Irrationality, Week 4

I thought the image above appropriate, since Sancus was an avenger of dishonesty; Week 3 of Dan Ariely's course on Irrationality covered dishonesty. It's interesting stuff - his idea is that within a group there aren't a few bad apples, everybody cheats regardless of the reward or the likelihood of being caught - but they all cheat only a little bit, because they still want to appear moral to themselves. Impartial or biased behavior also arises every time there is a conflict of interest.

The readings for this section were fairly long - I was only able to get take down summaries for five out of the six articles, which is a shame because the last one was all about the psychology and evolution of self-deception. I'll try to finish reading it sometime.

Here are my notes about the other papers:

Contagion and Differentiation in Unethical Behavior: The Effect of One Bad Apple on the Barrel - Dishonest behavior is affected by social norms and saliency more than cost-benefit analysis. Subjects in the two experiments demonstrated that when the unethical behavior is done by someone identified as not part of their group, dishonesty is reduced; the reverse happens when the unethical behavior is done by someone identified as belonging to their group. With salience, even just calling attention to the likelihood of unethical behavior caused dishonesty to be reduced. The control was a situation where cheating would be detected unfailingly; however, the findings indicate possible applications in policies to curb dishonest behavior. Dishonest behavior is contagious. 

Prefrontal white matter in pathological liars -

Liars and malingerers have more white matter and less white-to-grey ratio in their prefrontal cortex, even after controlling for brain volume, age, psychopathy, and antisocial personality disorder 

Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing -

Being put in a state where one's self-concept of one's morality is threatened results in a need to cleanse one's physical body and/or a greater affinity for cleaning products. Physically cleansing oneself also alleviates negative impressions caused by being in a state of threatened morality. The mechanism for this seems to be that a person will engage in activities to make indicators of a particular self-concept meet standards if that person perceives that his identification with that self-concept is lacking, even if said activities may not be related. In the case of morality, the tie to ideas of cleanliness and purity was probably where this tendency came from.

The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance -

Based on the results of this paper, even though people place a high value on honesty and in general ascribe to moral standards, they justify dishonest actions through malleability of categories (for example, stealing a pen against stealing money equivalent to the price of a pen). Even though they may be aware that their actions are dodgy, they may let awareness of such actions "fly under the radar" and refuse to update their self-concept with regard to this behavior. Instead of magnitude of punishment or likelihood of getting caught, it seems like being reminded of their moral standards and having them compare their possible actions to this at the point before temptation strikes is more effective in reducing dishonesty. 

Justified Ethicality: Observing Desired Counterfactuals Modifies Ethical Perceptions and Behavior -

People lie more often when they perceive a justification for their behavior, even if such justification is known only to them. This is because people value feeling honest in their eyes. One justification used in the study was that an event "falling just short" of reality could be passed off as reality (a lie). People are less likely to lie in a situation where there is a narrow choice of options, because it becomes harder to justify to themselves the act of lying. 

Week 4 is all about labor and motivation, can't wait!