Honesty and Moral Reminders

Chapter 13 The Context of Our Character, Part I

Why We Are Dishonest, and What We Can Do about It

In 2004, the total cost of all robberies in the United States was $525 million, and the average loss from a single robbery was about $1,300. These amounts are not very high, when we consider how much police, judicial, and corrections muscle is put into the capture and confinement of robbers—let alone the amount of newspaper and television coverage these kinds of crimes elicit. I’m not suggesting that we go easy on career criminals, of course. They are thieves, and we must protect ourselves from their acts. But consider this: every year, employees’ theft and fraud at the workplace are estimated at about $600 billion. That figure is dramatically higher than the combined financial cost of robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, and automobile theft (totaling about $16 billion in 2004); it is much more than what all the career criminals in the United States could steal in their lifetimes; and it’s also almost twice the market capitalization of General Electric. But there’s much more. Each year, according to reports by the insurance industry, individuals add a bogus $24 billion to their claims of property losses. The IRS, meanwhile, estimates a loss of $350 billion per year, representing the gap between what the feds think people should pay in taxes and what they do pay. The retail industry has its own headache: it loses $16 billion a year to customers who buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked in, and return these secondhand clothes for a full refund. Add to this sundry everyday examples of dishonesty—the congressman accepting golfing junkets from his favorite lobbyist; the physician making kickback deals with the laboratories that he uses; the corporate executive who backdates his stock options to boost his final pay—and you have a huge amount of unsavory economic activity, dramatically larger than that of the standard household crooks.

When the Enron scandal erupted in 2001 (and it became apparent that Enron, as Fortune magazine’s “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years, owed much of its success to innovations in accounting), Nina Mazar, On Amir (a professor at the University of California at San Diego), and I found ourselves discussing the subject of dishonesty over lunch. Why are some crimes, particularly white-collar crimes, judged less severely than others, we wondered—especially since their perpetrators can inflict more financial damage between their ten o’clock latte and lunch than a standard-issue burglar might in a lifetime? After some discussion we decided that there might be two types of dishonesty. One is the type of dishonesty that evokes the image of a pair of crooks circling a gas station. As they cruise by, they consider how much money is in the till, who might be around to stop them, and what punishment they may face if caught (including how much time off they might get for good behavior). On the basis of this cost-benefit calculation, they decide whether to rob the place or not. Then there is the second type of dishonesty. This is the kind committed by people who generally consider themselves honest—the men and women (please stand) who have “borrowed” a pen from a conference site, taken an extra splash of soda from the soft drink dispenser, exaggerated the cost of their television on their property loss report, or falsely reported a meal with Aunt Enid as a business expense (well, she did inquire about how work was going). We know that this second kind of dishonesty exists, but how prevalent is it? Furthermore, if we put a group of “honest” people into a scientifically controlled experiment and tempted them to cheat, would they? Would they compromise their integrity? Just how much would they steal? We decided to find out.

The Harvard Experiment

The Harvard Business School holds a place of distinction in American life. Set on the banks of the River Charles in Boston, Massachusetts; housed in imposing colonial-style architecture; and dripping with endowment money, the school is famous for creating America’s top business leaders. In the Fortune 500 companies, in fact, about 20 percent of the top three positions are held by graduates of the Harvard Business School. What better place, then, to do a little experiment on the issue of honesty?

The study would be fairly simple. We would ask a group of Harvard undergraduates and MBA students to take a test consisting of 50 multiple-choice questions. The questions would be similar to those on standardized tests (What is the longest river in the world? Who wrote Moby-Dick? What word describes the average of a series? Who, in Greek mythology, was the goddess of love?). The students would have 15 minutes to answer the questions. At the end of that time, they would be asked to transfer their answers from their worksheet to a scoring sheet (called a bubble sheet), and submit both the worksheet and the bubble sheet to a proctor at the front of the room. For every correct answer, the proctor would hand them 10 cents. Simple enough.

