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Our Moral Compasses

Looking at God's Book of Life and the professor's 'Book of Dishonesty.'

Louis Finkelman

Special to the Jewish News

A

t the High Holidays, the services
and liturgy help us reset our
moral compasses by examining
our deeds throughout the past year and
striving to do better, despite the tempta-
tions out there to lead us astray.
Dan Ariely has a knack for leading
people into temptation. A pioneer in the
field called behavioral economics, Ariely,
professor at Duke University, designs inge-
nious experiments in which people can get
away with cheating.
In one scenario, experimenters offer
to pay college students for every correct
answer on 20 difficult math problems.
Students write the answers on their work-
sheets, and then put the worksheet into a
shredder; then they tell the experimenter
how many problems they solved and col-
lect their money. Students can tell how
many they actually solved and get the
payment they honestly earned, or they can
claim to have solved all the problems and
get additional money dishonestly.

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September 20 • 2012

Classical economics posits that people
behave in their rational best interests, so
it would make sense for every student to
cheat, getting as much money as possible.
That's not what happens. Only a small
minority of students rationally and dis-
honestly claim to have solved every prob-
lem. Almost half of the students honestly
record their results, even though they get
less money. About half the students cheat,
but they cheat only a little bit. Instead of
recording four right answers, they claim
about six out of the 20 questions. The
average number of right answers goes up,
but only by about one right answer.
Ariely knows about the dishonesty
because he has done something slightly
dishonest himself: His shredder does not
work.
How do the two extra right answers
make sense? Ariely thinks that people
want to get the rewards for dishonesty, but
we also want to think of ourselves as hon-
est. Faced with that dilemma, about half
of us split the difference, and cheat just a
little bit. Ariely summarized: "So we try to
steal as much as we can, while not hurting

our own image in our own eyes."
Then Ariely tweaks the circumstances.
Run the experiment with people who have
already cheated. Anyone who has cheated
once is more likely to cheat again.
Another tweak: Arrange to have one
student get up at the begin-
ning of the experiment,
and announce "I got all the
answers right" as he hands
in his paper, and many more
students cheat. Apparently, if
someone else is doing it and no
one objects, we can cheat, too.
However, if that apparent
cheater wears a sweatshirt from
a different university, then cheating goes
way down. We think that those people
cheat; we do not.
Another variation: If, right before the
test, the professor asks the students how
many of the Ten Commandments they can
remember, no one cheats. Even students
who say they can remember none of the
commandments, even atheists, called
upon to recall the Ten Commandments,
decide not to cheat. If the experiment-

ers ask a group of students to swear on a
Bible, no one cheats. This works even if
the students are all atheists. It does not
always take a religious text to get this
result. When the experimenters ask the
students to recall the school's honor
code, the students do not cheat. This
works even though the school does
not actually have an honor code.
If these experiments interest you,
you can find them, and a great deal
more, in Ariely's new book, The

(Honest) Truth About Dishonesty:
How We Lie to Everyone —
Especially Ourselves."

Resetting Our Compass

Maybe those experiments can affect the
way we think about Rosh Hashanah.
Much of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy
describes it as the day when God acts as a
judge and evaluates all of humanity. This
image from the Mishnah (Rosh Hashanah
1:2) echoes through Jewish prayer and
folklore. We pray to get inscribed in the
Book of Life.
Not everyone feels comfortable with the

Compasses on page 16

