Marginal Dishonesty: The Adding-to-10 Task

Principles of honesty are rooted in the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith. Modern economic models espouse the belief that people behave dishonestly by consciously weighing the benefits versus the costs of the dishonest acts. This cost-benefit analysis considers possible external rewards, the probability of being caught and the magnitude of possible punishment. Psychologists build upon the economic model by introducing the effect of internal rewards. When people comply with their internal values systems, derived from society norms, they are provided with positive rewards, whereas noncompliance results in negative rewards, i.e., punishment. This internal reward system affects people's self-concept, their self-perception which is influenced greatly by notions of morality.

This procedure typically results in a considerably higher number of correctly "solved" questions in the experimental condition (Figure 2). This procedure can also dissociate whether this inflated performance is a result of a few individuals cheating a lot or most individuals cheating a little bit. If the former were true, this would result in a mostly overlapping distribution except for a large relative increase of individuals reporting the highest possible score. Instead, typical results reveal that most participants cheat a little bit.

Figure 2: A typical frequency distribution resulting from the task. In this example, there is one experimental condition and one control condition with no opportunity to cheat. The y-axis values reflect the proportion of individuals who reported correctly solving a specific number of test questions. Values on the x-axis represent bins of three numbers centered on the label displayed (e.g., 30 = participants who solved 29, 30, or 31 questions).

People inherently are torn between achieving gains from cheating versus maintaining a positive self-concept of honesty. By using techniques like the Adding-to-10 Task, modern psychological research concludes that often people, who think highly of themselves in terms of honesty, will rationalize their behavior in such a way to allow them to engage in limited dishonesty while maintaining positive views of themselves. Put another way, there is an acceptable level of dishonesty that is defined by internal reward considerations. Given these factors, dishonesty may actually decrease as external rewards increase, i.e., the internal punishment does not kick in until a certain level of gain is achieved.

Economists estimate that dishonest behaviors (e.g., cheating on tax returns, returning clothing after use, employee theft, etc.) cost organizations billions of dollars each and every year. Legislative regulations that penalize dishonesty can be expensive and exploited. In contrast, research suggests that interventions that appeal to our motives for self-image maintenance may be cheaper and more effective. For instance, research suggests that subtly priming people's self-awareness (e.g., placing a mirror behind a jar of money) can reduce theft.²

These findings also cohere with one of the core tenets of social psychology: Almost everyone is capable of misbehaving depending on the situation. Efforts to discourage cheating might be more effective if they focus less on the rare master-mind criminal and instead address the possibility that most people cheat slightly. Interventions that draw attention to ordinary people's self-image may be fruitful for reducing this temptation. For instance, Mazar et al. found that priming participants with The Ten Commandments dramatically reduced cheating (even among atheists).