In another setup we asked a new group of students to take the same general test, but with one important change. The students in this section would take the test and transfer their work to their scoring bubble sheet, as the previous group did. But this time the bubble sheet would have the correct answers pre-marked. For each question, the bubble indicating the correct answer was colored gray. If the students indicated on their worksheet that the longest river in the world is the Mississippi, for instance, once they received the bubble sheet, they would clearly see from the markings that the right answer is the Nile. At that point, if the participants chose the wrong answer on their worksheet, they could decide to lie and mark the correct answer on the bubble sheet. After they transferred their answers, they counted how many questions they had answered correctly, wrote that number at the top of their bubble sheet, and handed both the worksheet and the bubble sheet to the proctor at the front of the room. The proctor looked at the number of questions they claimed to have answered correctly (the summary number they wrote at the top of the bubble sheet) and paid them 10 cents per correct answer. Would the students cheat—changing their wrong answers to the ones pre-marked on the bubble sheet? We weren’t sure, but in any case, we decided to tempt the next group of students even more.

In this condition the students would again take the test and transfer their answers to the pre-marked bubble sheet. But this time we would instruct them to shred their original worksheet, and hand only the bubble sheet to the proctor. In other words, they would destroy all evidence of any possible malfeasance. Would they take the bait? Again, we didn’t know.

In the final condition, we would push the group’s integrity to the limit. This time they would be instructed to destroy not only their original worksheet, but the final pre-marked bubble sheet as well. Moreover, they wouldn’t even have to report their earnings to the experimenter: When they were finished shredding their work and answer sheets, they merely needed to walk up to the front of the room—where we had placed a jar full of coins—withdraw their earnings, and saunter out the door. If one was ever inclined to cheat, this was the opportunity to pull off the perfect crime. Yes, we were tempting them. We were making it easy to cheat. Would the crème de la crème of America’s youth take the bait? We’d have to see.

As the first group settled into their seats, we explained the rules and handed out the tests. They worked for their 15 minutes, then copied their answers onto the bubble sheet, and turned in their worksheets and bubble sheets. These students were our control group. Since they hadn’t been given any of the answers, they had no opportunity at all to cheat. On average, they got 32.6 of the 50 questions right.

What do you predict that the participants in our other experimental conditions did? Given that the participants in the control condition solved on average 32.6 questions correctly, how many questions do you think the participants in the other three conditions claimed to have solved correctly? What about the second group? They too answered the questions. But this time, when they transferred their answers to the bubble sheet, they could see the correct answers. Would they sweep their integrity under the rug for an extra 10 cents per question? As it turned out, this group claimed to have solved on average 36.2 questions. Were they smarter than our control group? Doubtful. Instead, we had caught them in a bit of cheating (by about 3.6 questions).

What about the third group? This time we upped the ante. They not only got to see the correct answers but were also asked to shred their worksheets. Did they take the bait? Yes, they cheated. On average they claimed to have solved 35.9 questions correctly—more than the participants in the control condition, but about the same as the participants in the second group (the group that did not shred their worksheets).

Finally came the students who were told to shred not only their worksheets but the bubble sheets as well—and then dip their hands into the money jar and withdraw whatever they deserved. Like angels they shredded their worksheets, stuck their hands into the money jar, and withdrew their coins. The problem was that these angels had dirty faces: their claims added up to an average 36.1 correct answers—quite a bit higher than the 32.6 of our control group, but basically the same as the other two groups who had the opportunity to cheat.

What did we learn from this experiment? The first conclusion, is that when given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat. In fact, rather than finding that a few bad apples weighted the averages, we discovered that the majority of people cheated, and that they cheated just a little bit. And before you blame the refined air at the Harvard Business School for this level of dishonesty, I should add that we conducted similar experiments at MIT, Princeton, UCLA, and Yale with similar results. The second, and more counterintuitive, result was even more impressive: once tempted to cheat, the participants didn’t seem to be as influenced by the risk of being caught as one might think. When the students were given the opportunity to cheat without being able to shred their papers, they increased their correct answers from 32.6 to 36.2. But when they were offered the chance to shred their papers—hiding their little crime completely—they didn’t push their dishonesty farther. They still cheated at about the same level. This means that even when we have no chance of getting caught, we still don’t become wildly dishonest. When the students could shred both their papers, dip their hand into the money jar, and walk away, every one of them could have claimed a perfect test score, or could have taken more money (the jar had about $100 in it). But none of them did. Why? Something held them back—something inside them. But what was it? What is honesty, anyhow?

