental and psychological factors that encourage us to cheat, and environmental and psychological factors that can help discourage us from doing so. All of us run the risk of drifting into dishonesty, a little bit at a time, while remaining convinced that we are acting morally. In a high paced, modern lifestyle, we may never get the chance to stop, reflect, and reset those patterns, but it may be ever more important that we try.

Interested? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Readers might also like Ariely’s earlier books, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, about the irrationalities that drive us and their potential benefits. Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!