A review by chriswoody94
The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone--Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely

4.0

The basic understanding of why people cheat from an economic perspective is that they have weighed the benefits of cheating and the costs of potentially getting caught and the harshness of the punishment. However, as Dan Ariely asserts, this simple model of rational crime (SMORC) may not be all it's cracked up to be. According to several experiments that Ariely and his colleagues did in this book, strong punishments and the amount that you can stand to gain from cheating actually play a small role in whether or not one is more likely to cheat. What's the main thing, then? How much we can get away with while still being able to call ourselves honest people. From that basic premise, Ariely looks at what can make us more likely to move that line to cheat more (like the distance from physical money, our conflicts of interest, seeing someone else successfully cheat, etc.) or less (like having supervision or reciting the Ten Commandments before a test). This was an interesting look at why people, myself included, cheat in small amounts here and there and are still able to maintain some kind of moral self-image, and how the amount of cheating can be increased for some without sacrificing the same self-image. However, as it turns out, the few who cheat a lot of the time don't cost society as much as the majority of people who cheat in small ways here and there.