Theories of Honesty

To that question, Adam Smith, the great economic thinker, had a pleasant reply: “Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his bretheren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favourable, and pain in their unfavourable regard,” he noted. To this Smith added, “The success of most people . . . almost always depends upon the favour and good opinion of their neighbours and equals; and without a tolerably regular conduct these can very seldom be obtained. The good old proverb, therefore, that honesty is always the best policy, holds, in such situations, almost always perfectly true.” That sounds like a plausible industrial-age explanation, as balanced and harmonious as a set of balance weights and perfectly meshed gears. However optimistic this perspective might seem, Smith’s theory had a darker corollary: since people engage in a cost-benefit analysis with regard to honesty, they can also engage in a cost-benefit analysis to be dishonest. According to this perspective, individuals are honest only to the extent that suits them (including their desire to please others).

Are decisions about honesty and dishonesty based on the same cost-benefit analysis that we use to decide between cars, cheeses, and computers? I don’t think so. First of all, can you imagine a friend explaining to you the cost-benefit analysis that went into buying his new laptop? Of course. But can you imagine your friend sharing with you a cost-benefit analysis of her decision to steal a laptop? Of course not—not unless your friend is a professional thief. Rather, I agree with others (from Plato down) who say that honesty is something bigger—something that is considered a moral virtue in nearly every society. Sigmund Freud explained it this way. He said that as we grow up in society, we internalize the social virtues. This internalization leads to the development of the superego. In general, the superego is pleased when we comply with society’s ethics, and unhappy when we don’t. This is why we stop our car at four AM when we see a red light, even if we know that no one is around; and it is why we get a warm feeling when we return a lost wallet to its owner, even if our identity is never revealed. Such acts stimulate the reward centers of our brain—the nucleus accumbens and the caudate nucleus—and make us content.

But if honesty is important to us (in a recent survey of nearly 36,000 high school students in the United States, 98 percent of them said it was important to be honest), and if honesty makes us feel good, why are we so frequently dishonest? This is my take. We care about honesty and we want to be honest. The problem is that our internal honesty monitor is active only when we contemplate big transgressions, like grabbing an entire box of pens from the conference hall. For the little transgressions, like taking a single pen or two pens, we don’t even consider how these actions would reflect on our honesty and so our superego stays asleep. Without the superego’s help, monitoring, and managing of our honesty, the only defense we have against this kind of transgression is a rational cost-benefit analysis. But who is going to consciously weigh the benefits of taking a towel from a hotel room versus the cost of being caught? Who is going to consider the costs and benefits of adding a few receipts to a tax statement? As we saw in the experiment at Harvard, the cost-benefit analysis, and the probability of getting caught in particular, does not seem to have much influence on dishonesty.

The Limits of External Controls

This is the way the world turns. It’s almost impossible to open a newspaper without seeing a report of a dishonest or deceptive act. We watch as the credit card companies bleed their customers with outrageous interest rate hikes; as the airlines plunge into bankruptcy and then call on the federal government to get them—and their underfunded pension funds—out of trouble; and as schools defend the presence of soda machines on campus (and rake in millions from the soft drinks firms) all the while knowing that sugary drinks make kids hyperactive and fat. Taxes are a festival of eroding ethics, as the insightful and talented reporter David Cay Johnston of the New York Times describes in his book Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else. Against all of this, society, in the form of the government, has battled back, at least to some extent. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (which requires the chief executives of public companies to vouch for the firms’ audits and accounts) was passed to make debacles like Enron’s a thing of the past. Congress has also passed restrictions on “earmarking” (specifically the pork-barrel spending that politicians insert into larger federal bills). The Securities and Exchange Commission even passed requirements for additional disclosure about executives’ pay and perks—so that when we see a stretch limo carrying a Fortune 500 executive, we know pretty certainly how much the corporate chief inside is getting paid.

