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A review by sevenlefts
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely
2.0
An interesting look into the ins and outs of dishonesty from a social science perspective. Most of the discussion centers on variations of one kind of study. Although I was impressed with the many questions that could be answered by tweaking the basic study in different ways, I wanted other perspectives.
This sort of things happens sometimes with books written by academics -- they tend to focus on their own work. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but the effect is one of repetitions and variations on a them. A journalistic approach might have generated more variety.
My favorite part of the books was the diagram that summarized what factors lead to dishonesty, which activities tend to guard against it, and which ones have no effects -- surprisingly, to me, among the latter was the amount of money that might be gained by cheating.
This sort of things happens sometimes with books written by academics -- they tend to focus on their own work. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but the effect is one of repetitions and variations on a them. A journalistic approach might have generated more variety.
My favorite part of the books was the diagram that summarized what factors lead to dishonesty, which activities tend to guard against it, and which ones have no effects -- surprisingly, to me, among the latter was the amount of money that might be gained by cheating.