Even Nice People Cheat Sometimes

By Kathryn Canavan Special for USA TODAY

Be honest. Would you cheat if you were certain you'd get away with it?

We cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self images as reasonably honest individuals, says Dan Ariely, who teaches behavioral economics at Duke.

We want to see ourselves as honorable, but we also want to benefit from cheating, he says in his book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone -- Especially Ourselves. That's especially true when we observe others around us cheating -- fudging their taxes and boosting pens from the office supply cabinet.

Dishonest people don't always stand out like the crew at Enron. Nice people fib -- and not just about golf, fishing and billable hours. Take the case of the purloined profits at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The center's gift shop, run by about 300 theater-loving volunteers, was leaking about $150,000 worth of cash and curios annually.

A National Park Service sting operation nabbed the culprit.

Make that "culprits." It turned out that many well-meaning volunteers were helping themselves to merchandise and loose change just a little bit at a time.

Ariely and his team of researchers discovered dishonesty increases when we are a couple of steps removed from the cash. The author asks what that could mean for our increasingly cashless society:

- The average golfer studied nudged the ball with a club 23(PERCENT) of the time, but it's far less likely a golfer would actually pick up the ball and move it, because there's no way to pretend that's not intentional cheating.

- When researchers placed six-packs of Coke and six $1 bills in dorm fridges, every Coke disappeared within 72 hours, but no one snatched the cash.

- A large insurance company told Ariely it suspects few people engage in outright fraud, but many customers who lose property seem fine with exaggerating their losses by 10(PERCENT) to 15(PERCENT) on paper, so that 32-inch flat-screen TV grows to 37 inches.

Consider Ariely's book a field guide to dishonesty -- from you parking illegally to the dentist who insists those tiny craze lines in the enamel surface of your tooth require a costly crown.

The book also holds up a mirror to our own actions. Where do we draw the line? How "cognitively flexible" are we?

Consider these findings:

- Cheating may be contagious. Think Enron. Researchers say we can catch social behaviors from others. We may recalibrate our internal moral compass and adopt others' behavior as a model for our own.

- People cheat more when they're tired or angry, and they tend to believe their own whoppers after they tell them for a while.

The researchers have some suggestions to get more of us on the high road:

- Stop cheating before it balloons. As James Wilson and George Kelling posited in their "broken windows" theory, if you repair each broken window, large-scale vandalism is less likely to occur. Ignore small-potatoes cheating, and it could grow.

- Ariely points out that many religions have rites that help us reset our ethical compasses -- Catholics have confession, Jews have Yom Kippur and Muslims have Ramadan. He suggests secular versions would help potential cheats recognize their own actions and turn a new page.

- Recognize people who do the right thing. Hold them up as examples.