But can external measures like these really plug all the holes and prevent dishonesty? Some critics say they can’t. Take the ethics reforms in Congress, for instance. The statutes ban lobbyists from serving free meals to congressmen and their aides at “widely attended” functions. So what have lobbyists done? Invited congressmen to luncheons with “limited” guest lists that circumvent the rule. Similarly, the new ethics laws ban lobbyists from flying congressmen in “fixed-wing” aircraft. So hey, how about a lift in a helicopter? The most amusing new law I’ve heard about is called the “toothpick rule.” It states that although lobbyists can no longer provide sit-down meals to congressmen, the lobbyists can still serve anything (presumably hors d’oeuvres) which the legislators can eat while standing up, plopping into their mouths using their fingers or a toothpick. Did this change the plans of the seafood industry, which had organized a sit-down pasta and oyster dinner for Washington’s legislators (called—you guessed it—“Let the World Be Your Oyster”)? Not by much. The seafood lobbyists did drop the pasta dish (too messy to fork up with a toothpick), but still fed the congressmen well with freshly opened raw oysters (which the congressmen slurped down standing up).

Sarbanes-Oxley has also been called ineffectual. Some critics say that it’s rigid and inflexible, but the loudest outcry is from those who call it ambiguous, inconsistent, inefficient, and outrageously expensive (especially for smaller firms). “It hasn’t cleaned up corruption,” argued William A. Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute; “it has only forced companies to jump through hoops.” So much for enforcing honesty through external controls. They may work in some cases, but not in others. Could there be a better cure for dishonesty?

The Power of Moral Reminders

Before I even attempt to answer that question, let me describe an experiment we conducted that speaks volumes on the subject. A few years ago Nina, On, and I brought a group of participants together in a lab at UCLA and asked them to take a simple math test. The test consisted of 20 simple problems, each requiring participants to find two numbers that would add up to 10 (for a sample problem, see the table below). They had five minutes to solve as many of the problems as they could, after which they were entered into a lottery. If they won the lottery, they would receive ten dollars for each problem they solved correctly. As in our experiment at the Harvard Business School, some of the participants handed in their papers directly to the experimenter. They were our control group. The other participants wrote down on another sheet the number of questions they solved correctly, and then disposed of the originals. These participants, obviously, were the ones with the opportunity to cheat. So, given this opportunity, did these participants cheat? As you may have surmised, they did (but, of course, just by a bit).

Up to now I have not told you anything new. But the key to this experiment was what preceded it. When the participants first came to the lab, we asked some of them to write down the names of 10 books that they read in high school. The others were asked to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could recall. After they finished this “memory” part of the experiment, we asked them to begin working on the matrix task. This experimental setup meant that some of the participants were tempted to cheat after recalling 10 books that they read in high school, and some of them were tempted after recalling the Ten Commandments. Who do you think cheated more?

When cheating was not possible, our participants, on average, solved 3.1 problems correctly. When cheating was possible, the group that recalled 10 books read in high school achieved an average score of 4.1 questions solved (or 33 percent more than those who could not cheat). But the big question is what happened to the other group—the students who first wrote down the Ten Commandments, then took the test, and then ripped up their worksheets. This, as sportscasters say, was the group to watch. Would they cheat—or would the Ten Commandments have an effect on their integrity? The result surprised even us: the students who had been asked to recall the Ten Commandments had not cheated at all. They averaged three correct answers—the same basic score as the group that could not cheat, and one less than those who were able to cheat but had recalled the names of the books.

