16 June, 2021
Are we really God Fearing?
3 minute read
Parents, teachers and sociologists have, for time immemorial, grappled with ways to promote honesty among children. The concept of honesty is complex and has been debated on multiple forums. Researchers have recently entered this domain and tried to run experiments to ascertain whether regular people would cheat and whether some of them could be “influenced” to be more honest.
In order to determine this, they conducted two experiments at Harvard and UCLA. In the first experiment, two groups of students were asked to solve 20 Math questions. The first group was given no opportunity to cheat while the second was “accidently” provided the answer sheet in addition to the questions.
The researchers observed that the group with no opportunity to cheat answered (on an average) 3.2 questions correctly, while the second group (the one with the opportunity to cheat) answered 4.3 questions correctly. These results clearly implied that when people were given the opportunity to cheat, some of them did, in fact, cheat (although the degree of cheating wasn’t very severe).
The researchers repeated this experiment but this time they divided the students into three groups. The first group had no opportunity to cheat and the remaining two were given the opportunity to cheat (let’s call them cheat group 1 and cheat group 2). Cheat group 1 was asked to write down the names of ten books before answering the questions. Cheat group 2 was asked to write down the Ten Commandments from the Bible (a process known as religious priming) before answering the questions. When reviewing the results, the researchers observed that the group with no opportunity to cheat answered on an average 3.1 questions correctly, cheat group 1 (no religious/moral priming) answered 4.4 questions correctly while cheat group 2 (with religious priming) answered 3 questions correctly on an average.
Based on these results the researchers drew the inference that when people are consciously or sub-consciously reminded of moral and religious values, they tend not to behave or act in a dishonest way.
How can this be implemented in the ‘real world’? Your guess is as good as ours, however, one can consider business scenarios which are prone to fraud (such as insurance claims and tax submissions) and attempt some kind of moral priming before people file their insurance claims or tax returns.
Original research by Dan Ariely, Nina Mazar and On Amir
http://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Dishonesty%20of%20Honest%20People.pdf