This week’s book learning is part of an 8 part series from The Honest Truth About Dishonesty by Dan Ariely. (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
The dishonesty research team conducted a survey where students from various countries were asked about cheating in their home countries. Most believed they would cheat more than Americans with the exceptions being the Nordics and Canada. Francesca Gino (originally from Italy) and Dan Ariely (Israel) were convinced of this as well.
So, the matrix experiment was conducted in each of these countries with the reward for solving a a puzzle being the equivalent of the cost of 1/4th of a pint of beer in these countries.
The results? It turned out everyone cheated just as much! It didn’t matter whether they were in Israel, China, India, Italy, Turkey, Canada, or England. The amount of cheating (i.e. just a little bit) was consistent across human nature.
Why the difference in corruption levels? The answer lies in the fact that the matrix experiment lies outside cultural context. It just tests the basic human capacity to cheat.
Our daily activities, however, have complex cultural contexts which changes the magnitude of the “fudge” factor.
Plagiarism is an easy example – some cultures view “getting caught” as bad while others look at the act of copying as normal. Similar examples with piracy of digital content, extra marital affairs – some cultures see it as wrong while some others view it as neutral. Our cultural context plays a huge role in our attitude towards an offence. Awareness of this is the first step towards understanding why we behave the way we behave (dishonest or not :))…
Sketch by EB
When well travelled friends get together back in India, a common topic of discussion is the behavior of Indians abroad. There is always a sense of amazement that the same people who litter at home and violate every rule in the book are clean law abiding citizens in other countries. This experiment puts that behavior in context…
We are nearing the end of our series in dishonesty. Now that we know the importance of socio-cultural context in dishonest behavior, are there any other instances where ought to be extra cautious? Coming up next week..
Wish you a happy weekend and happy week!
A Learning a Day 