As I walked home that evening I began to think about what had just happened. The group who listed 10 books cheated. Not a lot, certainly—only to that point where their internal reward mechanism (nucleus accumbens and superego) kicked in and rewarded them for stopping. But what a miracle the Ten Commandments had wrought! We didn’t even remind our participants what the Commandments were—we just asked each participant to recall them (and almost none of the participants could recall all 10). We hoped the exercise might evoke the idea of honesty among them. And this was clearly what it did. So, we wondered, what lessons about decreasing dishonesty can we learn from this experiment? It took us a few weeks to come to some conclusions.

Secular Oaths and Honor Codes

For one, perhaps we could bring the Bible back into public life. If we only want to reduce dishonesty, it might not be a bad idea. Then again, some people might object, on the grounds that the Bible implies an endorsement of a particular religion, or merely that it mixes religion in with the commercial and secular world. But perhaps an oath of a different nature would work. What especially impressed me about the experiment with the Ten Commandments was that the students who could remember only one or two Commandments were as affected by them as the students who remembered nearly all ten. This indicated that it was not the Commandments themselves that encouraged honesty, but the mere contemplation of a moral benchmark of some kind. If that were the case, then we could also use nonreligious benchmarks to raise the general level of honesty. For instance, what about the professional oaths that doctors, lawyers, and others swear to—or used to swear to? Could those professional oaths do the trick?

The word profession comes from the Latin professus, meaning “affirmed publicly.” Professions started somewhere deep in the past in religion and then spread to medicine and law. Individuals who had mastered esoteric knowledge, it was said, not only had a monopoly on the practice of that knowledge, but had an obligation to use their power wisely and honestly. The oath—spoken and often written—was a reminder to practitioners to regulate their own behavior, and it also provided a set of rules that had to be followed in fulfilling the duties of their profession. Those oaths lasted a long time. But then, in the 1960s, a strong movement arose to deregulate professions. Professions were elitist organizations, it was argued, and needed to be turned out into the light of day. For the legal profession that meant more briefs written in plain English prose, cameras in the courtrooms, and advertising. Similar measures against elitism were applied to medicine, banking, and other professions as well. Much of this could have been beneficial, but something was lost when professions were dismantled. Strict professionalism was replaced by flexibility, individual judgment, the laws of commerce, and the urge for wealth, and with it disappeared the bedrock of ethics and values on which the professions had been built.

A study by the state bar of California in the 1990s, for instance, found that a preponderance of attorneys in California were sick of the decline in honor in their work and “profoundly pessimistic” about the condition of the legal profession. Two-thirds said that lawyers today “compromise their professionalism as a result of economic pressure.” Nearly 80 percent said that the bar “fails to adequately punish unethical attorneys.” Half said they wouldn’t become attorneys if they had it to do over again. A comparable study by the Maryland Judicial Task Force found similar distress among lawyers in that state. According to Maryland’s lawyers, their profession had degenerated so badly that “they were often irritable, short-tempered, argumentative, and verbally abusive” or “detached, withdrawn, preoccupied, or distracted.” When lawyers in Virginia were asked whether the increasing problems with professionalism were attributable to “a few bad apples” or to a widespread trend, they overwhelmingly said this was a widespread issue. Lawyers in Florida have been deemed the worst. In 2003 the Florida bar reported that a “substantial minority” of lawyers were “money-grabbing, too clever, tricky, sneaky, and not trustworthy; who had little regard for the truth or fairness, willing to distort, manipulate, and conceal to win; arrogant, condescending, and abusive.” They were also “pompous and obnoxious.” What more can I say?

