The Limits of Lying

Lying is a part of human nature. But how far will people go? Psychologist Dan Ariely became interested in dishonesty about 15 years ago. During a long-distance flight, he came across an IQ test in a magazine. He answered the first question and checked the answer key to see if he got it right. He then took a quick look at the next answer before looking back at the quiz. He continued in this way through the whole test. Not surprisingly, he scored very well. “When I finished, I thought—I cheated myself,” he says. So why did he do it?

“Presumably, I wanted to know how smart I am, but I also wanted to prove I’m this smart to myself.” The experience led Ariely to develop a lifelong interest in the study of lying and other forms of dishonesty. To find out more about lying habits, Ariely developed a series of studies known as the Matrix Experiments. In the experiments, volunteers completed a test with 20 simple math problems. They were given five minutes to solve as many as they could. For each correct answer, they were told they would receive a sum of money. When the time was up, the volunteers counted the number of problems they solved correctly. They were then asked to destroy their answer sheets in a shredder.

After reporting their own test scores, they were paid accordingly. However, there was something the volunteers didn’t know. Their answer sheets were never actually destroyed. By comparing actual test scores to reported scores, Ariely’s research team found out how many volunteers lied, and how much they lied by. The results? Of the 40,000 people who participated in the experiment, nearly 70 percent lied about their test score. On average, volunteers said they solved six problems, but it was closer to four. The results are similar across different cultures. Most of us lie, but only a little.

The question Ariely finds most interesting is not why so many of us lie, but rather why we don’t lie a lot more. In one version of the experiment, participants were offered significantly more money for each correct answer. However, this did not cause them to cheat more. “Here we give people a chance to steal lots of money, and people cheat only a little bit. So something stops us—most of us—from not lying all the way,” Ariely says. The reason, he believes, is that we want to see ourselves as honest, because honesty is a value taught to us by society.

This is why most of us place limits on how much we lie. We may be able to come up with an excuse for taking Post-it Notes from an office fairly easily. “But it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000,” Ariely explains. The extent of our lying is determined largely by what is acceptable by society. “Cheating is easier,” he says, “when we can justify our behavior.”