The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone--Especially Ourselves

As Tim Harford describes in his book The Logic of Life,* the birth of this theory was quite mundane.

suspect that when the amount of money that the participants could make per question was $10, it was harder for them to cheat and still feel good about their own sense of integrity

I started wondering if the problem of dishonesty goes deeper than just a few bad apples and if this kind of wishful blindness takes place in other companies as well.

The good news is that people seem to want to be honest, which suggests that it might be wise to incorporate moral reminders into situations that tempt us to be dishonest.

On the other hand, in the group that was asked to recall the Ten Commandments, we observed no cheating whatsoever.

it’s more likely that most of us need little reminders to keep ourselves on the right path.

we can try to shorten the distance between our actions and the money in question.

I am not sure how you feel about “only” one added matrix—after all, it is still cheating—but given that the one difference between these two conditions was the location of the signature line, I see this outcome as a promising way to reduce dishonesty.

each of us has a limit to how much we can cheat before it becomes absolutely “sinful.”