The medical profession has its critics as well. The critics mention doctors who do unnecessary surgeries and other procedures just to boost the bottom line: who order tests at laboratories that are giving them kickbacks, and who lean toward medical tests on equipment that they just happen to own. And what about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry? A friend of mine said he sat waiting for his doctor for an hour recently. During that time, he said, four (very attractive) representatives of drug companies went freely into and out of the office, bringing lunch, free samples, and other gifts with them. You could look at almost any professional group and see signs of similar problems. How about the Association of Petroleum Geologists, for instance? The image I see is Indiana Jones types, with more interest in discussing Jurassic shale and deltaic deposits than in making a buck. But look deeper and you’ll find trouble. “There is unethical behavior going on at a much larger scale than most of us would care to think,” one member of the association wrote to her colleagues. What kind of dishonesty, for goodness’ sake, could be rife in the ranks of petroleum geologists, you ask? Apparently things like using bootlegged seismic and digital data; stealing maps and materials; and exaggerating the promise of certain oil deposits, in cases where a land sale or investment is being made. “The malfeasance is most frequently of shades of gray, rather than black and white,” one petroleum geologist remarked. But let’s remember that petroleum geologists are not alone. This decline in professionalism is everywhere. If you need more proof, consider the debate within the field of professional ethicists, who are called more often than ever before to testify at public hearings and trials, where they may be hired by one party or another to consider issues such as treatment rendered to a patient and the rights of the unborn. Are they tempted to bend to the occasion? Apparently so. “Moral Expertise: A Problem in the Professional Ethics of Professional Ethicists” is the title of one article in an ethics journal. As I said, the signs of erosion are everywhere.

The MIT Honor Code Experiment

What to do? Suppose that, rather than invoking the Ten Commandments, we got into the habit of signing our name to some secular statement—similar to a professional oath—that would remind us of our commitment to honesty. Would a simple oath make a difference, in the way that we saw the Ten Commandments make a difference? We needed to find out—hence our next experiment.

Once again we assembled our participants. In this study, the first group of participants took our matrix math test and handed in their answers to the experimenter in the front of the room (who counted how many questions they answered correctly and paid them accordingly). The second group also took the test, but the members of this group were told to fold their answer sheet, keep it in their possession, and tell the experimenter in the front of the room how many of the problems they got right. The experimenter paid them accordingly, and they were on their way. The novel aspect of this experiment had to do with the third group. Before these participants began, each was asked to sign the following statement on the answer sheet: “I understand that this study falls under the MIT honor system.” After signing this statement, they continued with the task. When the time had elapsed they pocketed their answer sheets, walked to the front of the room, told the experimenter how many problems they had correctly solved, and were paid accordingly.

What were the results? In the control condition, in which cheating was not possible, participants solved on average three problems (out of 20). In the second condition, in which the participants could pocket their answers, they claimed to have solved on average 5.5 problems. What was remarkable was the third situation—in which the participants pocketed their answer sheets, but had also signed the honor code statement. In this case they claimed to have solved, on average, three problems—exactly the same number as the control group. This outcome was similar to the results we achieved with the Ten Commandments—when a moral reminder eliminated cheating altogether. The effect of signing a statement about an honor code is particularly amazing when we take into account that MIT doesn’t even have an honor code.

So we learned that people cheat when they have a chance to do so, but they don’t cheat as much as they could. Moreover, once they begin thinking about honesty—whether by recalling the Ten Commandments or by signing a simple statement—they stop cheating completely. In other words, when we are removed from any benchmarks of ethical thought, we tend to stray into dishonesty. But if we are reminded of morality at the moment we are tempted, then we are much more likely to be honest.

Implications and Recommendations

At present, several state bars and professional organizations are scrambling to shore up their professional ethics. Some are increasing courses in college and graduate schools, and others are requiring brush-up ethics classes. In the legal profession, Judge Dennis M. Sweeney of the Howard County (Maryland) circuit published his own book, Guidelines for Lawyer Courtroom Conduct, in which he noted, “Most rules, like these, are simply what our mothers would say a polite and well raised man or woman should do. Since, given their other important responsibilities, our mothers (and yours) cannot be in every courtroom in the State, I offer these rules.” Will such general measures work? Let’s remember that lawyers do take an oath when they are admitted to the bar, as doctors take an oath when they enter their profession. But occasional swearing of oaths and occasional statements of adherence to rules are not enough. From our experiments, it is clear that oaths and rules must be recalled at, or just before, the moment of temptation. Also, what is more, time is working against us as we try to curb this problem. I said in Chapter 4 that when social norms collide with market norms, the social norms go away and the market norms stay. Even if the analogy is not exact, honesty offers a related lesson: once professional ethics (the social norms) have declined, getting them back won’t be easy.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. Why is honesty so important? For one thing, let’s not forget that the United States holds a position of economic power in the world today partly because it is (or at least is perceived to be) one of the world’s most honest nations, in terms of its standards of corporate governance. In 2002, the United States ranked twentieth in the world in terms of integrity, according to one survey (Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand were first; Haiti, Iraq, Myanmar, and Somalia were last, at number 163). On this basis, I would suspect that people doing business with the United States generally feel they can get a fair deal. But the fact of the matter is that the United States ranked fourteenth in 2000, before the wave of corporate scandals made the business pages in American newspapers look like a police blotter. We are going down the slippery slope, in other words, not up it, and this can have tremendous long-term costs. Adam Smith reminded us that honesty really is the best policy, especially in business. To get a glimpse at the other side of that realization—at the downside, in a society without trust—you can take a look at several countries. In China, the word of one person in one region rarely carries to another region. Latin America is full of family-run cartels that hand out loans to relatives (and then fail to cut off credit when the debtor begins to default). Iran is another example of a nation stricken by distrust. An Iranian student at MIT told me that business there lacks a platform of trust. Because of this, no one pays in advance, no one offers credit, and no one is willing to take risks. People must hire within their families, where some level of trust still exists. Would you like to live in such a world? Be careful, because without honesty we might get there faster than you’d imagine.

What can we do to keep our country honest? We can read the Bible, the Koran, or whatever reflects our values, perhaps. We can revive professional standards. We can sign our names to promises that we will act with integrity. Another path is to first recognize that when we get into situations where our personal financial benefit stands in opposition to our moral standards, we are able to “bend” reality, see the world in terms compatible with our selfish interest, and become dishonest. What is the answer, then? If we recognize this weakness, we can try to avoid such situations from the outset. We can prohibit physicians from ordering tests that would benefit them financially; we can prohibit accountants and auditors from functioning as consultants to the same companies; we can bar members of Congress from setting their own salaries, and so on. But this is not the end of the issue of dishonesty. In the next chapter, I will offer some other suggestions about dishonesty, and some other insights into how we struggle with it.

Reflections on Dishonesty and Toilet Paper

About a year after Predictably Irrational was first published, I received an interesting e-mail from a woman who used elements from our honor code experiment to design her own test, which effectively solved an important problem involving stolen toilet paper.

Rhonda

I must confess that when I thought about the implications of the honor-reminder experiments for day-to-day life, issues around toilet paper didn’t come to mind. But I am happy that Rhonda made the connection and applied it to her own situation. I am also quite pleased that she placed the note in one bathroom but not the other—nice experimental control!

Appendix: Chapter 13 The Ten Commandments

• Catholic - I, the Lord, am your God. You shall not have other gods besides me.
• Jewish - I am the Lord your God who has taken you out of the land of Egypt.
• Protestant - You shall have no other gods but me.
• Catholic - You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain.
• Jewish - You shall have no other gods but me.
• Protestant - You shall not make unto you any graven images.
• Catholic - Remember to keep holy the Lord’s Day.
• Jewish - You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
• Protestant - You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
• Catholic - Honor your father and your mother.
• Jewish - You shall remember the Sabbath and keep it Holy.
• Protestant - You shall remember the Sabbath and keep it Holy.
• Catholic - You shall not kill.
• Jewish - Honor your mother and father.
• Protestant - Honor your mother and father.
• Catholic - You shall not commit adultery.
• Jewish - You shall not murder.
• Protestant - You shall not murder.
• Catholic - You shall not steal.
• Jewish - You shall not commit adultery.
• Protestant - You shall not commit adultery.
• Catholic - You shall not bear false witness.
• Jewish - You shall not steal.
• Protestant - You shall not steal.
• Catholic - You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.
• Jewish - You shall not bear false witness.
• Protestant - You shall not bear false witness.
• Catholic - You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.
• Jewish - You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.
• Protestant - You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.